Listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/emergency
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, catch a falling language and put it in my pocket, never let it fade away.
Today’s episode is about one of the most…bold? euphemisms I’ve ever come across - no, it’s not one of the powder room ones. The euphemism is a particular use of the word ‘emergency’ - and no, it’s not a powder room emergency.
Quick bit of news for you if you’re in or near Toronto (Ontario version, sorry to the other Torontos) the Allusionist live show about eponyms Your Name Here is coming to town! It will be on at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema on 11 December 2022 at 1pm, a matinee; and aside from swears I’d say the show is suitable for kids if you want to bring them, depending on how into language-based amusement they are. Perhaps this is the opportunity to learn that. Tickets are on sale now at theallusionist.org/events, and everyone who comes gets a special Allusionist pencil.
On with the show.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: There are things that are often called emergencies, so the small wars, which are often referred to as emergencies in this period.
HZ: Yeah… How did they come up with that? And why?
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: Emergency comes from the concept of a state of emergency, that's what it comes from. So it comes from the idea of Britain declaring a state of emergency in one of these places. And, you know, Britain can declare a state of emergency in Britain if it wants to. It's something that governments can do to enable their executive to have more unfettered power.
I'm Charlotte Lydia Riley. I'm a lecturer in 20th century British history at the University of Southampton, and I work on the history of the British Empire.
HZ: A state of emergency might be declared in the event of, say, an environmental disaster, or civil unrest, or war, or terrorism. And it enables the government to do things like impose curfews, or bring in the military, to push through laws quickly, to detain people without some of the usual procedures. But the way the British government has also used the term ‘emergency’ was to avoid calling a war a war.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: There's a moment in 1953 actually where Labour MPs are in the House of Commons asking the Conservative government: how many states of emergencies are there currently in the Empire? Can you enumerate them for us? How many are there? And since 1951 at that point, states of emergency have been declared in Kenya, in British Guiana, in the Buganda area of Uganda, in Nigeria, in Sarawak, in Malaya, in Aden, in Grenada, in Gold Coast in Jamaica, Nigeria, Trinidad… So this was actually quite a common thing. And what the Labour MPs are saying in this debate in the House of Commons is: this is essentially anti-democratic. This is a British colonial government giving even less local control over things enforcing itself even more on the local population, allowing even less opposition.
HZ: And the emergency we're talking about today is the Malayan Emergency. Or at least that's what the British called it. The people in what was then called Malaya had other terms for the conflict.
SIM CHI YIN: To the left, they called it - in Chinese, they called it [fǎn yīng zhànzhēng], which is the War Against the British, the Anti British War, the Anti British Struggle. Yeah. Some people would use terms like ‘independence’, you know, the fight for independence. Liberation, independence; these terms would kind of float around in Chinese. What is it called now? From the people that I interviewed who actually were part of this war, they still call it the Anti British War. They also use the word [fǎn zhǔyì], which is 'anti-colonial'. So these are the terms that they use. But they do acknowledge the term ‘emergency’. Yeah, they, that there is a Chinese translation for that too, but it's more commonly known as the Anti British War.
So my name is Chi Yin, I am a Singaporean visual artist, and I work around issues of colonialism, memory, conflict and extraction. My main long-term project over the last decade or so has been around the histories and historiographies of the so-called Malayan Emergency or the anti-colonial war that was fought between 1948 and 1960, by local leftist guerrilla fighters against the British. And this work has been both a work of historical research as well as artistic production.
This whole thing started with a kind of curiosity about who my paternal grandfather was. I remember very vaguely that my father had mentioned him in passing and had mentioned that he had died and in China and had a monument to him, but I didn't get around to investigating this until a decade long career in journalism, and I decided that I needed to go and find out what my own story was. The more I dug, the more I found, so I discovered that my grandfather had died for the Chinese communist party; and I then tracked it backwards and I realized that he was a leftist in Malaya, but I never found a smoking gun to prove or disprove that he was a member, underground or not, of the Malayan communist party. I then extricated all these stories about who he was and what he did, doing his political activism in Malaya. And I got more and more curious about this period of history that even as a Singaporean I don't know much about. So I went down this humongous rabbit hole of researching this thing called the Malayan Emergency, and ten years later, I'm still here.
