I've had people writing me and asking, "Are you Malaysian?", or "Are you Japanese?". Well, I'm Malaysian. "mokui" is a made-up name. I thought it meant nothing until a Japanese visitor wrote to say that "moku" means "wood/silence" and "i" means "a well". So much for making up names.

Why did I set up this site ?  To be honest, I wanted the ego boost. Then I discovered that it was tedious work and nearly wanted to quit. But I learned a bit about web design and stuff ... and made a few friends along the way, so I kept on going.

Originally, this site was supposed to cater for people who have never heard of P Ramlee. Then, I discovered that most of my visitors were Malaysians, or Malaysians living abroad. So now my aim is to keep this site alive and perhaps one day word will spread far enough to get more non-Malaysians, or non-Singaporeans (they visit quite often too), to actually DISCOVER this site. I believe that only by word of mouth can a total stranger to P Ramlee discover this site since it is within the "Entertainment" category of search engines - and we know how many entertainment sites are out there; and P Ramlee is not a current chart-topping artist - which effectively rules him out of being discovered by chance. So to my visitors, my request is that you to tell your friends about this site, especially your non-Malaysian/Singaporean friends. I hope you'd do this because, to me, P Ramlee is perhaps the only Malaysian artist to transcend the boundaries of race in Malaysia. For this, I honour him ... and I am Chinese.

But beyond that, I've yet to see another artist with such versatility and appeal; or whose movies are eagerly awaited, even if they are being shown for the 10th time on TV. P Ramlee's movies, most of them, are like Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life". You WANT to see them, even if you've seen them many many times before.

But current limitations of the Internet make it impossible, if not irritating, to have decent streaming video clips for the majority of users. So I present the songs to you - songs which my original target audience would not understand but surely can appreciate since they are melodically brilliant. With that, I offer my basic translations of the lyrics with some background to the movie in which those songs appear. Hopefully, they would pique a casual visitor with no prior knowledge of this man and perhaps let him/her into the wonderful world of P Ramlee movies.

mokui

30th. July 2000