What happens
This episode of The Pacific Story, broadcast by the National Broadcasting Company on July 9, 1944, examines the Chinese communities scattered across Southeast Asia and the Pacific in the years before the war. It follows Lee Hon-wah, who sails to Malaya as a young laborer and dreams of owning a great junk, and his grandson Lee Foyen, a wealthy Singapore financier. The narration describes how Chinese immigrants came to dominate mining, rice milling, rubber, retail trade and commerce in Malaya, Thailand, the Netherlands Indies, Burma and the Philippines. It also describes the resentment of local populations and the new laws and measures that governments adopted against the Chinese in response.
Malaya, Singapore, the Netherlands Indies, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines and other Pacific lands, in the years before Pearl Harbor
Characters: Lee Hon-wah, Lee Foyen, Chang
Listen for: Lee Foyen's account of his grandfather's journey to Malaya and the Chinese role in business across the Pacific
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.