Tag: manjung

Growing economic potential outside the city

Work life balance is the starting point for a young family
By Foong Pek Yee
After five years studying in Kuala Lumpur and  in UK, he is hesitant about returning to the laid back lifestyle in his hometown.
It takes Ooi Choo Teck about three years of contemplation before he returned to  Jering New Village in Manjung, Perak for good.
That was in 2008.
Today , Choo Teck is a tiger prawn farmer and has set his sights on the China market.
Making progress:  Choo Teck’s prawn farm in Segari, Manjung.
Scalability:  The quest for food security worldwide sees growing potential for farming.
A typical day for the  41-year-old farmer sees him juggling  between his house and farms  in Segari, Manjung, about 35 minutes drive apart.
He is already  in the business for eight years .
Prior to that he was helping his father Datuk Ooi Jing Ting in the family business.
He says  a relative taught him prawn farming.
“It involves much work and attention to detail ,and the need to be hands on,” he says.
While Choo Teck has workers to handle the job, he goes to the farms daily to stay on top of things.
Unlike living in a big city like Kuala Lumpur where traffic congestion can be  time consuming and stressful, Choo Teck says work-life balance is better away from  the  hustle and bustle.
Nowadays he has time to play badminton and goes jogging with his wife Yap Oi Leng.
The couple who are both  41 are blessed with three children.
Cultivating a future:  Rising economic opportunities outside the city.
 On what it takes to stay on in a village while many young people are leaving for the cities, Choo Teck says he makes new friends,  focus on his business and bringing up his family.
With food security  a rising world concern, he says food production has good business potential.
He has plans to expand his prawn business and export to China in five years’ time.
To date, his prawns go to Pantai Remis in Perak.
“We must have a certain volume of production in order to qualify to venture into the overseas export market,” says Choo Teck who has a degree in marketing.
Prawn and fish farming is a big business in Manjung.

A Dinosaur Park hidden inside a village

More than meets the eye.

By Foong Pek Yee

A Dinosaur Park inside a Chinese village comes across an intriguing mystery.
This is a common reaction when people first heard about the park.
The park with colourful replicas of dinosaurs and animals among lush greenery is certainly more than meets the eye.
It was champion in the Clean and Beautification Campaign by the housing and local  government  ministry in the early 1990s.
Datuk Ooi Jing Ting, an ex village chief,  says the villagers had decided to build the park to take part in the campaign.
“We formed a committee to raise money to come up with the park and continue to maintain it after the campaign,” says the visibly proud 66-year-old Ooi.
The well-maintained park and surroundings  says a lot about the villagers’ love for their village.
Jering Village is one of the 452 barb wire settlements called Chinese new villages set up by the then colonial government in Malaya during Emergency (1948-1960).
Today, most of the villagers are the second, third and fourth generation from the day their families settled down in the village.
In their 80s , Yu Kwong Tieng, Choi Sau Fong, Loi Heng See and Seow Kok Toh are the second generation.
Old friends : (from left) -Datuk Ooi Jing Ting,66,  Choi Sau Fong, 81, Loi Heng See, 80 and Yu Kwong Tieng 82.
Their fathers who were the  first generation came from China.
Seow, 86, remembers the shacks – literally a roof over their heads- was all they had when they first arrived at the village.
It was a type of temporary common housing for the early settlers before each family was given a plot of land and 100 Malayan dollars to build their house, he adds.
Good old days: Seow Kok Toh, a great grandfather, continues to cherish the days when he first arrived at the village as a  young man.
The villagers are mostly Foochows  and the dialect is widely used even among those from other clans.
Ooi who is a Foochow, was born and bred in the village.
According to him, there are more than 400 houses in the village.
Meeting place: The shops and coffeeshops are located in this part of the village.
Many of the villagers have moved to cities like Kuala Lumpur to seek a living over the years, and the village is a greying community these days.
The village’s  Chinese primary school, SJKC  Kampung Jering, has about 150 pupils now.
About 90% of the villagers are oil palm small holders, using the land given to them to plant rubber in the old days.
According to Ooi,  each house was given six acres of land to plant rubber; four acres given in 1957 and another two acres in the 1960s.
Nowadays, a typical day for the villagers is spend in the house, coffeeshop and oil palm holding.
Ooi says there are four coffeeshops in the village which open around 6.00am.
Villagers are early risers in this predominantly agricultural community.
The villagers find company in each other and coffeeshops is their favourite meeting place.
If there is anything that remains unchanged, Ooi says it is the villagers who remain close- knitted in good and  challenging times alike.
Filial piety also remains intact.
Ooi says many return to the village to pay respect to their ancestors during the annual Ching Ming festival.
But he says the number returning for major festivals like Chinese New Year is dwindling over the years  as some of them no longer have any family members living in the village.
About 20% of some 400 houses in the village are abandoned units these days.

