ABOUT a month ago, I met up with two old friends, who had cycled 25km from Petaling Jaya to Bukit Serdang, where I currently reside.
For them, it was a usual fun way of exercising over the weekend by exploring various territories and trying out different eateries.
As I was catching up with them over breakfast at a friendly neighbourhood mamak stall, I recalled the days of growing up in Subang Jaya and the bicycle adventures I had with friends during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Think Stranger Things or, if you go back further, ET: The Extraterrestrial — minus all of the sci-fi and fantasy elements, of course. But the magic was real.
Life was simple and carefree back then. No haze, hardly any traffic, not as hot, no tall structures and lots of wide areas to check out.
In the 1980s, Subang Jaya (developed in the 1970s by the United Estates Projects Bhd and later renamed Sime UEP Properties Bhd) was not yet a municipality and UEP Subang Jaya was still made up of rubber and oil palm plantations, while Sunway was a vast tin mining land.
It was practically a new township with just an entry and an exit point connecting to the Federal Highway.
No one really knew where this suburb, about 24km away from Kuala Lumpur, was. My family would have to tell relatives and friends that it was somewhere between Petaling Jaya and Shah Alam, and relatively close to the airport.
For a while, it was somewhat infamously known as the location where “the beauty queen murder” happened. In 1979, Jean Perera Sinnappa was found dead by two Malaysian Airline System engineers with 10 stab wounds on her chest. She was found in her car with the seatbelt still on.
This happened at a secluded junction between the Federal Highway and the road leading to the Subang International Airport. Her death remains a mystery to this day.
The airport is now known as the Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport. This was way before the Kuala Lumpur International Airport came along.
My family stayed in a double-storey terrace house in SS14 and the quiet ambiance of the residential neighbourhood was periodically broken by the sound of airplanes flying overhead. It only became somewhat noticeable to me when visitors pointed out: “Wow, it’s the sound of a plane!”
There was also this hysterical myth that planes dumped their fuel before landing at the airport. But, really, the only expulsions from the sky I ever encountered was the good old rain and in one unfortunate incident, a bird’s poop.
Our backyard, which faced a mirrored row of houses, had a wide berth of a brick road set in between, where kids would play in the afternoon. Older boys would play football at the small green fields that book-ended the two rows of houses.
This secluded brick road path was where a nine-year-old me learnt how to ride a bicycle for real when my father removed the training wheels on my hardy BMX.
From then on, I travelled farther into the neighbourhood with school friends — slowly exploring the areas from SS12, where the Subang Ria lake and park were, and the industrial expanse of SS13, to the hilly well-heeled enclave of SS19 and everything in between.
Prior to that, I remember playing with neighbourhood kids in nearby massive, concrete monsoon drains that we practically descended into. There, we searched for frog eggs and played games of catching tadpoles.
Those days most of us had raised kittens as well, from stray cats that would give birth to litters in odd nooks of homes.
Our journeys on two wheels were simply dubbed “jalan-jalan” that we’d do after school. It was lots of fun as my friends and me conquered the hills and zoomed down the long and snaky stretches, which covered an average distance of more than 6km a day. And there were plenty of funny moments too.
I’ll never forget the day when I had to help a friend, who was tip-toeing on the ledge of a deep drain. He was pinned by his bicycle to the bouncy old steel mesh fence after he made a braking misstep and lost control.
Little scrapes here and there didn’t deter us. Another funny moment was dodging the police during a raid on a particular video arcade centre we used to frequent in a shophouse in SS15.
As my two other friends and I hotfooted it on our bicycles to the impotent cries of “berhenti!” from the authorities, we got to know later that other underaged kids who got caught were made to stand in a straight line and sing Negaraku and perform a series of “ketuk ketampi” (squats) as punishment.
But things got more interesting during the end of Forms 4 and 5. Me and my motley muhibbah group of secondary school classmates would take the “jalan-jalan” concept a step further by going on a cycling excursion from 7pm to 7am the next day.
I was on my trusted Shimano mountain bike as we pedalled to our friends’ houses around Subang Jaya as well as the USJ area, which by that time was already rapidly expanding as a further township.
We could easily cross over to USJ 2 from SS14 since the KESAS highway (and the NPE) were yet to be built.
As the evening progressed, so did our numbers as we visited more homes along the way until there were close to 10 of us in the cycling group.
A side event consisted of one buddy giving those of us who didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle some quick riding lessons on his dependable Honda kapcai!
For a quick supper session, we dropped by the famous open air square lined with food stalls in SS15 for some simple but sumptuous roti canai and “teh ais” at the popular Ravi’s stall.
This was before the entire flat area surrounded by shop houses was later reconstituted as the SS15 wet market, complete with a sprawling building and a food court.
The main wet market at the time was a simple setup, which was a few kilometres closer to the residential area, and the then Taylor’s College. I remember stepping on a RM50 note once when I accompanied my mother during her grocery run. This place is now the hulking Subang Square business building.
Our bike trail in SS15 also took us past the quaint Pawagam P. Ramlee, which sat across Inti College at the time. This was where I developed an appreciation for movies by watching movies such as “The Silence Of The Lambs” and such. Back then the tickets were only RM2.
The site became the famous Asia Cafe, which was demolished in 2017, and is now the development site for Grand Subang Jaya, a business block with two towers and 20-plus floors. This is expected to be completed in 2021.
One more funny thing happened when we were racing along Persiaran Jengka towards SS12. As we ascended the hill which divides SS15 with SS17, a couple of friends, who rode racer bikes, zoomed off ahead and disappeared over the summit.
As they did so, the rest of us heard an increasingly loud snar-ling. A pack of stray dogs were getting ready for a chase, but when they subsequently saw more and more cyclists speeding down the hill, they turned tail.
The foot of the hill we were on was Jalan Kemajuan Subang, where Subang Parade was later built. This was once the longest mall in Southeast Asia and the first regional shopping centre in Selangor when it opened back in 1988. I remember sifting through a body-to-body crowd with my family on the first weekend of its opening as people thronged the three-storey building.
Along this stretch were also two other tallest buildings in Subang Jaya during the early 1990s.
On one end was the 15-storey Wisma Consplant and the more interesting Menara Mesiniaga on the other end. Its award-winning futuristic look featured a sky garden that spiralled up the cylindrical 14.5 floor structure to provide a sharp contrast to its steel and aluminium-plated surface.
We must have cycled 30km at the place each night. The weather was clear and cool and the starry night sky offered us a different perspective and vibe of the land around us.
During our intermediate breaks early in the wee hours of the morning, we chilled out at a playground in USJ2 to breathe in fresh air and stare at the picturesque sky as we lay peacefully on the grass.
It was pure tranquillity without cars or Mat Rempits on the roads. The freedom was palpable and infectious. Just us boys alone with nature as best as it could offer in a suburb.
While the Subang Jaya and its surrounding areas of today are a far cry from where I was as a little boy and a teen, these simple but potent experiences have left an indelible impression and will remain in my memory always.