Old Town Snake-King
The Hakka people used to label lazy bums who tried to evade work or their duty at all cost as “sa-wong”[蛇王,Snake-King] whereas in other communities the title “Snake-King” was a recognition bestowed on an expert snake catcher, especially if he could catch poisonous king cobras.

Recently I was shocked to hear from a good friend of mine, Mr.Henderson Tan, who is my ‘online encyclopedia’ regarding the history of my Old Town, Nibong Tebal. I was told that the ancestors of the King Cobras in the vicinity of my town were specially imported from India by the local British estate managers more than fifty years ago to hunt for rats at oil palm estates. They were thought to be effective pest control in the estates.
If what my friend had told me is true, I am rather curious as well as wonder whether the local species of cobra would ever ask the Indian species of cobra to “Pooh-lah! Hang balik India!” whenever they meet each other to argue over the matter of “cobra immigrants” or “pendatang Ular Tedung” in Malay. The Old Town of Nibong Tebal was surrounded by rubber estates, where some of them were later converted into oil palm estates. These estates were naturally infested with snakes, so these estates gave rise to a new occupation, snake catching ‘specialists’.These expert catchers would earn the tittle of ‘Snake Kings’. In the sixties and early seventies of the last century, Snake Kings of all races were found in abundance everywhere in Peninsular Malaysia. Newspapers at that time were never short of news of one snake king challenging another to see who would emerge as the ‘ultimate king of the kings’.

Hong Lim was our Old Town Snake King during that period. He was a resident of Old Market Road, Nibong Tebal. He caught snakes for his clients’ consumption. He would also sell the skin to be used as leather for making shoes, handbags, belts or outfits. He even made ointment with his own concoction to cure snake bites and skin diseases.

Believe it or not, the raw blood of cobra mixed with a liquor was served to men as a tonic drink. It claimed to be an aphrodisiac similar to Viagra. The flesh of poisonous snakes were kept in bottles filled with liquor for a period of time before it was used as a herbal tonic to cure rheumatism. I learned from another friend in Bukit Mertajam that an elderly lady who habitually ate a slice of raw gall bladder of a snake to preserve her youthful complexion. For Hong Lim,he would go out in the evenings with his assistant from one town to another with a police permit to set up a roadside stall to promote his home-made ointment and herbal tonic of liquor made of snakes. As if to attest to potency of his homemade brew, he displayed it along with live snakes. Being a devoted Buddhist ,his mother was very much against Hong Lim’s job of catching and killing snakes as a livelihood. Her advice “fell into deaf ears” as Hong Lim had had no other means to earn better money than catching snakes.

One evening the residence of the District Officer of Parit Buntar by the River Krian was disturbed by the presence of a cobra measuring twelve to fifteen foot long. All the occupants in the house were frightened and screaming hysterically ‘like fans at a Michael Jackson’s concert’. The District Officer, Mr. Abraham Lingkun, quickly summoned for a Police Inspector to catch the snake. The inspector duly arrived but declined to follow orders. He explained that he was trained like any other Police officers to maintain law and order, and definately not “to catch snakes!”

As luck would have it Hong Lim was busy selling his products near the bus station of Parit Buntar. The District Officer quickly ordered his driver to fetch Hong Lim to catch the cobra. Hong Lim, with the help of some others, wrestled with the snake for half an hour or so before they finally captured the beast.

The District Officer was very pleased and thankful to Hong Lim,and instantly he wrote him a letter of appreciation. Whether the District Officer rewarded Hong Lim monetarily, it was still as good as every body's guess.

However, Hong Lim was proud to possess this precious letter. He framed it and used it to promote his business. He would place it in a prominent place so that even a casual onlooker would not miss it. To a certain extent it did help to boost his sales. For all its worth the letter did considerably ward off harassment from the corrupt police officers (“mata-mata” for “duit kopi”).

As a Chinese adage states, “No one can be well and healthy for over a thousand days.”[人无千日好]. A minor mishap did happen to him while he was doing his business in Alor Setar. He was invited to catch a pair of king cobras in a rice mill. Although he was successful in his mission, one of his fingers was bitten by one of the beasts. He immediately cut off the poison-infected finger and asked his assistant to take him to the General Hospital for treatment.

