by Jeremy Tiang
“Almost there,” says Revathi. “Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m all right, why do you keep asking me that?”
“Because you look like a nervous wreck. You’re doing that thing where your leg keeps twitching.”
“I can be anxious and still be all right. I’ve had a lot of practice.”
The table they are sitting at has cracked lino nailed over it. None of this has changed in decades, he can tell. Nothing at all different but the price of the coffee. Henry is crying a little, and has no idea why. Revathi kindly pretends not to see.
The Thai border is staffed by a single guard, and they have to rap at the glass to get him to take their passports. Betong is not all that different—Henry hears a lot of Chinese and Malay being spoken, along with Thai. He wonders how many Malayans ended up here after everything that happened, recreating their lives on the other side of the line.
The town is rather worn, but shows signs of recent prosperity. When they ask for directions, the locals point proudly at the squat pink lozenge of the Merlin Hotel, looming over the skyline. Just look for that, they say, you’ll never get lost.
They have lunch at a street-side stall—fishball noodles. He is able to order in Mandarin, and while waiting for the food to arrive, he asks the owner, a grey-haired woman, where to find the Ma Gong. She looks up from what she’s doing, dunking dishes in a plastic bucket of water to clean them. “You want the Peace Villages or the Friendship Villages?” she asks, smiling. Her front two teeth are missing.
“Friendship, I think. Is there a difference?”
“Two groups. They don’t agree about some things.”
He has questions about factions and ideologies, but can’t remember the Chinese words for these things. Instead, he asks for directions, and she points at the peaks around him, explaining what lies where. She speaks crisply, her accent more like a Mainlander than a Malaysian. Her expressions are old-fashioned, a little formal.
“My son-in-law works on one of the farms up there. He’ll be stopping by in a while, if you’re looking for a lift.”
He glances at Revathi, and she apparently knows what he’s thinking. “No, you go, I’ll stay down here,” she says. “I’d like to check out this pink hotel, see if it’s as good as all that. Maybe I’ll join you in a day or two, if you stay that long, but you should do this on your own. Text me if you need anything.”
“Are you sure?”
“I might write a piece about this place. Look at it. I love border towns. All sorts of meetings happen here.”
“Thank you, Revathi.”
“You’d do the same for me. All right, you Chinese people go and have your drama. By the time you come back down, I’ll have found out where all the good food is.”
•
The Thai name for the villages is Piyamit, or “dear friend”. On the back of the son-in-law’s motorcycle, Henry rises into the hills. The metalled road soon peters out, and then they are rocking along the same red soil that makes up the exposed flanks of the slopes. A recent landslide has blocked half the road, and they have to move slowly, honking the horn before rounding corners.
Land for agriculture has been hacked out of the hills. Spindly rubber trees stand on terraces, next to durian and rambutan groves. “People come to Piyamit especially for the durians,” the son-in-law tells him. “Eating durians in the mountain air is a special experience.” There is no sign of human activity—the farmers are probably sheltering from the noontime sun, having been up since dawn.
There are four Friendship Villages, a short distance from each other. The first one they pass looks semi-deserted—there are only a couple of kids out in front, glaring at him as they zoom past. The second is more promising. When they show up, a thin middle-aged woman comes out onto the road, while other faces peer from the large building behind her. “This is Gaolan,” says the son-in-law. “She’ll take care of you.”
“We don’t get many visitors this time of year,” says Gaolan by way of greeting. She is already taking his rucksack and ushering him into what looks like some sort of guesthouse. He hasn’t said anything about wanting to stay here, but fair enough, there probably isn’t anywhere else. “People used to rent out rooms in their houses,” she says, “But then we had a meeting and decided to build this hotel. I think you’ll be comfortable here.” They negotiate a price that includes all his meals, to be taken at the attached restaurant. He asks if she’s the owner, and she looks at him as if he is mad. “It belongs to the village.”
