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By Root 4391 0

the evenings. The crowds could wander from each to each, and impresarios would attract their attention by entr’actes of boxing, magic and other ‘special turns’. The Worlds were a playground for all ethnic communities and income groups, a place of high and vulgar culture; a place of escape for the poor. The Worlds were a fantasy of Asian modernity, enacted nightly for the invisible city, in a walled enclave within the colonial town, but outside its order and exclusions.72 During the war the Japanese had allowed gambling farms to operate in the parks, but they generally stayed away from them. Here, in the absence of Western movies, local culture such as the Malaya opera experienced a revival: a new scripted form called the sandiwara became ‘the drama of modern daily life’. The troupe of a Malay radical, Bachtiar Effendi, the Bolero, took the lead in attacking the corruptions of the age, and popularized new political languages.73 After the war there was a boom in entertainments. Theatres screened continuously the movies people had missed. In this free and democratic time, the Worlds became showgrounds for the new spectacles of mass politics.

As the Malayan Communist Party emerged from the undergrowth in which it had hidden so long, it embedded itself in this urban landscape. In most towns an MPAJA ‘Anti-Japanese Union’ office became the nucleus of a cluster of communist-led organizations. Its fighters, many of whom were now unemployed, moved into the informal economy. After its first triumphs through the streets, the MPAJA adopted the Worlds as a platform for its work; the cabarets in the daytime became used for political ‘tea parties’ and even schools and crèches. In the evening they staged fund-raising events with ‘glory tickets’ for workers at $1 or de luxe ‘emancipation tickets’ for businessmen at $100.74 Theatre groups such as the Mayfair Musical and Drama Society, which had around 300 members, raised awareness of the communist cause in China and elsewhere. The Worlds were sites for many of the great rallies and commemorations that marked the first weeks of peace. It began on 2 October, with the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. In Singapore Indian soldiers fraternized with a crowd some 7,000 strong. The slogans were Long Live the Independence of India! Long live Mr Gandhi! Long live the Communists in India! Long Live the Malayan Communist Party!75 A week later, the national day of China – the ‘Double Tenth’ – was celebrated for the first time in four years in Singapore, by a procession five miles long led by the communists and Kuomintang, sometimes in unison but increasingly separately. In Penang there was a grand parade, with bands and lion dances, but also three minutes’ silence for the war dead: the day was also the first anniversary of some of the most brutal Kempeitai arrests and tortures. Afterwards, 20,000 copies of the ‘Eight Principles’ of the Malayan Communist Party were distributed.76 A few days later, the Russian revolution was celebrated by the arrival of the 8th Regiment of the MPAJA in Wembley amusement park in George Town, and there were events and film shows elsewhere. In the months that followed, appalled by the anarchy on the streets, the British would attempt to seize back urban space; they rounded up hawkers and prohibited processions, but as they cleared the streets the revolution continued in the Worlds.

With Lai Teck’s decision not to oppose the British by force of arms, the MCP embarked on the ‘democratic’ path to power. For the first time it began to acquire a public personality. In Singapore the chosen voice of the MCP was Wu Tian Wang, a Party organizer from Ipoh. To the British he stood apart because of his fluency in English; Victor Purcell described him as ‘an elegant young communist intellectual with eyes gazing into utopian space’. His ease in colonial circles would earn him the resentment of his comrades upcountry. The other ‘open’ representative, Lee Kiu, had been a propagandist for the MPAJA during the war: ‘a young Chinese coolie girl of 26 with a neo-Jacobin toilette’, recorded Purcell,