“So many ways to be human, and most people were certain their way was best.” —Siew Li in Jeremy Tiang’s State of Emergency
Jeremy Tiang’s State of Emergency opens with a 76-year-old man, Jason Low, who is suffering a serious ailment and is hospitalized in Singapore. As a young man, he had met and married a young firebrand, “outlaw girl” Siew Li, even though he himself was from a middle-class family. Their chemistry overcame their language challenges, with she a Chinese speaker, and he mostly fluent in the Queen’s English.
The two became parents to fraternal twins. His daughter, Janet, is a former teacher and a current government bureaucrat. His son, Henry, is a history professor in London. Siew Li became a fugitive from the British colonial government because of her work with the communists militating for new governance, and she disappeared from their lives when the children were very young. She would have been arrested otherwise.
The core narrative anchor in Jason’s life is the terrorist bombing (by Indonesian attackers) of the bank building where his twin sister, Mollie, worked. This MacDonald House bombing, in March 1965, is understood as an element of Konfrontasi (confrontation) between Malaysia and Indonesia, which was militating against the emergence of Malaysia (and Singapore). Tiang writes:
“Konfrontasi was drearily familiar, after the real war with the Japanese and the false war of the Emergency, they were once again in an unreliable world. Bubbling through the murk of Indonesia’s foreign policy came the idea that the new Malayan Federation would be dangerous, that it was a contrived creation of neocolonial forces, the nekolim.
“Sukarno was in charge, having reclaimed his country from the Dutch. He filled his country with a giddy unreality, a sense that there were no boundaries for them. He proclaimed Tahun vivere pericoloso, the year of living dangerously. At a public rally he shouted ‘To hell with your aid,’ his voice resonating with justified anger, his audience roaring with him.”
In Jason’s ruminations, there is a sense of some political strife, but the details are not clearly spelled out. It has now been 50 years since the attack and the terrible loss, but it is imprinted in his memory — his desperate bicycle ride to Mollie’s workplace, his interactions with the police.
Time has passed too quickly. He feels his daughter is not very engaged when she visits, and she is trying to proselytize to him of her Christian faith. He feels she is more interested in her inheritance than in his well-being. His son has his own life in London and is not available to visit. He goes in and out of lucidity. Sometimes, he recalls powerful and dramatic moments in his life, which has wound down to this. His has been a life with regrets. To Jason, history is inexorable, and it is wiser not to get caught up in the changing gears of large-scale change. In police states, citizens all have forever dossiers, and they are never in the clear if they have stepped out of line even once.
The next chapter focuses on Siew Li. The omniscient narrator describes her recruitment into the communist movement as a teenager by a glamorous older girl who talent-spotted her. She starts to read books by Mao Dun and the works of Mao Zedong and believing in the possibility of a fairer world. She buys into the glorification of physical labor. She decries the formulation of the class system. Even as she strives toward her own sense of political enlightenment, she faces a sexist society that sees her as only having a role in the house, within the confines of marriage. Hers is one thread of competing groups trying to create an idealized society.
Then, the third chapter focuses on Nam Teck. He was a 4-year-old when their home in Batang Kali was attacked by soldiers. Tiang writes:
“Later on, there was a lorry, and more weeping as they were dragged into the back. As they drove off, he saw their stilt house burning along with the rest of the village. They were dropped off at the next town with nothing at all.”
They meet up with his late father’s aunt, Auntie Poh. He and his mother are moved to a section of jungle, on which ramshackle housing is built — and then surrounded with barbed-wire fencing. There is only one gate in or out. They are watched because they are suspected of communist sympathies, of supporting rebels out in the jungles with food. The food is cooked centrally and controlled tightly to prevent anything from reaching the rebels, the Ma Gong (Malayan Communist Party). This fenced-in village is Semenyih Village.
When Nam Teck comes of age and heads in to Kuala Lumpur, he realizes that the city folks are not aware of the fighting in the rural areas of the country:
“Kuala Lumpur seemed untouched by the last dozen years of chaos. City dwellers vaguely knew it was dangerous in the rural wastelands—but why would they want to go there? There were difficulties over long journeys, and it was a bore that you weren’t allowed to bring food out with you. As if we would feed those people, said one lady scornfully when he asked—but rules were rules, and they recognized the need for them.”
He works in a shop for Mr. Chiam, a colorful raconteur and maker of bullet-resistant cars. In a time of political turmoil, anyone who is anyone has extra layers of security.
While the locals are not political, per se, they do have conversations around identity:
“Occasionally they had an argument at dinner about whether they were Chinese or Malayan. Can’t we be both, asked Nam Teck, who wasn’t very good at arguing and not bothered either way. Seng insisted he was Malayan. He would never go back to China and who cared if he didn’t speak a word of Malay? This was his home. Mr. Chiam claimed his entire family was Chinese, even though every one of them was born here. The British don’t care about you, he said, red in the face, and now the Malays don’t either. You know what they call us? Pendatang, visitor. You think they will ever let us belong?”
This is not about the pageantry of change at the highest levels, but more about how political change is experienced at the local levels by common folk.
This novel then jumps to the experiences of Stella, the daughter of Mollie and her husband, Barnaby Remedios, the niece of Jason. Stella is targeted by law enforcement because several aspects of her past raised red flags. She is detained for months and undergoes intrusive and torturous questioning.
A pivotal chapter is about Revathi, a British journalist who is assigned to explore a Malaya equivalent of the My Lai massacre. She is from that region of the world but does not speak all the languages of the space (Malay, Tamil, Singaporean Mandarin, and English). She uses a translator who is a communist sympathizer to gather information. After decades of suppression by the British colonizing authorities, the story has emerged of their brutality in putting down communist insurgents. As a journalist, Revathi’s access to various individuals highlights the striving factions and events that led to the massacre.
A stark reality emerges. One group’s devastation — for generations — is an occupying power’s triumph, a military leader’s crowning achievement. Human justice is elusive at best. There are different narrative overlays to the same event. Human losses are irretrievably permanent and ripple out.
Each of the characters brings something to the revealing of the political events and mass-scale violence. This novel is based on years of research. It mentions some real-world events but changes up some of the people’s names. The focus is more on people’s lived lives and less on politics. State of Emergency is presented as a novel about remembrance of history, but its being fiction softens the impact.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow has written a foreword to the 2024 edition of this book. She provides an early bridge to the text and suggests that governments use the playbook of “states of emergency” to justify various forms of extrajudicial and extralegal oppressions and violence. She suggests optimistically that bearing witness may jog readers out of their stupor and apathy. She suggests that awareness of history comes with burdens and responsibilities.
Will this remembrance mean a lighter hand by current and future militaries? Will righteousness be a consideration in decision-making? Will human memory and empathy endure sufficiently to affect actual choices?
Those who want a clearer sense of the historical events may do well to study up on the Malayan Emergency prior to reading the novel.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
