This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 1, 2017 - May 7, 2017

Prof Emeritus Tan Sri Dr Khoo Kay Kim is widely regarded as the country’s national historian. To me, Prof Khoo (as he is fondly referred to) is a historian and scholar par excellence.

The Sultan of Perak, Sultan Nazrin Muizzuddin Shah, called him “a walking encyclopedia of Malaysian history” in his address at the launch of the book, I, KKK: The Autobiography of a Historian, in Kuala Lumpur on April 12.

Written with his eldest son Eddin Khoo, the 140-page autobiography tells of his private life. It starts with a one-sentence prologue: “Memory comes in impressions, history in facts.”

This sentence reminds me of the first time I attended his lecture as a first-year (history major) student at Universiti Malaya (UM) in 1981. He said, “History is facts, not what you think the past was.” He told us, “History is also the interpretation of the facts. You come to university to learn how to interpret the facts. If you are interested in memorising the facts only, you don’t enter university.”

The interpretation must be sound, with clarity of thought. In one of the exams, we were required to answer each question in not more than 40 words. His rationale was typical of his hard-hitting style — “Sometimes when you write long, you goreng only!”

Prof Khoo was my favourite lecturer. To many, history is a boring subject. But he has a way of making his lectures and tutorials interesting. Maybe it is because he was a schoolteacher before he became a lecturer. He was probably trained in the “teaching and learning” methods. But there are also trained teachers who do not teach well. So, I think, it is because he loves teaching.

Attending his classes was like listening to stories about the country, as is the case with his autobiography — it is like reading a story.

According to Sultan Nazrin, the book “is a poetic reflection of the country’s history composed in fragments and vignettes … told from the prism of an individual history — of a young boy in Kampar witnessing the coming of Japanese soldiers by foot; of a teenager trapped on a train in a crossfire between Gurkha soldiers and Communist insurgents; of university life in Singapore, torn between radical political change and the cabarets…; of an intercommunity marriage to his wife Puan Sri Rathi in a period of conservative community attitudes; … an encapsulation of the aspirations, dreams and faith of a young historian contemplating the birth of a new nation … a eulogy to teachers … an expression of devotion to the society and landscape from which he has always returned — his native state of Perak … his undying passion for football”.

Besides his classes and books, I learnt a lot from Prof Khoo during the countless chats in his room at the top floor of the UM History Department — the room he has maintained until today, for 50 years or so.

Prof Khoo wrote many of the seminal works on Malaysian history, including his Master’s thesis, The Western Malay States 1850-1873. He is a leading 

pioneer in the writing of Malaysian history from our perspective — “Malaysian-centric historiography”, which is a paradigm shift from the earlier writings, which were “Euro-centric”.

He is the pioneer in the writing of our “social history”. In his speech at the book launch, he said, “To talk about Malaysia meaningfully, it is important to know the society well. Without a close understanding of the society, it is almost impossible to provide a sound analysis of the process of social, political or even economic development.”

He is also the first historian to write about Malaysian sport and its history. This is because to him, sport is where the majority of the people participate in, directly or indirectly. Hence, if you want to talk about a society, you have to talk about its sport.

The book ends with a postscript: “I always feel that I have achieved very little. My conclusion is that when you’re a true Malaysian, you are a very lonely person.”

I do not know why he wrote that. Based on my conversations with him, I can only guess that for a Peranakan whose command of the Malay language and appreciation of the Malay culture are better than many Malays’; who understands that the May 13, 1969, incident was not the only racial riot to have occurred in the country; who was instrumental in the formulation of the Rukunegara; and who has lived the true Malaysian narrative — multicultural and moderate — in his own family, I can sense that his undying cumulative efforts in being a true Malaysian, both in his private and public lives, can indeed be a very lonely struggle.

Coming back to historical facts, Prof Khoo has always reminded his students on the importance of empirical evidence. This must start with the core of it, namely “primary sources”. He taught us by asking us to write, as our first assignment, the history of our own place — village, school, town or district. Of course, nothing was published about most of those places at the time. In order to write, we had to search for files and documents and interview people — primary sources.

So, it is befitting that the accompanying volume of his autobiography — on his public and intellectual life — which will be published at the end of the year, is titled Primary Sources.

Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah is chief secretary of Pakatan Harapan and director (strategic and social development) of Institut Darul Ehsan. He is active on Twitter: @saifuddinabd.

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