Chan Ah Thong, Brickfields – A State of Mind

 The places we live in bring us together regardless of race, religion or language. One such place was Chan Ah Tong in Brickfields. Chan Ah Tong was not simply the name of a road in Brickfields, but the state of mind of a people from different origins living together,

For those who grew up in the period after WW2 and Independence in 1957, it was a part of the embryo of the multiracial country being formed at that time. 

I don’t know about the adults who lived there, but the boys we met from Chan Ah Tong, regardless of race, spoke in a common idiom; they grouped together, shared a common loyalty and even formed football and cricket teams. 

"Dei", a Tamil word, was a commonly used term to call someone or as an interjection or filler to keep the speech flowing. This single, percussive syllable acted as the heartbeat of their interactions—a linguistic bridge that rendered the distinctions of their parents' origins irrelevant.

In this embryonic Malaysia, identity was forged on the sunken playing field bordered by the houses and the main road. It must have been formed after the red earth was dug out to make the bricks that rebuilt Kuala Lumpur after the great fire at the end of the 19th century. 

If the place was the embryo of a nation in making, Chan Ah Tong boys were the early births from that embryo. 

To those who today seek to divide Malaysian society along communal lines, the memory of Chan Ah Tong offers a sharp rebuke. It proves that ethnic identities are not monoliths but fabric that can be woven together. When the Vivekananda Ashram, the Sam Kow Tong Temple, the Madrasathul Gouthiyyah Surau and the local churches all stood within the same square mile, they didn't compete for dominance; they provided a collective spiritual canopy for a community that saw itself as a single unit.

Today, the field is a car park, and the quarters have been demolished to make way for new structures. But the lesson of the Chan Ah Tong culture remains: unity is not something that needs to be engineered through policy if it is first allowed to bloom through proximity. Those who preach division would do well to remember that for decades, in a small corner of Brickfields, Malaysians had already figured out how to live together—not by ignoring their differences, but by playing, eating, and dreaming right in the middle of them.

To look back at that era is to remember its lesson that the "Malaysian identity" was never a complex puzzle to be solved by politicians. It was already there, loud and unforced, in the shout of a Chinese boy calling "Dei" across a Brickfields field, standing as living proof that we were always meant to be one.