AUGUST 1 — Penang has a few iconic structures, the most photographed of which is the Penang Bridge, opened in September 1985. Penang Economic Monthly talks to Liaw Yew Peng, the chief resident engineer for the project. Proudly, he tells us that the bridge was actually completed below budget, but is clearly upset, among other things, at how Penang no longer receives any revenue from it.

Liaw Yew Peng could have been a doctor.

His grades were good enough, and he enjoyed subjects like biology. Many of his peers had chosen to go into medicine. Career-wise, it made sense.

His mathematics teacher, James Vinniasingam, didn’t see it that way.

“He told me, ‘Your maths and physics are also very good’,” Liaw recalls. “‘Why do you want to follow all these people? Next time, no job for you!’ He frightened me, actually. So that’s how I applied for engineering (at MU in Singapore).”

That decision was a major turning point in Liaw’s colourful life. His training and expertise landed him in a variety of major Malaysian projects from the 1960s to the 1980s; projects that included the Temengor dam, the Prai Thermal Power Station and the Teluk Bahang dam, all of which were instrumental, directly or otherwise, to the modernisation and eventual betterment of Malaysian lives.

Arguably his most famous project, however, is the iconic Penang Bridge, where  Liaw served first as deputy chief resident engineer, before being promoted to chief resident engineer. The bridge remains in his mind as one of his best projects.

We meet Liaw and his wife, Tan Phaik Guat, at their home in Lengkok Pemancar.  Liaw is about 80, and a little hard of hearing. Yet his mind and memory remain almost shockingly sharp as he recalls details, anecdotes and names from decades ago. “When I was a little boy, I went to the old type of Chinese school,” he says, recounting his humble beginnings in Port Dickson. “We studied old classic Chinese, Confucius books and so on.”

Then the Japanese Occupation happened, and by the end of the war, Liaw, then 15 years of age, had missed out on four years’ worth of education, and had to enroll as an overage student in a local English school to do some catching up.

In spite of these difficulties, he eventually completed his engineering training in 1959 at MU, where he was taught by Tan Sri Professor Chin Fung Kee. While waiting for his results, Liaw caught sight of an ad about a “big project” in Cameron Highlands, quite a distance away from Port Dickson. (The project would turn out to be the Cameron Highlands Hydro-Electric Scheme.)

“My parents were not happy at all, because at the time there were plenty of jobs. I could easily walk into DID (Department of Irrigation and Drainage) or JKR (Public Works Department) for work first. The interview could come later.

They wanted local engineers, and engineers from MU were in especially great demand.

MU graduates were like jewels.

“I wanted to gain experience. I could study anytime, but work experience, if I missed it, would never come back, I thought.”

It wasn’t easy. Liaw found himself sharing a bungalow with an old clerk working on the site. “The old man asked me, ‘Do you have any food?’ I said, ‘No.’ The poor old man had to feed me,” Liaw says with a laugh. Still, he spent a lot of time learning on the site, and would eventually meet his wife there. More than two years later, Liaw received the opportunity to further his postgraduate studies in the United Kingdom, where his eldest child was born.

On returning to Malaysia in mid-July, 1964, he was stationed at Tenaga Nasional  Berhad (TNB) headquarters in Kuala Lumpur for a short while. He was involved in hydrology projects such as the Prai Power Station, where he handled the construction work.

In 1972, Liaw was assigned to the Temengor Dam project, a massive long-term project involving overseas contractors. This required Liaw and his family to relocate to Gerik for the next 10 years. There were a few complications that came with this arrangement. The first was the fact that Gerik back then was mostly a jungle. “We had to live like pioneers,” Liaw says. “We had to build a road to the dam for 18 months first, then the quarters and power station for our own use.” This preliminary work, which Liaw led, took two years, and only then could the big international contractors move in. Gerik would soon have the largest concentration of engineers than any other part of the country.

The other complication was Communism. Gerik was considered a “black area” in the country, and was subject to strict curfews. The locals also harboured a deep suspicion of the government. “When we first went there, everyone was hostile to government servants,” Liaw says, his tone becoming more serious. “I had to be their friend, to make sure that they wouldn’t harm us. In Gerik, if you wanted to kill a person, it was nothing, especially for the Communists. They just shot you dead, then off they went. It was impossible to catch them.”    

Liaw eventually managed to win the villagers over, and calls his time in Gerik some of the best years of his life, where the friendly locals would often grind hill paddy for him, or offer his family fish. “They never harmed us,” he says proudly.

Living in a relatively peaceful 21st century Malaysia, it’s easy to forget that the 1970s was a dark period for the country, no thanks to constant terrorist attacks. During Liaw’s time in Gerik, the place saw three separate Communist attacks. Two of those times, Liaw was away. It became a bit of a joke. “They used to say, ‘Hey, you mustn’t go away lah! Every time you go away they come and attack!’” he says, laughing.

