On Home Is Not Here by Wang Gungwu

Review Essay I: Philip Holden

Two moments of self-discovery stand out from Wang Gungwu’s account of an Ipoh childhood in his memoir Home Is Not Here. The first arises from the world atlas given to him by his father on his tenth birthday. The book, Wang writes, “transfixed” (p. 50) him, so much so that he stopped playing with friends and retreated to his room, filling an exercise book with long lists of place names drawn from across the globe. Uneasy about his place as a child in a family of migrants from Jiangsu in Ipoh—a minority within a minority—and in a colonial plural society on the cusp of great change, Wang found “pleasurable calm” (p. 50) in the way the atlas made the world legible to him. The second occurred a few years later, during the Japanese occupation. Wang’s father asked him to help catalogue a library of books collected from homes abandoned by British expatriates. In the evening he learned classical Chinese, but during the day he took out popular and classic English novels from the library, often finishing three or four a week. These private acts of self-making through reading and writing then became more public. Towards the end of the Japanese occupation, Wang listened to English news on a secret shortwave radio, translating a summary for his father’s employer, and mentally plotting the battle zones on to a world remembered from the atlas. After the Pacific War ended, he succumbed to an “obsession” (p. 93) with movie-going in Ipoh, devouring cinematic representations of the history he had lived through and the books that he had read.

These acts of reading and analysis provide an entry point into a series of experiences of doubleness that constitute Home Is Not Here, experiences that produced several productive paradoxes for the historian Wang was to become. In his inaugural address as Professor at the University of Malaya, Wang spoke of three main “methods of presenting history”. The third of these, propaganda, was the most dangerous because it put “forth only one point of view” (Wang 1968, p. 15). Historians in Southeast Asia after decolonization, Wang argued, needed to work with two other historical methods, each of which might intersect with and question each other. These were narrative or story, and “critical and analytical scholarship”, drawing widely on contemporary developments in social science (p. 5): in the novel and the atlas, we might see this dyad in embryo. And in Home Is Not Here, Wang elaborates a second experience of doubleness that begins in personal experience and ends in an intellectual concern. Early in his memoir, he expresses trepidation about publishing a personal account of his early life. His interest in history, he writes, was premised on establishing “a critical distance in the hope of learning some larger lessons”, whereas the book he is writing serves, in contrast, as more of an exemplum of “what people felt and thought who lived through any period of past time” (p. 1). At the end of the memoir, recounting his preparation to enter the University of Malaya in 1949, he returns to this concern regarding the relationship between individual and collective experience. Reading Karl Mannheim, he wonders “whether a society can be built which will give the benefit of collectivism without loss of freedom” (p. 201). Again, one thinks of the library and the radio, those solitary experiences of listing and reading that unfurl themselves in the comprehension of global historical events and public narratives.

Home Is Not Here tells the story of the first two decades of Wang’s life, moving from his birth in Surabaya to an extended account of his Ipoh childhood. His father was a Chinese teacher, principal, and inspector of schools, but he had also studied English Literature. Wang’s childhood was thus marked by transcultural crossings, yet also by a strong sense...