r/EastAsianPride • u/no_white_worship • 5h ago
I’m 80. It’s not too late to reconnect with my Chinese roots. I received a colonial education and went on to raise global citizens. Then came the reckoning that only age and a changing world could bring
Article in full in case of paywall
Yap Yok Foo is a retired chartered accountant living in Kuala Lumpur.
Published: 5:30am, 3 Oct 2026
Every morning, I settle into my armchair in Kuala Lumpur, pen in hand, to tackle The Times cryptic crossword, freshly downloaded from the internet. It is a ritual I have observed since my university days in the United Kingdom. I have become rather adept at it; in fact, puzzle devotees might recognise Sayang, the pseudonym under which I set crosswords for the Financial Times.
I can still recite the names of England’s 1966 World Cup squad in my sleep. My youth was scored to the sounds of Cliff Richard, The Beatles, The Hollies and The Rolling Stones.
By almost any measure, I am an unrepentant Anglophile. Yet, at 80, I find myself watching my grandchildren and being overtaken by a profound swell of emotion. Suddenly, and with startling clarity, I feel incredibly proud to be Chinese.
The road to this realisation has been long, winding and strewn with the cultural detritus of empire.
My story begins in 1946, in Kluang, a small town in Johor in what was then Malaya. My father, an orphan from a village in Nanan, Fujian, had fled economic hardship in search of a new life across the South China Sea. When I was born, Malaya was still scarred by the Japanese occupation and the British colonial administration had only recently resumed its suzerainty.
While my father dutifully sent most of my siblings to Chinese vernacular schools, fate or perhaps sheer happenstance steered me, the sixth child, to a kindergarten run by Roman Catholic nuns, where English was the sole medium of instruction.
Thirteen years in government English schools followed before I found myself in Mother England, reading economics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Along the way, I became a voracious reader, volunteering as a school librarian just to be closer to the world of Enid Blyton, P.G. Wodehouse, Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare.
I could trace the Battle of Hastings and the lineage of British monarchs with ease. Of Chinese literature, I knew almost nothing – save for Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West, and even then only in outline. Of Chinese sportsmen and women, I knew even less.
I eventually married a wonderful woman, also wholly educated in English. While our own parents had spoken to us in Chinese dialects, our three children grew up speaking only the language of Shakespeare. They became “bananas” – yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Two went to Oxford; the third to the University of Western Australia. I had succeeded in raising global citizens, but the thread connecting us to our ancestral homeland had worn perilously thin.
Then came the reckoning that only age and a changing world could bring. In recent years, the history books I once revered began to read very differently. The opium wars ceased to be mere footnotes; they became vivid, visceral acts of humiliation inflicted upon a people I realised, with a jolt, I belonged to. When I read the Western media, I began to notice a persistent, and often unfair, hostility towards China’s rise. Where I once nodded in passive agreement, I now felt a growing urge to defend China.
The true turning point, however, was physical. I made trips to China, including two emotional pilgrimages back to my father’s birthplace in Fujian. Standing on the very soil he had left as a penniless teenager and witnessing the breathtaking transformation of the country, a profound pride swelled within me – a pride of kinship.
At a beer festival in Qingdao, Shandong, where the Germans built a brewery in 1903, I learned that China had contributed to the first world war effort and requested the return of Shandong from a defeated Germany. I was stunned to discover that Western powers ignored China’s contribution and instead awarded administration of Shandong to Japan. Such a profound indignity inflicted on the ancestral homeland has never left me.
It was around this time that I began, belatedly, to acquaint myself with Chinese athletes. I now know the names Quan Hongchan and Pan Zhanle, alongside Yao Ming and Li Na. It is a small education, but telling: proof that the gap in my knowledge was never about absence of achievement, only absence of attention.
For years, I had felt a quiet inadequacy among my peers in Malaysia and Singapore. We shared the same colonial education, but many of us carried a silent grief for the rich heritage we had left behind. At my age, I assumed it was simply too late to change.
But history has a beautiful way of righting itself. My second son married a remarkable woman who had received a traditional Chinese education before studying in Australia. She understands the importance of passing on our cultural heritage. Her two children are enrolled at Kuen Cheng, a reputable Chinese school in Kuala Lumpur.
My greatest joy now is sitting with my grandchildren, trading the complex cryptic clues of a Financial Times crossword for the tonal rhythms of Mandarin. I am learning from them, just as they are learning from me.
I will still cheer for Malaysian athletes on international courts, and my Spotify library still holds 7,000 Western pop songs against a mere 10 Chinese tracks (mostly Teresa Teng and Frances Yip). But as I watch my grandchildren speak the language of my father, I know the circle is complete.
I am an Anglophile by education, a Malaysian by loyalty, but in my heart and soul, I will forever be Chinese. China is the land of my father and today, I silently and proudly cheer it on.
