Church Weekly for 27 April 2008
My dear readers,
Senai our Sinai
Senai was our first refuge in Nanyang, as Sinai’s plain was a haven of rest for God’s people in their Exodus from Egypt. Far from China’s tension and turmoil of revolution, Father and Mother, and Grandfather, were thankful to God for Senai’s quiet and Peach River’s seclusion, “far from the city’s madding crowd.”
Here we gathered before the Lord, as Moses had gathered God’s covenant people Israel at Sinai. Grandfather set up a “Family Altar” for worship each Lord’s Day. How fitting is Psalmist David’s song for our family gathering. “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits ... Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's. The LORD executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed. He made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel” (Psalm 103:2 , 4-7 ).
Senai as I knew it in the 1930s
We, the spiritual Israel, would never be forsaken by God. We cannot thank Him enough for Senai. It remains an enduring symbol of God’s salvation, as Mt Sinai was to Israel.
Today, eighty years after, Senai has grown out of all recognition, from a “one street town” into a modern “Airport City,” bustling with an international airport, housing estates, shopping centres, and every modern development, in step with twenty-first century progress.
But in my mind, the “Senai of my dreams” remains the sleepy one street town and Peach River Garden’s plank and atap estate house, our “family retreat” for six years - the whole “scenario” glamorized by Peach River, thanks to Father’s poetic eye, appreciating the beauty of God’s creation, the rolling stream and rippling water brook. For me the charm of Peach River Garden lives on: “Distance lends enchantment to the view.”
Our family’s arrival in Senai could not have been better timed. Nineteen-twenty-six was boomtime for rubber. America’s automotive and other industries were “on a roll,” reviving the world’s reconstruction after the devastating World War. Led by America, global kingpin of finance and industry, the global economy was surging upwards and onward into a new era of prosperity. Rubber was in ever increasing demand.
The world was recovering because of America! Amazing, America had become the world’s Number One Nation. Malaya, with her rich resources of rubber and tin, was prospering likewise.
Peach River Garden shared in the boom. Our tappers started on their rounds long before morning light ? tapping, tapping, tapping. With every cut of the bark out flows the latex, the white rubber sap. The milk flows into a collecting cup. When the “shaving round” is completed, the tappers start their “collecting round,” the latex from each cup is emptied into a “collecting pail.”
Before noon, the pails of precious latex are brought into the processing house, and turned into sheets. The sheets are then smoked and packed into bales for the market. (The foregoing summary account describes what was done in Peach River Garden Estate eighty years ago).
So we prospered! Father congratulated himself for his foresight and good planning, little knowing that Senai’s market-place was linked to a bigger market half-way around the world, the Stock Exchange of Wall Street, New York, and that Wall Street was subject to the interplay of market forces of “buying and selling.”
As long as the market sentiment was healthy, prices were sustained and it was “Business as usual.”
Our first three years in Peach River Garden were blessed years, like Joseph’s first seven years of “great plenty” in Egypt. In high spirits, Father revived his favourite pastime, fishing. As the story turns out, I became Father’s fishing companion, for I was the “apple of his eye.” (To be continued)
Father's nocturnal pastime - fishing in Peach River