CHAPTER TWO   War and Marriage

     WhenI was six and comic-crazy, running out of the house to stand by the Indian newsstand and browse through the comics clipped to the stand's ropes for an hour or more (the Indian newsman later charged me five cents for the privilege of reading each time I came by), something was misfiring at home. First, Father went to the hospital. He was pale when I visited him after the operation for appendicitis.The cold glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice on the bedside table coniused me.Why was it there? Why hadn't he drUnk it? Then I was sent to play in the sun room, where I found ommbuses of Reader's Digest novels shelved and free for the taking. Superboy and the Phantom obsessed me then; still, I was impressed by these books, free to the public, not in a stand or store beyond one's ordinary reach.
     Father's hospital stay introduced me to Auntie May, a young buck-toothed nurse. After his return from the hospital, some evenings he took me, without my mother, for a car ride. We drove to the hospital which was about ten miles out of town. We picked up Auntie May, who sat with my father in the front passenger seat while I sat in the back, contented with the breeze Mowing through the open window She was kind to me in an absent-minded mannen We children called every adult "aunt" and "uncle," and Auntie May seemed like a real aunt to me in her odd familiarity I was comfortable with her presence, and believed we three belonged together in a special way when these evening drives ended, Father began to take the family out to Coronation Park, a couple of miles across town along the shoreline. There, as the evening swiftly gave way to tropical night, my brothers and I tumbled about in the cooling grass, chased each other through the spookily darkening space, Among the White Moon Faces and ate boiled peanuts, fried legumes, and steamed chickpeas that Father bought from the peddlers who lined the roads under the flaring fluorescent street lamps.
     Sundays were the best days of our life togethen Father worked six days a week and late on Saturday night when families shopped for shoes and entertainment. But as a British colony, Malacca observed the blue laws. My parents were Westernized although not Christianized. When many of their friends were dressing for church, and our relatives were resting at home, we were packing up for a picnic by the sea.We fought over the Sunday newspaper, patticularly who got to read the Sunday comics first. Then, all seven of us squeezed into the car and drove to Tanjong Bidarah, stopping to buy some coconut-steamed ric~nasi lema~for lunch.
     The sea was always a visual shock to me, the waves of the Malacca Straits slapping gently and unceasingly against a sloping gritty beach. Somethmg about the sun shining on such immensity excited me. I was afraid of the water but in love with its sensation. I had just read in John Masefield's poem, "The sea, the sea, the open sea, the fresh, the wild, the ever-free," and I lay in the water as it ran down the sand ridges and murmured over and over again to mysei{ "The sea is my mother, the sea is my mothen"

     And so I wanted to believe. Was it because my own mother had already withdrawn from us that I loved the sea so extravagantly? I have no memory as a child of the kind of warm physical affection with my mother that I felt with my Primary One teacher, Sister Josie. Emak appears in my child's album as a self-absorbed driven creature, continuously pregnant~ix babies with only a year or so between each of them.
     My mother may have resolved on escape long before she left us, but she shared nothing of herself with us in those final years. She was already absent, a weeping woman stripped slowly to some unknown other whose ultimate departure came to me as no surprise. My images of her in the painfli' years of uprooting, in 1952 and 1953, are dulled, as if the imagination had leaped forward and already registered Mother as gone, not so much lost or misplaced as deliberately disappeared.
Maternal abandonment is unthinkable in human culture. Maternal malice marks a boundary humans can hardly bear to speak O{ reformulating it instead into the wicked stepmother found in the Grimm brothers' fairy tales and numerous Asian folk tales. How then to understand my own mother, mother of six children, who picked herself up off the ground where my father had knocked her down, and left us forever?
     Months of momentous crossings led up to that sudden evening when she vanished. One afternoon in the room behind the front shop, in the zone between home and store, I came across them yelling at each othen He had the War and Marriage red glare in his eyes, that crazed look of going over an edge that came over him when the rattan cane would come singing through the air again and again and again. She who had turned soft and fat after the sixth baby was stock-hard, acing him implacably I went between them and caught them both in each hand. "Don't, don't," I cried and must have shamed them because they stopped, fell silent, and moved away I remember the risk I felt, and the pride that I had reconciled them.
