The word game was something akin to a crossword puzzle. There were questions and there were clues to consider. We had to fill in the blank spaces in the puzzle with letters from the alphabet.But of course, it was always tricky. Many of the clues led to alternate answers. It was up to us to consider the most appropriate letters that would make sense of the clues. And a fortnight later, we would skim through the Monday editions for the judges' answers. Although we attempted this weekly word game for about five years, we never did win anything. Not even a consolation prize.
Right from the first copy that my father bought, I was taken in by a daily columnist going by the name of SH Tan. Every day, I would be chortling to his stories which were far, far different from the usual news reports. It was as if he was talking directly to me, and he was clearly a master of that art of writing.
Some would say that SH Tan wrote nonsense. Perhaps that was true. But he did keep me entertained every day with his irrelevance. And I would perhaps even say that my interest in journalism probably began with this man. [Note: In one of my earlier stories two years ago, I had already made a mention of The Malay Mail's word puzzle game and SH Tan. Read it here.]
SH Tan died on 29 Oct 2001 and Bernama, the national news agency, felt the death significant enough to report it.
Subsequently, the obituary below appeared in the New Sunday Times as a tribute to SH Tan's contributions to the literary world.
November 4, 2001
Obituary
S.H. Tan - Last of a breed
By Philip Mathews
TAN Siong Hoon, known as S.H. Tan to his readers, and simply as S.H. to friends, died last week at 81. But we shall hear from him yet, through his last book now ready for publication.
His publisher, Datuk Ng Tieh Chuan of Pelandok, was among a small group of relatives, friends and former colleagues who bade farewell to this inveterate journalist who practised his craft for 50 years, earning for himself a pride of place in the annals of Malaysian journalism.
The book, to be called Ramblings, follows in the steps of his previous eight publications. It covers similar ground in terms of content, and is written in his usual earthy style. He is as blunt as ever, and - as he would have said - calls a spoon a spoon, not "an implement to transport morsels of food from platter to portal".
As a prolific writer, S.H. Tan had no equal. Everyday for 11 years, he kept up his column in The Malay Mail, a feat no other Malaysian columnist writing in English, before or since, has matched.
He has also regaled his readers who followed him from newspaper to newspaper on both sides of the Causeway and beyond - from Malaya Tribune and The Straits Times in Singapore, to the New Sunday Times, The Star, National Echo and Malaysian Post in Peninsular Malaysia, and to People's Mirror in Sarawak.
He would write about the foibles and idiosyncrasies of young men and women. About language howlers, food, and sex and the single girl. Dogs, horses, and sex and the single male. Mahjong, the war years, and sex and everybody else.
But while his readers loved him, S.H. was something of a loner in the Malay Mail. Like the sans serif typeface he avoided, he was sans friends. Forever morose and moody. Sullen and silent. Grumpier than Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. The reason was not difficult to understand.
It needed superhuman effort for anyone to be bright and cheerful if his working day started everyday, for years on end, at 3am and consisted of making sense of rough copy of reporters who had difficulty separating fact from fiction, supervising subeditors working headlines that did not fit, and keeping a close watch on typesetters setting type backwards. And if the paper missed its deadline, it was as good as a dog's breakfast.
S.H. Tan would leave for home everyday at noon. From 1pm till 3 pm, he would open up and talk to his trusted friend Royale. He would let his fingers do the talking, for Royale was his trusty typewriter.
S.H. was one of the last who fought a rearguard action against the march of technology. He never traded in his manual typewriter for MS Word. On his faithful machine he pounded away, day after day, producing gems of wit and wisdom.
Since he was a man of few words, when he wrote, he wrote like he would have spoken. To himself. In a conversational style, with scant regard for rules of language, structure or elegance. Words were mere tools for communication, not adornments.
Words, words, words. S.H. was, unlike Eliza Doolittle, never sick of them. Over the years, nearly three million words flowed from his typewriter into the pages of his newspapers.
To his critics - and there were many - his writing was pedantic and lacked literary merit. But to his fans - and there were more, many more - he was comic to the core. His earthy jokes, interspersed in his columns in bazaar Malay, sidewalk Hokkien or street English, went down well with readers of all ages and both sexes.
His sense of humour served him well, especially when he faced grave situations. In Ramblings recently, he recounted the days when he incurred the wrath of the editorial chief of the paper. As Malay Mail editor, S.H. had let slip into print a libellous statement about a race horse owner. His paper had carried a letter which alleged that the horse owner, to use S.H. Tan's words "would sometimes scratch a horse, not because it was itchy, but to fix a race".
Alleging that the horse owner would deliberately throw a race was indeed actionable. The error was caused by one of his staff, but S.H. took full responsibility and resigned. Company chairman (the late) Tan Sri Sheikh Abdullah Sheikh Abu Bakar then summoned SH over "for coffee and a biscuit".
When asked what he intended to do after his resignation, S.H. replied: "Oh, I dunno. I have no family commitments, so I was toying with the idea of making my way to Vladivostok, board the Trans-Siberian Railway, and then rough it out till I reached that editorial mansion in the sky." Fortunately, Sheikh Abdullah appreciated his integrity and courage as much as he did his complete absence of rancour over the affair. He had the resignation withdrawn and S.H. re-designated as editorial manager.
