Old Town Gamblers

Years ago while I was standing by a roadside at the old town, I saw a man walking to a telephone booth knocking furiously at the box hoping that coins would fall out from the box, like striking a jackpot from a slot machine. His desperate effort was in vain as expected as people nowadays seldom use public phone as mobile phones are already reining the day. Even if a person opted to use a public phone, he would prefer to use a telephone card instead.

Zooming at the man from a distance as he walked away I was shocked to know that he was once the ‘idol of the town’ as he had been a prominent basketball captain of the Paik Teik School Union which was invincible in many tournaments in the Krian District for a couple of years in the seventies.

On another occasion, I saw him present as an ‘uninvited guest’ at a wake to get a free meal as his dinner. This character is non other than the compulsive gambler, Ah Poh. Over the past umpteen years he had exploited all avenues to borrow or swindle money from friends and foes alike to fuel his gambling spree instead of leading a decent life. I was told he even went overboard by becoming a Police informer,“Je Goh Kia”[二五仔]. With this bad reputation most town folks preferred to keep him at an arm’s length, making him a lone ranger that people despised.

The fate of my former classmate was no better than Ah Poh. He was another compulsive gambler who superstitiously adopted the Christian name,Winson , hoping that the name would bring him better gambling luck as “Win” means “to win” and “son’ still carries the meaning of “to win” in Chinese when it is pronounced in Mandarin as “胜”. So the Chinese equivalent of Winson is 连胜[Lian-sheng]. Before Winson indulged in full-time gambling, he was a very promising sale personnel working for a well-established public listed company in the eighties. He used to travel back to the old town from Kuala Lumpur giving lifts to friends and relatives who wanted to ‘balik kampung’.
According to a friend who had frequently travelled with him, Winson truly lived up to his Christian name when he first tried his luck at Genting. Luck was with him just like a shadow attached to a body under the broad daylight. Everyday in that particular month he won money by the thousands. Within a month he had accumulated over eighty thousand dollars. This easy money that he made at Genting prompted him to resign from his job to become professional gambler. However, “no flower would blossom for a hundred days”[花无百日红]。 He did not realise the ancient wisdom of the Chinese adage, “输钱总是赢钱起” , which means “for a gambler to go bankrupt, he is always given the chance to win money at its initial stage”.

Later on ‘the wheel of fortune’ turned against him. In one instance, he lost all his chips until he had not even money left to get down from Genting. He tried to hitch a ride but to no avail. In the end he had to walk all the way down from Genting to get back to Kuala Lumpur.

Another of my childhood friend was Kun. He was a sales manager of a wholesaler of beers in town. To promote the sale of liquor, it was natural for him to mix with friends and entertain clients in the evenings. Hence his social networking was very extensive. Among the friends he mixed were Police Inspectors of all races. He took pride of his friends and always boasted to others that they were his ‘best friends whom he could rely on’.

One evening Kun was gambling with his friends in a secluded cottage near a pig farm. The Police raided the place. The gamblers fled helter-skelter. Kun and my one other friend were caught as they were too slow and clumsy to react to this sudden commotion. Actually the Police was more interested in the money on the gambling table than rounding up the gamblers. They went all out to snatch the money found on the table before they pretended to catch a few ‘lame ducks’ from the dispersing crowd. On seeing that the Inspector was one of his drinking buddies, Kun waved his hand excitedly and yelled to him, “Wei, Ooi, it is me, Ah Kun!” The Inspector Ooi retorted, “I’ve caught even you.” Poor Kun and my other friend had to stay over-night at the Police lock-up.


The next morning they were brought before a magistrate, with a set of cards and a mere ten ringgit Malaysia was produced as concrete evidence of their crime. Both pleaded guilty and each had to pay a fine of RM 200.

Yet another of my friend was Ken, a petty hawker who was living from hand to mouth. One evening he was strolling along the Old Market Road . On the abandoned jetty by the riverside of River Krian he saw a group of boys squatting. This aroused his curiosity. He approached the boys. On reaching the spot, he heard the sounds,“toong!” “toong!” “toong!” “toong!”. All of a sudden, the boys jumped into the river. Scattering on the ground were cards and some money of about twenty to thirty dollars. Ken was overjoyed to see the money and he wondered why did the boys jump into the river. As he was about to reap his good fortune by scooping up the money, he found his arms were rudely pulled behind by two Policemen who mistakenly arrested him. My poor friend had to swallow the sorrow just like ‘a dumb person tasting a bitter pill’[哑子吃黄连]. That night Ken had to sleep with the bugs and mosquitoes on the cold floor behind the iron bars.

On the next morning, he was escorted to the Magistrate court together with some other gamblers who were rounded up on the previous night. The magistrate, Mr.Abraham Ali Katuk, passed a uniform verdict of RM 200 fine for each and every gambler who admitted to his guilt.
When it was the turn of my friend to face the magistrate, he pleaded, “Your Honour, My Lord, can I pay by instalments?”


On hearing that, Mr.Abraham Ali Katuk chuckled and then burst into laughter until he fell off from the bench and rolling on the floor as he took it as the ‘joke of the century’. After regaining his composure, out of sympathy for my friend, the magistrate dismissed him with a fine of ninety per cent discount. Ken was able to leave the court after his neighbour, Ah Tom, helped him to settle the fine of RM 20.


