• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The local landscape was now poignant with memory; the local situation a microcosm of Asian history and current politics. In the past, Fu-sheng wrote, three races – China, India and Indonesia – had ruled half the globe and now they came together in Malaya. The ‘three big races’ of Malaya – the Chinese, Indians and Malays – were like the three Great Powers at Yalta. They had a shared destiny. ‘Peace is indivisible; so is the fate of Malaya, China, India and Indonesia.’25 Whilst Chinese writing in Malaya tended to claim a leading role for the Chinese in the political struggle in Malaya – for Chinese rights as ‘pioneers’ – it remained divided on how far this struggle was for Malaya. But through the prism of the resistance struggle, Chinese writers and intellectuals explored their surroundings with a new emotion and purpose, and debates on identity and emancipation were conducted with a new urgency.

One of the key figures in this revival was the writer and journalist Hu Yuzhi. Educated in Paris and a leading luminary of the Shanghai intellectual scene, he had, along with many other ‘refugee writers’, fled from China to Singapore in 1940. This influx of sophisticates was a minor revolution in a society that for the most part comprised labourers and traders, and, for their part, the writers saw the Nanyang as an artistic utopia. Hu Yuzhi later admitted that he was secretly a member of the Chinese Communist Party sent to Singapore to intensify propaganda work in the Nanyang. He spent the war in hiding in Sumatra, running a wine-brewing factory with a fellow-exile, the celebrated modernist novelist and poet Yu Dafu. Yu was killed by the Japanese in the interregnum: he was witness to too many of their brutalities. This loss would haunt Chinese writing in Malaya after the war, and writers composed multiple laments for his passing. Hu Yuzhi – ‘a little homunculus of a man with bright eyes like a marmoset’, wrote Victor Purcell – returned to Singapore to work with Tan Kah Kee to build unity among the local Chinese.26 He edited the most prominent literary magazine, Feng Hsia (Land Below the Wind), which ran to 132 issues between December 1945 and June 1948, and achieved an unprecedented quality of output. Hu Yuzhi’s wife, Shen Zijiu, published Malaya’s first journal for women, New Woman, and many newspapers now began to carry literary supplements. Hu Yuzhi became a vocal critic of the Malayan Communist Party’s propaganda: he felt it lacked power and depth. The people were in a state of ‘semifeudal towkay-ism’. Bosses controlled the newspapers, would-be intellectuals such as students became clerks and were ‘shoved into a shop’; teachers became ‘mere wage-earners’.27‘We do not require tanks, guns and hand-grenades now,’ wrote Hu Yuzhi. ‘Our weapons are pen and paper only.’ The struggle was against a ‘servile culture’. The problem was ‘thinking too highly of foreigners and belittling ourselves. This is a common psychological phenomenon among the Malayan people. It needs to be conquered, because it makes it easy for the rule of imperialism.’28 This touched upon a nagging difficulty for the Malayan Communist Party. After its losses to the Japanese in the war, it lacked experienced and educated leaders; Chin Peng’s schooling had ended when he was fifteen years of age, and in this he was not exceptional. To broaden its support, the leftist movement began to cultivate the intelligentsia.

The war made anti-imperialists out of British rule’s natural supporters, the very middle-class ‘Malayans’ the British hoped to cultivate. For them a defining issue was ‘back pay’ for civil servants. After the liberation, the Europeans in Changi and Sime Road were quietly paid the thousands of dollars in salary they had accrued over three and a half years; they were given 90 per cent of it in cash before being repatriated, and even a generous clothing allowance to replace their wardrobes. This ‘internment bounty’ incensed Asian civil servants, who, although they had not