OOI KEE BENG is turning 70. His rather youthful look belies his age. I remember driving him home in 2005 after one of our earliest meetings, and during our chat, was stunned when he said his eldest daughter was born in 1980. I thought he was only slightly older than me.

After the change of the Penang state government in 2008, I was assigned to bring change to it’s think tank, the Socio-economic and Environmental Research Institute (SERI), which in 2012 changed its name to Penang Institute. One of my earliest—and in hindsight, most lasting and prided—initiatives at the Institute was to turn a black-and-white periodical internal publication into a full-colour monthly magazine.

Kee Beng was most supportive and fully committed. We took the large mock-up of the magazine up and down, trying to convince various stakeholders to back the project. A trial issue was printed in October 2009, and Penang Monthly—a publishing miracle in Malaysia—was born, and has been under Kee Beng’s stewardship ever since.

There’s no better place to honour his ideas than in the pages of Penang Monthly. Hence, for the first time in 16 years since its existence, I am writing the editorial instead of him, and the issue will feature Kee Beng as the subject.

In 2004, Kee Beng returned to the region after more than two and half decades in Sweden. At the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) where he worked, he started writing op-eds in the Singaporean newspapers. He writes with a very unique style and feel—there’s hardly any anger in his writings; instead, they are philosophical and informative. He was soon noticed.

Around the same time, Taufik Ismail deposited his father Ismail Abdul Rahman’s (popularly known as Tun Dr. Ismail) private papers to ISEAS in the hope that someone would go through them and write a memoir of this very special statesman of the Merdeka era. Many thought of him as the Prime Minister we never had. Kee Beng was in the right place at the right time.

To write this memoir, Taufik and Kee Beng travelled extensively to meet many people who knew the former Deputy Prime Minister. It was during one of his trips to KL in July 2005 that I was first introduced to Kee Beng. I had just come back from Australia in February that year after completing my studies.

Over the last 20 years since, Kee Beng, Francis Hutchinson (whom I met in our alma mater, the Australian National University, in 2002), Wan Hamidi Hamid (whom I first met in 2006) and Woo Wing Thye (whom I first met in 2008) have been my longest lasting intellectual collaborators until this day, for which I am immensely grateful.

When The Reluctant Politician: Tun Dr. Ismail and His Time was launched in January 2007, it took the nation by storm. Malaysia was in search of a moral compass, and the book filled the void by reintroducing Ismail Abdul Rahman as a politician to be exemplified. Kee Beng became an instant intellectual sensation.

“In life, it is often who we meet that changes the course of our lives,” he is fond of saying. Thanks to him, I became a research fellow at ISEAS. Through him too, I was introduced to the Sultan of Perak, Sultan Nazrin Shah, as well as Robert Kuok and his wife, Ho Poh Lin.

More significantly, when I contested in Penang in 2008, Kee Beng—a local—connected me with many Penangites outside the political circle, who provided me with an in-depth and wide-ranging understanding of Penang society, some of whom I still maintain contact with today. The unexpected 2008 political tsunami also provided Kee Beng with the opportunity to reconnect with Penang, initially assisting me with my work at Penang Institute, and, since 2017, leading the Institute himself.

Kee Beng is an unusual public intellectual. In Wan Hamidi’s words, a “curious case”. An accomplished and prolific writer, he has published many op-eds, compilations, biographies, academic works, and translated Sun Tzu’s The Art of War into Swedish. I know he is particularly delighted that his conversation with Wang Gungwu while writing The Eurasian Core and Its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World has attracted very favourable compliments and significant attention.

He is arguably one of Malaysia’s best editors too. Most of my op-eds in the earlier years were edited by Kee Beng. Not only does he edit well, he has acquired a special knack for creating new fit-for-purpose formats for publication. Penang Monthly is a testimony to this; there are also various other formats he had created, as explained by Francis Hutchinson in his article. His influence in the writing and editing of opinion pieces in Malaysia, and even in Singapore, is unparalleled.

Ultimately, Kee Beng is a thinker—a public intellectual with a mission and purpose. He does not write to express frustration or anger, as with most opinion pieces today, but rather to effect change. How he functions is underpinned by Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy as activities, and in Kee Beng’s case, as activism.

On the occasion of Kee Beng’s 70th birthday, we celebrate his ideas and life’s works that have inspired many of us, and that have smoothed the nation’s path to a better future.