She scurries ahead of him to air out one of the rooms, and when he walks in she is painstakingly arranging a towel on the bed in a fan shape, individually wrapped guest soaps amongst its folds. It’s a rustic place, latticework on the top parts of the walls to provide ventilation, sturdy furniture and sheets that smell of starch.
As soon as Gaolan puts the room key on the table and leaves, he lies down on one of the twin beds fully dressed, and falls immediately to sleep. He rouses himself three hours later with a slight headache and the mild panic of waking up in a strange place. Too late to do much more than wander round the village, taking photographs of the wooden houses and neat vegetable patches in the fading light. (Such an early sunset, he thinks, then remembers that Thailand is an hour ahead of Malaysia.)
When he gets back to the restaurant, a dozen or so people are there. They want to have dinner with him—they’re curious about the visitor. It’s not tourist season. Is he here for the hot springs, or the rambutans? What does he do? Oh, a university professor, visiting from London? “I knew you couldn’t be local,” says one of the women, “Your Mandarin is so terrible.”
He hasn’t ordered any food, but Gaolan says, “I made you something simple,” and brings out soup, rice, a few vegetable dishes sprinkled with meat. “We grow all our own vegetables,” she adds. “Taste how fresh that broccoli is. Do they have greens like that in London?”
They are silent for a while as they eat, then the questions start again. What is he here to find out, is he writing about this place for his university? Is he married, does he have children? They are all older than him, the young people having left for further studies, for the bigger towns. Happy to have someone to fuss over, they put food on his plate, ask for news of the outside world. They have TV and the Internet, of course, but it is hard to understand how the world is changing when so much has remained the same here.
He asks how they live, and they tell him about the land they were given, for planting rubber, fruit, vegetables, so much they have to hire local labour come harvest time to get everything in. There is a flower garden named after the Thai princess Chulabom, who visits at least once a year. They grow more than enough for themselves, and the surplus gets sold in the market at Betong. It’s a good, simple life, and the Thai government treats them with respect. “We didn’t surrender, after all,” they remind him. “We negotiated a peace.”
“We came out of the jungle in 1987,” says a tall man in glasses. “Two years sooner than the other lot. They spent more time haggling, so they got a better deal—we weren’t allowed to enter Malaysia until later, but they could go right away. Doesn’t matter. We just wanted to get out.”
The other lot, it turns out, is the Communist Party of Malaya, who now occupy the Peace Villages. The people around him are from the Communist Party of Malaysia, a splinter group, comprising the Revolutionary Faction and the Marxist-Leninist Faction. “Did you believe different things?” asks Henry, and they mutter about this or that article, before a woman sheepishly admits, “We followed different people.” Anyway it’s all fine now: the Peace Villagers and the Friendship Villagers are on good terms again, partly because they have united in hatred of Chin Peng, the former leader who spent many of the post-Emergency years in China. “He should have saved us,” snaps Gaolan, “but he didn’t care, in the end.”
When he reveals he’s a professor of history, they’re surprised he doesn’t know more about them, and he has to confess his expertise is more the H
apsburgs. He has done some quick Internet research around the subject, but much of the literature is about the Emergency itself, not the decades after. He was vaguely aware that these men and women were in the jungle all the while he was growing up, but they barely figured in the papers, unless they had one of their occasional skirmishes with the Thai army. Yet from 1948 to 1987, there they were, for forty years. He asks, but none of them were inside all four decades; the ones who joined earlier on have all been martyred by now.
“Martyred?”
“Yes, if they were part of the Ma Gong when they died, we call them martyrs, even if it was from sickness or old age.”
Gaolan particularly wants him to know about the great purge in 1970—when the leadership sent down lists of traitors to be terminated. By this point, they had radio equipment—no need for messages to be smuggled in tubes of toothpaste. “They said that was why there’d been no progress after twenty years of struggle, these traitors,” she says. “But we knew these people, we’d grown up with them. They were just different, maybe livelier or more opinionated than the rest, that’s all. So many of them were strangled or stabbed—they didn’t want to waste bullets on them. Our own people.”
