When Britain sent Malayan Chinese into exile and sometimes death: taboo-breaking exhibition brings a dark episode to life
It’s a cold war episode many would prefer stay buried: Britain’s ultimatum during the Malayan Emergency to leftist Chinese of jail or deportation. The discovery of a family secret led a Singaporean photojournalist to trace surviving deportees and tell their stories
Revelations about a grandfather who died before she was born stirred photojournalist Sim Chi Yin to delve into her family history and a little-known chapter of the Malayan Emergency: the large-scale deportation of ethnic Chinese by the British just after the second world war.
The Singaporean photojournalist has lived in Beijing since 2007, where she was first the China correspondent of The Straits Times and, since 2011, a freelancer working on socio-political stories.
In between assignments about the treatment of migrant workers, pollution in China, and North Korea (the 2017 Novel Peace Prize commissioned “Fallout”, her exhibition about nuclear weapons currently on show in Oslo), Sim has interviewed, photographed and filmed dozens of surviving deportees now living in southern China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand.
They were all accused of being leftist guerillas or were their supporters during the bloody communist insurgency from 1948-60.
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Sim’s grandfather was Shen Huan Sheng (the mandarin pinyin of his Chinese name), a school principal and editor of the Chinese language Ipoh Daily. His paper published a lot of anti-British editorial and he was arrested at his family’s provision shop in Selama, near the northern Malaysian city of Taiping, and taken to a detention camp in Taiping, in Perak State.