Thank you for coming.   I get to celebrate my father by sharing some of the stories which I feel helped me understand who he was and why his accomplishments in life were so remarkable.

 

Father was born into a life with humble beginnings in another era.  He was born as the first son to a barber in Malaysia during the Japanese occupation and subsequent British colonialism.  My grandfather took him back to China when he was a child to as my father would say ‘to re-open the kitchen door’.  According to tradition, when the prodigal son has been successful, he should come home to re-open the kitchen door and thus pay homage to our ancestors.  This was a formative experience for Dad to have a chance to ‘live a hakka’s life.  He told me that he learned more about being Hakka in 3 years than it would take a western scholar, a lifetime to learn.  This would have a profound impact on him through his life to cherish and celebrate Hakka tradition.  He in turn did the same for his children.  In 1980, at the height of his career took a whole year off to take the four kids to experience living in China.  This enabled us to more fully appreciate our roots and to be able to understand and celebrate more of who we are. 

 

The pursuit of knowledge through learning was another key characteristic of my father.  He was first and foremost a scholar.  Some of you may not know however that how it began was in a detention camp in Malaysia when he was in high school.  He was jailed because he ordered some books from China and the British authorities incorrectly thought he was a communist spy and subsequently put him in a detention camp for several years. 

During that time he self taught in mathematics.  He got my grandfather to send him the textbook, read it, tested himself and checked his answers with the answer book.  So, he started his career in teaching by teaching himself.  He also taught some of the children in the detention camp, who were obviously not in school.  Two of them were Yaps (not directly related to us), one of whom eventually moved to England and who my father and I visited in later life.

 

He taught himself English by learning by heart the world’s great English speeches.  Mark Antony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Sir Winston Churchill’s wartime radio speeches and Patrick Henry’s Gettyburg address, (give me liberty or give me death).  All these fiery speeches were learnt by heart and practiced in private as if my father was really were playing a part in a drama.  I could almost just see him doing this, standing alone in an empty dormitory room in a detention camp with rows of beds in Malaysia practicing Shakespeare…  Those of you who knew my father at Nantah will recall him performing Julius Caesar… Sometimes I wonder if a very suitable alternate career wouldn’t have been as an actor.

 

Father was always a champion for justice, fair treatment and human rights.  He told me that the people in the detention camp were not criminals but rather individuals who’s human rights were violated by the British colonial government under the emergency regulations.  This I think played a part in why he was often a student leader for movements of change, a vocal leader for the Nantah/Nanyang associations and for the court battles where he would take on the government… He liked being the underdog and winning.

 

Going to university was also a long shot for someone of his background.  Father graduated from Nanyang University which was created for Chinese students who wanted to go further in their education.  They would otherwise find themselves at a dead-end because apparently the local universities would not accept them.  He excelled as an academic.  He was chosen for a scholarship in University of New Brunswick in English Literature where he completed a Masters degree.  He also began a PhD at Columbia University in NY however the need to support and raise a family in a new country, prevented him from finishing.  That must have been a very difficult decision for him as he loved academia but chose taking care of his family first.

 

Dad also had a history and I think enjoyed going against the grain or as he might say ‘taking the road less traveled’.  Dad always did what he wanted to do even if everyone else didn’t agree.  However, this mentality was a key driver for many of the good things that happened to him.  Taking English literature as a major in university vs Chinese literature.  I remember Dad telling me that many of the students took an easy route of a Chinese literature major.  He relished the idea that he would take on the most challenging Eng lit degree where most students dropped out because it was too hard and intimidating as all the professors were either from Britain or the US. 

 

This decision led to him receiving a scholarship to UNB and eventually coming to Canada.  He braved uncertainty and left his culture, family and everything else to come to Canada which must have been difficult.  Coming from a tropical country and moving to the coldest capital in the world takes a strong sense of adventure… or a desire to torture oneself! 

 

His enthusiasm for adventure and trying new things resulted in him taking the family camping and fishing, bicycling and generally doing lots of fun activities together.  I have fond memories of growing up and of feeling loved. 

He also had the foresight to ensure his children all become well educated and multi-lingual… skills critical to success in today’s global world.  He spoke so many languages that I have forgotten but I believe it was at least 8.  His love of learning was passed on to all four of his kids and we can even see it in his three grandchildren.

 

In the end however, I feel his greatest legacy is what he did for his family.  Because of his decisions, he effectively broke the cycle of poverty for the Yaps… he was born into the bottom 25% of the world’s relative standard of living index and he left this world with his family being in the top 10%, living in one of the best countries in the world.  He once told me that had his mother been able to live in Canada, she would have found it to be a paradise.

 

Hi, I’m Tin’s youngest son, and I’m glad I have a chance to speak about my father.

 

One of my earliest memories of my father was in Beijing, China around 1980, when our family spent one year there.  I was one or two years old and my father would bring me on his bicycle everyday to drop me off at school.  There was this little seat just in front of his, behind the handlebars that I sat in.  I remember feeling safe under my father’s protection while also bravely and curiously looking around at the passing world that I was just beginning to discover.

 

Dad loved to laugh and was always quick to tell jokes.   When we were young children, he was always making funny faces and playing games with us. .  He enjoyed having fun conversations with us as children and recording us on audiotape for posterity, which we still have today.  He liked to tell jokes involving the different meanings of the same word in different languages, as he was fluent in many. Dad loved to eat, but he was also very pragmatic.  One of his favourite sayings when we said he was mixing foods badly was “Well, it’s all the same in the stomach!”

 

Dad also cared much for his children and gave us many things.  One thing that sticks out in my mind was one day out of the blue when I was about ten years old, I said I wanted to try hockey.  The next day I was signed up to a league and we were at Canadian Tire buying hockey equipment…Now that’s fast.  He drove me to many tournaments that were sometimes hours away.

 

Even now, I am amazed at the many hardships and challenges that my father faced throughout his life: from living under Japanese occupation in Malaysia; to being imprisoned as a political prisoner; to moving to Canada with my mother with literally two suitcases to their name and working tirelessly in a country that, at the time, still had much prejudice towards Asians.  He took great steps to remove this prejudice by being one of the founding members of the Canada-China Friendship society. 

 

He and my mother made us a home and provided an upbringing and education for us four children that gave us many opportunities that they never had, and I am thankful for it.  In the later years, he survived two serious aneurysms and even fought off cancer to stay with us a while longer and see his grandchildren.  He was very proud to be Hakka and always stood strong against those who would put him down.

 

There’s a picture of my Dad sitting at a desk when he was the age I am now, and I’ve been told it’s uncanny how much I look like him.  I would only hope that I also share some of my father’s characteristics too, as he was a good man.

 

To finish off, I would like to share something that will hopefully help everyone come to terms with what happened.  Now I am not overly superstitious, but the day after he passed away, I had a dream in which I was consciously looking for my Dad in the spirit world.  I was in a room and while I was searching for him, all these people whom I didn’t know started coming into the room. I think they were the spirits of other people who had passed away.  At first I would catch glimpses of him in the back, but then he would disappear.  I would call him, and he would appear again and again, but wouldn’t come out.  Finally, he strode out of the crowd towards me.  He was young again and he looked like he did in his prime.  I gave him a hug to say goodbye and told him that I loved him and missed him, and his exact words to me were:  “I’m on the members list.”

 

So don’t you worry about my father, as he’s on the member’s list and it sounds like it’s a good place to be.

 

Thank you for listening.