“It was because of the Cultural Revolution,” says a thin-lipped woman who was introduced only as “Ah Chang’s lover”. She shuts her eyes for a moment. “Central always wanted to copy China. They never understood that this country is different. It was a mistake to go into the jungle—that made us irrelevant. We should have been
urban guerrillas.”
Siew Li’s last letter is dated 1974. Suddenly, Henry has a vision of the woman in the photographs—his mother, though he still can’t quite think of her that way—being taken into a little shack, questioned by some uniformed thug with a machete in his hand, and then—
Before he has even thought about it, the picture is on the table—the one he’d been carrying around in his wallet. The best one—the rifle in one hand, her other shading her eyes as she stares proudly into the sunlit day. “Is this— Do you know—” He gestures helplessly.
Gaolan picks it up and stares, and they pass it around. Their eyes are not good, he realises. A couple have glasses, but with the nearest optician a bumpy ride down the hill, most of them probably haven’t bothered. They peer at her so hard he feels strangely protective, and then they are saying a name. Lifeng. A couple are uncertain, after so many years, but Gaolan and others nod, definite. “It’s her, it’s our Lifeng.”
“That’s not her,” he says, warily. Could this all be some sort of mistake? No, they explain, they all changed their names when they went inside.
“I used to be Ah Mui,” says Gaolan. “Can you imagine? Like a little girl. I don’t think about Ah Mui much, these days. She was a different person.”
“What happened to Lifeng?”
“She’s dead,” says Gaolan gently. “How did you know her?”
“She was a family member.” That’s all he feels capable of saying at the moment, and they let it go. This must happen a fair amount, because they don’t ask him where he got the photograph, or seem surprised that he has a picture of one of them in uniform.
“It was a long time ago,” says Gaolan. “She had a friend in the next village. I’ll take you to see him tomorrow—he can tell you more.”
•
Henry sleeps well that night. This place is high up enough in the hills for there to be no mosquitoes, and the air is eerily still. When was he last completely out of reach of traffic noises, even distant ones? Real silence. It’s unsettling. He reaches for his phone to text Janet, but there is no reception.
There is surprisingly good coffee the next morning. Gaolan serves him toast and soft-boiled eggs in a porcelain bowl, with soy sauce and white pepper on the side. “From our own chickens,” she beams. “See how yellow the yolks are? That’s how you know they’re fresh.”
Breakfast is just as delicious as last night’s dinner. There’s something appealingly simple about life here, everything pared down but of the highest quality. He knows a lot of the former Ma Gong were devastated not to be allowed back into Malaysia or Singapore, but he can also see why these people chose to stay here after the travel ban was lifted, on the land they were given. This place is monastic, stark without being austere. If I stay here too long, he thought, I’ll stop thinking about the outside world, because everything I need is right here. But this isn’t fairyland, and he can break the enchantment anytime, as he does now—taking in a lungful of sharp, fresh air, and shaking his head.
Afterwards, Gaolan offers him a lift on her scooter. They putter along the trail, heading higher into the hills so white that wisps of mist start blurring the way ahead. Should have brought a jacket or something, he thinks. He should have known—the hills were always where the British came to cool down, when they wanted weather that reminded them of home.
The road wraps around the overgrown slopes, and it’s easy to see how the Ma Gong could have stayed hidden so long, beneath the green fog of vegetation. “They sent planes out—the Thai air force,” says Gaolan when he asks, “but we always managed to avoid them. They just dropped bombs at random onto the canopy.”
She drops him off not at the next village, as he expected, but in front of a cave just outside. He looks at her askance and she waves him in. “Xiongmin works inside. You’ll see.”
This is some sort of underground museum, it turns out. Not secret, literally underground, lit by orangey halogen lamps. He goes up to the counter for a ticket (priced in both ringgit and baht). The woman there also tries to entice him into buying some incense.
