Kho Ping Hoo survives into digital age
Evi Mariani, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
Although Asmaraman Sukowati Kho Ping Hoo died 11 years ago, his work has survived into the digital age.
The past three years have seen Kho Ping Hoo stories being uploaded to the Internet, as a website or e-book, and downloaded to people's PDAs.
On Yahoo Groups alone, there are six e-groups of Kho Ping Hoo fans, of which kho-ping-hoo group is the most popular, with more than 1,200 members.
Bagus Pursena, the founder of the group, said that he met other Kho fans who sought e-books of Kho's works on various mailing lists.
In 2002, after cyber communication with fellow fans, he decided to create the group which now has about 20 titles of Kho's e-book, 70 megabytes in size.
"The titles include Kho's most popular series called Bu-kek Sian-su, which has 17 titles," Bagus, an employee at a private company in Jakarta, told The Jakarta Post.
He said that he found some of Kho's digitalized works scattered on a variety of Internet websites.
"But some of the files were not arranged in correct order," added Bagus, a Javanese whom people often suspected to be a Chinese-Indonesian due to his fanaticism for Kho's works.
With the help of other fans, he retyped the files, improved the scan quality and arranged the books in order. He even rechecked the accuracy of the files using the Kho hard copies he had.
He said that he was willing to devote time to doing that because he really liked the stories.
Bagus, who has read Kho's works since he was in junior high school, added that about 20 to 30 people joined his group every day and about 40 group members who lived in Jakarta met two to three times a year.
He said that most of the e-group members were longtime fans of Kho's works who had read all the books.
"But we like to read them again from our PDAs in our spare time," he said.
"I like his works because he did not merely write martial arts stories but also focused on values of critical thinking, peaceful ways of resolving matters and inclusiveness in racial issues," Bagus added.
Kho's stories were tales written by Kho himself, and are not an adaptation or translation of Chinese tales. Most of his works have mainland China as their background although he also wrote stories that have Java as the setting.
Kho, a Chinese-Indonesian born in Sragen, Central Java, on Aug. 17, 1926, wrote stories in Indonesian with Chinese-Malay terms like suheng (teacher) inserted here and there.
His stories have kung fu (Chinese martial arts) virtuous heroes who fought against "jai hwa cat", a group of people whom Kho described as playboys or "flower-picking heroes" and "bo ceng li", a group of shameless cowards.
His works emerged to popularity in the late 1950s and prevailed for 30 years.
After his first story, Pedang Pusaka Naga Putih (White Dragon Sword) published in the 1950s in Teratai magazine received a warm reception, he became a full-time writer, publishing his own pocket books through his publishing company, CV Gema, in Surakarta, Central Java.
Leo Suryadinata, a Chinese-Indonesian literature researcher, wrote in his book Sastra Peranakan Tionghoa Indonesia (Chinese- Indonesian Literature) that Kho's works within his 30-year career totaled 120 titles.
Many Kho fans consider the Bu-kek Sian-su series of 17 titles to be Kho's masterpiece.
Besides becoming an e-book, a number of websites have also been developed for Kho's works, including a link on newsportal www.detik.com.
Previously, Kho's stories were also made into a TV program, Legenda Kho Ping Hoo (Kho Ping Hoo Legend), which was aired on commercial TV.