   Of course I had done nothing of the kind. As they spun apart, my mother must have withdrawn into a shell of rage and hatred that reached out to include "his" children. For we were our father's children more than hers.At some point, after the drives with Auntie May ended, he had focused his life on us.
    I remember one splendid Sunday morning when we four children, Beng, Chien, Jen, and myseit clung to each other's shoulders, and Beng hung on to Father's, who swam out to the horizon, unaftaid that the four of us might drop out of each other's grip into the salty waves. Father was a strong swinmien As a boy he had jumped off the bridge into the Malacca River in weekend play and his love of the sea blinded him to the danger he was leading us through. The water rushed like a living current over us; we were suspended above the drowning element by the power of my father's body
    Were we seven, six, five, three? All four of us did not add up to my father's years, although he was still a young man. Remembering his body I need to count to materialize it out of the myth of muscle and salt waten A man of twenty-eight, lean, muscular, hearing on his shoulders the exposed naked slippery bodies of four children, each destined to grow larger than he, whose little fish bodies he could have so easily shrugged off; dropped over the horizon's edge, to return unencumbered, a free male. Instead I feel his calves kick, his arms arc and flash in a flight through welcome space. His teeth gleam white, a father shark, as he turns his handsome head, laughing at our squeals, taking pride in our fearless faith.

     Because my father loved his children, I have kept faith with him, through the years of living with his pursuit of women, his gambling, and his rages. The bond I sewed tight between my father and me was illicit. In a Chinese family perhaps in every family daughters must be wary of their love for their fathers. We are constrained as daughters; the ties that strain us to our fathers are tense with those constraints.A vast because fea61'1y crossable boundary must separate girl-child from male parent. I wonder if all daughters suffer a revulsion about their fathers' bodies, instinctively reacting to save themselves from unacknowledged dangers.
     As a child I adored my father's body When I slept with my parents, before even more children arrived to remove me to a newly purchased iron-frame Amon9 the White Moon Faces bunk bed, it was my father's body I reached out to touch when I roused in the night. He was warm and solid; it made me happy to touch his flesh lightly with my fingers, then drift back into sleep. So in that serpent-like familial swim, with a brother gripping me around my neck, clinging to another brother as he clung to another who clung to my father's confident body, all of us children extruded from my father like grown sperm, links in an unbreakable, undrownable chain, the meaning of my father's life made manifest to him.
    My father was so ordinary that his name appeared in his lifetime in only those two pieces of paper testifiring to his King Scout status and his passing the Overseas Senior Cambridge Exams. After the age of nineteen, he left the world of testimonials, of the seen and acknowledged, and entered a world of breeding, of feeding hungry mouths, of struggle and failure, small pleasures, and modest hopes. His life has remained undocumented, unrecorded, and therefore unvalued and unsaved. I write to make my father's lik usefiil.To do that, I have to explain my love for him.

    My father beat me on many occasions. Every time he slapped me, raised the cane and cut me on my legs, my shoulders, my back so that the raised welts were also deeply grooved and bloodied, I hated him. My eyes would blank and hurt and in my ears I heard the chant, "I hate you, I hate you:'
    That silent chant gave me an enormous sense of secret powen I never begged him to stop beating me, never cried, although my throat burned with stifled feeling, and my head spun from the violence of his slaps. The rattan's whipping cuts were like knife-tongues of fire that licked the flesh and stayed and stayed. I hated him as much for humiliating me as for the pain. I felt public shame, for he beat me in front of anyone, my brothers, the neighbors, visitors, and relatives. I never asked then what drove him to these maddened episodes. I knew it wasn't me. He beat me viciously once for dropping a spoon and breaking it; on another occasion, when he thought a hawker had cheated me.