A newspaper reporter from the Penang based English daily,The Straits Echo, came to know about it and published the news on the following day mentioning that “A renowned Snake King from the Old Town was bitten by a cobra but his own ointment did not help and he had to seek treatment at the General Hospital in Alor Setar.”

Hong Lim furious after reading the report. He went straight to Penang to see a famous lawyer, Mr. KS Lim, for legal advice whether he should sue the reporter for defamation.

Before the lawyer answered his question, Hong Lim was asked to produce a fifty-dollar note on the table. After keeping the note in the drawer, the lawyer answered briefly, “Sue? Of course, you can! But then, you wouldn’t be compensated much even if you won the case as the reporter didn’t mention your name.”

With the reply given, Hong Lim took heed of the hint from the lawyer and he did not pursue the matter any further. He went home ‘like a defeated dog with its tail tucked between its legs’. Nevertheless,he vowed he would try to catch more snakes within the shortest period to ‘redeem’ the fee that he had paid to the lawyer.

An Annual Get-together Lunch On 5 February 2011, we had an annual get-together lunch for the ex-pupils of the Class of ’69 of the Technical Institute of Penang at Goh Swee Kee Restaurant 5, Sri Bahari Road, Off Penang Road.

This was the first time I took part in this lunch gathering although Tick Lay had told me about it without fail for the past two years. Seventeen of us who attended had two tables to ourselves. Many among us did not meet one another since we left the Technical Institute more than forty years ago. However, we shared the same yearning of catching up with one another with news after all these decades. As Kim Piaw puts it, “Even though we might have changed in physically, our friendship remains intact.”

The attendees of this function were deeply indebted to Herman Teoh and Lye Choon Sheng for their enthusiastic and untiring effort in organising this annual gathering and to the others who tried to contact and canvass for the rest of school mates to grace the event.

At the gathering,when I was initially introduced to some of the gentlemen, I couldn’t recognise who they were as they definitely looked nothing like what they did forty years ago! It was only after I dug down deep into the recesses of my memory and during our conversations that I was able to piece together who was who. If all of us who had not met before for a long time were to bump into one another in Penang Road, we would have most likely treated one another as total strangers. Even though Tick Lay and Seen Moun were room mates in the school hostel when they were in Form Five, could not recognise each other when they met at the gathering.

I supposed it was the same with Soek King who could not make out who I was although we were in the same class during our Sixth Form years. It could be that her busy working life had resulted her ‘memory card’ being re-formatted many times over the years that ‘some of the older files might have been deleted or chucked into the trash bin’.

One particular file which Soek King still retained had aroused the interest of everybody at the gathering. It was a love story that is worth mentioning here.

This love story started during our school year in 1968. The main actor, the ‘Romeo’ of our school, was staying in the hostel - in the room next to mine. At that time some of us were already aware that he had to take his medication to help him sleep. But then no one would have suspected that he had fallen in love unilaterally with his classmate, Juliet.

Persistently Romeo would find every opportunity to stick around Juliet in school just like ‘bees swarming around a hive’. But Juliet did not want to have any affair with Romeo then . She got very annoyed and upset to the extent that she told her friends that one day she would not hesitate to give Romeo a huge mirror for him “to take a long look at himself in the mirror”.

Whether one would consider it lucky for Romeo, or otherwise for Juliet, fate had charted the destiny of this love affair. As if with the divine intervention, both Romeo and Juliet went to the “same” university, took up the “same” course, attended the “same” church, taught in the “same” town in a Northern state of Peninsular Malaysia and finally got married and lived happily as a family. The story definitely had a fairy tale ending.

Our conversation hovered around topics such as ways of maintaining a healthy lifestyle; means of reducing stress; recommended reading and selected places of interest worthy of visit.

The two hours of lunch together was hardly enough for us to catch up with one another. So we adjourned to Coffee Island at Gurney Drive, for another round of conversation and a free flow of beer and coffee. We lingered for another couple of hours. All of us enjoyed the companionship, especially when we had a few “jokers” among us.

Before we bid farewell to one another, Lye Choon Sheng had made a proposal to have our next annual Chinese New Year gathering at Chiang Mai. Hopefully it would materialize with a better response from our school mates and their family members.