Mohammad Nor Khalid was born on 5 March 1951 in a "kampung" (village) in Gopeng, Perak, Malaysia. His father was a government clerk with the Malaysian Armed Forces, and his mother a housewife. Khalid was a stocky boy with a cherubic face, which led his family to nickname him "bulat" (round). His friends shortened it to "Lat"; it became the name by which he was more commonly known in his "kampung" and later in the world. Lat was the eldest child in his family, and he often played in the jungles, plantations, and tin mines with his friends. Their toys were usually improvised from everyday sundries and items of nature. Lat liked to doodle with materials provided by his parents, and his other forms of recreation were reading comics and watching television; Lat idolised local cartoonist Raja Hamzah, who was popular with his tales of swashbuckling Malay heroes. Malaysian art critic and historian Redza Piyadasa believes Lat's early years in the "kampung" ingrained the cartoonist with pride in his "kampung" roots and a "peculiarly Malay" outlook—"full of [...] gentleness and refinement".