HZ: That ten years Chi Yin has spent is still less long than the Malayan Emergency, a conflict that lasted from June 1948 to July 1960 but definitely wasn't a twelve-year-long war, no no no, just an emergency, nothing to see here guv.
SIM CHI YIN: In Britain basically it's more or less one of those faraway forgotten wars. It was an out and out war that was merely called an emergency. Scholars have written about why it was called an emergency and people have come up with different reasons. But one that stands out is a very pragmatic one, which was that the British wanted to keep insurance coverage for the very important rubber and tin supplies from Malaya.
HZ: Malaya was by far the British Empire's most profitable colony in the late 1940s.
SIM CHI YIN: The rubber supply from Malaya essentially propped up the British economy after World War Two, the rubber supply brought in lots and lots of cash for the British economy, and tin played a role as well. And so the British wanted to keep insurance coverage for these commodities that they were extracting from Malaya, and therefore they always called it an emergency, they never declared that it was a war. But basically it was a war.
HZ: I wonder how the insurance companies assessed this. Weren't they like,"This emergency sure sounds like a war to me,” particularly eight years in or whatever?
SIM CHI YIN: A lot of insurance policies, if you read in the fine print, they don't cover natural disasters and war. So it was a way to keep your coverage.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: The emergency thing's really interesting because you often see people asserting that the reason the Malayan Emergency is called an emergency is because Lloyds of London doesn't insure war losses but insures emergency losses. I've seen this assertion quite a lot in people writing about it. And I'm not sure if it's true or not, but I've never really found any kind of evidence that this is definitely what's happening.
HZ: OK, bear that in mind: the insurance thing is very often cited - I've seen it mentioned in nearly all the academic papers and museum texts I've read about the Malayan Emergency - but it remains under-evidenced. Whether true or not, it's not the only motive the British had for avoiding calling a conflict a war.
SIM CHI YIN: There were things that the British did that probably would have come under Geneva Convention scrutiny, or conduct of oneself during war time. So all these things didn't come to pass also.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: Because obviously wars are governed by rules, right? Particularly around things like the treatment of prisoners of war, and the use of chemical weapons. And of course, if it's a state of emergency, then you don't come under those Geneva Convention doctrines. You do come other things - you come under things like the United Nations Human Rights Convention, for example - it's not that you can completely avoid oversight. But that could be the case.
HZ: The British were not bound by wartime laws regarding, for example, torture, beheadings, internment camps, killing unarmed civilians, using the recently invented Agent Orange…because it wasn’t a war, right?
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: We might also see it as the British government wanting to define these things as periods of civil unrest rather than as wars, because wars implies perhaps civil war, and civil war implies the sense of two sides, one of which might be fighting for freedom. If you're talking about a period of civil unrest, it's very contained, it's very interior, it's something which is going to come to an end and the colony is going to continue as usual. So it might be about framing these things not as a kind of war with two sides, which implies the existence of a nation in Malaya or in Kenya or in Borneo that have rights around their own identity, but instead a kind of a minor skirmish happening within a territory that Britain controls that will eventually kind of sort itself out.
HZ: Some of the language I've seen in British sources describing the Malayan Emergency barely even makes it seem like there was another side at all, that the British forces spotted a little bit of bother and put a lid on it.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: You often see that language, about Britain putting down an uprising, quelling an uprising, and it gives you very little sense of why people are rising up, who's involved in this uprising: is this 50 people? Is this the entire population? What's motivating them? So it's not just that it makes it very one-sided and it makes very much about Britain firefighting in an empire that they have legitimate control of; it's also that it makes it very difficult to understand the motivation behind this. Which is itself something that happens a lot during Empire, of course, because Britain's overriding sense that imperialism is correct means that anti imperial activism is given very short shift and is not taken seriously at all. And the motivations behind anti imperialism are not taken seriously.
