Borneo. Jewel in a Jade Rainbow, Letters and Legends from North Borneo Sabah. (Book Reviews).

David and Sue Fielding. Borneo. Jewel in a Jade Rainbow, Letters and Legends from North Borneo Sabah. Koisaan Cultural Development Institute, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, 1998, xiv + 444, photos and maps.

Historian friends tell me that it is nearly impossible to find a publisher for a colonial memoir. What a pity, especially if the memoir is as engagingly told as this delightful book. Jewel in a Jade Rainbow is not a work of analytical reflection, but an illustrated chronicle of people, places, and daily events conveyed with all the immediacy of letters written to parents and friends at home, diary entries, snapshots, district tour reports, shipboard menus, official circulars, and picnic and sporting day programs. It covers a highly eventful period--sadly neglected by academic historians--the final years of British colonial rule in Sabah.

At the heart of Jewel in a Jade Rainbow is a collection of personal letters sent home by a young cadet District Officer and his wife during three years in Sabah, from July 1960 through August 1963. The officer, David Fielding, served in the British military in Malaya during the Emergency. After returning to England, he read geography at Oxford and upon graduating in 1959, he applied for a post with the Colonial Office. His application was successful, but first, before being posted, he was sent for a year to study law and languages at Cambridge. One has the sense that this year was largely a waste of time. In any event, at the end of it, with a letter of confirmation in hand, he proposed and married Sue, a registered nurse at Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. It was a "rash act", as he tells us in the preface, for, in those days it required the permission of the Governor to marry and bring a wife to North Borneo on a first appointment. As students of colonial history will know, anti-marriage rules were virtually un iversal in colonial Southeast Asia down to the 1920s. Clearly, in North Borneo, they lingered on even longer. Luckily, the Governor was sympathetic.

From the perspective of the present, it seems remarkable, but, in 1960, newly appointed officers were allowed a full month's travel time in which to reach Sabah. Sensibly, the Fieldings made the long steamship trip from Southampton their honeymoon. Arriving in Jesselton (by way of Singapore) aboard the S.S. "Kunak", they are packed off almost at once to Tambunan, in the Interior Residency. Tambuan and the Fieldings prove to be a perfect match. The district was then one of the most inaccessible in Sabah. As A.D.O., David's enthusiasm for improving farming methods and building rural schools found ample outlet. With seemingly inexhaustible energy, he is soon traveling from village to village, acquainting himself with the people, listening to what they have to say, and, from time to time, writing reports to the Resident. In one of these, included in the book, David describes a tour, made partly by bamboo raft, to Kuala Rompon on the Pagalan River, to meet a group of Ranau Dusun then opening land for wet rice cult ivation.

In Tambunan, the A.D.O.'s house is spectacularly situated atop a hill commanding a panoramic view of the entire valley. However, a series of bachelor officers had left it a veritable hovel. But Sue soon has it in hand, bringing domestic order not only to the interior, but adding chickens and a flourishing vegetable and flower garden to the surrounding compound. The house soon draws a steady stream of visitors. Among their regular callers is Father Connolly, a kindly priest who, for twenty-five years, has lived totally absorbed in the life of his Tambunan Dusun flock. Sadly, we learn in the "Epilogue" that, in 1965, Father Connolly was compelled to retire and, pining, he died three months after his return to England. The Fieldings' first Christmas in Sabah is celebrated with an "open house", followed by a memorable Christmas dinner with mince-pies and Christmas bread, a goose with stuffing, applesauce, new potatoes, a Christmas pudding, wine, and candles.

For all this, the Fieldings are rewarded by being uprooted from Tambunan and moved, six months later, to Sandakan. Although a promotion, it is "really demoralising", David observes in a letter home, "--you just get to know a place and then, like a pawn, they shift you...--you can't see any projects through in six months and I leave two schools, four bridges and a new hospital hanging in the air" (p. 135). On the very day of their first wedding anniversary, their baggage is shipped off. Sandakan is a cosmopolitan port city and here the job of District Officer is utterly different than that of a Tambunan A.D.O. No more bamboo-rafting; instead, here, he writes home, it is "digesting files, [and] dreaming up a reply to the latest letter" (p. 147).

