Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [81]
Victor Purcell travelled to the scene of the Perak disturbances in early December to meet the local MCP leadership. He spoke with Eng Ming Chin, whose propaganda troupe and speeches at Ipoh had roused the crowd into an uncompromising mood. With Lee Kiu in Singapore in mind, he recorded in his journal that Miss Eng ‘has decidedly more sex appeal… Her most remarkable features are her eyes. At one moment they are flat, brown and dull, at the next revealing in baleful flashes the smouldering fires of fanaticism if not of actual insanity, at another melting into a smile of something suspiciously like coquetrie.’101 But such contacts were becoming less common. Although the MCP had allowed women leaders such as Eng Ming Chin to take centre stage, it was less willing to expose its leading men. Although Chin Peng now worked from a well-appointed party office in Kuala Lumpur, living with his wife on the affluent Ampang Road, he had adopted the cover of a businessman. The lesser-ranking ‘open’ leaders in the public eye allowed much of the rest of the Party to slip back into the shadows.
On 1 December the MPAJA formally disbanded. It did so in an acrimonious mood, its commanders outraged at the humiliations they had received at the hands of Allied military leaders. ‘The British treated us like coolies,’ Wu Tian Wang told the Americans.102 Lai Teck organized the men into ex-servicemen’s associations. ‘We might not have an army now’, Chin Peng reflected bitterly, ‘but at least we had a club.’ Many ex-comrades found it hard to settle back to peace and to work or study. Many found that, on presentation of their demobilization certificates, managers were unwilling to take them on. A year after the war’s end, the MPAJA commander Liew Yao estimated that over half of his men were unemployed. He even asked the Office of Strategic Services for help in setting up an import–export business to bring in US goods.103 The Chinese veterans of Dalforce, who had defended Singapore to the last, were ignored. They had been given only $10 each when the British disbanded them in February 1942, and many were later slaughtered by the Japanese.104 Their commander, John Dalley, freshly released from internment, campaigned in London for benefit payments for them. The dispute dragged on until 1950, when the government buried the issue by pointing out that many of the veterans were untraceable as they were back in the jungle.105
Passing-out parades were held across Malaya. They were carefully stage-managed. In Alor Star, in Kedah, Ho Thean Fook, a noncommunist who had fought with the guerrillas, stood proudly on the podium as the interpreter for the occasion. The representatives of the other resistance organizations were there, even of the Kuomintang fighters whom, Ho recalled, ‘we used to call “bandits”’. The proceedings began with ‘God Save the King’, and a message from the British commander, General Messervy, was read out promising the guerrillas training as motor mechanics or licences as hawkers. The MPAJA men did not surrender their weapons publicly but later, in the barracks, ‘throwing them into a heap as if they were old brooms’. The guerrillas were each given $350 – in Messervy’s words, to ‘tide [them] over’ – of which $200 was taken by the MPAJA for political funds. With his share Ho Thean Fook bought some waxed duck, a local delicacy for which Kedah was famous, to take back to his home town in Perak. ‘The copy of General Messervy’s speech, campaign ribbons, medals and flashes, we burnt… We could not buy a cup of coffee or exchange them for a plate of mee rebus [spicy noodle soup], could we?’ Ho had been promised a scholarship to study in England; it never materialized. He was shocked to discover in the weeks that followed