Malaya is complex in terms of the different sides and in terms of what people want, all wars are, but Malaya is complex because of the regional context. But calling it an uprising, which has to be quelled, doesn't really take seriously the idea that there might be people who have a sort of a cause that they're fighting for.
HZ: The cause being Malayan independence, and most of the people fighting for it in this conflict were ethnically Chinese Malayans who were communists.
SIM CHI YIN: The so-called Malayan Emergency ended up being a 12 year old war that the British fought against local anti-colonial guerrilla fighters.
HZ: A very brief and much oversimplified background about a situation that involves several different lands and people from a range of places, backgrounds, ethnicities and political sympathies:
Having traded there since the 1600s, from the late 1700s, the British had been taking control piece by piece of what is now called Malaysia. Then from 1942 to 1945, Japan occupied Malaya, Borneo and Singapore, and for that time the British and the Chinese Malays had something in common: wanting to oust the Japanese, and the colonial government cooperated with - and also funded and armed - the newly formed Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army, the majority of whom were ethnic Chinese. But while the British were not in charge, there was a growing movement for independence in the region, so then when the British resumed control in 1945, it was not popular. Nor was the Malayan Union they then formed, which the Malay people objected to so much that it was replaced in 1948 by the Malayan Federation, which the Chinese Malays felt was way too under the thumb of the British.
And though they had fought alongside the British against the Japanese so recently, they had since been in conflict with them over poor wages and working conditions, facing beatings, deportations and death. In retaliation against the killings of left-wing activists, Chinese Malay communists murdered three British plantation owners; and in retaliation against that, the British outlawed the Malayan Communist Party and declared the state of emergency. Twelve years of brutal conflict ensued, with the British destroying farmland and homes and forcing half a million rural Malayans, the majority of whom were ethnic Chinese, into what were euphemistically called 'new villages', which were actually internment camps; this was to cut off the guerrilla fighters from their sources of support.
There were an estimated 7-12,000 guerrilla fighters in the Malayan National Liberation Army, most of them ethnic Chinese, so they were outnumbered more than twenty times over by the combined British and Allied troops and police. Much of the fighting took place in rural areas, out of the view of most of the population. And the people of Malaya weren’t united against the British, in fact many of them were in favour.
SIM CHI YIN: We have to remember that this war was a sectional war. It was a war that was fought by, a certain section of the Chinese, mainly Chinese population in what was then Malaya, and even amongst the Chinese population, there were people who were very pro British and pro colonial and pro-business, and those people eventually ended up forming an alliance with the state and the colonial state, under the MCA.
HZ: The MCA being the Malayan Chinese Association, the political party formed in 1949 in concord with the British.
SIM CHI YIN: This is a very, very broad generalization and very unscientific, but even within my own family - so my father's side of the family, my paternal grandfather was the one who was an anti-colonial activist and journalist and paid the price with his life. But my maternal grandfather was pro-British. And he cosied up to the British rubber estate managers and he managed to send eight out of his ten children to England to school. So even among the relatives of mine who are now British but previously Malaysian, there's very little interest even to remember this conflict. I think they find it very curious that I've spent almost a decade of my life dealing with this history. It's their own history, but they are very, very far removed from it and they tend to have a good relationship with the colonial state and therefore the colonial narrative. And they do sort of take on the colonial administration's judgment and conclusions about what this war was for and what it was about: it was a bunch of communist terrorists trying to destabilize the state and undo Malaya's prosperity and things like that. So this is the narrative that they believe.
HZ: Maybe it's less painful to believe that, in a way.
SIM CHI YIN: It’s less painful; it's more convenient. And so yeah, I do think that there is some kind of lack of remembrance around this; but where people remember this war, so for instance in Singapore and Malaysia, it's almost a cliche to say this amnesia around this, but I think it's actually not amnesia. I think it's more akin to not having the words actually to describe the memory that one might have.
HZ: So it's also not talked about that much there either?
