Recording the Emergency: On the Historical Fiction of Jin Zhimang, Anthony Burgess, and Han Suyin

Abstract:Three novelists have written major works on the Malayan Emergency: Jin Zhimang (The People’s Writer Jin Zhimang’s Selected Anti-British War Novels 人民文學家金枝芒 抗英 戰爭小說選, Anthony Burgess (Time for a Tiger and The Enemy in the Blanket), and Han Suyin (And the Rain My Drink). This article examines how historical fiction engaged with the Emergency. Jin displayed a commitment to a socialist realism, Burgess to a comic mode, while Han assumed a blend of ethnographic detail and metafiction to render the period. All three writers assumed a variety of strategies to capture the political intensity of the period and the multi-ethnicity and multilingualism of Malaya. These works, each written during the Emergency itself, contribute to a multiplicity of ways of engaging with the period from various linguistic vantage points, resisting hegemonic pronouncements surrounding its historical legacy.