Poor migrant boy with self-betterment spirit

Shan Ruhong was a very poor migrant boy who was brought to British Malaya from the then very poor southern China in the 1920s and after completing merely five year of elementary education, he had to start working in the Ipoh-centered Kinta Valley. However, he never gave up reading books. Like Rashid Maidin (1917-2006), whom he befriended as a fellow tin-mining worker in the 1930s when the Great Depression seriously hit the tin-mining industry in the Kinta Valley, he also learnt from other more knowledgeable persons whenever opportunity arose. I have certainly learnt a great deal about the different aspects of the colonial history of Malaya from my personal conversation with Ah Hai.

Ah Hai in Chin Peng' s autobiography appears