    The only time I felt private shame when he beat me was the first time. A five-year-old stay-at-home, I was fascinated by my older brothers' sophistication, the new they brought home each day from school. They said different words, played different games, and owned large shiny books with photographs and drawings and stories in them. I felt my chest tighten with the desire to possess what was in their mouths and headsfMy brothers shared a secret joke that galvanized them with mirth. I stood outside the circle of two and spied. They whispered, pretending not to see me. They formed circles with the thumb and first finger of their left hands and stabbed the round air with fingers of their right hands, a secret sign that haloed them as partners and insiders. It was an understanding that they shared, and they slyly glanced at me to see if I had caught it from them, then yelled, "Go away!"I ran outside into the evening air with their secret. I was elated, for I understood the sign, I knew how to form that circle and how to penetrate it. I ran to my father who was just closing up the shop. He was moving yet another wood plank into its grooved position, completing the wooden wall that shut the shop each night and transformed it into a home. There was no one else for me to play with; I tugged at his arm and showed him the secret I had just mastered But his face reddened. His eyes took on that crazed glower, only this time, for the first time, it was directed at me. I was horrified, but it was too late. He put the plank against the wall, went inside, dragging me with him, and caned me. I do not remember how many times the feather duster descended. Perhaps, because it was the first time, the switch came down for only three cuts; perhaps it was more. After that evening I knew I could not count on my father's love.
    Later, as I approached ten and eleven, I understood the meaning of the sign, and the memory of his rage shamed me. The shame is unspeakable. I am covered with coniusion. Did I, five years old, know the power of the sign? What secret was I breaking open as I tugged at his arm, smiling? Why am I still ashamed? Am I shamed by his uncontrolled use of power over my small female body, his displaced, repressed fears? Or by my child's desire for him, the man whom I had approached as my playmate, my partner, with whom I wanted to share the secret of the circle?
     When my father beat me for the first time, the horror that filled me as I sobbed through that evening was not simple horror at pain, the sting of the rattan switch on my buttocks. It was also the horror at the knowledge of the break, that he had forcibly set me aside from himsei{ asserting a presence so alien that it could turn the lithe pliable rod on my flesh and cut me. My father became a fearifil stranger to me then; as he gripped my arm, cursing in the growing darkness, and brought the rattan down on me, he appeared simultaneously to melt away, to lose his familiar contours, and to harden, to loom as a featureless man to whom my screams and tears signified nothing. My lifelong sense of the evening as the hour of abandonment, when one looks out into the world and is overcome by one's aloneness, begins with the beating.
     And the shame. For I understood deafly that it was what I had done that had changed this man from father to monsten Something in my desire for him, that tug on his arm, the sharing of a sign, had toppled something in him. His rage was inexplicable otherwise.The shame was like a hot stone I had swallowed, different fiom the pain of the caning. It was inside my body, it went bruising, slowly, down my chest, and settled in my stomach. For days after, I felt slow; draggy; as if the stone were weighing me down. The buoyancy of the five-year-old girl looking up into her father's eyes as she showed him the sign she had just learned from her brothers never returned. I can mark that moment as the consciousness of another sei{ a sullen within, hating the father who beat me.

     Hate does not explain love, but it sharpens love, in as much as it gives us the power to see the fragilities of the object of our hate. From the moment my father beat me, I became aware of his weakness rather than of his powen while I feared the pain of his canings, I never came to fear him; instead I came to acknowledge the depth of my responses and the interiority of my feelings. His blows drove me inwards into misery that cannot be spoken. I felt the power of my unhappiness, and therefore the power of my personhood. I learned to love my father again because I pitied him, and I pitied him because he gave me the power to hate him.

     I did not learn to love my mother, who left us when I was eight, though she is perhaps more to be pitied than my fathen As a grown woman, I know that her life was harder than his, the odds in her struggles for a good life unfairly stacked against hen But as her daughter, when I think about her, I frel instead a stubborn resistance against pity and forgiveness, an adolescent resentment that will not grow up.