Unlike Tambunan, Sandakan has a resident European community. Remarkably, a British suspicion of "foreigners" seems to have reached even into this remote corner of empire. The community includes a polyglot assortment of Continentals, and even a down-at-the-heels outcast, "one G. Byer", a familiar figure often seen "tooling" about town "on his scooter", who owns the "Water Boat", "an old barnacled hull...which fills up with water and chugs laboriously out to the ships at anchor" (p. 192). Here, its owner earns a precarious living by selling freshwater to ship captains. Being the center of a Residency, in Sandakan gradations of prerogative and status are on full display. "The Resident", David observes in a letter home, "is driven by a liveried chauffeur in a Wolsey sporting a huge embossed crown on top and coats of arms on the doors... his private car, a Jaguar, has the registration S.l" (p. 153). By contrast, he notes, his own sole means of transport is his humble "Mini". It is galling. In addition, there is th e official paperwork: "The DO.", he quips in a letter home, "will then complete F.S. 15 in quadruplicate and forward one copy to the Resident". Much in the spirit of Noel Coward, weekends, among the colonial expatriates, are given over to sports and other forms of strenuous activity. "Sunday, I am...playing cricket for the Chartered Bank! Our opponents... [are the] Hongkong and Shangkai bankers!" (p. 149).

Yet, Sandakan is not without surprises. Ever on the lookout for exemplary farming methods, David discovers a thoroughly up-to-date citrus, pig, and poultry operation. In a letter home, he writes, "I found the young Chinese proprietor sitting out in the evening twilight listening to a Tchaikovsky symphony on his battery record player" (149). Thus begins a lasting friendship between the Fieldings and the Lam family. At the end of July, 1961, having completed a year of service, the Fieldings take their first local leave, which they spend climbing Mt. Kinabalu. By this time, among colonial officers the air is filled with talk of Independence and the creation of Malaysia. But, as he notes, old habits persist and in an atmosphere of increasing unreality, official secrecy prevails. There are also rumors in the air of a transfer to Jesselton; fate, however, has something much more interesting in store than toiling in the Secretariat's accounts department.

The Fieldings' next assignment, they learn, is Semporna, on the southeast coast of Sabah, "a pirate stronghold, ...remote and inaccessible...connected only by sea". After Sandakan, Semporna brings back, they write home, "that precious sense of being thankful that we came to Borneo" (p. 203). "Believing Tambunan was Shangri-La, this exquisite place must be Paradise" (p. 206). The steamship that carries them to Semporna is, fittingly enough, the 5.5. "Kunak", the very ship that first brought them to Sabah. They arrive at the end of August so that David can take over from Mr. Peter Regis, the previous District Officer, who is being sent to England for further studies. They are instantly drawn into a hectic, two-week round of parties. "Semporna is situated", Sue writes in a letter to her parents, "right on the sea, overlooking a large bay of shallow water about 5 miles wide, and many tall, queer-shaped islands dotted around in the distance. The wharf, just to the right of the house,.. is made entirely with coral. ..The town is slightly bigger than Keningau, but no other Europeans; the communities however seem to be openly harmonious... It is more of a closely knit, gathered together town... Our house, perched right on the sea edge, is halfway between the pier and the town, which lies off to our left, starting with a village over the water" (p. 207). The Fieldings remain in Semporna for the next two years, until they return to England.

Having arrived in Semporna myself, scarcely a year and a half after the Fieldings departed, I must admit to a strong personal interest in all that they have to say of this remarkable district. Youngsters from the nearby Bajau Laut settlement of Bangau-Bangau are frequent visitors to their house, and years later the Fieldings would be fondly remembered. David quickly became an enthusiastic sailor with his own boat, a small European-styled sailboat, which naturally endeared him to the seafaring people of the district. In races, however, his European-rigged sailboat was no match for the local lepa. In their very first pages on Semporna, the Fieldings answer what had always seemed to be an insolvable question: namely, how did the melody of "Clementine" become part of the local Bajau musical repertoire? Here, we learn the answer, that the wife of Peter Regis taught the Semporna Girl Guides to sing the "We are Girl Guides" song to the "Oh My Darling" melody. Part of the attraction for the Bajau Laut was the slight hint of risqueness in the English chorus. Mr. Regis himself was a legendary figure. The Fieldings tell one story of how a group of rough Japanese tuna fishermen, on a visit to Semporna town, made provocative gestures towards Mrs. Regis, who was Asian, and how her husband had them all at once arrested and taken to the padang, where they were given a public lecture on civility.

Writing of the local people, David Fielding observes, "The Bajaus here are... very different from the Tambunan Dusuns to work with. 'Difficult' is a fairly tolerant description" (p. 218). For Sue, "...the gaiety, charm of manner and beauty of these Bajau children leaves me spellbound" (p. 207). "What would probably make you gasp most", she writes in a letter home, "are the spectacularly colourful costumes of...the Bajau. The men wear tightly tapered trousers laced or buttoned up the calf, with a small, circular cuff at the ankle and close fitting, black or white long sleeved waistcoats braided with gold and adorned with coins or gold buttons over a collarless white shirt, then a finely patterned, handwoven scarf is wrapped and folded around the waist...The women, too, wear glittering sarongs, tight, shiny waistcoats with large gold coins as buttons" (p. 203). Two years later, such costumes were rarely seen, at least on men. My own memory, living, by contrast, with the Bajau Laut (or sea people) is just the op posite, of how little clothing people wore. Particularly, this was so at sea. The Fieldings' comments are a useful reminder that, in the old days, when the sea people depended on shore villagers for such traded cloth as they were able to obtain, the contrast between them must have been very striking, indeed.

