“There are a couple of things you might want to remember if you’re serious about community service,” Sim Kwang Yang told me once.
“First, never sleep around with the women you’re working with,” he said, breaking into a grin.
“Second, never give up – persevere at the work all your life.”
We were chatting at a coffeeshop near Tasik Biru in Bau on the way to Kampung Opar. The Bidayuh folk there had started a blockade against a logging company. Loggers had desecrated the villagers’ forests, streams, burial grounds and fruit orchards.
At that time, Sim Kwang Yang, known fondly by his initials SKY, had been MP for Bandar Kuching for eight years.
He was a clean and selfless politician, a creature so rare in Sarawak – a beautiful land explored by great scientists like Alfred Wallace – that this specimen defied taxonomy.
SKY was a walking, talking incarnation of the politics of hope, of idealism, and of principle.
He travelled to longhouses up and down Sarawak. He was an inclusive leader: he brought people together, and helped them organise politically, to defend their native customary rights or NCR, land.
On our visit to the Bidayuh heartland, he invited along Gara Jalong and See Chee How.
Chee How, a political protégé he loved like a son, is now a land rights lawyer and a PKR state assembly representative. Gara is a respected Kenyah leader from Long Geng near Bakun.
Gara gave the Opar villagers some idea of the pain they would face if they persevered with the defence of their ancestral land.
Gara explained how the Long Geng blockade had been demolished by the police and recounted the arrests of blockade leaders.
To this day, more than 20 years later, Gara remains a defiant ketua kampung, in his independent village, now re-located to Long Lawen.
Building bridges in a poor society
All his life, SKY persevered at this “social bridging,” bringing together diverse sections of society. He swept aside ethnic, religious, rural-urban and class divides. He taught younger politicians, journalists and NGO activists to ignore their own prejudices.
SKY may have been an urban MP but he was never photographed pointing at a pothole or a blocked drain. He envisioned an elected representative’s work as going beyond addressing physical defects.
He worked to build independent thinking and political consciousness. He not only spoke up for the disenfranchised. Both as a politician and a writer, he encouraged them to speak for themselves.
By showing contempt for our entrenched feudal hierarchies and political patronage, SKY inoculated many members of two generations of Sarawakians against our plague of corruption.
SKY’s work prepared the way for the numerous NCR landmark victories that have tumbled down from the Federal Court in recent years, protecting many native communities’ land for generations to come.
Healing the mind
SKY had grown up in desperate urban poverty. His father died young, so he and his three brothers were raised mainly by his intellectual, articulate but penniless mother, Goh Yong Kiang.
One rented room was in a ramshackle “house of 14 families.” His memories of chronic hunger, and the parasites in the outdoor toilet, haunted him for life.
He found his feet as a boarding student at the De La Salle Brothers’ mission school – St Joseph’s – in Kuching.
His lifelong passion for literature was prompted by Irish teachers such as Brother Albinus and Brother Henry, and by school plays. He was a head prefect, a champion sprinter, a mercurial basketball “wing” forward, and by most accounts, a bit of a rebellious thug.
SKY earned his first degree in biochemistry in Winnipeg, Canada, with an eye on reading medicine.
He worked part-time as a fireman and a nursing home porter. In the convalescence home, he cared for young paraplegic patients with spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis.
He lifted these patients both physically, using sheer muscle and will power, and spiritually – by listening to them and playing chess with them.
SKY’s minor was in philosophy, and thanks to professors such as Brian Keenan, he was plunged into – and remained immersed in – a life of uncertainty, and of questioning.
He gave up medicine for a second bachelor’s degree in philosophy, won the gold medal in his year (1977), and thus, secured a bright future of “doing well” in academia.
Like Lu Xun and Anton Chekov, two of his favourite writers, SKY came to see that doctors treat only our bodies. Unfortunately, large sections of humankind have healthy bodies but weak and diseased minds.
A new political SKY
SKY returned to Kuching for a brief summer vacation in 1978, shortly before he was to begin his paid scholarship for a PhD in philosophy.
He was sporting a beard, hippy threads, and shoulder-length hair. While SKY was leaning against a pillar at the tiny airport, his older brother Chris walked around the pillar twice – without recognising him.
SKY experienced profound culture shock. He found Sarawak’s social injustice back then unbearable. He chose to work for socialist democracy, in the tradition of critical thinkers like Jurgen Habermas and Frantz Fanon.
He left behind his closest friends in Canada, as well as a career path leading to a professor’s chair in a university philosophy department.
For SKY, philosophy or “love of wisdom” did not extend to the love of conventional wisdom. He accumulated no possessions from politics, and later in life, survived only on his MP’s pension.
SKY helped to establish the DAP in Sarawak. His pioneering work came during the dark days for the opposition in the state.
