His hobby was academia, yet he was never interested in taking examinations. He prefers philosophy, understands Confucius and Laozi well, and loves Wittgenstein’s language games. He left Malaysia for Europe almost 50 years ago; became a factory worker to enable him to study Sinology and all things Chinese—in Sweden, of all places. And he has always known that he is a child of Merdeka. This interview provides a glimpse into the life of Ooi Kee Beng, a writer, editor and thinker who celebrates his 70th birthday this year.

WH: What makes you want to write?

OKB: I’ve always wanted to write. As far as I can remember, I was interested in books as soon as I could read. My problem, living in Rifle Range, Penang, and being from a quite poor family was I never had enough books. The books would be Enid Blyton’s, those kinds of books. You read what you can. But I think I must have been fascinated by language—and by the power that language has and the ability of language to communicate all sorts of ideas and values, and so on.

As far back as I remember, my first dream job was to be a journalist. Because in Penang, you don’t think bigger than that. If you’re good in English, what do you become? You become a journalist. The Star newspaper has started (in 1971), so I joined, and they put me as a court reporter, which was the most boring. You write the same thing every day with different names and different sentences—“the jail sentence is six months, and then nine months; and this guy had cannabis, that guy had heroin”. That’s very boring for six months.

The boss then said he wasn’t going to extend my six months. So, I said, OK, I’ll go to The Straits Echo (a much older newspaper in Penang). I told them The Star did not want to extend me, that’s why I’m here. And they laughed and said, “No, it’s OK, we’ll take you”.

I became a sub-editor rather than a reporter. Maybe that led to my editing. The main difference between writing as a reporter and sub-editing is that you have to have a more detached view. The reporter is just getting the facts, and then writes a certain way. The sub-editor has to think of what the reader is capable of understanding and so on.

I noticed back then, editing was largely grammatical, I think. But what was important was the heading. I think I became very good at giving headings. I picked that up immediately. Looking back, I think your first career is really important, somehow, because you have that focus when you’re very young. And then you go in, and you go in deep, right? And I think it formed me greatly. Until now, I don’t let headings go too easily, even for my publications. I change all the headings.

The Star moved out to KL after that. Now, people don’t seem to realise The Star was a Penang paper. The Straits Echo, I think, closed down in the 1980s. I had left by then. But as a journalist—both as reporter and sub-editor—I was quite unhappy because I thought it wasn’t giving me what I thought it would give me. I wasn’t just looking at what other people wrote and trying to make them look better. I wanted more, and so I left. I left Malaysia for Sweden.

I remember leaving on the plane, first flight out of Malaysia in my life. This was 1978. I remember writing it down, and even looking back, I thought it was strange that I was thinking like that. Back then I was 23. I didn’t know how long I was going to leave Malaysia.

WH: What did you do in Sweden?

OKB: I went to Sweden to learn something new. The first degree I went for was public administration. Being a left-leaning person, it was one way to learn about the well-known Swedish welfare system, how it works, how they think and so on. I did that for four years.

At the end of which, I didn’t trust bureaucracies anymore, and my thesis for that was on promoting anarchism—the opposite of bureaucracies—and of course, the teacher didn’t like it. But the headmaster said that was good, go with it. Teachers didn’t like it because they didn’t know anything about anarchism. That was a big thing for me back then.

And I found anarchist thinking—not anarchy thinking, but anarchist thinking and anarchism, reading Peter Kropotkin and soon. Conceptually, it was important for me to see the whole dichotomy from fascism and capitalism to anarchism. To me, it became a yin-yang circle. But if you don’t have anarchism, the yin-yang circle isn’t complete. You can’t really see the whole turning of political processes and thinking. I thought that was a big achievement.

I was looking for something. I needed more stimulation—and yet, although I went away for many years, I never felt I was leaving Malaysia. I was just going out to learn things. So, when I changed my passport in 1989, it wasn’t an emotional moment.

WH: Why did you change your passport?

OKB: Sweden gave me a scholarship to study Sinology, and I have to go to China. But I can’t get into China if I’m a Malaysian, at the time. To me, I was in a philosophical crisis. I had to go to China to find out why I found certain Western thinking unacceptable.