Journey to the Promised Land

From Grit to Great :  The story of the Foochows .
By Foong Pek Yee
THEY finally arrived at their destination on Sept 9 after surviving the perilous journey.
There were 303 on board, while another 60 arrived a week later.
And that was in September 1903 –  the beginning of the Foochows in Sitiawan, Perak.
Together we progress:  Tan Sri Dr Ting Chew Peh (left) who was then the  Housing and Local Government Minister opened the Manjung Kutien Association Building in 1994.  He is a Kutien and his hometown is Merbau New Village in Manjung.
According to the book “The Foochows of Sitiawan: a historical perspective” this pioneer group were from China’s Foochow rice growing community.
The author Shih Toong Siong said the then Colonial Administration in Malaya wanted to ” transplant” this community in Sitiawan.
The mission was to turn Sitiawan into a rice growing region, and to meet the rising demand for the staple food as more immigrants arrived in Malaya to work in the tin mines.
The Methodist Episcopal Mission (MEM) which was tasked to undertake this “transplant”, had assigned Rev Ling Ching Mi and  Rev. Dr H.L.E Luering to the job.
Of the 484 Foochows who boarded the ship and set sail for Malaya on  Aug 3, 1903, only 363 made it to the promised land.
Four days into the journey saw five deaths which were attributed to cholera and exhaustion.
They arrived in Singapore for quarantine on the St John’s Island on Aug 22, where many either died or went missing in transit.
The final headcount was 363 when they were ready to set sail for  Sitiawan.
But their ordeal was far from over upon arrival – they did not get what as promised to them , and from then they only had their resilience to survive in the tropical wilderness.
True to the Chinese saying ” we get up from where we fell” – the Foochows have proven their mettle the day they step foot on Malayan soil.
United and strong:  The Manjung Kutien Association was set up in 1956, and Ling (right) and the association’s committee member Ting Hsia Sung showing a photo of the historical day.
The place: Ayer Tawar Heritage House in Ayer Tawar, Manjung is a showcase of the Foochows’ way of life in Manjung from the early 20th century and beyond.
Proud descendants: Foochows  at the opening of the Ayer Tawar Heritage House in 2016
Today, the Ayer Tawar Heritage House in Ayer Tawar, about 65 km from Ipoh, will give a glimpse of the life of the Foochows in Ayer Tawar and Sitiawan from the day they landed in Sitiawan.
Ayer Tawar is about 12km from Sitiawan, and the Chinese in both towns are predominantly Foochows.
One of the landmarks in Ayer Tawar is the Manjung Kutien Association Building along the main road of Ayer Tawar
Kutien is one of the 10 sub dialects of Foochows (sub dialects  are  based on their respective district in China) , and the Ayer Tawar Heritage House is under the Manjung Kutien Association.
The heritage house chairman Ling Sze Hing says the artefacts, mostly donated by the locals, are dated back to more than a century ago.
He says the heritage house opened doors in 2016,  and entrance is free and by appointment (019-5582543)
Ling, 56, says he and his committee are coming up with a research centre on Foochows in the heritage house – to make it the place to go to for people who are interested to find out more on Foochows, especially the Kutien.
A Kutien himself, Ling’s passion and pride on anything Kutien a and Foochow  is palpable.
Hardwork:  Mr Ling showing how to operate a traditional grinder
Bare necessities:  Irons using charcoals (top row) and pots used during the old days.