Double Preeta

I picked up two magazines today which both contain articles I've written on Preeta Samarasan. And both also have a plenty more great book related stuff to read.

Preeta is cover girl of MPH's Quill magazine (free to cardholders, RM8 to others, at branches of MPH) with a gorgeous portrait photo taken by top New York-based photographer Miriam Berkley who talks about her work and about what makes a great author photo inside.

The piece on Preeta here is an e-mail interview in which I ask her about the starting point of her novel, how far the family in the novel is based on her own (perish the thought!), how doing an MFA helped her and whether writing from outside the country gives her more freedom to write honestly. Do go pick up a copy to find out the answers! Preeta herself writes a very interesting piece - No More Dirty Laundry : In Defence of Fiction.

In other pieces I enjoyed, Chet writes about her "torrid affair with digital books" (!) ; Lydia gives poor, mistreated books a voice; Amir Muhammad (who seems to have the scary ability of getting everywhere these days!) reviews Adibah Amin's Glimpses; Daphne Lee writes about one of my favourite Scottish folk heroes Tam Lin; Yang May Ooi talks about her encounters with British food and Saradha Narayanan talks about hanging up her stethoscope to become an author.

The other magazine is Off the Edge and my piece about Preeta here is a review of Evening is the Whole Day. I am so happy that Jason Tan gave me the space I needed.

There are the usual thought-provoking articles about politics and the arts, and the more literary things include another episode in the life of Kam's Datuk, and the second extract from Kee Thuan Chye's The Swordfish and Then the Concubine, as well as reviews of two recent publications from The Edge Publications, Shape of a Pocket by Jacqueline Anne Surin, and Tipping Points : Viewpoints on the Reasons for and Impact of the March 8 Election Earthquake. Benjamin McKay reviews Shanon Shah's play Air Con.

Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah is the cover boy here, and the subject of a very lengthy interview with Jason. I wonder if he will still be able to mount a challenge for the presidency of UMNO and really hope so.

* (The piece is not online at the moment - but may be later.)

Does Size Really Matter?

MPH celebrates the 10th anniversary of the opening of the first book megastore in the country - the branch in Mid Valley Megamall in Kuala Lumpur, and in Starmag Rouwen Lim finds out all about it.

Says MPH's chief operating officer Donald Key :

Back in 2000, the concept of a mega bookstore was something new. We were not sure how Malaysians would take to this idea but we took a risk and went ahead with it. Right from the beginning, we had contests and events such as storytelling sessions, fashion shows, talks, craft, cooking and hair styling demonstrations. ... This lifestyle concept was an instant hit with the customers. They had not seen anything like it before in bookstores here, and it transformed the entire industry.Today, of course, we are no longer the only player in the industry. But the industry has changed for the better and we are proud to have contributed towards that.

It's interesting how quickly we have got used to the concept of the huge bookshop. I must confess that I seldom visit this branch of MPH because the size of Mega Mall (Mega Hell!) freaks me out, but much prefer the 1 Utama branch.  My favourite huge bookshop, of course, is Kinokuniya, and it's high time I paid it a visit and did some serious damage to my credit card  ...

But I must confess that hugeness for me isn't a selling point - my perfect bookshop would be small and intimate and squidgy and have just the books that I wanted to read. So let me ask you what you think - is bigger necessarily better?

By the way, MPH are celebrating with some tasty offers.

Sellerating Away!

I was very happy to receive my copy of  Clutch, Brake, Sellarator - the compilation of the winning entries for last year's MPH Short Story Competition, for which I was one of the judges. Encountering the stories again reminded me of the morning all those months ago the six of us battled it out over the 20 stories that had been shortlisted for us. And I have to point out that anything I say in this post reflects my own views and not necessarily those of the judging panel as a whole.

There were, you will remember, two grand prize winners.

Tan Twan Eng's  Some Things Will Remain set the bar for the competition very high indeed (as you would expect from a Booker-longlisted author) I loved the control of the piece - not a word is wasted and the story builds and builds to its heart-stopping climax while the peace and beauty of the setting, a lotus-covered lake, contrasts so starkly with the ugliness of the crime. I appreciated too how much is left unsaid, for the reader to bring their own interpretation of events to the story. 

The title story by Ivan Yeo was enjoyed by all the judges for its humour, carefully observed characters (we particularly loved the "not girlfriend"), and strong Malaysian voice. However,  I must confess that I found it a little over-written in places and I personally had a problem with the sudden change of mood at the end which seemed out of keeping with the rest.  But it is a very strong debut piece and I do hope that Ivan keeps writing : control and craft can be learned, but the strong storyteller is there already.