     There was a time when I must have loved hen Doesn't every infant, cradled in human arms, sucking on a mother's breast, fix its loving gaze upon the eyes above? Yet I have no memory of that primal bonding, no memory of hugs, kisses, physical affection, the kind of comfortable, safe bodily pleasure taken and felt in the presence of a loved othen
     In a black-and-white family portrait taken when I was five and touched up by the unknown photographer with paint, my mother, seated, wears a light-colored samfoo. My father sits close to her, his head leaning as if drawn in affection towards hen She is already round-faced, a little chubby in the fashionable print. I stand by her arm, my cheeks and lips painted red, in a tiered, outrageously flowered print dress, my little legs and arms like awkward stems on a droopy blossom. An absurd purse is looped around my arm, and a large bow shoots off the back of my head. Everything on me looks too big, too loose, too floppy Beng and Chien stand by my father in shorts and white shirts, their skinny legs smartly turned out in pufled-up socks and polished shoes, and Jen sits solemn-faced on a metal pony Except for my leaning father, we all face the camera straight as soldiers. Those studio portraits for which we sat every Chinese New Year posed us together as a family-permanent, transfixed, the moment held in mercury and paint innocently displayed in a way that I do not remember us at all.
     I remember us as brushing images, as gazes, sensations, and stories. I remember my mother as a woman I gazed on. Pondering this childhood War and Marrage sensation of gazing upon the maternal face, rather than of living within the maternal breast, I wonder if the break was mine, coming from an infant's original coldness to the mothen Or did the break originate in my mother, unable to or reflising to nurse the infant, to whom she hovers, as a face, but never satisfies and fills up, as a breast?

     Yet she also loved me, at least later in life. When I was sixteen and visited her in Singapore for the first time, she took a day off from work to spend the morning at Robinson's, then the largest department store in Singapore, where she had recently worked. "Eleanor, Eleanor!" the wefl-dressed and made-up women at the counters called, and it took me long minutes before I understood that they were calling her by an English name she had taken in Singapore.
    We walked through the crowds and stopped at Helena Rubinstein, Estee Lauder, chinaware, and pajamas, where she introduced me to women who looked like each othen "This is my daughter;' she repeated, "Shirley" as if this Eleanor, who hadn't seen me in eight years, were introducing me to herself over and over again, or as if my meeting her friends of the past eight years filled in the void of time between us.
    Her pride, so evident during that social ritual, which continued in the afternoon and evening with taxi rides to numerous of her brothers' and sisters' homes, was a kind of love. But as my father's daughter, I knew love as falilial and daily proximity; not as social ritual. Leaving Malacca for Singapore, abandoning farlily for society; my mother was always to remain estranged to me.

     My parents married just before the outbreak of the Pacific War. I remember a photograph of two very young people dressed in the ancient heavy silk robes of the traditional peranakan wedding. She wears an ornately embroidered headdress that sweeps almost a foot above her smooth pinched face; its crimson tassels fall about her face like fliclisia blossoms. Her blouse is covered by a cape encrusted with silver and gold embroidery On her feet, traditional embroidered silk shoes with curved tips peep out from under the long skirt. Father is uncharacteristically serious. On his head a conical straw and bead-plaited hat sits like a food coven His costume is a long Chinese gown, like a mandarin's robe. The wedding portrait shows every sign of social respectability: their solemn seated pose, and especially their dress, the traditional wedding costumes that testi£y to the young couple's acceptance of the conventions of Malaccan peranakan society
    The elaborate robes also indicate that their wedding took place in a time of civil peace and plenty; when the British ruled Malacca as part of a tripartite state called the Straits Settlements that included Penang and Singapore. Baba and Emak, both born in the state of Malacca, were British subjects I was Amon9 the White Moon Faces a position that conferred enviable status in a society of irrirnigrants, transients, and undocumented laborers from China, India, and the Indonesian islands. In the late 1 930s, there were almost two million Chinese living in the different political territories of the Malayan peninsula, and only a minority of them were Straits-born, a term that I was to hear pronounced with pride all through my growing years.