The only time they attacked while Liaw was on-site was also arguably the bloodiest. He was in the office when the call came in, and after alerting the police (though Gerik didn’t have telephone lines back then, the Temengor site itself had communications lines specially set up by Telekom), they went in. “We saw the attack. We saw the soldiers going in to chase them almost immediately. So many people were shot dead,” he recalls.

Naturally, security in Gerik was very tight, with multiple security checkpoints, curfews and the need for security passes. So it came as a bit of a surprise to Liaw when, on a random inspection of the site, he found that workers had managed to sneak in five call-girls. Liaw laughs at the memory. “We had to survive on our own. We learned a lot of good lessons, I tell you. The world is a good university, provided you know how to learn.”

In 1982, after Liaw took optional retirement from TNB, he received a call from an old university mate. “Yew Peng, the Old Man wants you. You better come.” The Old Man here was Prof Chin, then a consultant, who specifically wanted Liaw for a project he was working on. Liaw protested, but eventually relented and moved to Penang and began work on what would become his most famous project, the Penang Bridge.

“It was one of my best projects,” Liaw says. “We had very good cooperation from the staff, the paymaster (the Malaysian Highway Authority), the consulting engineers and the contractor.” It was not an easy project to deal with, and Liaw would usually return home late at night, sometimes covered in mud.

Worse was that the hours he put into the bridge meant that his family saw little of him.

The bridge was a massive undertaking, employing as many as 2,000 workers at the peak of the project, including 100 Koreans. Prof Chin introduced a number of innovative design features, including the use of rubber pads to absorb the seismic loading. This innovation would eventually be adopted by engineers all over the world, and is used extensively in earthquake-prone areas like California, USA.

The bridge may be one of Liaw’s best projects, but some aspects beyond his control left him disappointed. Foremost are the iconic cables at the centre-span of the bridge. Extensively tested in Germany, the cables had a lifespan of over 100 years, as estimated by Prof Chin. Yet the cables have since been replaced in a multi-year project that ended earlier this year, which Liaw estimated cost the public to the tune of hundreds of millions of ringgit.

In talking about the cables, he is clearly upset, raising his voice. According to Liaw, who was chief resident engineer of the bridge, the original contractor responsible for the cables was legally obligated to cover the costs of the cables if they were at fault. “If the cables were overstressed, go back to the contractor! Why does the employer have to pay a few hundred million? It has only been 25 years.” Liaw says that everyone involved in the bridge was outraged when they found out.

Another disappointment for Liaw was his discovery that Penang no longer receives any revenue from the Penang Bridge. “I thought the state government gets 15 per cent of the bridge income. An Exco member (YB Lim Hock Seng, Penang Exco for Public Works, Utilities and Transport) said that the 15 per cent was taken away long ago. So Penang doesn’t benefit from the bridge.” (An email from YB Lim confirms this.)

But there are happy memories as well. The happiest moment for him was during the celebration dinner on the bridge, which hundreds attended, shortly before it was opened for use. “All the hard times, the scolding and cursing were forgotten,” he laughs.

Liaw remains proud of the work he and his fellow engineers did on the bridge, particularly when it came to the budget. Liaw would personally review the expenditures for every single day of the project, and although the bridge was budgeted at RM850mil, the final cost was RM100mil lower. In an age where project budgets continue to balloon, Liaw’s achievement is all the more remarkable.

Throughout his career, Liaw developed a reputation for being strict, something he acknowledges, and he even jokes that people often complain about him to his wife. “You don’t like to lose your temper, it’s very bad,” he then says, serious again. “There must be something very silly that happened, and you just can’t control it anymore.” The “silliness” included accidents that happened at the project, accidents that Liaw says could have been completely avoided if the workers had adhered to safety guidelines.

About nine people died during the construction of the bridge.

Liaw now lives with his wife in their home in Penang, and though he has been retired for several years now, he still gets invited to speak at engineering conferences and events. What does he think of today’s engineers? “They vary very much. Some are very good, some are very bad. It is not uniform. They all know theory very well, but I think they are lacking in the practical part. I think it’s a university problem. When I was working in the Teluk Bahang Dam, not a single university organised any visit to the site for their students.

“But when I was working on the Penang Bridge, the Singaporean engineering alumni took the trouble to come visit.

“You need to create interest. If you only let them read about it, it will all be forgotten.”

Liaw Yew Peng could have been a doctor, but he chose to be an engineer, and Penang — and Malaysia — is all the better for it.

*  Jeffrey Hardy Quah built a bridge once... straight to your heart.

* This article is taken from the August issue of “Penang Economic Monthly”, published by the Socio-economic and Environmental Institute (SERI), Penang, now out at all good bookshops and newsagents.