“I didn’t know you Communists were religious.”
“We’re not, but you might be.” She smiles at him. “The tourists kept asking for an Earth God shrine, so we set up one down the hill. It’s a Malaysian-Chinese thing: wherever they go, they want to pray to the local gods.”
He refuses the incense, and instead browses a rack of memorabilia—khaki caps with red stars on their crests, postcards of old propaganda posters. A little Mao statue seems like the perfect gift for Janet, and if it annoys Winston that’s a bonus.
Xiongmin is waiting just inside, and is expecting him. They shake hands gravely. “I mostly look after the archives,” he says, “but Gaolan says you’re a special visitor, so I thought I’d show you round myself.”
They walk down the tunnel, which Xiongmin explains was built as a refuge. “We had to hide from the bombs, and what if the army came? So we dug this with nothing, just a changkol blade and baskets to clear the soil away. We had to go back out every half hour for air, or we’d have fainted.” Henry pats a packed-earth wall as he walks past. It is cool and firm, like a real cave. There are alcoves for sleeping in, storage niches, and even a larger chamber with a peaked roof. “The radio room,” says Xiongmin. “We had a wire leading up to the surface.”
There is a whole warren of these underground passageways, now fitted with information boards and displays. A map marked with different colours shows how the area occupied by the Ma Gong shrank over time. There are entire walls of propaganda materials, posters and pamphlets emblazoned with revolutionary youths. And photographs, some posed, some candid—the comrades doing surprisingly ordinary things.
“Are those people…gardening?” It seems so unlikely.
“Yes,” says Xiongmin. “You mustn’t think it was just fighting all the time. We went amongst the Thai people, you know, helped them with their weeding and housework, sorting out domestic issues. The Thai police knew we were here, but they didn’t do anything. Everyone trusted us. When we told them we were leaving, some of them held onto us and cried, but we had to go. The struggle was over.”
They walk on a bit farther, in silence. The exhibition is amateurishly designed, the grammar imperfect in both English and Chinese. They have obviously done it all themselves, with no outside help. Four decades of fighting, and this is the only residue. There are newspaper articles too, including Revathi’s famous one in the Herald. Xio
ngmin points at it with some pride. “That’s my mother,” he says, “That’s her, in the photo. I didn’t see that till years later, but I was happy to have that. I never saw her again.” He says it without loss, as a fact. Henry thinks of mentioning that he knows the journalist, but what for? Another meaningless point of connection.
Xiongmin says, as if he has been holding this in a long time, “Gaolan tells me you knew Lifeng.”
“In a way.”
“Family?”
“My mother.”
Xiongmin nods, absorbing this. Henry shows him the photograph, and he smiles, “Yes, she was so proud of her rifle, and rightfully so; she was one of our sharpest shooters.”
“She sent it to us. Letters too.”
“I knew she was doing something like that, but I chose not to notice. Why make trouble? She missed you terribly, you and your sister. I could tell, even though she hardly mentioned you. We weren’t supposed to think about our old lives. I wasn’t jealous, we all had things in our past. I loved her too, you see.”
Henry looks at him, uncertain what he means. Xiongmin is wiry, light on his feet. Even though he must be past seventy, his hair is still quite thick, and mostly black.
“We didn’t get married in the jungle. It was too bourgeois, part of the old society. But I was her lover. That’s what we called it. I knew about her other family—you—but that didn’t matter. We had a daughter of our own. I was with Lifeng until she died.”
“That was in—”
“1975. Something was growing inside her.”
“Cancer?”
“I suppose you’d call it that now. We didn’t know very much. The medicine we had cured most things, but she was too sick.”
“Couldn’t you have taken her to a doctor?”
“We have medics here. They tried everything, cut her open more than once, but she kept getting worse, losing weight. Like she was being emptied from the inside.”