Wang Gungwu, the scholar who helped the West understand China and the new Asia

When the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours list recognised Wang Gungwu for his services to Australia-Asia relations, the eminent historian responded with typical grace – even if some attached an air of sadness to that which he left unsaid.

“It is an honour. Australia from the 1960s to the 1980s led the Western world in its keenness to understand the new Asia. I was privileged to be among those who tried to make that wish come true. It was a most exciting time,” Wang told the National University of Singapore (NUS) newsletter on receiving the honour in June.

Sun Yat-sen to Mao Zedong, I watched a new China being reborn: the Wang Gungwu memoir

This was Wang, the consummate scholar and educator, the ultimate Nanyang junzi (gentleman), speaking. A man who, even as one of the world’s foremost experts on the Chinese diaspora, could summon enough diplomacy not to mention the decline of Asian studies in Australia in the decades since – a decline that has caused great sadness in the academic world.

Diplomacy comes naturally to Wang, as is clear from the memoir of his youth Home is Not Here, which he is publishing at the grand age of 87. As the memoir makes clear, Wang – a professor at NUS, a former vice chancellor of the University of Hong Kong and emeritus professor at the Australian National University – benefited from his early years growing up in a multicultural, immigrant family. Wang’s early life was marked by the crossing of borders, something that was to have a profound impact on his later outlook and academic career.

He was born in Surabaya, Indonesia, on October 9, 1930, but from the age of 2 was raised in Ipoh, Malaysia. He went through the English-medium education system but acquired a strong grounding in Chinese classics and history under the watch of his father Wang Fo Wen, a federal inspector of Chinese schools in Kuala Lumpur before he retired to become principal of a Chinese high school in Johor Bahru.