Why do I react so strongly to certain ways of thinking? I assume it’s my Penang background, which is part English, part Chinese. And in Stockholm, if you want to learn Eastern thinking, the best way was to learn Chinese. So, I actually learned Mandarin from Swedish people. That’s why it’s not so good. And they like to teach you Mencius, Confucius, all that stuff. In the end, the one good thing out of that was that I’m the first one to translate Sun Tzu’s The Art of War from classical Chinese to Swedish. It is still selling; I’m still getting royalty out of it.

WH: You love writing, why didn’t you pursue studies of language or literature?

OKB: You have to know the world to write about it. When I was young, that prompted you to go towards that. I was born a Catholic. I went to Catholic school. And when I look back today—even though I’m no longer religious in any sense—but I think what I picked up from Catholic teaching was exactly catholicism, the small “c”, universality.

Once that becomes very strong in you, you see that it can easily become socialism, you start thinking like that. That’s why I have trouble forcing myself to accept narrow nationalism. That’s why when I gave up the passport, it didn’t feel at all like an important thing, because the world is human, it’s not national. A child of mankind probably, I would say.

Maybe enlightenment, maybe Confucius, this universal thing has always been around. But in our nation-state era, the national identity is the most demanding. You travel with your passport. Without your passport, you’re dead. I mean, that’s how we’ve organised humankind.

WH: So, you “discovered” philosophy in Sweden?

OKB: After I got my degree in public administration in the Swedish system, I thought I had to do Western philosophy. There were two types, practical philosophy and theoretical philosophy. Practical is actually ethics. Theoretical would be, perhaps, you study philosophers. Of course, I went into practical philosophy. But then I realised it’s actually only ethics. And in Stockholm University, ethics is utilitarianism. These people take ethics as mathematical. Everything is, wow, so it becomes very simple. If you’re able to count, it’s very simple. But you cannot. I don’t know what the hell they were doing. Spending years trying to argue that the best happiness is the one that gives you more this and more that.

We don’t act like that. I mean, to some extent, qualitatively, we act like that, yes, but never quantitatively. Thanks to certain friends that I met in that course, I got interested in Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose philosophy is very deconstructionist. Instead of looking for logic with a big “L”, you actually understand that all languages have small logic, small rationale. And it becomes a language game.

WH: Could you elaborate that, please?

OKB: For a person coming from a multicultural society, most of our language is not high-end language. Our language is all market language. It’s obvious to us that language is whatever is required, then you have that. These guys in Cambridge, they don’t see this. All these philosophy people, they’re looking at this big “L”. They say, this is Plato, I suppose.

Why I liked Wittgenstein was he went against the whole thing, cracking Western philosophy, that Western philosophy largely had gone wrong. That’s why I think Wittgenstein became so popular in Japan. Because the Japanese also consider language to be a problem.

Language is not neutral. Very useful, but you don’t get trapped by it. That was what fascinated me. Out of all the studies about Western philosophy, I would say, of course, some Marxist thinking is important, and a bit of Foucault, because at least power is a problem. I love Spinoza because he sort of changed religious thinking into “God, or Nature”. And I rather like some of the Chinese thinkers. Confucius had certain things to teach us, and naturally, everyone loves Taoism because Taoism gives you excuses to be whatever.

Looking back, I think this would be the few philosophers I was influenced by—but I never took the exam. I went four years in philosophy, and I thought, you cannot test philosophy. You can just teach me. If I’m going to pass the exam, I’m going to pass the exam of the utilitarian. So, I don’t have a degree in philosophy, although it affected me greatly.

WH: Coming back to your plan to go to China, what happened?

OKB: After that, it led me to Chinese thinking, and the best way to do it was to join the Sinology Department. In Sweden, they’re very classical, so you learn all the classics instead of the modern ones. Then, they gave me a scholarship for two years to study in Beijing. It was a good time to go to Beijing—just after Tiananmen, so there were soldiers everywhere.

But it was during the tail end of communism, if you like. There were good things to see—like this idea of community was very strong. China taught me it was good to see the tail end of communism, and then to see China today. Here was a country that actually practiced minimal income gap. There was corruption out there. Everyone’s making 300 or 400 yuan per month.

When it’s switched into “any cat that catches a mouse” mode, it is fine; the whole thing works, certainly, definitely, the last 30 years has worked. Recently, I’ve been to China a bit. It’s shocking to see what they managed to accomplish. Because when I was there in 1989, what I saw, I asked myself, where were the 5,000 years of civilisation? I couldn’t see it anywhere. The toilets were the worst you can imagine. The spitting was everywhere. You actually walked by looking at the floor. You’re going to step on somebody’s spit.