Of the runners-up, the story I thought strongest was Lee Eeleen's The Englishman at Table 19. It is simultaneously a coming-of-age tale, a ghost story, and a comedy exploring the family holiday from hell: it works very well on all these levels.

Pilling Time is a surreal short story by Shih Li Kow which the judges enjoyed very much.  It was very nicely written (and would we expect any less from Shih-Li?)  but I have to say that I preferred her more "rooted-in-the real-world" pieces in Ripples.

The Hunter and the Tigress by Zed Adam Idris is a dark and magical story which captures the smell and feel of the Malaysian rainforest. It's disturbing (I found particularly chilling the scene where the tiger design on the plate begins to move and bites the hand of the man trying to steal it) and it doesn’t give easy answers.  I was interested to see in the notes in the front of the book that this piece had grown from a short short story - because I've told Zed that it feels as if it needs to grow larger still and perhaps become a novella.

Vincent Foo's The Cobra's Mate is set in Sarawak.  I liked that there was plenty of action  and that the writer manages to maintain tension. I was fascinated by the insights into the dayak culture of the time.  


The competition has, I think, been very important in opening up another avenue for local writers, and in encouraging short story writing, and this collection is well worth a read.   I'm looking forward to next year so I can send in an entry myself!

Poised on the E-Brink

Can e-readers ever replace paper books, journals, magazines and other things we love to read?

asks Abby Lu in The Star's Metro section. She interviews a few guys including my own favourite tech geek, Leon Wing, Timothy Tiah of blogland's ad agency Nuffnang and Donald Kee of MPH who shows off the bookshop's e-readers.

The dingdongdingdong debate goes one with most of us not yet too sure how we'll feel about our reading delivered in this way, whether we will be full embracers or techno-luddites, or simply something sensible in-between.  If we're confused then the bookshops and publishers, take my word for it, are even more so.  We're all poised on the brink.

Bookshop Just for Women

So what do you think of this idea - a bookshop especially for women?

Elizabeth Tai writes that MPH Bookstores has introduced Malaysia’s first “women concept” store which is at The Curve :

To begin with, the outlet’s books will be chosen for their appeal to women. There will be everything from women-centric business and management books and autobiographies on prominent female leaders to chick-lit and cookbooks. EspresSOUP is a little corner where you can relax with a cup of coffee and a good book. ... There will also be other products with female appeal, such as wedding stationery, to name just one. Brides-to-be will be glad to know that stationery specialist MOOF will be bringing in its exclusive designs, which will only be available at The Curve outlet.

I think it is a clever marketing strategy, especially as The Curve already has a big branch of Borders and the branch of MPH does need to differentiate itself.

Bookshops also do need to reinvent themselves as destinations which customers associate with a pleasurable experience, if they are to survive especially as we move towards the age of ebooks.

This sounds like a place where women might go to treat themselves and get away from the pressures of the day and that's good and I like the idea of the books club, talks and workshops:  it's bookstore "squidginess", for sure.

But, I do have some reservations.  First, I personally don't like segregation of the sexes. Men need their spaces to relax and hang out too.  

And secondly I don't like the cliched assumptions that women should like certain things whether in terms of decor (usually frilly, flowery pink things) or in the choice of  books.  The concept of women's bookshops is nothing new, but around the globe most have been independents which promoted feminist and/or lesbian thought.

Furthermore, it seems to me that there is an increasing de-emphasis on selling books and a move towards the store becoming a gift shop that also sells books. 

I will go check it out the next time I go shopping at The Curve ... and I hope the EspresSOUP corner serves decent coffee!

Anyway, what's your reaction to this?

More Bookshop Harrassment

One of Amir Muhammad's books has now fallen victim to this plague of bookshop snafflings. 

He received this fax from MPH Distributors telling him that all copies of Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things (Vol 2) were seized from MPH Mahkota Parade, Melaka on Feb 10th.

Amir writes on his blog :

I view this seizure is the latest act of harassment by the authorities against bookshops and publishers.

If, indeed, these people suspect that the book (which has been on sale since December 2008 -- yes, for 14 months-- with no hassle) might "have a negative impact on public tranquility/morals/public safety/relations between the country and foreign nations", why can't they just go through the proper channels by banning the book?

