By Stephen Ng
KEPONG is where my roots are.
Kepong in the 60s was just a small village with one main street (now, Jalan Kepong).
I remember there were some wooden houses by the side of the road. There were small vegetable farms and a couple of small ponds with Lotus plants in front of these homes.
There was a mechanic shop which my father used to send his car to. The mechanic, Ah Wah was his name. Yes, I also remember the big tree next to the workshop.
That was Kepong in the 60s. My family bought a home in Taman Kepong, but decided to move in only after 1970 when the tension in the aftermath of the May 13 incident had eased. Kepong Baru developed by the late Tan Sri Lee Yan Lian had started much earlier.
The communists were still very active. One day, after school in 1971, I noticed a commotion at the junction turning out of Jinjang Utara into Jalan Kepong. The next day, it was reported in the newspapers that two cannon balls were found hanging on a coconut tree at the junction. Someone must have climbed up the tree to hang the cannon balls.
The industrial area in Taman Kepong was once a rubber plantation. I remember seeing a colourful parrot flying past us when we -- my uncle and I -- were on a hunting trip with our self-made slingshot, commonly known as 'lastik.'
Of course, at the tender age of five or six, the sighting of a parrot could not be easily forgotten.
Younger Days
The Kepong police station was only a small building before more buildings were added to the compound. My father, who had been co-optedas a traffic police in his younger days during the Emergency, had a number of friends at the police station.
I remember being shown how bullets were loaded into the revolver. And, during Chinese New Year, the policemen, along with their children, would visit the family. Unfortunately, such practice no longer happen these days.
Beside the police station was a wooden building used as post office. It was built on stilts. In my secondary school days, I frequently visited the post office to buy stamps whenever I needed to send letters to my penfriend in Sydney, Australia.
There was a middle-aged Chinese uncle with a strict face at the counter. Whenever I went to the counter, he would immediately ask, as if knowing what I wanted to buy, "How many stamps do you want?"
Because Kepong was a small village in those days, everyone knew each other at least by face. There was no AEON or AEON Big, no MRT stations, and even the KTM train track was mainly used for transportation of all kinds of cargoes. Much of Sri Damansara, Aman Puri and Wangsa Permai was either rubber plantations, or oil palm estates.
In our lower secondary school days, a few of us boys ventured into the nearby rubber plantation along Jalan Damansara (now, the LDP or Puchong-Damansara Highway) looking for rubber seeds. We would then rub the seed on the floor until it was hot enough that we could use it to press on someone's skin just for the fun of it.
Member of Parliament
I remember vividly the name Dr Tan Chee Khoon, although I had never met him in person. Dr Tan had been the MP of Batu, and when the Kepong constituency was carved out of Batu, during the 1974 general election, he beat Tan Siew Sin.
There was one particular term where Chee Khoon lost to a Gerakan guy, Tan Tiong Hong, who promised that the Kepong main road would be upgraded by the federal government if he won the election.
Tiong Hong, however, was only a one-term member of parliament of Kepong. People were generally fed up with the BN politics of giving the goodies only in return for votes. After all, we are taxpayers, and there is no business for Kepong voters to be treated as second-class citizens. BN has paid a high price for this policy.
Younger voters would not buy into such bias BN policy as we are all taxpayers like anyone else. This is why, since 1982, Dr Tan Seng Giaw was voted in as the MP of Kepong. He was always present whenever there was a complaint, whether big or small. He was MP for eight terms until his retirement in 2018.
Seng Giaw should be credited for helping house owners of Taman Kepong to convert their Qualified Title (Hakmilik Sementara) into proper Grant or a title deed. I only discovered this when my mother showed me the document with the words 'Hakmilik Sementara,' and to my shock, the Federal Territories Land Office had not converted it into a proper grant. After I told Dr Tan, as I would address him, about the qualified title after 40 years, he immediately called for a meeting at the Rukun Tetangga base in Taman Kepong. The response from the houseowners was overwhelming.
By now, I had moved out Kepong but for the sake of my family home, together with Dr Tan and a few neighbours of mine, we visited the Land Office for meetings. Finally, after two years of persistence, the qualified titles were changed to title deeds.
The current MP of Kepong is Lim Lip Eng. Looking at his Facebook account, I see that Kepong is once again blessed with an MP who is people-friendly.
I believe, if he continues to work hard, he would win every general election in the future.
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