Life as the River Flows: Women in the Malayan Anti-Colonial Struggle (review)

This refreshingly straightforward book mostly lets the narrators speak for themselves, but what sociologist Khoo has to say about the process of oral history is also very interesting. Khoo spent five years living amongst and interviewing ex-guerilla fighters in southern Thailand, including the sixteen women featured here.

The term “Malaya” refers to the Malayan peninsula (now the western states of Malaysia) and the island of Singapore. The British began to colonize Malaya in 1786, staying in control until the Japanese occupied the peninsula during World War II. Malayans resisted their Japanese rulers; the British fled. After the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army briefly governed Malaya. The British returned the following year. But the seed had been planted. For some Malayans, the anti-colonial struggle continued against the British. They joined the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM), the only organized anti-imperialist fighting force. After Malaysia gained independence from Britain in 1963, the CPM continued to fight against capitalism.

Khoo’s curiosity about communists began early. In 1965, the year she was born, her father was preparing to participate in an International Labor Day rally with others in his trade union. Government authorities sought to prevent the rally by branding many of these men, including Khoo’s father, communist, and detaining him without a trial. So communists became an important but mysterious part of Khoo’s childhood. In history class, communists were dismissed as terrorists. Their objectives were never explained.

In 1998, Khoo was shocked to learn that Malayan communists were still alive and living in villages in southern Thailand. “I decided to meet them. I wanted to see for myself who they were and to understand firsthand what they were fighting for. I wanted to know what they did for over half a century and why they can’t return home. Today, they are still considered ‘persona non grata’ by the Malaysian and Singaporean governments, even though they are no longer a security threat to either country” (26).

The guerilla war officially ended in 1989, when the CPM signed a peace agreement with the Thai and Malaysian governments. They left the jungle on the Thailand/Malaysia border where they had been living for more than forty years and settled in what were called Peace or Friendship villages in southern Thailand. Most are officially stateless. These villages are where Khoo collected her stories. And here she learned that her childhood history books had been grossly inaccurate: Malaysian independence had not been won without bloodshed.

The first chapter of Life as the River Flows gives the historic context that most readers, including this one, probably lack regarding Malayan communism. This is definitely a sympathetic account, so readers might want to consult the history of Malaysia page on Wikipedia or some other erudite source for a broader historical view. The second chapter is about Khoo’s research process, her methodology, her status as an outsider, the help she received from colleagues, transcription and editing, adventures in translation, surviving nine revisions, and the extra difficulty of simultaneously writing English and Chinese versions of the book. This was Khoo’s first oral history project, and she writes candidly about her challenges.

But the bulk of the book is the words of the women guerilla fighters. Each of the sixteen women has her own chapter that begins with a recent photo, a one-paragraph blurb about her current life, and a few of Khoo’s favorite lines from that interview. Then comes the edited interview. Most are at least ten pages, and some run more than twenty. These have been heavily abridged to fit in the book and arranged within each chapter according to topic. Khoo worked with the women through the editing process to make sure she represented them accurately in the final product. Some chapters also include photos of them as guerilla fighters, standing tall in their jungle gear, holding rifles, looking very...