From Our Correspondent: On The Right Track
A wistful look at a kinder Malaysia
By SANTHA OORJITHAM
Friday, January 19, 2001

Next month, veteran Malaysian actor, playwright and director Chin San Sooi will be staging a period piece, with a multiracial cast, which takes a wistful look back to a time when racial polarization had not appeared in Malaysia. No, not Yap Ah Loy - The Play, set in Malaya in the 1800s, which he first staged in 1985 (and is now rewriting as a musical, with composer Johan Othman). His new musical, KL Sentral (staged at the Dewan Bandaraya in Kuala Lumpur from Feb. 28 through March 3), is set in the railway quarters of a newly independent Malaya in 1957. Coincidentally, Malaysia's new transport hub of the same name is also scheduled to open next month - merging all the major rail, light rail transit and monorail lines and offering a central check-in for Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

The themes of the two productions by the Five Arts Center (of which Chin is a founder member) are similar. Back in 1986 (our 5/1/86 issue), Chin told Asiaweek that through Yap Ah Loy he was subconsciously trying to depict "a time when boundaries were not defined, and people threw in their lot with each other." The drama chronicled the rise of Yap, a penniless Hakka from southern China who arrived in the Malay Peninsula in 1854 to work for his uncle and rose to become Kuala Lumpur's third "Kapitan China," elected by the ethnic Chinese as their chief, a decade and a half later. He fought for Kedah prince Tengku Udin (grand-uncle of Malaysia's first premier, Tunku Abdul Rahman) and later became a magistrate and state councilor. In KL Sentral, Chin says, he depicts Indians, Chinese and Malays "very at home with each other. They fought and played and were in and out of each other's homes. They lived and worked together and were concerned about and for each other."

But KL Sentral is a more ambitious, personal work. The 1985 play had only six incidental songs and a cast of 16. KL Sentral is a full musical, with a cast of 46. Yap Ah Loy recounted the life of a historical figure and, says Chin, his plot "had to relate to certain events." The new musical is based entirely on Chin's memories and imagination: He was born in the railway quarters in 1941. His father started out as a railway clerk and worked his way up to stationmaster (in Ipoh and Singapore). "I thought the railway quarters was the center of the universe," recalls Chin (the finale refers to KL Sentral as the "Nucleus of the Nation"), who enjoyed free train passes until he started work.

In the musical, children of all races play together - though they sometimes make fun of the child of a mixed marriage between a Sikh and a Chinese. Women help out at each other's festivities by preparing their culinary specialties. The men share a common fear of the Communist terrorists (in those days, the Night Mail train was preceded by a pilot train in case of sabotage attempts) but relax at the Railway Recreation Club after work. Even the music by composer Johan Othman (who teaches at the Science University of Malaysia in Penang) is multiracial: Seven musicians perform on an Indian tabla (played by a Malay), an Indian tamburam, piano, cello, guitar, Chinese drums, bamboo flutes and wooden blocks.

Chin appears more optimistic now than he was in 1985. Back then, he told Asiaweek that Yap Ah Loy was "a vision of what might have been. We've missed something that's now not here, how it was man to man, and not this race and that race." He says KL Sentral mirrors "the Malaysian way of life without politics." The character Spirit of Twilight sings of "common dreams" and "mutual minds." Says Chin: "I'm sure it's still there if the politicians don't highlight politics."

KL Sentral will be accompanied by an exhibition of black-and-white photographs of Malaysia's old railways by Eric Peris.