A booklet for holiday reading

Sick and tired of window shopping or doing nothing in the house during holidays? Why not read a little book to enhance our knowledge on the alternative or critical history of our land and people which the school textbooks do not tell?

Serikandi Suriani Abdullah (Kuala Lumpur, SIRD, 2005) is a little autobiography of a forerunner of our own modern women and labour movements as well as a real fighter for true Merdeka!

Born in January 1924 in Setiawan in Perak as Eng Ming Ching, Makcik Suriani Abdullah studied in Setiawan's Chinese-language Nan Hwa and Ipoh's English-language Methodist Girls' School (MGS). She joined the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) in 1940 at the age of 16 and literally fought the Japanese fascists as an underground armed partisan of the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) in the Kinta Valley.

She was captured in Tanjong Tualang and tortured by the dreaded and accursed Kempeitai in Ipoh but no stick or carrot could change her deep love for this land and the people of all races.

She learnt Bahasa in the late 1940s from Indonesia's independence fighter and first generation of Southeast Asian Marxist, Sutan Jenain.

In 1947, Makcik went to tour Indonesia to express solidarity of the Malayan people with the Indonesian people's revolutionary struggle for independence. She spoke in the Madiun University and also on the air through the Radio Republik Indonesia. Above all, she met Bung Karno at the state commemoration of the second anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Indonesia.

After coming home, she continued to be active in the peaceful as well as armed struggles for true Merdeka!