     Baba grew up as an irresponsible child, loving Western popular culture, within a Coriflicianist-gated community Unreflecting, he lived his early years as if scnan~ase or leisur~were his human right. My father\ charm lay in his reminder that struggle ought to be unnatural. It was also, for his children, the cause of our danger; for our needs and his senang were mortally conflicted. It was to this unseffled, pleasure4oving man that my mother was to graft her life at the age of seventeen.
     He must have appeared to her as an ideal suiton He was two years older than she, and had five more years of British schooling. With a Standard Six certificate, she could read, write, calculate, and was better educated than many of the women in town. She stayed home after the Standard Six examinations, cooking, keeping house for her parents, and waiting for a husband to declare himseW There were five girls and four boys in her family: five disastrous burdens and tree of the boys too young for anything but school. A station master; eldest daughter had social standing. Her father; position as a British civil servant and her well-married aunts gave her a class association in the town that was above her actual precarious condition. My father; position as Fifth Son of a towkay sirriliarly disguised his uncertain financial standing.
     Theirs was not a traditionally arranged marriage, in which the woman is given to a man she has never met. My father not only had chosen her himself but had played the mandolin for hen I see him, this young passionate man who had just successfiilly completed his Senior Cambridge Examinations, who was wondering what life he would make for hinasel{ biking to her parents' house in Kiebang, balancing the small curved polished instrument on his handiebars. Standing in the sandy front yard of the wooden house with his best friend beside him, he glanced nervously at the moon in the clear night sky and then recklessly plucked the strings of the mandolin. It was only a joke he was pursuing, a story to tell his bachelor friends, for the marriage had already been arranged. He had seen her; she was pretty, quiet, and a wonderftil cook.
     My mother should have been warned by his mandolin, by the moon above her garden, by his breaking the propriety of peranakan behavior for a romantic tale. My father; unconventionallty, in the face of small-town Malacca where everybody knew everybody; actions, was not to be trusted.
     Married in the peace and security of the British Straits Settlements, she never had time to learn to trust him. On December 8, 1941,just a few months after the birth of their first son, the troops of the Japanese Imperial Army landed on the undefended northeast beaches of the Malayan peninsula. On swift light bicycles, carrying grenades and fast-firing weapons, thousands of green-uniformed soldiers rode south down the British-built roads, capturing without resistance Kota Bahru, Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Malacca, Johore, and finally Singapore, which the British had boasted of as the impregnable fortress of their empire. At the end of these ten amazing weeks, the British High Commissioner surrendered and withdrew the Royal Armed Forces from the entire peninsula. The mighty Royal Navy pulled out of Singapore port, ferrying British administrators and farnilies in ignominious retreat to Australia.
     It wasn't only the rumors ofjapanese barbarity that struck my parents' early years of naarriage.As a young child I heard, as a buzz of historical static, about the continuous daily horrors of the Japanese Occupation of Malaya from December 1941 to 1945, deeds less recounted than exclaimed over as sharp unexpected elements bursting like repressed trauma into a reconstructed normality
     The Japanese forces patrolied by the Kempeitai began a three-year era of pillage, killings, and terrorism at the tinie that my oldest brother was born.Word went around in February 1942 of the massacre of five thousand Chinese in Singapore. My mother's faith in her husband's power to defend her and to provide for their first-born must have been shattered as the Chinese Malayan raale population shrank and went into hiding from the Asians in green uniform. The second child came when rice was rationed, no Inilk was available, meat was scarce, and the townspeople ate tapioca and yams, root vegetables with little protein value. By the time my mother was carrying me, the Japanese Imperial Army, at the point of defeat, was also at its most brutal. With two sons to feed and clothe, my parents were living with my grandfather at Heeren Street, and had yet to set up their own home. Jobless, my father had no way to feed his family without the handouts from his fathen
     I was conceived and born toward the end of the bleakest period of the wan Only in 1943 were the Allied Forces able to begin counterattacks in India, Burma, and the Philippines. These attacks seriously damaged Japan's war resources. Rice, which had always been an imported staple food for the Malayan population, became even less available. Sugar, rhilk, meat, and rice had been rationed when the Occupation began, but in 1943 shortages of food led to fears of starvation and to acute hunger and malnutrition. Hunger was most prevalent among the Chinese townspeople; the Malays who were rural folk still grew their own food.
