Wong Len Yu
黃蓮友/
黃蓮有?
1907-1981?

Age : 74 years

My Maternal Grandmother (My mother's mother)

WONG LEN YU
PEREMPUAN

KG. LAKUT, PAPAR

Date of Registration : 5-10-1972

Place of birth : NEGERI CHINA

Date of birth : 1907

Reference :

K/P LAMA 278966
S.WN.NO: 0780826
PER. 16A

Papar Town and Beaufort Town are major initial Hakka population centers in Sabah and boasts a large Hakka minority to this day.

I have fond memories of  her house and rice field.

She brought me to see the rice field one day in 1978 ?. I have never seen her out working in the farm as she was already 70 over years then.

This formal rice field is beside Jalan Highway, Kampung Lakut, a kilometer from Papar Town Center. The family members are no more rice farmers but engaged in other professions.  The wooden houses of those days were today replaces with concrete houses. There were 2 houses today belong to 2 of his 3 sons. The other youngest son has long moved to settled down in Tanam (or Beaufort).

I knew very little about her. I never seen her husband (my maternal grandfather) she never talked about him.

I have been mistakenly assuming that she was born locally in Borneo until recently a copy of her Identity Card (photo above) indicated that her birth place was in China.

I've always been interested in the past. For long time I have wanted to understand my ancestors that came from South China.
Like a detective, I am trying to solves a mystery of how my family developed into who we are today.
What factors contributed to my grand parents being so anxiety filled their whole life?
Why did the grandparents come here from China?
How did my maternal-grandmother raise her children without the present of a husband?
Where has my maternal-grandfather gone to?
How my parent met?
It was a decade ago when I began exploring further into my family tree but I could not get very far.
A mere four generations, my ancestor’s names, along with their pioneering histories in Sabah are long-buried.

My mother left over a dozens of old family photos with images of people whose names I never know. But these faded photos are good begin to journals the life stories of my parents and grandfather, documented for my children to treasure.

The House was beside Jalan Highway, a kilometer from Papar Town Center.

In the photo is a young couple standing. They were my mother (at left) and father (at right). This was probably taken between 1951 to 1952 before their marriage.

Wong Len Yu is not in the photo.

Behind my father (the man standing) is a round object. That was a wind blower for rice hush. Wong Len Yu's family were rice farmers. The rice field was at the right hand side of the above photo.

The long hut at the right side of the photo was the pig house.

My mother (Liew Soon Tshing) often talked about rice planting and pigs rearing when she was young.

But she almost never talked about rubber tapping while in the photo the house looked surrounded by fully grown up rubber trees. By around 1974 when I visited this house, there were not many rubber trees left. My mother seldom talked about rubber at their house likely the rubber trees were abandoned at the that time of the photo.

Rubber first came to Sabah in 1900 and by 1940 it was estimated that there were 132,000 acres .
After the Japanese war, rubber was estimated only approximately 122,000 acres left in 1946
The missing some 10,000 acres had either been cut out for food production or abandoned.

(Reference Source: Sabah Rubber Fund Board Annual Report – 1968)
 

Obviously at the time of above photo, Wong Len Yu's family (my mother's mother)  has abandoned rubber tapping and shifted to rice planting and pig rearing.