The multi-ethnic Sarawak National Party (SNAP) and the Sarawak United People’s Party (SUPP) had both been absorbed into the Barisan Nasional (BN)ruling coalition.
In 1982, SKY unexpectedly wrested the Bandar Kuching parliamentary seat from the well-funded SUPP.
He remained MP for three terms until 1995 – resisting BN’s overwhelming logistical strength with his strength of will, charisma, oratory brilliance and an army of young volunteers.
He remained an isolated opposition MP despite offers to give up politics.
Sarawak’s working class MP
He was a true environmentalist – he considered forest-dwellers like the Penan to be an intrinsic part of the environment.
He helped both the urban and rural poor, and remained a hero to many working folk.
One loyal friend was the late Tua Kampung Ahmad Sahari, the wrinkled chief of Kampung Pandan, a Malay fishing village in Lundu. He embraced SKY like a son each time he saw him, and called him “anak.”
In 1990, SKY, Chee How and Tua Kampung Ahmad had worked together to save a mountain – Gunung Gading – from clear-felling by a logging company. The mountain’s reprieve restored clean drinking water for 16 villages around the foot of Gunung Gading.
SKY was sanguine about his status (in many eyes) as a local folk hero, straight out of the pages of rebel mythology like “Water Margin”, striding onto Carpenter Street in Kuching in his shabby everyman’s short sleeves and slippers.
“Life is a journey, just like it is in great literature,” SKY explained. “We’re all in the same boat. And on this journey, we all have to pay for our passage.”
He applied himself to learn Iban and Malay, and worked to improve his understanding of Chinese literature and command of Mandarin, although his formal Chinese education had been limited to primary school.
He was deputy secretary-general of the DAP to Lim Kit Siang, as well as state DAP chairperson, for the best part of a decade.
The “Kick Out Kit Siang” schism in DAP in 1999 led to the exit of SKY, and several other talented leaders, from the party. SKY then led a membership drive in Sarawak for the newly formed PKR.
Over a decade later, SKY was awed by the sight of immense crowds at urban DAP and PKR election rallies or ceramah in 2011 – and the unprecedented election of 12 DAP and three PKR members to the state assembly.
He was intrigued by the social bridging evident in the Bersih rallies in 2011 and 2012 for free and fair elections. He saw these as a new beginning, as well as a stake in the heart of May 13 racist fear-mongering.
SKY was, however, certainly not starry-eyed. He expressed contempt for our racial politics.
He despised the mainstream view of votes as commodities, and of politicians as products to be marketed to voters as shrewd consumers.
“Politicians are like trees growing from the soil of the rakyat,” he said, “and the trees nourish the soil in turn. The trees can only be as healthy as the soil they grow from, and vice versa.”
A Socratic teacher and writer
SKY was disillusioned by his defeat in the 1995 parliamentary election to money politics and cynicism among part of the electorate. Shortly afterwards, he uprooted himself and moved to the Klang Valley.
He returned to his beloved Sarawak only to campaign for an alternative government in successive elections up to 2011.
SKY taught adult classes in philosophy at the New Era College in Kajang (now a college university). He relished Socratic debates with his perceptive students. He was, his students say, a dazzling and witty teacher.
Even in private, with a skinful of langkau, he discussed ideas rather than people or things.
He wrote well-researched, erudite newspaper columns – painting pictures and posing questions, rather than hammering away at political certainties and preaching to the converted – for decades.
He contributed to, among others, Malaysiakini, the Nut Graph, the Merdeka Review, the Malaysian Mirror, the Sarawak Tribune, Sin Chew Daily, the International Times, Nanyang Siang Pau, The Borneo Post, and his home-grown blog, Hornbill Unleashed.
One for the road
SKY had suffered from diabetes for decades. A stroke in 2010 rendered him unable to read. Letters appeared to be in a foreign script, as incomprehensible to him as Cyrillic or Thai.
This was an irony worthy of the Book of Job: SKY, one of the most literate Malaysians ever, tormented by the tedium of watching CNN and BBC television news.
SKY died in his sleep on November 27, aged 66, apparently of a heart attack.
On several occasions, he remarked that when he was gone, his friends would do well to raise a glass to him in celebration, rather than in sober mourning – the proverbial “one for the road.” He always liked a good conversation over a glass of Glenfiddich.
He was incomparably generous and humorous company, even though he had been familiar with suffering all his life. Poverty had failed to make him poor in spirit.
He understood the absurdity of our comical, tragic, sometimes magical lives. He often cautioned his loved ones against despair.
Was SKY the limit for the politics of hope and inclusiveness in Malaysia? Or will others follow?
SKY, and those he inspired, have opened the minds of many. We live in hope and try never to give up.