     Moreover, the imprisonment, torture, and massacre of Chinese Malayans, especially young men, continued unabated. The Japanese forces, having faced Among the White Moon Faces years of military struggle in their attempts to conquer China, equated every Chinese Malayan with the Chinese people, whose nationalist opposition had so enraged them that in a racialist bloody orgy the Japanese Imperial Army had massacred three hundred thousand Chinese in Nanjing in 1937. My fourth uncle, the brilliant brother who was planning to study medicine at the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore before the outbreak of the Pacific War, broke the curfew one night. He never returned home. Family story has it that his body was found floating in the Malacca kive~ his decapitated head attached to the neck only by a skein of skin.
     How did my grandfather protect the lives of his other sons? Where did he hide the men? How much did he pay to buy off the Japanese commandants, the Kemreitai? Wives and daughters had been raped and their wombs ripped by bayonets. Young men had obeyed or fled, and had been gunned down or decapitated. After the Japanese Imperial Army withdrew from Malaya in late August 1945, what sorrows lay in the rn-lit and shadowy rooms of 99 Heeren Street, in the memories of the executed brilliant son, of the savings extorted for a few illicit katties of rice and some store of crackers for the grandchildren, and of the hopes for a Chinese-peranalaan union through my parents' socially matched marriage? What was exchanged for those few precious tins of condensed Inilk on which my mother fed her babies? How much more was given up to save his daughters-in-law from the attentions of Japanese soldiers and his sons from the forced recruitrnent of young Chinese males into the jungle to plant tapioca and yarns when the supplies of rice and foodituffi from Burma were cut oft?

     My birth, at the end of 1944, at the peak ofjapanese torturous repression, and of food shortages and mass starvation, could have brought no rejoicing. Can an infant carry memories of hunger and terro~ the whisper of rumors, the blackout of censorship? Can she imbibe the early darkness of days without electrical energy; the lackadaisical quiet of a mother's mainutrition, leading to the absence of the maternal breast?
     The Japanese Occupation was not a story my parents dwelled upon, yet it marked our beglimings as a fainilyWhat might my mother have felt at the news of a third pregnancy? Was I an unwanted baby? The absence of physical intimacy, the coldness I felt even as a very young child toward my mother, may be, in part, derived from the history of war-time maternity

     The Chinese Malayan history of the Japanese Occupation the experiences of over three million peoplmwas almost immediately suppressed. The British, slowly returning a couple of months after the Japanese forces had left Malaya, ignored the horrors of Chinese Malayan warttine suffering and the War and Marriage courage of Chinese Malayan guerrilla fighters.Within a few months, a different war narrative replaced that of British defeat at the hands of Asian armies: the Chinese Malayans who had remained loyal to the British and fought the Japanese swiftly became the new Asian enemy. when a small group of poorly armed volunteer militia, the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), gave rise to the Malayan Communist Party; a revolutionary party that pressed for political representation and independence, they came to be defined as no less "alien" than the Japanese invaders. These guerrillas threatened British colonial government and economy, and quickly became identified with the "Red Scare$' Communists allegedly armed by the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. And thus Chinese immigrants and Straits-born Chinese, associated through race with disorders and terrorism, also had their "Chineseness" marked as evil.
     In 1948, when I was three and when the Chinese in Malaya were 45 percent of the population in contrast to the Malays' 43 percent, the British High Conirnissioner, Sir Edward Gent, declared a State of Emergency in the Federation of Malaya.This policy resulted eventually in mass dislocations, in the military-patrolled resettlement of Chinese Malayans, in the complete suspension of civil liberties, and in the establishment of a police state empowered to search, detain, and deport suspected Communist members and sympathizers. The Malayan Emergency provided the model for all other state powers in the twentieth century for battling insurgency movements through the surveillance, control, and suppression of entire populations.
