Emergency Unending

Darren Wan reviews Hai Fan’s “Delicious Hunger,” translated by Jeremy Tiang, as well as Tiang’s own novel, “State of Emergency.”

By Darren WanAugust 18, 2025

• Fiction

• History

HOW DOES A COMMUNIST guerrilla in one of the Cold War’s forgotten battlefields regain his footing at the end of history? In a scene in Hai Fan’s short story collection Delicious Hunger, Xu Kai returns to camp from a family visit. After the signing of a peace agreement just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he and his comrades have been decommissioned, and some of their families have made the trek up to Southern Thailand to visit them for the first time since they became guerrillas. Xu Kai sheds his green uniform and walks around camp in a white sweater with a print of the Singapore skyline, a gift from his family. Chen Nian, another Singaporean guerrilla who longs to but has yet to make contact with his family, studies the skyline on his comrade’s chest, and realizes how unrecognizable the city he had left to enter the rainforest years ago has become. So much has changed; only “the sea is still the sea.”

That several factions of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) going by slightly different names were at war with the Malaysian state until 1989 is a little-known fact. Much public memory, scholarly work, and artistic production on the Cold War in this part of the world focuses on the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), a guerrilla war fought between the armed wing of the MCP on the one hand, and British Commonwealth and Malayan military forces on the other. Emerging from World War II with a reputation for having mounted the only viable resistance to the infamously brutal Japanese army, the MCP had wide appeal. Answering the call for an anti-colonial war, thousands took up arms and entered the rainforest. Their sympathizers were legion and, initially, racially diverse. But increasingly, communism came to be associated exclusively with the Chinese—Malaya’s largest demographic minority—transmuting the Emergency in state-sanctioned narratives into something close to a race war. To further weaken the MCP by cutting it off from its predominantly rural support base, at least 500,000 people were forcibly resettled in “new villages,” a euphemism for the settlements behind checkpoints and barbed wire that the MCP has described as concentration camps. The outcomes of such counterinsurgency tactics were so pleasing to the colonial government that, by 1957, it felt ready to grant Malaya its independence with anti-communist leaders at its helm, even as the state of emergency dragged on. With many guerrillas starting to take up offers of amnesty, the MCP became a spent force. The remaining soldiers were demobilized while most party leaders relocated to Beijing. In 1960, the Malayan government declared the end of the Emergency.

Except it wasn’t the end. Over the next three decades, emergency conditions persisted, a phenomenon dramatized not only in Delicious Hunger, Hai Fan’s 2017 Chinese-language collection translated into English by Jeremy Tiang, but also in Tiang’s own English-language novel State of Emergency that was published that same year. (Tiang notes that the research he conducted for State of Emergency “served as unwitting preparation to translate Hai Fan’s work.”) Both books, which have become available in the United States for the first time this year, paint rich portraits of social worlds forged by the “Second Emergency” (1968–89)—a term often used for the period when the MCP officially relaunched its armed struggle. This time around, apart from high-profile assassinations in the early 1970s, the war was of a smaller scale and not given nearly as much publicity. But for those in the rainforest, it was a continuation of the first war, for which there had been no official surrender. And even for people on the outside, the communist bogeyman left an indelible mark on state-society relations, with state violence and periodic waves of mass detentions justified at least in part by the need to contain communism. In their sensitive rendering of these dynamics, these works make tangible the atmospherics of a state of emergency so stifling that it could not be contained by neat chronologies and solid lines on a map.

Tiang and Hai Fan are writers from Singapore, but the geography of their fiction is capacious. It reflects the spatial imaginaries of mid-20th-century revolutionaries and extends beyond national borders that are of relatively recent vintage. (Singapore was part of Malaysia from Malaysia’s formation in 1963 until 1965. Before the Second World War, Singapore was governed as a British Crown Colony composed of other territories that are today a part of Malaysia.) Extending north from the “southern island”—as Hai Fan’s guerrilla characters are fond of calling Singapore—is Peninsular Malaysia, with its sprawling cities, tin-mining towns, and plantation settlements. These inhabited lowland areas abut a sparsely populated and thickly forested spine of mountains that extends into Southern Thailand. It was in this ancient rainforest that the central drama of the MCP played out. To and from its permanent base located on the Thai side of the border, the guerrillas moved matériel, food, and information along clandestine north-south routes that shifted constantly to avoid their being detected by Malaysian and Thai armed forces. In striving to leave no trace, they behaved, as Tiang observes, as “forest spirits.”

Hai Fan was just one of these forest spirits. Having entered the rainforest in 1976, he spent 13 years as a foot soldier before he and his comrades were decommissioned after the ratification of the Hat Yai Peace Agreement in 1989. Capturing this experience in unaffected prose, his short stories reconstruct life in a society made anew by people who were disenchanted by the one they had left behind. This new world was not always as they had expected. Gunfights occupied intense yet only brief moments; much of the work of soldiering instead “revolved around eating” for sustenance. “We all thought the same way back then: when we go into the rainforest and become guerrillas, we’ll be fuelled by revolutionary fervor. Who cares what we’ll eat or how we’ll get food? How is that even a problem?” Weeks spent roasting cassava and pickling durian go to waste when the food must be left behind after enemy troops chance upon their campsite. Three characters struggle to bring an ensnared wild boar back to camp alive, in the hope that they can collect its fresh blood for a soup to supplement its meat to nourish their starving unit. Soldiers painstakingly pack metal tubs with rations to be buried underground for future consumption, only to dig them up years later and find that black bears—facetiously referred to as “Enemy Number Two”—had gotten there first. Delicious Hunger is a study in exertion in a context where people are repeatedly reminded of the futility of their labor.

