by Jeremy Tiang
“We can walk to the next place,” said Mr Leng. “It’s the Royal Lake Club.” This turned out to be an old colonial-type bungalow, surrounded by trees and water. The sun was starting to go down, swirling vivid purple and orange streaks through the sky that, judging by Mr Leng’s nonchalance, was absolutely standard for this part of the world. As they climbed the cracked stone steps to the entrance, Mr Leng said cheerfully, “In the old days we wouldn’t have been able to step inside here, you know. Especially not you. No women or locals.”
The man they were there to meet looked like he rather missed those days, thought Revathi uncharitably. He introduced himself as Sergeant Cameron, late of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, now retired and staying on in Malaya. (For the rest of the conversation, Revathi took mild pleasure in saying “Malaysia”, and watching him twitch and pointedly stick to the old name.)
“Mr Cameron kindly agreed to answer some questions. He was here during the Emergency.”
Revathi smiled as charmingly as she could, considering she hadn’t slept at all on the plane and was feeling fairly woozy, though that could also have been the gin and tonic the sergeant gallantly ordered her without asking what she wanted.
Fortunately, she didn’t need to do much talking at all. Even before she’d got her notebook out, he was regaling her with stories of the old days, the lawless frontier of the jungle and how his strapping British lads had restored order to the place. This was clearly a screed that got delivered at regular intervals, the anecdotes polished from repetition. Mr Leng melted into the background and let them get on with it.
“We were meant to be protecting the natives, but the natives were in on it. It was a mess, none of it made any sense. We locked them up in these camps, the rural people, the squatters—they lost all the land they had before, pigs and everything, right, we locked them up and they had to find a new way to keep going, where they ended up. And still they were helping the bandits. There were too many to keep track of. We searched them, but you’re always going to miss a few grains of rice in someone’s shoe, pills under someone’s tongue. They told them things, where our defences were weak.”
Revathi nodded. She’d heard this happened, and why.
“Why were we even here? If they were all doing it, who were we saving from whom? They said we’d be out of here before too long—not just the army, all of us, white skins, even the chaps up in city hall—they’d chuck us out, they wanted their country back. Can’t say I particularly blamed them. We hadn’t exactly covered ourselves in glory. And it happened, most of the old chaps are gone. Only stubborn buggers like me clinging on. Nothing for me back in Suffolk. Might as well stay.
“We made all kinds of mistakes. This chap, middle-aged bachelor type, he was found in the jungle with two tins of fruit, of course he got detained. Later on, his neighbours claimed he was worshipping his ancestors, that’s how they do it, offerings of food. They knew they weren’t supposed to bring food out, but some of them risked it, and he couldn’t stand to think of his poor dead mother trapped in hell with nothing to eat. I told my commanding officer, he laughed at me for listening to the natives. Then he got serious and said, It doesn’t matter, there’s nothing we can do, it’s worth sacrificing some innocents if it means clearing the turf properly. They arrested this girl, just a schoolgirl. She liked sugar in her coffee, they got coffee in her school but no sugar in it, so she brought sugar out with her in a twist of a paper. Someone found it and reported her. And they took her to court for that, girl of eleven.”
He stared morosely out into the twinkling dark. It was a harsh, still night, the heat rising off the road with a smell of burnt rubber. The air must be close to blood heat, thought Revathi. She raised her hand and signalled for another round of drinks.
“Why do you think it went wrong?” she asked him gently.
“Did I say it did?” he returned. “We made mistakes, that’s what I said. We won, you know, whatever that means. They surrendered in droves. We eliminated more than seven thousand. That’s two-thirds of them, the ones we knew about, anyway. They’re callous, the Chinese. They’ll sit on the fence and wait to see which side wins.” Revathi glanced at Mr Leng, but his face was stone, his body turned away slightly to make him invisible.
The drinks arrived. The waiter, clearly exhausted, patiently placed the glasses neatly in the centre of each coaster, not spilling a drop. Revathi waited till Cameron had taken a deep draught of his beer before asking, “Were you at Batang Kali? December 1948.”