The book has many pictures and very little text; even so, did it really take the authorities 14 months to even suspect that the book committed any or all of those vaguely-stated offences? If so, should we worry about the literacy rate of the members of the police force?

I wonder why the police are being used in this way, too, rather than the Home Ministry's enforcement officers? Wouldn't they be better employed working to reduce some of the crime on the streets?

Leon Roadtests Malaysia's First E-Reader

My favourite tech geek, Leon Wing, was the perfect person to review the first e-reader to be brought into the country. So how does the Hanlin V5, brought in by bookstore MPH, measure up?

MPH hasn’t gone wrong by bringing this one in

he says ... fairly diplomatically, I think.  A little underwhelmed, Leon?

Our Local Oprah Announces a Book Club!

Umapagan Ampikaipakan talks about detective fiction on his BFM89.9 and talks about Shamini Flint's Inspector Singh series, Qio Xiaolong's Inspector Chen novels, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy. All the books are available from MPH and will be in the shops with special stickers on them.

Uma also announces  a new book club - you have a month to read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and I am going to be one of the guests discussing it with Uma.  Now to re-re-read it!

More of Uma's shows are archived here if you want to play catch up, and they are full of great recommendations if you are not sure what to read. (And I must say that I am really happy about the way BFM keep their programmes accessible in this way so that those of us who forget to tune in at the right time can enjoy the talks later.)

Ebook Readers Arrive in Malaysia - Finally!

Last Sunday's Starmag carried the news that MPH will be bringing in stocks of an e-reader - at last! The device in question is called Hanlin, and is produced by China-based Tianjin Jinke Electronics.  (Pictured on the left in the hands of MPH's Rodney Toh.)

It will most probably be followed by models from companies such as Samsung, Toshiba and Asus (and Sony? A rather odd omission from the list.).

Hanlin was chosen, apparently :

... because of its flexibility: it can read a wide range of files, including the new eBook industry standard, Adobe ePub, as well as PDF and text files. ... This means it can download eBooks from different online stores, not just MPH’s.

(This is important to me, since much of what I need to read are unpublished manuscripts which are expensive and time consuming to print off, and impossible to read comfortably on present computer screens.)

MPH plans to sell 200,000 eBooks of current titles in the first half of this year through its online bookstore mphonline.com

One particularly interesting point made in the article is that mphonline is in a great position to promote Malaysian literature overseas. Donald Kee says :

There are a lot of Asian authors that are underrepresented, such as Malaysian, Singapore and Thai authors ... we want to become a platform to showcase these writers to rest of the world.

The device is reviewed in next Sunday's edition, so we'll see how it measures up.

But, one wonders, is it already too late for the eBook reader?  The newly unveiled Apple iPad looks impressive and can do so much more ...

Sarah's City of Stories Workshops

Sorry for not blogging for a few days. Was very caught up in the British Council's City of Stories creative writing workshops, which have been very intensive. For this first week we had Sarah Butler of Urbanwords who ran workshops for us last year too. 

I know those of you who weren't in the workshops are dying to know what went on, so here is a potted version :

We read and discussed three short stories : The Lady with the Dog by Chekhov (a classic, this, and one of the best love stories I've read), The Numbers by Clare Wigfall (my favourite of the three, and you can download it from here), and Popular Mechanics by Raymond Carver (a very powerful short short). How did each of the writers achieve their effects and what could we take away from the stories with us?

We thought about plot and how it differs from story, and we drew a diagram of  the plot in our own short stories.

We looked at the decisions you have to make when you write a short story : Whose story is it?  Who is telling it? What tense do you want to use?  What mood/tone/atmosphere do you want to create?  What is the timescale? What is the change that happens in your story?

We looked at how those decisions applied to a short story we are writing, and we wrote two alternative beginnings to the story to see which one worked best.

We looked at how we build characters. We too one of the characters for a story we are currently working on and filled in a table which asked questions like - What is their favourite item of clothing and why? What's their favourite food? What's their relationship with their parents like? What are their obsessions? What do they usually have in their pockets and handbags? In what ways are they like you?

We drew round out hands and then made notes about our characters hands, and then did the same with our feet and their feet. (And were amazed at what extra detail this threw up.)

The we put our characters in a situation they would never normally be placed in, and looked at what happened to them. (My rather dowdy, self-sacrificing Malay lady got a makeover in a department store and rather enjoyed the experience!).  the we had them lose an item that was of great significance to them.  (The poor woman lost her wedding ring, and wasn't too happy with me.)