A few years back when I went there again, everything changed; everything was better when they had become richer, although they’re now less friendly.

WH: What happened after you completed your PhD?

OKB: In Sweden, I worked at Ericsson the whole time. That was how I lived. I was a factory worker, doing quality control, running machines. You didn’t have to know anything; you just made sure what buttons you need to press. I did that for 22 years.

But my hobby was academia, if one could put it that way. I went for all sorts of courses, and in Sweden, it’s free. You can go for this course or that course, just learn whatever you want. But if you do that as a hobby long enough, you’re going to end up with a PhD! It took me a long while, but I got there in the end, lecturing and soon. Seen another way, I just went into Stockholm University and did the whole shebang—going from undergraduate until you run out of space. You’re never going to be a professor.

But then Ericsson moved to China. Suddenly, I lost my main job at the same time I had just finished my PhD. With my third child coming, my wife and I decided to go back to Asia.

UKM (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) offered me a job, but took it back. At the same time, I applied to ISEAS Singapore and was accepted. We moved to Singapore even though Singapore was never in my head. But it turned out the stars were aligned; I did need Singapore because Sweden wasn’t enough.

Singapore was a country that actually consciously went for a type of decolonisation, and although not totally a form of decolonisation, its nation building was serious; no fooling around. All these men—Lee Kuan Yew and his group—knew what nation building historically involved. That’s how I would look at Singapore now. But being a small country, certain things look bad and go wrong.

I returned to Penang, to the state where I was born. I think I’m a Merdeka child. Looking back, when I was born in 1955, I was for two years a subject of the Queen. I think this must be why, when I did all the political biographies, I can understand them. I can understand Tun Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman, I can understand Lim Kit Siang… I think I was at the tail end of it, getting the tailwind of what it meant.

WH: What is it about philosophy that interests you so much?

OKB: Language is a problem. Language carries connotations, that kind of thing. Nothing more dramatic than that, I think. And then it suddenly hit me that if we think, we think of everything as language games. Now, this ties in with something I do with my kids. I allowed them, when they were young, to play computer games. I never stopped them. Because I thought a computer game is complete in itself. It’s a bubble. You cannot have contradictions in a computer game, right? It’s all thought up to be complete. And then you change game.

The rules are different. You let them play five or six games, they start becoming conscious. It’s all made-up. So, they will see that the world is made-up. You know, a bit like that. It’s all discourse-based. That’s why the words after that, I like words like paradigm and discourse—other words for language games.

The Chinese are different. The Chinese base can’t be controlled that easily, I think. If you have a civilisation without power, what does your science look like? I sort of sense that the Chinese have something there. It could be medicine even. It’s sort of half scientific today.

WH: Would you dare to go against the contemporary stereotypes, questioning things such as racism in Malaysia? Do you consider yourself an activist?

OKB: I get very cynical nowadays and like to talk about how the problem of the world is universal education being badly done. We have a lot of slightly educated people, and the problem with these slightly educated people, they think they can say things. And then we have the social media.

What I mean by that is actually language traps you into thinking there is an agent. “So why don’t you do this? Why don’t they?” Where are these agents coming from that can be supplanted by the word “they” or “you”? Any system is so complicated, there’s no one agent, unless you have a routine system, whatever you have.

And I’ve been an activist for some reason all the time. But I think I want to be a smart activist. So, you’ll not see me joining NGOs because I find NGOs don’t know enough.

WH: Perhaps you see yourself as an anarchist? Or how do you actually view things?

OKB: If I’m an anarchist, it’s only as a philosophical anarchist. I know that anarchism won’t work. But you have to conceptually think like an anarchist. To your earlier question, if I would oppose racism, yes, but only smartly. And I don’t think burning bridges help.

People are not going to listen to you after you have shouted at them. Be their friend and then “I understand you a bit.” The only thing I ever joined when I was in Sweden was a syndicalist movement for a little while. But that was also just a joke, just to fill in the spot they have placed, things like that.

For me, philosophy is activism. Basically, I view things in passing processes, more than in moral stances and situations. So, my ambition is to synergise, facilitate and merge positive and half-positive energies. Put another way, I analyse largely from that angle of fluidity of purpose, process and prominence.