and, in Malay, of the role of the 10th Regiment, and eventually in Malaysia itself other memoirs of the forgotten wars began to appear. For younger Malaysians and Singaporeans they were something of a revelation. At the heart of Chin Peng’s story, as with many others, was a demand for recognition as a fighter for his nation’s freedom; a claim for a place in the narrative of the nation. With this lay the possibility of return, the issue which had broken up the Baling talks in 1955, but seemed to have been conceded in the Haadyai agreement of 1989. A number of old fighters, including veterans of the Malay 10th Regiment, had quietly come home. But now, it was asked, could Chin Peng – with his lack of repentance for armed struggle, with his long revolutionary’s exile in China and Thailand – be considered a citizen of Malaysia? Permission to return was refused and Chin Peng – seeking to fulfil his obligation to honour his parents’ graves – was forced in 2004 to challenge the government of Malaysia in the Malaysian courts with breaking the Haadyai agreement. He has yet to have his day in court. As this controversy rumbled on, in 2005, a Malay writer and film-maker, Amir Muhammad, born after the Emergency had ended, shot a documentary that traced, through interviews and music, a voyage from Chin Peng’s childhood home of Sitiawan and other parts of Perak to the veterans’ villages in south Thailand. Chin Peng himself did not appear. The film, Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, ‘The Last Communist’, was released in the wake of the sixtieth anniversary of the ruling party, UMNO. Its old veterans warned that ‘old wounds will bleed again’, and the film was eventually banned in Malaysia. ‘I don’t believe’, mused the minister responsible, ‘Malaysians have reached a level where they are ready for it.’71 The Last Communist’s claim for his side of history, was only one of many – of friends and fellow-travellers; victims and vanquished – that were yet to be heard. For many individuals and for whole societies – in the struggles of everyday life and in the perpetual play of memory – the great, terrible Asian war was not yet at its end.
Notes
PROLOGUE: AN UNENDING WAR
1. Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at war: an oral history (New York, 1992), p. 306.
2. Stuart Ball (ed.), Parliament and politics in the age of Churchill: the Headlam Diaries, 1935–51 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 473.
3. John W. Dower, ‘The bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese memory’, in Michael J. Hogan (ed.), Hiroshima in history and memory (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 116–42.
4. John W. Dower, Embracing defeat: Japan in the wake of World War II (London, 1999), p. 45.
5. Dr Constantine Constantinovich Petrovsky interview, OHD, SNA.
6. The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the physical, medical and social effects of atomic bombings (New York, 1981), p. 478; Rinifo Sodei, Were we the enemy? American survivors of Hiroshima (Boulder, 1998).
7. Petrovsky interview.
8. Brian MacArthur, Surviving the sword: prisoners of the Japanese, 1942–45 (London, 2005), pp. 420–1.
9. Hugh V. Clarke, Twilight liberation: Australian POWs between Hiroshima and home (Sydney, 1985), pp. 63–95, 121.
10. The best account of the campaign remains Louis Allen, Burma: the longest war 1941–45 (London, 1984).
11. Datuk Mohd Yusoff Hj. Ahmad, Decades of change (Malaysia – 1910s–1970s) (Kuala Lumpur, 1983), pp. 283–4.
12. Sheila Allan, Diary of a girl in Changi, 1941–45 (2nd edn, Roseville, NSW, 1999), p. 137.
13. The title of a vivid early memoir by N. I. Low & H. M. Cheng is This Singapore (our city of dreadful night) (Singapore, 1946).
14. See Chin Kee Onn, Malaya upside down (Singapore, 1946), pp. 199–202.
15. Cheah Boon Kheng, Red star over Malaya: resistance and social conflict during and after the Japanese occupation of Malaya, 1941–1946 (Singapore, 1983), pp. 130–1. This is a classic study.
16. Romen Bose, The end of the war: Singapore’s liberation and the aftermath of the Second World