He refocused on her. “No, why?” She was silent. “What have you heard? I was in Perak at the time. It was the right thing to do, you know. Templer and his curfew. It looks harsh from the outside, but it worked. A fortnight’s curfew, twenty-two hours a day. It did the trick, enough of them talked that they were able to find out who the Communists were.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she said neutrally.
“You’re not a sympathiser, are you?” He seemed suddenly suspicious. She could see him worrying that he’d said too much. “They were killing white men. We had to do something.”
“I’m just curious.” She kept her voice light, but brisk. “I’m writing a story.”
•
The next morning, Mr Leng phoned the hotel to say he was sending her to see one of the survivors in Seminyih, a new village outside KL. “I can’t take you myself,” he added. “I’ll send Lina.”
Lina turned out to be a Chinese woman a little older than Revathi. Her English was careful, correct. When Revathi complimented her, she flinched, as if this wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “I grew up in Singapore.”
“Oh, my parents are from Singapore,” Revathi volunteered brightly. Lina nodded, uninterested.
The car was, unexpectedly, an Alfa Romeo, bright red and polished to a fierce sheen. “Not mine,” said Lina. “Mr Leng’s. I have to get it back to him by the end of the day. You must be very impressive, he doesn’t usually lend anyone his car.”
“How do you know him?”
“Lawyers always need people to help them. I’m good at helping.”
Traffic was ridiculous for the first half hour, then they got to the edges of the city and suddenly everything was wide and open, the sun glaring harshly against the road so it seemed to shimmer in the distance. Here and there along the dusty verge, ramshackle wooden stands were piled with fruit she dimly remembered, dusty but still fantastical-looking, bright yellow stars and furry red bulbs, such abundance and colour. British food had come a long way since the end of rationing, of course, but how insipid it suddenly seemed, all greys and browns.
“You want some?” smirked Lina, seeing her look.
She shook her head. “I think I remember the taste.”
“You’ve tasted durian? You talk with a potato in your mouth, I thought you must be completely ang moh.”
Revathi wasn’t sure what that meant, but it seemed intended as an insult. She nodded neutrally and settled back in her seat, looking out the window—they were passing by fields of occasional scrawny cows, sun so scorching it was a wonder anything grew at all, yet there was so much of it, such long, sharp blades of grass—“lalang,” something whispered in her mind—and weeds bursting through the asphalt of the road.
After a while, the road became more of a dirt track, and they were moving between regular rows of trees. “Rubber?” she hazarded, and was surprised to find how pleased she was when Lina nodded. Earning my keep after all, she thought, scrabbling in her bag for a pencil, belatedly remembering she should be recording all this too. The air was moist and muddy, cooler now they were shaded by trees. Local colour. Readers go mad for that. Chinese and Indian restaurants in every British town these days, but who really knew anything about these countries? She was still scribbling away when the first narrow shops and houses appeared, and she understood they were in Seminyih.
The woman she was to meet was younger than Revathi had expected, maybe about fifty, her face set in grim lines and hair tightly permed. She looked anxious
, peering at them through the metal grilles of her front door. Following Lina’s lead, Revathi carefully took off her shoes before entering, balancing awkwardly on one foot as she struggled with the straps of her sandals.
Lina said something, and the woman replied. “Mrs Wong says she’s pleased to meet you,” They shook hands, and Revathi realised Lina was also here to interpret. Well, of course she was, why had she thought anyone out here in the countryside would speak English? They all did in KL, like in Singapore, but this was a different place. Looking at the concrete floor and painted wooden walls, Revathi thought with a lurch that none of this had existed when she was last in this part of the world, not just the house but the whole settlement, where Semenyih now stood would have been nothing, jungle or grassland, all cleared for the new village. And here it was, the fences and gates removed at the end of the Emergency, but still feeling cramped and hemmed in, the trees around it just another form of stockade.
