’This haunting series of stories of ingenuity, solidarity, comradeship and futility is an impressive example of history as written by the defeated, but it’s more than that too - an almost hallucinatory dispatch from another world.’ — Owen Hatherley, a writer and the author of Landscapes of Communism and Trans-Europe Express

In the author’s own words, the main aim of Hai Fan’s first collection of writing, “What the Rainforest Told You”, was to “commemorate [my] time in the rainforest, to present stirring sounds and images from back then in tales like those in 1,001 Nights, so people could hear the voice of someone who’d lived through this period of history and was closer to the truth.”

It’s a romantic evocation of the fantastical Arabian Nights fairy tales, and yet the analogy may initially appear to be at odds with the context from which the author’s writing emerges. For thirteen years between 1976 and 1989, Hai Fan (a pen name adopted by Singaporean writer Ang Tiam Huat) served as a soldier of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), carrying out guerrilla warfare in the jungle near the Malaysian-Thai border. In “Delicious Hunger”, a new award-winning collection of short stories, Hai Fan blends elements of socialist tradition with evocative modernist techniques. The result is an almost unreal atmosphere, populated by individuals navigating complex emotions; a rainforest awakens from a slumber, enshrouding the comrades within it in the lush cloak of camaraderie, splintered by bullets and bombs.

Although not explicitly located in a specific time or place, the stories draw from Hai Fan’s experiences of Malaysia’s lesser-known “Second Emergency”: an armed Communist struggle against the post-independence government, lasting from 1968 until a peace agreement in 1989. Seven of the stories were written in the mid-2010s from Singapore, where Hai Fan returned in 1992, and the collection was first published in Chinese in 2017. Independent British publisher Tilted Axis Press, which specializes in publishing innovative works in translation by writers from the global majority, published the English translation in Britain last year, where it became the first book from Singapore to win an English PEN Translates Award. The English translation will be released in North America in June.

“I believe that the biggest, most political choice a translator makes is what we translaten the first place,” the book’s translator Jeremy Tiang tells me. He was immediately moved upon reading the original version of the collection in Chinese. “I don’t think anyone would have come asking me to translate “Delicious Hunger”; the translation happened because I decided it was vital for the book to make it into English, and went knocking on a lot of doors to make that happen.”

Instead of depicting an active battlefield or confrontation, several of the stories in “Delicious Hunger” focus on the “in-between” moments of daily survival in the rainforest. There are certainly instances of the extreme: amputations, sudden ambushes, sucking venom out of snake bites. But Hai Fan balances these heightened events alongside the intimate ordinariness of everyday emotions (falling in love, feelings of jealousy, building friendships), showcasing the sometimes banal nature of living against the backdrop of conflict.

Of particular note is the author’s sensitive representation of women, who not only grieve their fallen comrades and friends but also their own ability to have “normal” lives. In some ways, this reflects the reality: women played key roles at all levels of the MCP, including military strategy and warfare, and sometimes sacrificed the opportunity for motherhood. However, such narratives have remained largely under-explored in both historical accounts and literary representation.

Formal Choice

As Kate McLoughlin, professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, notes in Authoring War, chroniclers of war have favored different forms of writing in relation to different conflicts: from the epic in Ancient Rome to the lyric poem of World War I, the epic novel of World War II, the Vietnam War movie (mostly from an American perspective), and the Iraq War blog. Perhaps the short story or novella is the form of choice for the South East Asian revolutionary then, from “the Generation of ’45” who expressed frustrations with the Indonesian revolution, to Nguyễn Minh Châu, who called for less propaganda and more realism in representations of Vietnamese experiences of war, to Siburapha and Sidaoru’ang, who explored Thailand’s class struggles in their writing.

In “Delicious Hunger”, the short story form serves as a series of vignettes that are not connected to nor contingent on each other, nor particularly concerned with specific political or contextual history. “I wanted my translation to honor Hai Fan’s uncompromising vision, which meant treating the lives and life choices of the Magong comrades as equally valid to anyone else’s, without the need for additional explanation or justification,” says translator Tiang (Magong is a contraction of Malaiya Gongchandang, the Chinese name of the party). “Hai Fan’s stories work on their own terms, whether or not the reader knows their background, and so I chose not to weigh down the text with too much baggage in the form of additional historical material.”