We focused on dialogue, and looked at how it has to always further the plot and express character, but how it can also do other things such as set the mood, increase readability. We analysed a brilliant scene of dinner party dialogue from Larry's Party by Carol Shields.

We worked on mood and atmosphere, considered how we create a sense of place, and had one of our characters revisit a place they had known as a child. (My Rosmah went back to the kampong.)

We considered what we look for when we edit our stories, and then looked at a sample of writing, and then at our work with a checklist in hand.

And then we heard extracts from everyone's stories and offered feedback. This was an incredibly useful process, and we learned from hearing everyone talking about the other extracts, as well as from the feedback on our own. On my part, I know where a story I'd abandoned to the desk drawer went wrong and where it needs to be fixed.

And in between all these things we did lots of short writing exercises to get us warmed up and focused.

This week our workshops continue with Ardashir Vakil, and I'm greatly looking forward to that, although getting psyched up for some intensive brainwork!

Quill Online

Quill, published by MPH Bookstores now has a very good website up and running, featuring pieces from the magazine which is available in bookstores.

Robert Raymer (one of the judges) pours balm on the hurt feelings and wounded egos of those who did not make the shortlist to the MPH Short Story Competition in his piece Prove Them Wrong!; Tom Sykes describes A Haphazard Journey Through Java, and there is a very sensible piece (which I could have done with reading some years ago) about how to get your money back from the loved ones you've lent it to, without creating bad feeling.

And ... here's Chan Siew Fun's review of the first e-reader to become available locally (at last!) - the Hanlin V5 E-reader.

The magazine is off to a very good start - congrats to editor May Lee and the team.

MPH's Two-Way Tie and Other Stories

I guess most of you had forgotten all about the MPH-Alliance Short Story Competition. After all, the shortlist was revealed way back in July.

Well, the prize-giving was held on Saturday at Subang Parade, and I guess that everyone was surprised because it was a two-way tie between Booker-longlisted author Tan Twan Eng and complete newcomer, Ivan Yeo Mun Kit.

I was one of the six judges for the competition, and let me tell you that there was plenty of lively debate about all the shortlisted stories - but the panel was completely split over which one should win outright, hence the compromise. The sponsors were kind enough to donate one more top of the range laptop, and the prize-money was shared.


Left to right above : Ivan, Twan Eng's mum - Sally Tan, guest Mano Maniam who gave a very good speech on the importance of stories, Datuk Dr. Abdullah b Abdul Rahman, Director of the MPH Group of Companies, runner-up Shih-Li Kow, Zed Adams father (?), and Lee Eeleen. The other runner up, Vincent Foo Hiap Khian, could not attend the event - he lives in Sarawak and we were told that he is over-70. (So -hurray - it isn't just about young writers making a fiction debut.)

Tan Twan Eng's Some Things Will Remain is a heart-stopping drama in which a woman is forced into murder to keep her child, and its terrible climax contrasts sharply with the traquility and beauty of the setting. It asks important questions too about whether such a killing can ever be justified, and whether a person is ever truly able to make amends.

Ivan Yeo Mun Kit is a writer I am sure we will be hearing much more from in future after this promising start. All the judges loved the humour and the carefully observed detail in this story of a young man learning to drive and juggling the relationship with his “not girlfriend”. Ivan has a strong voice and has a great ear for dialogue. His characters were very well drawn. There was some disagreement among the judges about whether we liked the ending though. (But then disagreement is what makes the whole process interesting!)

I won't say any more here about the other stories beyond that I hope these writers will be encouraged to keep writing. (And I hope that others who didn't make the shortlist won't despair, there were some excellent near-misses, and other writers who show a lot of promise.)


The prize for the Teen category which went to the best story on the theme of Staying and Leaving went to Emily Jong. Again, congrats to all prize winners and I hope we are hearing more about you all soon.

It was nice to reconnect with friends at the event. Below is Shih-Li Kow who came with her son Jack, talking to Lim Soon Heng who was one of the judges of the teen prize. I also enjoyed meeting the members of Electric Minds Project, who put on an entertaining and well-acted sketch for us.


The biggest congrats of the day I think must go to MPH for organising this very much needed competition to give local writers something concrete to aim for, and to Alliance Bank for supporting it. I do hope it returns next year!

I'm in Love With ...

MPH have announced a fun contest for fiction lovers. Tell them about a book you enjoy on YouTube and you stand to win prizes. Find out all about it here.