Revathi got out her notebook, her face already slipping into interview mode. This was the same as anything else, set the subject at ease, start with something inconsequential, though of course in her regular beat nothing was ever of consequence, except to the people involved and that nebulous beast the public interest, which ponderous men were fond of telling her did not mean “what the public is interested in”, but then why do it? Why tell the stories of misfortune’s victims, magnifying their perfectly ordinary existences for a moment, giving readers a temporary hit of sympathy, or relief that their own lives were still whole, their families intact, everything just fine for the moment at least?
The small talk took twice as long because it had to go through Lina. It was actually quite soothing, the sounds she couldn’t decipher, although again the musical chirps and grunts hovered at the edges of familiarity. Was this something she might have heard her neighbours use? She genuinely couldn’t remember which dialect they would have spoken, and wondered if she’d ever known, if her parents would be able to tell her.
The questions came automatically. How long have you lived here? Tell me about the neighbourhood. What do you do for a living? The translation gave her time for mental wandering, allowed her shorthand to be less frantic than usual. They’d moved here, or rather, been moved, just scooped up and placed behind barbed wire, they said it was an Emergency so the laws didn’t matter any more, convenient how the law was so important one minute and then could just be ignored, but then when had people like them ever had any say.
“Who is ‘they’?” said Revathi, automatically. Always query pronouns, you never know. Mrs Wong didn’t burst into tears, but it was clear from the twitching of her facial muscles that a woman with less practice in suppressing her sorrow would have done so at this moment. She said something to Lina, who grimaced and said, “Her son.”
“I’m sorry. Is he—”
More murmuring. “He’s inside.”
“You mean prison? What for?”
“No, no. Inside—the jungle.”
She puzzled over this as they stared at her. Finally, Lina took pity. “He’s with the Ma Gong. The Communists.”
“He’s a bandit?” She bit her tongue. Lina looked blankly at her but did not translate. She didn’t need to. Mrs Wong’s eyes were hooded. “I mean,” said Revathi, trying to keep her voice level, “I thought all that was over. Isn’t it? All long ago?”
“They’re still fighting—up north, near the border.”
“Lina—seriously? What on earth?”
“The struggle’s still going on. I know it’s not in the news or anything. People here don’t think about it, why would you know?”
“Is she sure he’s there?”
“There are sympathisers in the town. He got a message to her through one of them. Saying not to worry, that sort of thing. That’s all she knows.”
Mrs Wong was staring at the table, its cracked linoleum surface, as if wishing them away.
“Lina.” Revathi licked her lips; her mouth was drying out. “Do you think it’s all right to ask her, does she miss him? No, wait. Ask if she approves of what he’s doing.”
“I’m not going to ask her that.”
“But it was the bandits, wasn’t it? Their fault. That her husband—”
“The Ma Gong didn’t shoot him.”
“But they created the conditions for the Emergency.” She wanted to say more, half-remembered stories from her parents, but Lina was already asking Mrs Wong something that sounded more involved than what they’d been talking about. Revathi considered going out for a cigarette—no need to worry about them talking behind her back, they could do that right in front of her. “What’s going on?” she hissed, not caring that she was interrupting.
Lina looked harassed. “She keeps breaking into Hakka, and I only know Cantonese. I’m trying to work out what she means.”
Revathi felt momentarily guilty, then immediately mistrustful. Why would Lina have any more loyalty to her than this woman? Her English was fluent, but in Chinese she was just as alien as the rest of these people, swooping through tones Revathi would never be able to hear, words she’d never be able to decipher. “The Chinese aren’t on your side, any more than the white people,” she imagined her father saying.
“What do you want to know?” asked Lina. “I told her you wanted to tell people in the West what really happened here. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Just the truth,” said Revathi, keeping her face neutral.
“She says so many people have asked her questions, the police and all, but they already seem to know what they want her answers to be. She’s not even sure about Mr Leng. He says he’s on her side, but lawyers can be like that. Persuasive.”
“Ask her to tell me, please, in her own words, what happened on the night of 11 December 1948.”