"The wharf", David writes, "[is] the key to Semporna's cash economy, for it is here that the long, sleek craft from the Philippines, powered by two or three 40 h.p. outboards come two or three times a week to collect cigarettes imported from Hongkong, smuggling them under cover of dark, across the Sulu Sea, at the hazard of their naval patrols and their own pirates, back into their own country" (p. 195). While, perhaps, a key to Government revenues, cigarette smuggling only marginally influenced the lives of most ordinary people in the district, for whom the harbor was, rather, the center of everyday commerce. Nevertheless, smuggling, officially called "barter trade", generated considerable wealth, and had, according to David Fielding, "the amazing economic advantage of satisfying all participants. Everybody does well out of it" (p. 204). Certainly, the government did well out of it, collecting 10 percent duty on what were otherwise untaxed cigarettes, chiefly American, brought in from Hong Kong specifically to supply the smuggling trade. Whether it was conducive to the development of a local political culture of financial rectitude is another matter. With Independence, and negotiations between Malaysia and the Philippines, this "barter trade" was gradually phased out, although, of course, more informal smuggling persists. In any case, by 1965, when I arrived, the profits from smuggling were totally eclipsed by those of logging, and the trading companies that participated in cigarette smuggling were rapidly moving into the much more lucrative timber business. Not surprisingly, given the massive volume of cigarettes that then passed through Semporna, the town, remote as it was, drew the occasional representative of a foreign tobacco company. "Three Americans staying in town at the moment are agents for Salem cigarettes. One of them has the inevitable tall blonde wife who talks the hind legs off a donkey...Sue is going bicycling with her today which should be amusing for the Bajaus are fascinated by her over the kn ee Bermudas" (p. 249).

Later David describes a visit to a Japanese fishery on Si Amil Island, where local fishermen catch and smoke tuna for export. Here he meets the new Japanese manager, "who has replaced the previous one who was killed in the most recent pirate raid" (p. 208). Tragically, before the Fieldings leave Semporna, this second manager is also killed, this time accidentally by a ricocheting bullet during another raid. When I arrived, this fishery was only a memory. Its place had been taken by a Japanese cultured pearl fishery, located closer to Semporna town, although, by 1990, this, too, was abandoned after its manager was also killed by raiders. Toward the end of Jewel in a Jade Rainbow, the Fieldings' letters describe a second season of pirate raids and the difficulties of convincing a skeptical government of the dangers that local people faced. At it height, they are forced to keep a loaded rifle fixed to their bedroom wall, and their letters convey the sense of the edginess that permeates the town and outlying vill ages.

With the approach of Independence, in April 1962, David leads a Semporna delegation to meet Lord Cobbold and his Commission in Tawau. Afterwards he helps organize voter registration and in 1963 the first District Council elections. He also helps set up and coordinate Semporna's first major land development scheme, financed in part with timber revenues. In the book he describes a number of local personalities, both Chinese and Bajau, but clearly David is most taken with the young District Chief at the time, who shared his enthusiasm for school construction. Now Governor of Sabah, Tun Datuk Sen Panglima Haji Sakaran bin Dandai writes a brief, but apropos, foreword to Jewel in a Jade Rainbow.

The dramatic high point of Jewel in a Jade Rainbow, much like Oscar Cook's earlier account of Semporna (in his Borneo: Stealer of Hearts), is a cholera epidemic. Sue, with the government doctor in Tawau, initiates a massive inoculation program (but only after the temporizing medical department director fortuitously goes on leave) in which the Division medical team is mobilized and manages, in the end, to reach every island and village, inoculating the entire District population of some 18,000 persons. The death toll is over 50, but clearly it might have been much worse. Soon afterwards, Sue suffers a stingray wound. This becomes dangerously infected, and she herself must be sent to Tawau for medical treatment. "My room", she writes, while convalescing, "is about fifteen yards from the seawall, under a row of casurina trees" (276). Two years later, I spent a week recuperating from Dengue fever in almost certainly the same hospital cottage, beside the seawall, with a view of Sebatik Island, Celebes Sea, and, in 1965, during Konfrontasi, at dawn, strings of Bugis copra vessels being towed by patrol boats into Tawau harbor.

With Malaysian Independence, the Fieldings return home and, like those they leave behind, begin a new life.