     By the time I entered elementary school in 1951 at the age of six, the stories I grew up with were those of Chinese bandits and oudaws. The Straits Times carried stories of murders of British planters, Chinese towkays, village headimen, simple farmers and rubber tappers. Sir Henry Gurney was assassinated by Chinese terrorists who burst out of the jungle then faded back, secure, into its concealing growth. Every movie we saw was preceded by British newsreeL, and the Emergency in the Malayan colony was often featured. We watched urban Malaya in black and white, a sinister landscape of Chinese facades that wavered on the screen even as the British voice-over intoned, "In Malaya, Sir Henry Gurney was gunned down in cold blood by the cowardly Chinese Communists:' A pan to rows of rubber trees rushing past the camera:
     "In this tropical country; the Communists, led by Chin Peng, have the population living in frar, but the British Army, under the leadership of Sir Gerald Templer, is successfiiiiy pushing them back into the jungles:' On screen a thin white man in army Thakis, carrying a baton, walks slowly past rows of khaki-clad soldiers.
Sir Gerald Templer was our hailed savion Waving energetically, I stood in the hot sun with all the schoolchildren of Malacca lining the streets towelcome him as he drove swiftly past to till in Sir Gurney's position in 1951. The Chinese Communists' inirninent defeat signaled the continued glory of British imperial powen
     I learned to hate Chinese Communists, men with faces like my father's or my uncles', whose pictures the Straits Times frequently published, with their despised Chinese names in large captions-Lai Teck, Liew Yit Fan, Lan Yew Chin Peng. I could not distinguish among ordinary Chinese Malayans, the Kuomintang members-Chinese who considered themselves citizens of China-and the Communists-Chinese Malayans who claimed to be struggling for national sovereignty. Although the Kuomintang and the Communists were attacking each other, they were both marked by an alien hieroglyphic script, both equally hostile to peranakans, whom they looked down on as degraded people, people who had lost their identity when they stopped speaking Chinese. I grew up afraid of Chinese speakers, having been taught by the British that they were unpatriotic, brutal, and murderous. A Malayan child, I understood Chinese identity as being synonymous with Chinese chauvinism.

     Because loyal Chinese Malayans could not be told apart from Chinese Communists, the non-Malayans, in 1948 the British colonial administration also required the mass registration of the Malayan population. At every road block, every unexpected encounter, and every state-regulated event, such as registering your child for school, you were asked to show your identity card. "I.C., I.C.$' the clerks, police, and civil bureaucrats demanded, an acronym that I understood as "I see (you)!" in English and "Ai seif' or "You are dead!" in Hoilien. Many evenings, groups of Malay constables, mata-mata, would suddenly come out from behind the shadows of shrubbery, their pistols resting casually on their hips. "Check!" they would say, and you would flimble clumsily for your card, your fear in the darkness as complete as their confidence.
     I remember sining in my father's Morris Minor, headed towards Tampin which was only about twenty miles away, passing through a number of checkpoints. At each checkpoint, soldiers hoisting long gleaming rifles searched our passenger seats and the car trunk, glanced at our blue identity cards, then waved us onward. Did we look suspicious? We hoped our faces resembled the scowling portraits on our identity cards.We worried a young soldier might be aggrieved by our festive family mood and shoot us. We pretended to be subdued; we became really subdued. It was conlusing to find that we could not be distinguished from the bloodthirsty enemy, that to the soldiers with the gleaming rifles we might very well be the enemy
     Our identity cards became as much a part of our persons as our eyes or hands.We did not venture from home without it, for to be caught by the police without an identity card was already evidence of breaking the law It wasn't enough that Chinese Communists had been driven out of certain "safe" areas of the peninsula, which therefore needed to be patrolled only by the Malay constabulary By 1953, Malacca was declared the first "white area;' officially free of the pollution of Communist insurgency and all Emergency Regulations were lifted from the state, But large sections of"red areas" remained in the surrounding states. When I was twelve, I was still carrying the blue identity card wherever I went, still fearifil of being stopped by a police check.