Lina interpreted, and then there was a pause, during which a car drove by noisily outside, and some sort of insect buzzed right past Revathi’s ear. Mrs Wong spoke, slowly at first, then gathering steam, not even waiting for Lina to finish translating so they began to overlap, talking over each other, leaving Revathi to pick out the English from the stream.
“It rained that day, so we were home.” (“She means they couldn’t tap rubber because of the weather, the dripping water would have ruined the latex,” interjected Lina, her voice a bit lower to show these were her own words.) “I was a bit worried because there’d been so much rain lately, the monsoon season was heavier than normal. Me and my husband were both tappers, everyone in the village was, so bad weather meant we all had no money. At least the rain made it nice and cool. My husband thought of going to visit his cousin in the next plantation, but decided he was too lazy. If he’d gone—”
Revathi nodded, her eyes fixed on Mrs Wong. Later on, she would find only one voice in her memory, as if Mrs Wong had spoken English.
“The men arrived around four something in the afternoon, maybe five something. They were all in uniform, two ang mohs and a Chinese. The ang mohs shouted at us, and he repeated in our language. I don’t know why they all had to shout so much, it’s a small village, you don’t need to be so loud, but we were used to it. Everyone was very kancheong—” (“I don’t know the English for that,” murmured Lina, “it’s something like anxious, but not quite.”)
“We lived in plantation houses; everyone in Sungei Remok worked for the estate. Our food came in a big lorry. We had to cook it ourselves, they delivered exact amounts, rice and oil and so on, just enough for the people who lived there. They said they didn’t want us to give any food to the people in the jungle; they thought because we were all Chinese that we were all—”
(“Bandits,” supplied Revathi, when Lina hesitated. “I didn’t want to use that word,” she snapped back.)
“There were police everywhere. None of us dared to bring food out with us when we went to tap rubber, we all went without lunch, it wasn’t worth the risk. Sometimes they came to ask us questions, had we seen something or did we know someone, we always said no, it was easier that
way. We had food and work and a place to live, we didn’t want to cause any trouble. My husband wasn’t perfect, but he was better than a lot of people. He didn’t deserve to be shot. I don’t mean because he wasn’t one of them, although he wasn’t; no one deserved to get shot.”
“The bandits killed people,” said Revathi. The two of them ignored her.
“At first we thought it was just another inspection. That happened sometimes, they came and started asking questions, usually there’d been some incident and they were looking for suspects, or maybe someone reported seeing something. Maybe they liked making our lives difficult. As if giving us trouble would make us too scared to help the Ma Gong.”
“So you were helping them?”
Mrs Wong shrugged. “Why not? They were all someone’s cousin, someone’s brother. It was just a bit of food. Should we have let them starve?”
A fly settled lazily on the tabletop. Mrs Wong barely seemed to move her hand, smacking down a placemat crisply on it.
“I don’t agree with what the Ma Gong did,” she said. “Not everything. They shouldn’t have killed the plantation owners, but maybe they were bad bosses. Most were all right, even good, but some of them… And it’s our land, we just wanted to get our land back. When the Japanese were here, we fought to get them out. What’s the difference?”
“We’re getting off the topic,” said Revathi, a little desperately. “Could you ask her again to say what happened that day?”
The older woman smirked, as if she’d scored a point. “I was cooking dinner. When the shouting came, I told my husband to go see what they wanted, usually it was nothing much, just shout a bit and then go. But it continued, so I went to the door to see, and the ang mohs were waving their guns, telling us come out, stand over there. All the men were already standing in a tight group, over twenty of them. I wanted to go back inside to turn off the fire but they said no, come straight out. I went back anyway, no sense burning the house down. When I came out they grabbed my hand and said you should learn to follow orders. Guns pointing right at us, guards on the paths away from the village. As if anyone would dare to run—” (“It was the law.” Lina again. “They weren’t supposed to shoot civilians, but if you ran, then you were automatically guilty. So they could shoot you.”)
