부산대학교 도서관

The jungle that once blotted out the sky over much of Malaya, today known as Peninsular Malaysia, is mostly gone. Yet when one is travelling through Malaysia, the jungle is always at the back of one‘s mind. As a child I travelled with my father, an engineer, who was supervising the water supply to the FELDA settlements through parts of the country that were just being opened up to development. At the edge of many a small town, once prosperous from tin or rubber, was the skeleton of an abandoned mansion, sometimes charred from a long-ago fire, but always streaked with fungus and crawling lianas - a haven for small creatures from the nearby forest that had reclaimed it. Built in the early years of the century by Chinese towkays who made their fortunes on tin and various cash crops, many of these mansions had served as interrogation centres for the Japanese secret police during their occupation (1941-45). These mansions were not reoccupied after the war, and they served as reminders of the temporary nature of humans inhabiting land wrested from the forest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]