Reflections of book seizure at JB customs

After the coach started to journey again back to Kuala Lumpur last Friday evening, my mind was highly stimulated by some what-if questions about the 20 copies of Faces of Courage (Singapore, Media Masters, 2006) which had just been seized by customs officers at the Johor Baru checkpoint not too long after I arrived from Singapore where I spent three days for a break:

What if the name of the writer of the essay The Papan Guerrillas and Mrs. K on the cover is rendered as Ong Boon Hua or BH Ong or Ong BH? Would the officers who found it difficult to understand the English contents of the book see it as "sensitive"?

What if the book is published and printed in Mandarin or Tamil or Thai or Hindi or Urdu or Arabic scripts which they do not understand at all?

What if at that time I also carried with me copies of Alias Chin Peng: My Side of History? Would they also seize them on the same ground?

What if at that time I also carried with me Karen Armstrong's A History of God or The Battle for God ? Would they seize only Faces of Courage which is not banned while let go Karen Armstrong's banned book because Karen Armstrong is not as well known as Chin Peng in Malaysia?

What if the books I carried at that time were Hakka Yong Tau Foo recipes written by chef " Chin Peng " which is a very common and gender-neutral name among Chinese people?

What if I register a unisex hair-dressing salon called Salon Gunting Rambut Uniseks Chin Peng? Would the application be accepted by the relevant local authorities ?

Finally, the old joke in 1987 about a "communist" book titled War and Peace written Leon Tolstoy being seized from an academic's house resurfaced in my mind. I hope we have all grown up enough to know that Leon Tolstoy and Leon Trotsky are actually two different persons although both were Russians who shared the same family name "Leon".

My Cantonese-speaking Mat Salleh friend Leon Comber, who met Chin Peng at the Australian National University in 1999 in Canberra and me in September 2005 in Singapore, is, of course, a former British Army and Special Branch officer as well as ex-husband of leftwing writer Han Suyin :)

Lift the ban on thinking
http://www.sun2surf.com/article.cfm?id=14618