Chinese in Malaysia: the story starts in 1786, at a burial ground
Malaysia's Chinese story does not start where the famous one starts. It starts on Penang island in 1786, when Francis Light raised a free port on a thinly settled coast — thirty-three years before Singapore's. What survives from that first generation is not…
Southeast Asia
The Woman at the Pier n nIn 1934, a fourteen-year-old girl stepped off a coastal steamer at Singapore's Clifford Pier. The humidity wrapped around her like a wet cloth. The harbor smelled of salt, diesel, and copra — nothing like the mulberry groves and fish ponds of home. She wore the simple cotton clothes of…