Twilight Kids: Once in a Blue Moon
Painting by Tang Yeok Khang
(at the Penang Mutiara Gallery)
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(Continuing Rashid Maidin’ memoirs)
8 The spirit of merdeka
It was bitter-sweet work publishing a newspaper. We had to be thrifty. Luckily, the writers were progressives like us, filled with the spirit of merdeka. They worked with the spirit of struggle and did not expect to be rewarded.
To economise, we bought sheets of paper and did the cutting ourselves. After publication I had to go from bookshop to bookshop to sell the paper, and visited them again to collect the sales money. This job meant that sometimes I had to spend the night in a trade union office instead of renting a hotel room. We were well known to the trade unions who always gave us a warm welcome and a place for the night.
Our tough job brought forth a paper that had an important role as the official organ of the PKMM, arousing the spirit of merdeka among its readers. We were proud and happy that we had some part in giving loyal service to the cause of merdeka for our country.
After the disappearance of Mokhtarudin Lasso, Abdullah CD got completely involved with the work of PKMM. Not long after, he was elected to its leadership. This increased our work load. I was not officially a member of PKMM but I was invited to discussions on many questions. We put all our energies into building up PKMM, especially in the field of propaganda, to unite the Malays along a progressive path and helping coordination between PKM and PKMM.
One of our activities was helping the fight of the Indonesians against the Dutch who were, with the British, suppressing the Indonesian struggle. In Malaya there were Indonesian officers among the Dutch troops here and we tried to get them to be national conscious. There were some who were awakened to the cause of nationalism and refused to oppress their people. We set up an organisation to help the Indonesian revolution which was influenced by Hadi Nor and thus won sympathy for the Indonesia cause among people here.
During the period of peace, I spent all my energies on waking up the people to merdeka. Up to then, merdeka was the call of the left. UMNO, lef by Dto Onn Jaafar, not only rejected merdeka but opposed our movement. They said “You can’t even make a needle, and you want merdeka!”
My family, including my wife Hamidah, supported the struggle. Despite the hardship, she never complained and carried on beautifully with her work as the lady of the house
COMMENT
Botanic Gardens
The erection of those silly arches showed up the transcendental ignorance of the politicians of the true role of the Botanic Gardens. But the slack in the running of the civil service is the real cause of the fall in their real value. As long ago as the year 2005 the Star newspaper reported that Auditor-General had complained that there was no course for training of staff and of the administration not paying attention to botany horticultural and research studies and recommended setting up a research and training unit. It noted that the collection of trees and plants was unsatisfactory. The Gardens should, it said, maintain a complete and systematic inventory system to record growth of plans for research purposes.
FOOD GUIDE
Ah Boon, our food guide, thinks the poh piah at Northam Beach is better than at Song River which is a little too sweet and reports that a new bar koot mee stall (excellent) has come to sell at the same coffee shop as the third generation “Tiger” char koay tiau
