Eureka! In other words, I found something today for my thesis

Weekends are typically best spent doing something different, something you don't do between Monday to Friday. So I played the SJC piano today in the social lounge (I haven't played it in at least 2-3 weeks), walked around the SJC courtyard twice, and relocated my work station a little. Erika said I should work on my thesis today, and after a lot of internal resistance, I finally decided to pry open one of the primary documents floating on my laptop's desktop. I re-read the Aiman letter that was the basis of my Iced Coffee historical fiction piece from Public History last year.

I realized I had not thoroughly followed Aiman's letter on a map, so I decided to use the 1962 British Library map of KL to follow his narrative. It made a lot of sense, and confirmed some of the things my other interviewees told me. So I followed along Aiman's words, from him leaving his house to drive on Batu Road, where he encountered armed Chinese and closed shophouses, where he made it to the roundabout at the end of that road. He saw cars burning and so he decided to go up Jalan Pahang, and went through the General Hospital to circumvent the burning cars at the roundabout end of Princes Road (Aiman mispells it as Princess Road). As he drives off the GH compound and goes onto Circular Road, he is fine, then he reaches the end of it and sees a Malay mob with weapons. He turned into Princes Road regardless because he thought he'd be safer in a Malay area compared to a Chinese area (Batu road), but the crowd surrounds him and he thinks he is going to die. Luckily a man steps forward and identifies him as a Malay, so Aiman is let through. He turns right onto the Mentri Besar/ Chief Minister's house and...

Wait a minute, what is this on the map? In plain sight writes, "M.B.'s house".

note my blue circle to the right of the map

I could not believe my eyes... it was marked this whole time? oh man, what a discovery. This revolutionizes the way I envisioned my thesis, and how I can manipulate this 1962 map for my work. Who would've thought that it would be there! Earlier I asked a Kini reporter if she knew the address, and she gave me a GPS location of it. I didn't follow up/ input the code into Maps, but here it is, frozen in time, with the previous road names and all. Batu road is no longer batu road today in KL, rather it is Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman. Similarly there is no Princes Road or Circular Road, though I've heard radio people use the phrase and seen road signage with circular road in brackets/parantheses. My gosh...

The MB house is significant because some academics/writers believe that that was where it all began. The ethnic Malays gathering together prior to them going out to injure/kill ethnic Chinese and ethnic Indians in KL. Why? Because the ethnic minorities of Malaysia had insulted the ethnic Malays with slurs the evening before while DAP and Gerakan were going around KL on a victory parade (DAP and Gerakan made some big progress on the polls, and at the Selangor state level, they had 14 seats together while the Alliance had 14 seats as well. There was 1 independent candidate who won, but I forget if he is counted as part of the Alliance or the Opposition since Selangor had 28 state seats in 1969). The MB house is a focal point of the riots, an inescapable part of the narrative I am trying to tell. And now that it is on the map, the primary source I'm using, I sure as hell am a lot more inspired to write and to use the map for my work. It changes so much, and helps the reader and me the writer picture the location of all the stories I am trying to tell.

So thank you Aiman for showing me where the MB house is, 51 years later through a letter that slowly but surely made its way from KL to the U.S.