A privilege to have travelled with you, Khay Jin
By Aliran, on 21 February 2012
Francis Loh pays tribute to Aliran’s long-time friend and supporter, the scholar-activist Philip Khoo Khay Jin, who passed away in December 2011.
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So many friends showed up at the apartment on the night of 22 December 2011, as soon as they heard that Khay Jin had breathed his last. Many more then attended the wake the following night and the funeral service held in the Catholic Church in Pulau Tikus, Penang, on Christmas Eve.
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Scholar-activist
For me, he was the model of a scholar-activist, a public intellectual. He was my fellow traveller. Perhaps I can share a bit more about some of Jin’s last thoughts about his projects and dreams. For, not only have I have known Jin for some 50-odd years, but I had the privilege to re-unite and interact with him quite intensely these past two months as he struggled with his failing health.
Jin grew up in Penang and attended St Xavier’s Institution like I did. He must have excelled in Mathematics like some have said; what I do remember was that he was the school’s pianist and on several occasions played concertos with the school’s orchestra. In the late 1960s, when it was still unfashionable to go to the US for further studies, he won a scholarship to attend Manhattan College in New York City, where he majored in Mathematics and Philosophy.
It was in the 1970s when we were undergraduates, and then graduate students in northeast America, that we first began to interact with one another intensely. Whereas most Malaysian students in the US studied the sciences, we turned to the social sciences. Those were heady times in the US and we were also caught in the throes of the social and cultural turbulence that engulfed American society, especially its youths then. We learnt as much in classes as outside them.
We next became colleagues in the School of Social Sciences in USM, Penang. Apart from teaching the same students and fighting the same battles in the School Board, we also conducted joint-research. Not for us to be ivory-tower academics for we desired a more just and free Malaysia and to this end we egged each other on to dedicate ourselves to be scholar-activists. We had lunch together, and debated on all kinds of issues over coffee and cigarettes, almost every day. We were fellow travellers.
But Jin was always several steps ahead of me. He had read more, had a more inquisitive mind, and had deep powers of absorption. While I would still be mulling about a problem, he had decided what ought to be done to overcome the predicament. Although I possessed a PhD and he did not, he was always more insightful and intelligent. He was my mentor.
In 1995, after 20 years in USM, Khay Jin transferred to Kuching. It was the beginning of a new phase in his life: for he turned anthropologist, trekked into the forests, and developed a special relationship with the Penans and other Orang Ulu in Sarawak. He was already there before the Bakun Dam project was launched. He took lots of photographs, filled many log books, and collected invaluable data about those times. Over the next fifteen years, he witnessed the worsening of the Penans’ plight first-hand. Inevitably, he took up their cause.
In this regard, Jin was very different from so many of us would-be scholar-activists. For as many of his peers grew in intellectual stature and moved up the academic hierarchy, and not a few becoming globe-trotting public intellectuals and assuming overseas positions, Khay Jin did the reverse! He dug deeper into the Borneo hinterland … and into local political issues. He even extended his interest to fathoming the ethnic violence in Kalimantan, across the border. And when Jane decided, upon her retirement from Unimas, that she wanted to move back to Penang to establish a new laboratory, Jin was reluctant to leave Sarawak
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Khay Jin, Philip Khoo [MC???? RIP]
Guestbook: None cited
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