SIM CHI YIN: No. The state narratives are very clear. And in terms of regular people, no; people have largely wanted to just get on. And also what happened in Singapore and Malaysia was that the colonial period left lots of structures behind, and the legacies of colonial rule are still very much with us. So the racialized politics that ensued in Malaysia have a lot to do with how the British structured its administration and how it favoured the Malays over the Chinese and how it set in place a frame for racialized politics. The detention without trial legislation has also remained in place both in Malaysia and Singapore. That also came from colonial legislation. So these laws and these political kind of legacies and structures remain in Malaysia and Singapore. It's not actually ancient history. It's impacting present day political decisions. So I do think that these histories need to be reckoned with, both in the former metropole and in the former colonies, and this is partly why I do - this is mainly why I do the work, is to try and open up these conversations that may be uncomfortable, in both former metropole and former colonies. But there is so much work to do. Yeah, it's not funny! There's so much work to do!
HZ: Some of the work is reminding people that it happened at all. Worth noting that many documents relating to British colonies and their decolonisation were deliberately destroyed by the British government during their ‘Operation Legacy’ in the 1950s-70s.
SIM CHI YIN: Speaking to people about this history, my impression is that older generation, the people who were national service men, or in the military somehow in the late 1940s and 50s, remember this very well because many of them were sent to Malaya as national service men on their first tour, poor them! Then there's a real kind of void after that, somehow, and if the younger generation has any inkling of this history, it's probably in a passing mention in a history book, from school. But, yes, there is this sort of void and lack of remembering around Malaya. I'm not really sure why that is in the British context, because in the military manuals of both the Americans and the British, this is celebrated as the textbook case of a successful counterinsurgency.
HZ: By 1960 the communist Malayan National Liberation Army was lacking in support - more than a million Chinese people in Malaya were no longer being denied citizenship, so they ceased to be mobilised about that; Malaya had become independent in 1957, so what were the liberation forces fighting for any more? Like many emergencies, this one had an abrupt cataclysmic start and a long, waning end. The Malayan government officially declared the Emergency over on 31 July 1960. And the conflict was counted as a win for Britain. This is a curious thing to me: the British are not usually shy to brag about their military victories, but I'd never heard about this one.
SIM CHI YIN: I don't think there's any kind of physical monument to this war in Britain that I've come across.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: I think it's interesting because… so I think all of these kind of colonial wars, which, which are often known from the British perspective as 'small wars' - small wars! Much less small if you happen to be in Malaya at the time. But these kind of small wars, which happened after the Second World War: I think there's a couple of things going on as to why they're not these celebrated things. I think, firstly, actually the murkiness of them happening in decolonization and leading up to decolonization means even if Britain did kind of quote unquote "win" this one, it happens in the context of lots of other wars that are going on that Britain's involved in, which are also ending up with decolonization. It's very difficult to take any of these as meaningful strategic victories.
HZ: Was a small war one where there wasn't a huge British body count?
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: Essentially. I think it has to be seen in the context of the Second World War. So a small war is also a war that doesn't have a kind of civilian aspect to it, it doesn't involve Britain itself. But yeah, essentially it's one that involves some British forces being sent out, or perhaps even just British colonial forces in the area already responding.
SIM CHI YIN: I suppose why it's not memorialized in a big way is scale, you know, Malaya was a small colony in, in size and in population. And in terms of deaths in his war, not so many people died.
HZ: The total deaths on all sides number around 12,000, although there were also people who disappeared who may have been killed in the conflict but are not officially counted with the dead. The numbers we do have are about 500 hundred British troops, 1300 colonial police, and on the Malayan side, around 6700 of the fighters and more than 3500 civilians.
SIM CHI YIN: I wouldn't say small, but, you know, in comparison to other places, relatively smaller number of people who died in this conflict, maybe for those reasons it's not memorized that much.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: I think in Britain as well, there's a huge sense of kind of fatigue around war and warfare after the Second World War, which means that these things just don't get celebrated in Britain.
