Malaysian Chinese, who formed the second-largest ethnic group in Malaysia, make up 22.8% of the Malaysian population. Most Malaysian Chinese arrived in Malaysia in two waves – in the 15th century during the Chinese Ming dynasty treasure voyages, and later on, during Malaysia’s colonial era between the 1500s and 1900s when many Chinese migrated to escape famine, war, and poverty in their home villages. They became farmers, working and cultivating the land, or miners, developing tin mines and playing a leading role in Malaysia’s tin-mining industry.
Malaysia, during the British colonial rule, was unstable. Due to political changes within China, a communist movement spread among overseas Chinese, and the communists in Malaysia fought to win independence for Malaysia from the British Empire. Between 1948 and 1960, the British colonial government implemented the Malayan Emergency, which, forced around 400,000 ethnically Chinese civilians into internment camps called New Villages. Official records document 480 New Villages created.
My family’s story as Malaysian Chinese began with my great-grandparents, who left their village in Guangdong and travelled by boat, arriving on the east coast of Malaysia in what is now the city of Kuantan. My grandparents grew up and met in Kuantan but were forcibly displaced by the British colonial government in 1955 and taken inland, where they resettled in a New Village called Sungai Ruan.
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