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Ms Chen Chew Wai
This photograph was taken in China in 1948, a short while before the Kuomintang defeat by the Communist Army in 1949.
Chew Wai came from a large family in Guandong which like every other family at the time was in a state of poverty. Consequently when a lady of means and married to a Kuomintang General offered to adopt her the offer was readily taken up. The lady, Poon Kim Chin aka Poon Ah Thye had been born in Papan, Perak, but when she was still a baby had been given away to a family in China, destined to become the wife of their 11 year old son.
This was quite common among Chinese families as girls were not as useful the their parents as boys, but would make good wives for sons of another family. They were known as "Little Ladies in Waiting" and were brought up as sisters to the boys while they waited to be married. However in this case the boy died before the wedding took place and no longer wanted, Poon Kim Chin, joined the Kuomintang Army as a trainee nurse, eventually marrying a General.
However when the Kuomintang had to flee South, the family ended up in Hong Kong but then, as she still had a Malayan birth certificate, it was decided that mother and adopted daughter should seek safety in Malaya and so they eventually arrived in Singapore. Chen Chew Wai's first memory of Malaya was an Indian girl in a Sari and wearing beautiful gold earrings. She immediately asked if she could have a pair the same!
Dressed in fine clothes (mother in a silk cheongsam) they made their way to the family home of Poon Kim Chin's family from whom she had been parted from so many years before. They lived in Kampung Kepayang and a terrible sight met Kim Chin and Chew Wai for her relations lived in a crowded wooden house with a dirt floor and nobody had shoes. Nonetheless, they both survived the ordeal and when the 'New Village' of Kampung Simee was established they were resettled there, building their house with timbers carried from the old house. Eventually they moved again to 31, Kampar Road, Ipoh. Today (2008) Madame Chen Chew Wai is a married lady living in Kuala Lumpur.
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