SIM CHI YIN: And then it also became subsumed by the, I guess, contemporaneous wars that were fought in what became the cold war in Asia with the dominoes falling and then the global Cold War. So it was subsumed by the memory of, I suppose, the Korean war and then subsequently, and more potently, the Vietnam war, America's war in Vietnam.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: And then they become quite controversial quite quickly. So Malaya becomes controversial in the context of the Mỹ Lai Massacre, actually, and then there's this huge moment in the late 1960s when a lot of the ghosts of the Malayan Emergency get dragged up and the fact that Britain had taken part in war crimes and had their own kind of Mỹ Lai massacre in Malaya gets pulled up.
One of the lies around imperial history, I think, is that nobody knew any different, or people didn't criticize the empire at the time; and that's very untrue. Not even just people in the colonies, who were obviously quite critical of Empire whilst it was happening, but people in England are very critical of these things. Malaya was very criticized as it was happening.
HZ: In what ways were people criticizing the empire at the time?
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: You have criticism, I think, of empire on lots of different levels in Britain. You have activism around diasporic communities, so people who are from Kenya or Malaya or the Caribbean in Britain who are very critical of these empires and these imperial wars that are happening. Criticism coming from places within Britain as well: movements sometimes around universities, around public speaking clubs, you have protests and things like this, very grassroots organizations. So there's anti-empire criticism on a lot of scales. And then you have ordinary soldiers who are involved in these things who come back and might be quietly critical to their friends and family, who might have had their experience of empire very shaped by their experience of taking part in one of these wars - and who might come back from that wanting to celebrate their role in it, but might come back to that from that with a sense of shame, or a feeling of criticism of imperialism more generally.
SIM CHI YIN: There's something about the British that there's not so much permeation of the colonial culture somehow, even in terms of food. So Malaya is not really remembered as a colony - people remember India, that's the big one, but Malaya is not really, I think.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: There's a sort of sense - and you get this with decolonization across all of the European empires: once you start fighting as a European side, you've essentially lost. And it might take a long time; it took France a long time in Algeria to recognize that they had lost. It takes Portugal a very long time in Angola and Mozambique to recognize that it has lost. But once you start fighting, you're not going to stop fighting and then go back to having a colony. You fight until a point of decolonization. Because as a metropole, once you've started having to put force in, every tenet that colonialism rests on has been destroyed. If you are a civilizing mission as Britain, if you are the only people who can keep this country profitable, if you are the only people who can make sure that this country runs as it should do, and then you're pouring troops in and killing civilians in the street, you've lost, right? You've already lost. And so I think the length of time that this goes on for is another reason why it's not really talked about and can't really be celebrated because it really signals the end of the empire, I think.
HZ: It seems kind of bold to call something an emergency, and an uprising and so on, when it went on for such a long time.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: Yeah.
HZ: Twelve years is not like putting out a fire.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: No, and I think that's another reason why it can't really be celebrated as a victory. If you're fighting for twelve years, who wins is sort of immaterial, isn't it? It's a long drawn out fight. And then decolonization happens. The sense of this being a British victory is very tenuous. And I think it helps actually to understand it in the context of other things that are happening at the time. Mau Mau is also happening into the 1950s and then Kenya gets, its independent in independence in 1960. And of course things are happening elsewhere in the Empire as well. And so you get this sense of Britain entrenching itself in these places and doing these long, grim, bloody drawn out campaigns. And, of course, imperialism is quite complex in terms of what keeps it going, because Britain doesn't have enough soldiers in every colony in order to put down an uprising at any time. It has an enormous army, which is very capable of using when it needs to, it's a very violent and brutal empire, I'm not suggesting that it's not using violence at all times to underpin imperialism. But that violence is often not as explicit as having a massive garrison of soldiers who can just be deployed when and where you want it to be. That violence is often structural, it's systemic, it's long term; it's something which has been used for a long time to keep populations down. And what Britain and colonial populations in the 1940s and 1950s start to realize is Britain can't fight in all of these places at once. But also colonialism to some extent equires people to not rise up essentially. Again, it's framed very much by systemic factors and it's within the context of, you know, enormous inequality and oppression and the threat of violence.
