Chin Peng

My mum told me the story about Chin Peng when I was still a little kid. She told me about the Baling meeting of Chin Peng, the head of Communist Party Malaya, with our 1st prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman. Though as a kid I did not understand much about politics, but the story just gave me the rough idea of how the two leaders discussed privately in a place where it was supposed to be easy for Chin Peng to flee mysteriously without being caught after the meeting was over. I suppose Chin Peng must have planned his escape route priorhand and his confidence of getting away would be high enough for him to agree on choosing Baling as the venue for the talk. As a kid, I would never be able to guess their topic of discussion and what deal had they evenutally struck. It was a story well told with excitement especially on the part where Chin Peng could penetrate layers of secret police, combing of the jungle by army forces and he just disappeared himself in thin air like magic!


It is difficult to mention who is right or wrong in politics. Is Mahatir correct and Anwar Ibrahim is wrong? Politic is something about idealogy, and because of leaders having this so-called differences in idealogies, the common people suffered. This happened in many parts of the world, the mainland Chinese and the Taiwanese, the East and West Germans, the North and South Koreans etc. Because of the differences, people of the same root and family background were divided by civil wars. Some Chinese solders fled with Mr. Chiang Kai Sek to Taiwan and never had a chance to return to their homeland, they left behind parents, wife and children, brothers and sisters and all their friends and relatives. It was a real tragedy that was caused by simple difference in ideology of the leaders and power struggle of the same kind to wrest control of the land. Many of our grandparents did not live to go back to China to visit their families because of the cut in diplomatic ties with Communist China and also the strict control of Malaysian government to limit Malaysian Chinese to visit Communist mainland China. My mum was lucky when Malaysian government at the later part relaxed the age limit for people above 50 to visit China. In her case, we had to submit letters of correspondence with my aunt in China as proof to the local police station for the vetting, it took months before the permit was finally approved. The she decided to postpone the trip and I went with her to the immigration office in Ipoh to speak with a lady officer on the possible postponement, quoting cold weather as the reason but she refused and insisted that it was a good time to visit China. She went finally and stayed about 2-3 months in Guangzhou. That was the first time she met her sister in China since she was brought to Malaya while she was just 3 years old. The story was that at that time, if someone carried a kid at the back, the ticket was free, so my mum came to Malaya. My aunt, the elder sister had to be left behind to live in the communist regime for years without seeing her mum and sister. She never had a chance to see her own mum before my grandmother died. Until in early 90s, the entire family had eventually migrated to USA.


It is always a sad thing to die in a foreign land! And I would say, never been able to return to your own land or home country is a form of punishment that is so traumatic that would torture a person mentally for the rest of his/her life. In the case of Chin Peng, he is probably now in that predicament, on humanitarian ground, he should be allowed to come home at this old age of 85.

I happened to have coursemate and lecturer who are related to Chin Peng as their uncle, his real name is Ong Boon Hua. The Ong family in Sitiawan consists of very bright and smart people, PHD holder, Consultant and pilot etc.

God bless Malaysia so that we would never have any civil war and any act of terrorism.