It is 1948 and the British in Malaya are struggling to put down a Communist uprising and deal with rising nationalism in the colony. Chinese girl Suyin falls in love with a British police officer and is able to see both sides of the war but she sympathizes more with the Communist guerrillas and is critical of the British colonials. A much-loved classic and an important work in ...
It is 1948 and the British in Malaya are struggling to put down a Communist uprising and deal with rising nationalism in the colony. Chinese girl Suyin falls in love with a British police officer and is able to see both sides of the war but she sympathizes more with the Communist guerrillas and is critical of the British colonials. A much-loved classic and an important work in the canon of Singapore literature.
By the hundreds, from Malaya's Chinese schools, boys and girls went to China. From the countries of South East Asia ten thousand had gone back the year before. They felt no hope of career or enterprise in the Southern lands which their fathers' toil had built. Deprived by the accident of their birth and their schooling from equal opportunity, they could not become lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects, or anything but at best a business merchant and at worst a waiter in a coffee shop or a manual labourer. And so they left the lush fair lands once full of promise and accomplishment for their fathers, and sailed for the China which their fathers had fled in the extreme of poverty.
For this - time's somersault, the jocund turn of fate, the wheel gone round - was the present, in this tremen... (查看原文)
They were unattainable now, and it was frightening as it was fascinating. They never spoke to their elders now, the young, but went their own way in unswerving self-possession. Puritans and pure, saints or knights on the new great adventure, the children of the Chinese schools had no small defects, no puny weaknesses, they were neither servile nor placid with the contented souls of the content to serve; but they were dangerous, for the exaltation of saintliness is always dangerous. They had courage and brilliance, they had idealism and honesty: they were the stuff that heroes and pioneers are made of: and what happened to them?'
They could not find jobs, except in business. They could not go to university, because the only university in Malaya catered nearly exclusively for English-speak... (查看原文)
![[英] 韩素音](https://img2.doubanio.com/view/celebrity/m/public/p1354800064.31.jpg)
韩素音 作者
还没人写过短评呢