SIM CHI YIN: This war and these people are not talked about in the way that is even handed. If this war is talked about, it's talked about in the sense that it was a big triumph over terrorists and people who were a destabilizing force. A lot of this does stem from language, the nomenclature does matter. The term that the British used at the start of this uprising, if you will, in 1948 was 'bandits'. They use the word ‘bandits’ to describe the communist insurgents at the start of the conflict. And then sometime in the early 1950s, according to scholars, they changed the nomenclature to communist terrorists, or CTs for short. And part of the reason for this rewording was that they wanted it to not seem like just common banditry and they wanted to hook this war onto the discourse of the Cold War that was beginning to emerge at the time. So they used 'communist terrorists' and they warned of Malaya being one of the dominoes in the domino theory, these falling dominoes that will lead communism to sweep across Asia. And they saw the hand of the Soviet Union and China behind the series of anti colonial struggles in Southeast Asia.
So they started to use CTs, communist terrorists. And I remember reading one scholar making a specific case that this was also to try and attract the Americans to come into the fray to join in the fight against this falling domino. But of course the Americans were mired already by that point in the Korean War, and soon after enter into a very protracted conflict in Vietnam. So the Americans stayed out of this, and the British basically did this largely on their own with Commonwealth troops pulled in from all over the Commonwealth.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: 'Terrorist' is really interesting actually, obviously at the time I think there was a sense of sort of terrorism within empire. So for example, when you think about Kenya and the Mau Mau emergency, the Mau Mau uprising, at the time, there is some language around that being terrorism. And then it kind of falls out of favour a little bit actually as a term, I think, because you have this sense, in the historiography and the politics of it, more of a sense towards calling it things like guerrilla warfare, which gives you a particular image of who it is that you're fighting against, it's not a kind of organized army. And I feel like terrorism is kind of creeping back in as a word that we would use. And of course, the problem with it really is that it's an incredibly emotive word, which brings with it a real emotional and a real kind of moral judgment. And actually if we strip those things away from it, then it probably is a correct word, right? There are people who are using terror to try to further their aims. That is often the role of an insurgent; that is often the role of a freedom fighter. If you are hugely outnumbered, that's how you fight. But because of this kind of moral and emotional weight that's attached to it, it makes it very difficult to use it. And you get thi sort of debate around terrorists versus freedom fighters, for example; really you're talking about the same thing, aren't you? But it's about where you're placing your moral judgment. Freedom fighters are good guys and terrorists the bad guys, but they're probably doing the same thing.
HZ: Right. Yeah, I had relatives who were on the ANC during apartheid, and they were classified as terrorists.
CHARLOTTE LYDIA RILEY: Exactly. And I think now people would feel very uncomfortable calling the ANC terrorists. We talk about them much more as being freedom fighters, but their tactics are exactly the same as when you look at other groups that we might feel more comfortable labelling terrorists.
HZ: It’s still quite an effective way to discredit a freedom fighting movement.
SIM CHI YIN: And the other way that language was very important, and I think particularly aggrieving in a way, was the fact that, as someone who's interested in this history, I am necessarily relying on the colonial archive for a lot of this information, unfortunately. And the information on the colonial archive is necessarily in the English language. So already that itself is something to acknowledge, that everything was rendered into English. It makes me uncomfortable and sometimes upset because people's names had to be rendered in English. And this is one of the reasons I could not find my grandfather's name for six years, because Chinese names had to be rendered in English by a random English officer.
So what we're seeing in the colonial archive is all these Chinese names that have been rendered and transliterated into English, but they've been transformed and bastardised. Place names were very often misspelled from Malay and other languages, indigenous languages, vernacular languages, into English. And I come across many, many errors in the archive. Of course the archivists in the Imperial War Museum archive have also made me aware that a lot of place names were left out because of intelligence reasons. That is probably true; but I've also seen many, many misspellings of local place names and things like that. So there's this kind of a violence that goes on in a colonial archive.