S.H. often chuckled at himself, to himself. His ability to poke fun at himself was uncharacteristic of his media colleagues, some of whom had egos that were larger than life itself.
In one Ramblings this year, he said he checked his horoscope on his birthday. According to his zodiac sign, he was "very sociable, with a special need for companionship and contact with the public. Possessing a natural attraction for beauty, has elegant tastes and enjoys the best money can buy, always striving for peace and balance and is warm-hearted, pleasant and romantic".
"But I am anything but sociable," he protested in his column. "I prefer my own thing ... my only special need is for the companionship of my eight-year-old daughter." He had no need for contact with the public. But if it was for cakes and fellowship, he would be at anybody's beck and call. However, in view of his retirement and his "reduced circumstances", the becks were few and the calls far between. As for his alleged elegant tastes, he admitted he had them, but alas, lacked the means to indulge.
Where language and its use were concerned, S.H. Tan would get away with oxymoronic, hyperbolical, or malapropismic words and expressions. He had a nose for useless trivia, and a matching ability to render them interesting for their own sake. For example: Question: How do you describe the movement of groups of animals? Answer: Lions move in prides, quails in a covey, squirrels in a dray, bears in a sloth, elk in a gang, crows in murder, herring in armies, hogs in droves, foxes in skulks, kangaroos in troops, cats in clowders, peacocks in ostentation, larks in exultation, locusts in hosts, pheasants in nye, sheep in hurtle, whales in a herd, trout in hover, swallows in flight and goats in trip.
A former reporter and now a senior officer in the United Nations system, David Lazarus, was a cub reporter in 1969. He says: "S.H. was perhaps the first person to encourage my travel writing in the days when Malaysians did not travel that much. He approved a series of articles in the Malay Mail on the travails of a young man's journeys through Hungary, Yugoslavia, Russia and Britain. Alas, I was never paid although they were written on my own time. 'I was just encouraging you', said S.H., and that was that." S.H. Tan spoke very little of his childhood, but of what he has written about his youth, it would appear he was the original Born Loser and - as he often said tonguein-cheek in his columns - he continued to be so in later life.
He did not complete his Senior Cambridge, which used to be the basic entrypoint qualification for any decent job. He had no special skills. He began training to be a fitter, a sort of technical assistant, but before he could qualify, the war put paid to his plans.
He was drafted into the British Army, but before he could see military action, was captured by the invading Japanese soldiers and sent to war camps in Indonesia. The end of the war saw him no closer to the dream he never had. With no recognisable qualification, no marketable skills and no money, he was, quite definitely, without hope.
But an impetuous decision made while a prisoner-of-war turned out to be the proverbial pie in the sky. He traded his rations for cash and used the money to buy an English language dictionary which he read from cover to cover.
He applied unsuccessfully for a job at the Straits Times in Singapore and then turned to the Malaya Tribune with a proposition. He told the editor he would work for six months without pay. He was hired, and within a year, promoted to the post of editor.
A few years later, he was in Kuala Lumpur, sitting in the office of the Malay Mail in Jalan Pudu as its first Asiatic editor. The rest, as he once said of a friend, was destiny.
The Malay Mail had started as an independent newspaper, serving expatriates and colonialists interested mainly in matters relating to rubber, tin and other commodities. It also carried the occasional crime story but nothing much else.
To add some colour to this rather mundane daily diet, S.H. started his personal column. The column gave the Malay Mail a reputation of sorts, which some later tried to shed, luckily without success. Sometimes his words would be lewd. He was, therefore, mistaken by many to be a DOM, whom the SYTs, a term of his own creation, were advised by an insensitive colleague, to assiduously avoid. But he was, in fact, harmless.
And luckless, too. They say 'lucky at cards, unlucky at love'. But S.H. was unlucky at both for most part of his life. But his luck changed, quite dramatically, when he was 68. He met and married Wang Swee Tiang, who doted on him. A few years later, a daughter Tze Chi was born, who was doted on by both.
S.H. Tan loosened up after marriage and became quite the social animal, revelling in the company of former colleagues and friends. At a recent gathering of old friends at the Royal Selangor Club, former NST chief news editor and now managing partner of Prestige Communications, Felix Abisheganaden, said of him: "In the office, we hardly exchanged two words. But now he is such a chatty person. S.H. was an efficient editor. He could be depended upon to deliver and deliver he did. Every time." As a newsman, SH was not a crusader or media evangelist. He was simply a man with heart, which he wore on his shirt sleeves.
Academic and literary critic Edward Dorall wrote of Tan five years ago: "He is the typical Malaysian Chinese success story - the youngster from the ulu (of academia) who succeeded in the big world on his own merits." And stood, and through his works still stands, on its summit.
He was probably the last of a breed of newsmen who making it to the top with nothing but sheer gumption and grit. And a large dose of home-grown humour.
S.H. is finally in that great editorial mansion in the sky. And probably having a quiet chuckle. At us.
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