Back cover of Suriani Abdullah's memoirs

This is how the back cover of Suriani Abdullah's forthcoming memoirs, Setengah Abad Perjuangan - Memoir Suriani Abdullah (Kuala Lumpur, SIRD, 2006) looks like. I have already shown you the front cover in an earlier entry.

The black-and-white photograph that appears at the back cover is the famous Miss Eng Ming Ching in 1947, not long after she came out from the torture chamber of the fascists without compromising her idealism and principle and without betraying anyone. She, who was an armed partisan attached to the 5th Independent Regiment of the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army in Perak) against Japanese occupation, was captured by Japanese troops in a gunfight with them in Tanjung Tualang in Perak on 28 January, 1945.

One young British man who met her face-to-face in 1946-1947 in Ipoh is on record as saying Miss Eng Ming Ching had "sex appeal" and "a streak of humour and phases of near charm".

Purcell, a Chinese affairs adviser of the BMA (British Military Administration or, as I was told by my grandmother when I was very young, 'Black Market Administration') , went on to describe her in a then confidential intelligence report with the following words:

" She has quite a good figure beneath her dowdy blue cotton dress, but the fountain pen stuck in her bosom is a sharp reminder that she puts business before allurement.

" Her most remarkable features are her eyes. At one moment they are flat, brown and dull, at the next revealing in blateful flashes the smouldering fires of fanaticism ...


" I had heard much of her oratory and of her decidedly unfair behaviour at the meeting in October 1945 during the rice troubles when she had stood at a platform on the (Ipoh) Padang and had worked up the crowd of 3,000 with inflammatory speeches and by beating time for revolutionary songs by her trained choir for an hour or more before Brigadier Willan's arrival, so that when he came the crowd was in no mood to listen to reason.

" There she sat in front of me, and whilst I detected in the occasional flashes of her eyes the eternal Trioteuse and firebrand of the Revolution, she was surprisingly subdued during the interview ".

Well, let us just wait for one more week to see what Miss Eng Ming Ching has to say in her memoirs some 60 years after the topsy-turvy period of our history and to ascertain how much our minds and those of our loved ones have been rendered one-sided for 60 years by the black-and-white propaganda of the anti-communist fanatics and firebrands of the Reaction.