The fact that English language was one of the most lasting legacies of British colonialism everywhere, and the fact that I'm speaking to you in English, and the fact that English is the main language of my brain is wired in, makes me also kind of complicit in all of this. And the fact that I'm researching all this in the English language - although I did all my oral history interviews in Chinese, and when I exhibit I leave the Chinese text intact and I do my own English translations alongside. So that's some kind of restoration of the original tongue that this history was told in to me.
HZ: You mentioned that your grandfather's death was kind of a secret in the family for a long time. Why do you think it was a secret?
SIM CHI YIN: Well, because Singapore and Malaysia became very anti-communist and my grandmother and great-grandmother felt that it was politically dangerous to be associated with someone who died for communism, and they decided that they had to write this man out of the family history. So the two women actually banned the five kids that were left behind, including my father, from speaking about their father ever again. They erased this person from the family history. On my grandmother's grave tablet in Penang, Malaysia, he is not mentioned, she does not acknowledge that she was married into the Sim family. She was somebody who supported her husband in his small-P political career. He was an anti-colonial activist, school principal, dean, and eventually the chief editor of a leftist newspaper in Malaya, and was arrested very early on in the Emergency and deported by the British to China, probably early 1949.
HZ: An estimated 30,000 Malay Chinese people were deported to China during the conflict.
SIM CHI YIN: And he found his way back to our ancestral village in Southern China, in Guangdong province. And after he got there, apparently he joined up with the Chinese communist guerrilla army unit, and he was killed by the nationalist forces, the Chinese nationalist forces who are retreating towards Taiwan towards what's the end of the civil war. He was killed just two months shy of the communist victory in China. So, it was a untimely death in a way, but it also was the pivot on which the family's fate completely turned. He left behind his mother, wife, and five children in British Malaya. They had to sort of regroup and reconfigure themselves, and the two women decided that he would never be spoken about again. And they just moved on with their lives.
HZ: Does your father remember him at all?
SIM CHI YIN: Yeah. My father remembers a little bit of him. My father and his older brother actually remember this day that their father was arrested, this day that the British came and took their father away. This is from 1948. My father was having a haircut in the barber shop across the street from the provision shop or the grocery shop that the family ran. And that's where my grandfather was arrested. The special branch - actually, apparently the only special branch officer who was British came to the family shop with two Malay policemen. My oldest uncle, he was in the shop at the time, and he witnessed the Malay policemen putting handcuffs on my grandfather and how my great-grandmother was pleading with them to not do that because it was so much a loss of face, it was so embarrassing for her son to be taken away handcuffed. And he remembers how his mother started crying because they realized that this was really serious. The British special branch officer and the two Malay policemen then took his father out of the shop and marched him down the one main street of their little town.
And then my father was in a barber's chair across the street; he was having a haircut, and he didn't dare move from this barber's chair. He didn't dare come out of the shop to say Dad or Papa, you know, um, he didn't dare to move. He was just frozen. He says, “But I hadn't finished my hair cut.” And I think neither of them realized that that would be the very last time they saw their father, but indeed it was, and they never ever saw him again. My oldest uncle still cries every time he tells the story, he's 86 going on 87. He still cries.
If you don't deal with these traumas that are three scratches beneath the skin, they come back to bite you somehow. I'm interested in this idea of what is lost when each life is snuffed out. So in a way, if not for the fact that I've gone and dug my grandfather's out from the woodwork within the family over the last ten years, he would have just become a forgotten person, but I kind of felt it was really important to do, it was important to acknowledge this person. It was important to acknowledge what he was attempting to fight for. And whatever your politics are and whatever judgment you want to pass on him and his generation and his compatriots, I think we need to acknowledge that they were real people who made real choices, and paid for the consequences of their choices sometimes with their lives. So I do think that they shouldn't go unrecorded in history, whatever you want to think about their politics.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
prosopopoeia, noun: a figure of speech in which an abstract thing is personified or an imagined or absent person is represented as speaking.
Try using ‘prosopopoeia’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with music by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Vera Chok, MiMi Aye and Tash Aw. You heard from artist Sim Chi Yin and historian Charlotte Lydia Riley. I’ll link to both of them at theallusionist.org/emergency.
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