Learning the Language of the Past

The notebooks excited me because, for all their gaps and mysteries, they recorded, verbatim, conversations around which I could build a story. I’d have to invent the context for the conversations, and I’d have to speculate about the people who spoke the words, and I was uncertain about how appropriate it was to do that. But in the end I felt it was important to try, because this story was one that recorded an aspect of our past—shared between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians—that was hugely important. It records a moment in that shared history where mutual goodwill and generous curiosity created real understanding.

Australian novelist, Kate Grenville (shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize for The Secret River), writes about how the contents of two notebooks brought alive to the friendship between a young lieutenant in a newly formed penal colony at the end of the C18th, and a young aboriginal girl; and how she set about using and this material and fleshing it out with further research. She says:

As a novelist I have latitude to speculate, to add, to omit, to guess and even to invent. But I also have available to me all the richness of the historical record. In a tradition that goes back to Homer and beyond, I’ve taken events that took place in the real world and used them as the basis for a work of imagination.

(You can preview the novel, The Lieutenant on Google Books.)

There are so many more excellent articles for the various editions of Quill magazine posted up on Eric Forbes' blog, so I urge you to go have a read. Quill seems to have evolved over the past couple of years into one of the best literary magazines - anywhere!

Crime Pays for Shamini

... crime fiction is a great prism through which to explore the tensions within modern Asian society because it is inevitably about conflict—and the starting point is, of course, murder. The genre allows for the interaction between people of different social stratas, race and religion to be explored at length. I find the idea of reflecting contemporary Asian society in crime writing exhilarating. From racial and religious divides in Malaysia (Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder), terrorism and social dysfunction in Bali (Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul, due in September 2009), to greed and exploitation in Singapore (Inspector Singh Investigates: A Singapore School of Villainy, due in February 2010), there are the plots for a dozen novels in any Asian country. I certainly hope that more Asian writers will turn to crime fiction writing!

In an essay up on Eric's blog and written for the Singapore Writers Festival version of MPH's Quill magazine, Sharmini Flint asks why there is no real crime writing tradition in Asia ... and why the region actually lends itself to the genre.‘

The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen

Julia of MPH wrote to tell me that author Paul Spencer Sochaczewski will be coming to Malaysia but in this case it is the Sarawakians (usually much neglected as far as literary events are concerned) who are the ones to get lucky and the rest of us who must feel a bit left out! You can catch him at MPH Spring 3-4p.m., on 23rd August.

Sochaczewski's first novel novel Redheads is set in the middle of a Borneo rainforest. On this trip the former Sarawak resident will be launching The Sultan and the Mermaid Queen : Surprising Asian People, Places and Things that Go Bump in the Night. (Here's an interesting piece about the Sultan and the Mermaid that he wrote for The Herald Tribune some time ago, and some of his other articles.) He is also a creative writing coach, and I have to say I feel very sad that I don't have the chance to meet him this time.

BookCrossing Liz

Caving Liz whose intrepid exploits lead her to clamber up topographical features and spelunk down into the bowls of the earth, makes an earthshattering new discovery at I Utama : there's an official BookCrossing zone!

It's located on the ground floor outside Parkson and MPH are sponsoring 50 free books a month. But of course, the whole point of BookCrossing is to release some of your own books, so that readers can enjoy them. Here's more about it on the 1Utama website.

Liz says :

There is a small book case and a lounge area for people to sit and read - although the people I saw there were just using the seats for a rest or to read the newspaper!

It will be very interesting to see how the scheme works out. I've crossed quite a few books in the past but find the person who picks them up doesn't tend to play fair and pass them on, which is a bit disappointing because it's nice to see how far books travel and what happens to them on their journey.



Here's an article about the BookCrossing Zone from The Star.

Outrage and Ouchy Grammar

It's been a day when our minds have been on much more serious things - tragic death (possible murder?) of political aide Teoh Beng Hock, and bombings in Jakarta.

Nevertheless, I had a little outrage left for this reader's letter in The Malay Mail today, asking why Salman Rushdie's books are sold in MPH when :

... they are banned in most Muslim countries.

(Unspecified, of course!!)

The unnamed MPH spokesman gives a very conciliatory answer and passes the buck to distributor Pansing.

If this bloke had wandered into my bookstore, I'd have told him to check in his bigotry and ignorance at the customer service counter. If I were a newspaper editor, I wouldn't have wasted column inches on him.

The fact is Rushdie's books are not banned in Malaysia with the exception of The Satanic Verses (although everyone who wants to read it can easily lay their hands on a copy). There is no earthly reason for them to be.