This embattled process of making a new society was premised on efforts to keep reminders of its members’ former lives at bay: they adopt new names, are instructed not to discuss their past identities, and are not allowed to leave the rainforest of their own volition. Yet much of the collection turns on the porosity of the border between inside and outside. Delicious Hunger immerses readers in an environment that is always “thrumming with sound and movement,” made possible by Tiang’s evocative translation that mirrors the onomatopoeic language of the original, from the “hoo-wah” of macaques to the “gok gok cries” of hornbills. It is because of such vivid depictions of the here and now of the rainforest that scenes where the outside bleeds in generate moments of whiplash. Water extracted from a woody vine is compared to Coca-Cola. Dreams of meals from the Before Times recur, from the first time eating KFC to the last time having a meal with one’s father. One character’s inability to keep up with her unit leads to gossip that she was once “a pampered girl from a middle-class city family.” Over the course of Delicious Hunger, the outside world starts to impinge on the comrades’ world with greater concreteness. With the exigencies of economic development in late 20th-century Malaysia, the guerrillas begin to move through other kinds of landscapes: palm oil plantations, public roads, and deforested land struggling at regrowth.

The impossibility of hermetically sealing this rainforest society off from its capitalist others implies movement in the opposite direction: a state of emergency meant to contain and eliminate a fringe group rippled out of the rainforest and into the urban mainstream. While parts of Tiang’s novel take place in the rainforest, it also traverses other spaces and times, from a pub in London in 1970 to a public hospital 21st-century Singapore. By tracing the interwoven lives of six characters, State of Emergency shows how even those seemingly distant from the rainforest were caught in the Emergency’s eddies. One of the protagonists, Stella, is a secondary school teacher who volunteers for a welfare program for foreign domestic workers at her Catholic church in Singapore. She is detained without trial for having allegedly participated in a Marxist conspiracy, the precise accusation leveled at those arrested amid Operation Spectrum in 1987. During her confinement, she is visited by the ghost of her aunt who entered the rainforest in the 1960s. “It was her aunt Siew Li, the one she’d never met, arms folded and in school uniform, like she was in the only photo they had of her […] ‘They’re going to break you,’ said Siew Li, and faded into the wall.” Siew Li’s spectral presence is one of the ways that a former, seemingly discrete state of emergency haunts a subsequent one. Another guerrilla, Nam Teck, was born in Batang Kali, where his father—like most of the men of the village—was killed in 1948 under suspicion of supporting the MCP. Meeting Siew Li in his early twenties, Nam Teck ultimately decides to enter his rainforest. Sworn to secrecy, he longs to but is unable to tell his mother about his decision: “How would she feel, her son doing the very thing her husband had been mistakenly killed for? Would this be consolation, or betrayal?” Moving nimbly between these varied moments of an emergency unending, Tiang’s novel is at once synoptic and intimate. “There’s always an emergency somewhere,” he tells us.

One of the novel’s most compelling relationships reveals the impasses faced when bridging the gap across linguistic and social worlds in Singapore. Siew Li is from a working-class Sinophone background, while Jason, her future husband, is English-educated. “Amongst his peers, it was a source of pride not to speak Chinese, a foreign language,” the narrator explains. “English was the future. His friends mocked the Chinese school students, still clinging to the language of the old country.” Both characters are ethnically Chinese, the demographic majority in Singapore. But it is primarily the Chinese-educated Chinese, for whom Siew Li is a synecdoche, who were at the forefront of labor and anti-colonial activism in the 1950s, and hence were assumed to be communist sympathizers at best, and raging communists at worst. These associations persisted through independence from the British in 1963, and Sinophone Singapore felt increasingly besieged by a slew of policies that thinned out their turf, most prominently with the implementation of a single English-medium education system. Counterintuitively, in Malaysia, where the Chinese are a demographic minority, Chinese-medium schools have persisted, but they have regularly faced calls to be shut down. Such contestations over language produced a yawning rift between Sinophone and Anglophone worlds, which in Singapore also manifests as a generational gap with a consistent decline in non-English language proficiency.

It is in this context of segmented reading publics that Tiang, Hai Fan, and many others have been writing. Rare, then, are sensitive portrayals of the fraught relations between these distinct linguistic spheres that encode class like Tiang’s. His work as Hai Fan’s translator from the Chinese to English also bridges this gap, one that has been left unbridged not least because the MCP “trying once more to gain a foothold amongst the English-educated intelligentsia” has been used as a pretext for justifying detentions in the 1970s and 1980s. The publication of State of Emergency’s Chinese translation by Lim Woan Fei and Chen Si’an in 2023 also reflects efforts in the other direction to think across these worlds. Collectively, this growing investment in literary translation is starting to afford distinct reading publics a sense of, in Tiang’s novel’s words, the “so many ways to be human,” even though “most people were certain their way was best.”

Once we think of the state of emergency not simply as a discrete event but as a four-decade-long crucible in which Malaysia’s and Singapore’s identities as sovereign states were forged, the source of paranoid perceptions of what constitutes a security threat comes into sharper focus. Even the Malaysian prime minister’s appeal to anticommunism as recently as 2023 becomes unsurprising. As a legacy of the Cold War in a region where it burned hot, the interminable state of emergency justified the continued application of mechanisms like detention without trial that were so central to the internal security apparatus, but it also engendered psychic continuities that perdure in our present. “A war that’s not a war, that’s stretching on even though it ended,” as Tiang puts it, ultimately necessitates a siege mentality forevermore.