Sunday, May 29, 2005

Never seen again

Source: "Lifestyle"-The Star- 29 May 2005

BY PHILIP GOLINGAI

Kuan Chin has some banana money to remind him of the bad old days but no knowledge of what fate befell his father. - Photo by ONG SOON HIN
THE first time Kuan Chin's father was arrested by the Kempetei (Japanese secret police), he was tortured and then released. The second time they took him away, he never returned home.

The story of the disappearance of his father, then a 42-year-old farmer in Kulai, Johor, starts with a wild boar.

“The (anti-Japanese) communist soldiers shot a wild boar and they asked my father to sell it in the (Kulai) market,” relates Kuan Chin, a 67-year-old owner of a traditional Chinese medicine shop in Kluang, Johor.

“He sold the meat at the market and a Chinese, who was collaborating with the Japanese, informed the Kempetei.”

The dreaded Kempetei arrested Kuan Chin's father and brought him to their headquarters. There, he was tortured in the usual Japanese fashion, having water forced down his throat and then his bloated stomach stomped on.

After a few days the farmer was released, to the joy of his family. His relatives and friends visited him to celebrate his freedom. Their joy was short-lived because the Japanese arrested him again, together with his male relatives and friends.

“Probably, the Japanese freed my father because they wanted to catch his friends and relatives,” speculates Kuan Chin, who was then just four years old.

The second time her husband was detained, his mother knew that she would be a widow.

To this day, his family does not know what happened to his father.

“Probably the Japanese must have chopped off his head. That is what the Japanese did, catch people and chop their heads off,” he says.

To understand what could have had happened to Kuan Chin's father, we can get an idea from history books. “In spite of the loudly-advertised might of the Imperial forces,” wrote the late Chin Keen Onn in Malaya Upside Down, “the Japanese had one chronic obsession - the communists”.

The obsession became “a disease which ate into their pride and wounded their vanity.”

“Exactly what sort of people were these communists? What was their actual strength? Where was their headquarters? What were their activities? Why were the Japanese afraid of them? ” Chin wrote.

“Every time a 'communist atrocity' occurred, the unfortunate people in the neighbourhood were immediately cordoned off and subjected to the most harrowing interrogation. Thousand of innocent men and women were lugged in, and hundreds succumbed to injuries and privations.”

Kuan Chin believes that his father's remains are buried in the Air Hitam cemetery in Johor. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the Chinese associations collected the remains of those killed around Johor during the occupation and buried them in a mass grave about 12km from Kluang.

Asked how he felt about never knowing his father's fate, Kuan Chin retorts: “What do you think? Of course, I'm sad. But we couldn't do anything.”

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