And the rest of us should stand up firmly against the very suggestion that books should disappear from the shelves.

I'm an extremist? You betcha. But I only read books. I don't plant bombs or throw young men out of windows. (Outrage is better saved for those people.)

As for whether Rushdie's books apart from The Satanic Verses are banned in other countries - I suspect not but I need to dig around to find the actual evidence. And certainly there is a move towards greater tolerance and away from book banning in the UAE [via].

While we're getting angry with things in The Malay Mail, let me ask you (since I feel like playing teacher today) if you can spot the grammar error in this sentence :

A leading light of the abolish English for science and maths campaign has a new book.

The article goes on to talk about how the Higher Education Ministry and the Malaysian National Institute of Translation (MNIT) will hold a road show nationwide to promote A. Samad Said's book, Bisik Warna. The Deputy Higher Education Minister calls it :

...a work of arts (sic) and words from the national laureate on life, organisations, leaders and philosophy ...

The (sic) proving that the journalist who wrote the column can spot someone else's ouchy grammar error, even if they can't see their own.

Congrats to Pak Samad anyway, and it is good to see a book getting so much official support.

Social Networking, the Bookstore, and the Bloggers

I have novelist Yang-May Ooi's latest book* in my hand ... but this time it isn't fiction. With co-writer Silvia Cambié, she has written International Communications Strategy : Developments in Cross-Cultural Cummunications and Social Media and is published by Kogan Page. (Listen to the authors talking about how they came to write the book here.) And I got such a surprise when I came to the chapter called Authenticity and Trust, because one of the case studies ... was about MPH Breakfast Club and how it brought together bloggers and writers and bookstore in an extremely positive way, connecting both online and in the real world. (Here's Tang-May's blog entry about the events she took part in.) I love this description of Eric Forbes :

He is clearly regarded as a local expert of publishing, writing and high-quality literature and has become widely known through his blog. In person he is approachable and unpretentious, reflecting the style and tone of his blog ...

Quite! Also mentioned (ahem!) :

Other literary events, such as 'Readings' run by Sharon Bakar, have also been thriving both on the blogs and in other trendy venues around Kuala Lumpur. Would-be writers encourage each other and enterprising young publishers have been forming new imprints to showcase local short stories and essays. many new writers have added their works to the body of Malaysian writing and a few more have been publsihed overseas. ... The key to success has been strong personal networks ... strengthened by the social media.

It's really good when someone recognises what you are doing, as well as the way that a terrific network of encouragment and support exists in KL now. I wonder where Breakfast Club has got to, though? Now that MPH in BV2 has closed, does it still have a home? (*Thanks a lot Yang-May for the copy.)

Shamsiah Fakeh ... At Last

I was very happy today to finally manage to lay my hands on a copy of Shamsiah Fakeh's memoirs in English! (See here and here for earlier posts about the book.)

Here's the cover blurb :

Shamsiah Fakeh was a leader in the independence movement among a group of Malay women who fought persistently right into the jungles of Malaya. She was the head of Angkatan Wanita Sedar (AWAS), which joined forces with Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (API) as flag bearers in the demand for independence from the British. Her collaboration with Ahmad Boestamam, the API head, stoked the spirits of a substantial number of Malayan youths to take up arms against the colonisers. Shamsiah also joined the 10th Regiment, the Malay wing of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Her life was filled with thorny obstacles.

She got lost a few times in the jungle in pursuit of the armed struggle for independence. Her struggle was regardless of place, whether in the jungle or the international arena. She and her husband Ibrahim were sent to China, Indonesia and Vietnam within a framework of inflaming the spirit of nationalism among the people of Southeast Asia who were still colonised then. Shamsiah sacrificed her life and limb to free Malaya through a path that was hers to choose. After she was expelled from the MCP, she stayed on in China and continued her life there working in a ball-bearing factory. She and her family finally returned to Malaysia on 23 July 1994 after the Peace Accords between the MCP and the Malaysian and Thai governments were signed in Haadyai, Thailand, in 1989. Upon her return home, she lived a moderate life in her old age with her children and grandchildren. She never regretted rising against the British and never regretted going into the jungle to join the Communist Party. She was grateful that her struggle had unsettled the colonisers.

She believed and was confident that the young generation who understood the true history of the country would be able to find their direction.

By the way, I bought it in MPH Bangsar Village 1, the larger Bangsar Village 2 branch having mysteriously disappeared. These are hard times for booksellers.