This brings to mind philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant’s argument for the right to opacity in the context of translation: one has the right not to be totally transparent with one’s reader, and particularly if they are reading from and in the West, one has the right not to overexplain or justify.

There is a lack of explanation and embrace of unknowing in both the absence of context and in the translation itself. Chairman Mao, MCP secretary-general Chin Peng and the 1989 Hat Yai Peace Agreement, which brought an end to the insurgency, receive only brief passing mentions with no introduction or explanation. “The Enemy,” “Leader,” and “Quartermaster” are the nouns of characters rather than their names, removing personhood from these presences of authority.

Certain terms and phrases are explained, partially explained, or left in their original language, in a combination of Hai Fan’s specific experiences and Tiang’s subjective, or “vibes-based,” translation of Singaporean and Malaysian literature — incorporating the fluidity, flexibility, and hybridity of languages in the region.

Dislocated Memories

Communist insurgency (although it should be noted that Hai Fan prefers the term “movement”) was a key feature of the Cold War world order in the aftermath of World War II. It was also a site of national liberation struggle, connected globally, with other similar struggles in Vietnam, China, and further afield. It is impossible to read “Delicious Hunger” as separate from this broader context and the individual, personal challenges that arose from it.

In the story “Mysterious Night,” an older leader orders a younger female comrade to “trust and rely on the revolutionary masses.” The fact that the woman is killed in enemy fire in the following scene perhaps signals the fallacy of this ideological messaging. Another story, “In the Line of Work,” takes its title from the refrain repeatedly spoken by one of the characters, Lim Kuan, who readily accepts anything that happens to him in the context of the revolutionary struggle. This includes severe injury to his leg, resulting in amputation, with its calf “like a withered branch stripped of its bark . . . the stump scraped red, raw and bloody.”

Such scenarios reflect the realities of the uncertain and disjointed times that Hai Fan lived through, when the Communist movement was beset by factional infighting. While the author doesn’t directly reference these internal fissures, a sense of frustration and disappointment is palpable within the disorientation and dislocation that several of the collection’s characters experience.

“Hai Fan’s book is sold as fiction, but it is closer to historical fiction, which makes it very fascinating,” says historian Jason Ng, coauthor of“ Narratives From Piyamit: Life Stories at the End of the Revolution”, an oral history of MCP guerrilla experiences during the 1970s. For Ng, this kind of literary work is important in humanizing those who were condemned as enemies of the state. “Books like ’Delicious Hunger’ expose the complexity of this historical memory, and for Malaysian history, it muddies the waters. It serves as recreations of lost memories.”

Complicating official state narratives about communism in Malaysia and Singapore risks controversy. After the launch of “Narratives From Piyamit” in Betong, southern Thailand, last month, Ng and publisher Chong Tong Sin (who also published “What the Rainforest Told You”) were detained and questioned by customs and travel control officers upon their return to Malaysia. More than twenty Chinese-language copies of the book were confiscated; Ng says that they still have not been returned.

This comes two years after two bookstores, including Chong’s Gerakbudaya bookstore, were raided by Malaysia’s Home Ministry. Eight Chinese-language books were confiscated from Gerakbudaya due to alleged “communist elements,” while a Malay translation of a book about Karl Marx was confiscated from another store. A selection of books that relate to communism and socialism are also listed on a publicly searchable database of banned books in Malaysia.

Recalling novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen’s work on just memory (which explores the complicated ways that memories of conflicting or traumatic events are constructed), war, and the ethics of remembrance, visual artist Sim Chi Yin writes of memory art as a way to confront and collaborate with ghosts of the past. “The stories, histories and memories of the local left-wing movements have been silenced or, worse than that, demonized,” Sim writes. “It is these silences and mutings that have now become fertile ground for much of the art-making around the Malayan Emergency.”

It is fitting, then, that an artwork made by Sim forms the cover image for “Delicious Hunger”, showing a prosthetic leg made up of composite components. “I keep feeling as if my leg is still there,” says the character Lim Kuan after his amputation. We can read this phantom, spectral leg — a recurring motif throughout “Delicious Hunger” — as a metaphor for missing elements of Malaysian and Singaporean historical memory of the Communist movement. Delicious Hunger is Hai Fan’s endeavor to recover these sensations and feelings, grounded in the truth of his experiences — inconveniences, messiness, inglorious intimacies and all.

Suyin Haynes is a London-based freelance journalist covering stories at the intersections of identity, culture, and underrepresented communities.