After the British came into power yet again, the MNLA waged an all-out war against them for twelve years. But the British never called it a war. They dubbed the conflict the “Malayan Emergency,” because calling it a war would have meant that insurers wouldn’t cover losses for their many assets—tin mines, pewter mines, limestone quarries, rubber and palm plantations. But make no mistake—thousands of soldiers and five thousand civilians died in this conflict. Britain’s success in this war was actually what persuaded America to go to war with Vietnam. Their tactics in Malaysia were used as a template for American warfare in other nearby jungles full of yellow usurpers.
The MNLA was mostly composed of Chinese Malaysians, and they survived in the jungles by accepting donations from Chinese sympathizers who left food and money in trees by the forests’ edges. So the British made it illegal for Chinese citizens to aid the MNLA with food or money, then ensured compliance by forcing 400,000 Chinese people who lived near the jungles away from their homes. They resettled these Chinese in what they called “new villages,” which had curfews, barbed-wire fences, and rations so citizens would not have enough food to hand out extras to the freedom fighters. Today, the online Encyclopedia Britannica refers to new villages as “roadside relocation settlements for rural Chinese.”[6] Other sources are more direct: They call them internment camps.
With their food supplies cut off, the MNLA got desperate. They approached homes and businesses near the jungles, demanding money and food and threatening to kill civilians. My grandfather worked at a lumber plantation that harvested wood in the middle of the rainforest—in other words, MNLA headquarters. The MNLA threatened the plantation, and in order to preserve their safety (and their bottom line), the plantation caved and provided them with food. But eventually, the British found out about this betrayal. Someone had to take the fall, and that unlucky bastard was my grandfather, a low-ranking employee. The British did not give him a trial. They arrested him and imprisoned him for three years. My aunts were so young when he left that they have no memories of their father before this imprisonment. Whenever I asked my eldest aunt to tell me why, exactly, her father had been in prison, she didn’t even really understand the details of the Malayan Emergency enough to say. “You might want to google it one day,” she told me. “I just know it had something to do with the communists.”
When my grandfather came back, he had no teeth. No one in my family knows why or how it happened—whether his teeth fell out from malnutrition or were punched out by fists. But in Radicals: Resistance and Protest in Colonial Malaya, Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied paints a bleak picture of the prisons that held MNLA supporters:
“These places were badly lit, overwhelmed by the stench of latrines, and infested with bed bugs and rats, which ensured that the prisoners had minimal rest. The prisoners were required to relieve themselves in the cells, where they were not provided with any water, and they could only dispose of the filth every morning…. The Malay radicals were deprived of food and drink and subjected to verbal assaults in sessions that could last for several hours at a time.”[7]
When my grandfather returned home, he was not the same. He got a job as a mediocre traveling salesman that kept him far from home much of the time. On the occasions that he was home, he drank and gambled heavily and sometimes yelled cruelly at my aunts.
I wonder what epigenetic scarring took place during his time in that prison. I wonder if he passed those scarred cells down to my father. I wonder if my father passed them down to me.
Like their mother before them, my grandmother and Auntie became the main breadwinners of their household. And like their mother, they tried starting up illegal gambling operations to survive. My grandmother had a few lotteries going. But when my eldest aunt, Tai Koo Ma, was seven, my grandmother was arrested over the operation.
Tai Koo Ma says she stood there, helpless, and watched her only remaining parent scream as the police cuffed her and dragged her away. Auntie sucked her teeth as she watched her go. “Well, that doesn’t look good,” she deadpanned. “She’ll probably go to jail!” Typical, blunt Auntie.
Luckily, my grandmother was bailed out after just a day or two. After that, she turned to more legit business dealings—eventually getting a job as the foreman in a glass factory. Auntie contributed money from her various hustles. And the children they raised went on to achieve middle-and upper-class success. One uncle became a doctor, one aunt a banker, another a diplomat’s wife. My father went into tech. Then, a generation later, came me.
And all of these mouthfuls of bitterness comprise only half of my genetic code. Less than half. There is still so much more. My grandfather’s father died when he was a child—that’s really all I know about his family history.
I know absolutely nothing about my mother’s side. What historic brutalities contributed to her ferocity? I know one of her brothers died when she was young. Her dad died when she was twenty. But even earlier than that, why had her birth mother given her up for adoption? Were they too poor to keep her? How had her family come to settle in Malaysia? My mother was born during the Malayan Emergency. Did the conflict have something to do with why she was given up? Some people say my mother looks as if she may be mixed-race. Was she the result of rape? An encounter with a British soldier who despised the Chinese? Was my mother’s mother affected by negative prenatal hormones; could her own emotional instability be traced to the anxiety of a woman who knew she was carrying a daughter she could not keep? So, so much bitterness. So many knives to carry.
No wonder I carry them, too.
PART IV
CHAPTER 32
The calls kept coming.
It was a year before my diagnosis—the beginning of 2017. Donald Trump had just been inaugurated, which exploded our newsroom at This American Life, and I was constantly running between meetings that were interrupted by people throwing open the conference room door to give us some terrible breaking news brief. In the middle of all this chaos, my father would call.
I told him to text me ahead of time to set up a time to talk, but he never did. He’d call in the morning, unannounced, and I’d have to excuse myself from meetings to pick up. It was the first time my father had ever called me multiple times a week of his own accord. It was because he was going through a hard time.
My dad’s stepkids—the ones he’d raised from toddlers—had grown into rebellious young men who played too many videogames. His wife was dealing with stress at work. It all made him depressed and anxious. He called to tell me what was happening, how sad he was, how lonely he felt, how he didn’t know what to do. I listened and counseled him, urging him to communicate better with his family. Because counseling him was what I had always done. Because his stepchildren deserved a better childhood than I’d had. Because he kept saying he needed me, that I was the only one he could talk to.
During one of his first calls, he told me that he was just now realizing the complexity of loving people. “You have to not just do…you have to be someone they want to be around,” my dad told me in astonishment. “You have to talk to them nicely…you actually have to say…out loud!…how much you care about them.”