From then on, my friend, Ken, vowed not to look at people gambling, especially at ‘those boys who would jump into the river’ before he knew what was happening.

Old Town Chinese Medical Hall


On the adjacent side of High Road,a stone’s throw away from my house, was a Chinese Medical Hall where I used to spend many of my ‘happy hours’ during my primary school years, especially during the year-end long vacation stretching over a period of five to seven weeks.

The medical hall was a shop-house at the corner of the t-junction of High Road and Lorong Pintu Sepuloh. It had a five-foot way in front and along side of the the shop. The five-foot way offered us a good avenue to play various games including hide-and-seek ,high jump with a rope as a ‘high jump pole’. We also played indoor games like Chinese chess and ping-pong in the house.

I always hung around the shop for the whole day except when it was time for lunch or dinner. On those days parents were too busy with their chores to care about the whereabouts of their children as long as they came back during mealtimes.

On Sundays we always woke up early to tune in to the physical exercise programme that Beijing Central People‘s Broadcating Station(CHINA NATIONAL RADIO) [北京中央人民广播电台] broadcast at 6.30 am, local time.

We performed the exercise on the road and along the five-foot way. If time permitted, we would jog to Pai Teik Primary School or cycle to Changkat Hill.

In the early sixties, it was a luxury for a household in town to subscribe to a newspaper as most of the town folks could hardly afford it. But for the medical hall, it was a different story. Every morning the medical hall had a copy of Chinese daily, Sin Chew Jit Poh [星洲日报], delivered to its doorstep. On Sunday mornings, children would wait anxiously for the delivery of the newspaper. They would rush and scramble for it, for one particular page with the section called ‘The Students’ Corner’[ 学生园地]。It featured short essays written by primary school pupils in the country.Being the children of the medical hall,they held the ‘trump card’ and had the ‘upper hand’ over me. They took turns to read the column. I had to wait till each and everyone of them had finished quenching their thirst of reading the column before it was handed to me. At times the youngest brother of the family would purposely ‘glue on to the paper indefinitely’ or ‘sleep on it with eyes wide-open’ just to test my patience. That was an initial social lesson that I had to learn to cope with.

The proprietor of this medical hall was a first generation Hakka immigrant from China with the surname of Chong. To respect him as one of the few Chinese physicians in the town,we addressed him as “Xin Sang” [先生]. Mr. Chong was a quiet, polite and soft-spoken man. He was not much of a talker but he was a good listener, synonymous with a doctor listening to his patient while diagnosing. He earned the respect of all those people who came into contact with him.

He was a very thrifty and disciplined man. He never ate out. The breakfast prepared was a bowl of oatmeal mixed with one or two teaspoons of cream milk for every one in the family. He lived a life of a puritan although he was an atheist . Whenever my late father ran short of cash to pay the rent or to purchase goods during those difficult years he would look up for Mr Chong.

Mr.Chong’s business was considered good as he did all his business transactions in cash terms only. Rarely did I see any patient entering the shop asking for a discount for the medicine Mr.Chong dispensed.

Although Mr.Chong was financially sound, he was very meticulous with the money he spent. To get better discounts and good offers, he would buy goods and essential items in bulk and paying cash.

To save money he cut his children's hair himself. The success story of Mr.Chong as a self-made barber spurred my late father to emulate. He bought a set of barber’s kit and used us as guinea-pigs. We became the instant laughing stock in the neighbourhood as our haircut became the forerunner of the Beatles.

The other children would ridicule us as “Coconut-head” [椰壳头].

Since then my late father stopped emulating Mr Chong. Later on we would use the abandoned barber’s kit as our plaything.

Mr.Chong had five sons and a daughter. I was quite close to the second youngest son, Ah Ming, who was a year older than me. We played together and seldom quarreled. Once in a while we would go out together to the riverbank of River Krian beside the bridge to build sand castles or the‘Great Wall of China’; or to a clear stream on the other side of River Krian to catch fish which Ah Ming’s father allowed him to keep in an improvised aquarium. Every evening I would go to his house to watch him change the water in the aquarium. Sometimes he allowed me to partake in the process. On every alternate day I would follow him to a muddy drain at Kalidonia Road to scoop with a wire loop, tiny earthworms to feed the fish he reared.

Ah Chau was Mr.Chong's second son. He was six years older than me. At the age of thirteen, he had to help his father to look after the shop in the morning while his father was busily preparing lunch for the family. In the afternoon he attended school at the Methodist Private Secondary School. I remembered when I was at Standard Three, I was lagging behind in my English lessons in school as I did not know how to read the textbook. I approached Ah Chau for help. He took pains to check the pronunciation of each word from a bilingual English-Chinese dictionary and I would try to translate the pronunciation of the English words with Chinese characters. It took us quite some time with a few sessions to complete a short chapter. By the time I had done with the first chapter, my English teacher would have already covered a few chapters ahead. I could never keep up with my teacher in school so I finally gave up learning the subject.

In a way, the memory of the Chinese Medical Hall and the family members involved are deep-rooted in my heart and whenever I reminisce of my childhood years, they come into my mind. In another perspective, I consider myself to be lucky not to be born in this new era whence the only ‘entertainment’ a poor child has after school is just a succession of tuition classes of all sorts.