31
rule over Malaya (known as the Emergency) and unmasking multiple pointless atrocities of the decaying colonial system.
And the Rain My Drink, the novel considered the most exhaustive and also the most accurate picture of this particular period of time ever written, was first published in 1957 and it summarizes Han Suyin's experience of Emergency, accumulated during her several years' stay in Johore Bahru, British Malaya, in the double role of wife of Leonard Comber, her English second husband, at that time Assistant Superintendent in the Special Branch (i.e., in the British colonial police), and a doctor running a private medical practice:
The Emergency. We lived and breathed it; it penetrated our pores, we chewed it with every mouthful of food. Its formless pervasive threat held gaunt shape in my unquiet mind (from Chapter Three of My House Has Two Doors).
At that time everyone except for the British already seemed to realise that there was absolutely no future for the colonial system either in that region, or in the rest of the world.
The book describes the great thirst for independence of the two peoples side by side inhabiting Malaya, namely the Muslim Malays and the Chinese national minority, and it emphasises the significant contribution of the Chinese jungle guerillas to liberation of Malaya from white rule:
It was the Japanese conquest of Malaya in 1942 which spurred national independence. The white man's myth of invincibility was shattered by the Japanese victories (from Chapter Three of My House Has Two Doors).
Han Suyin gives an abundant and informative record on ruthlessness of the British Special Branch in handling the evading situation, on their failed attempts to suppress the upheaval, on numerous penal re-settlings of whole villages of Chinese rubber-tappers from the regions neighbouring with the jungle taken over by the guerillas to the true concentration camps, additionally located in unhealthy marshlands far away from the rubber-tree plantations, and on imprisonments, torturing and blackmailing both active participants to the liberation
Page 75
Page 76
31
rule over Malaya (known as the Emergency) and unmasking multiple pointless atrocities of the decaying colonial system.
And the Rain My Drink, the novel considered the most exhaustive and also the most accurate picture of this particular period of time ever written, was first published in 1957 and it summarizes Han Suyin's experience of Emergency, accummulated during her several years' stay in Johore Bahru, British Malaya, in the double role of wife of Leonard Comber, her English second husband, at that time Assistant Superintendent in the Special Branch (i.e., in the British colonial police), and a doctor running a private medical practice:
The Emergency. We lived and breathed it; it penetrated our pores, we chewed it with every mouthful of food. Its formless pervasive threat held gaunt shape in my unquiet mind (from Chapter Three of My House Has Two Doors).
At that time everyone except for the British already seemed to realise that there was absolutely no future for the colonial system either in that region, or in the rest of the world.
The book describes the great thirst for independence of the two peoples side by side inhabiting Malaya, namely the Muslim Malays and the Chinese national minority, and it emphasises the significant contribution of the Chinese jungle guerillas to liberation of Malaya from white rule:
It was the Japanese conquest of Malaya in 1942 which spurred national independence. The white man's myth of invincibility was shattered by the Japanese victories (from Chapter Three of My House Has Two Doors).
Han Suyin gives an abundant and informative record on ruthlessness of the British Special Branch in handling the evading situation, on their failed attempts to suppress the upheaval, on numerous penal re-settlings of whole villages of Chinese rubber-tappers from the regions neighbouring with the jungle taken over by the guerillas to the true concentration camps, additionally located in unhealthy marshlands far away from the rubber-tree plantations, and on imprisonments, torturing and blackmailing both active participants to the liberation
Page 75Page 76
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.