Miss Lee alias Lee Mui (sister Lee) alias Lee Yok Ching (Moon Quietness) was found sprawled on a jungle path, in uniform, unarmed and starving, by the Security troops in Perak. She said she was on her way out of the jungle to surrender, and immediately proved her worth by giving information, leading to the discovery of two abandoned terrorist camps, the capture of a food supplier, the collective detention of a village, and the shooting of a Branch committee member. Miss Lee gained several hundred dollars in reward for the latter, who, as a high-ranking terrorist, had a price on his head. She bought herself new clothes, and ate well; she was particularly fond of drinking Guinness, which she found nourishing. As she began to fill out, a susceptible young Englishman in the Force bought her a radio and a bicycle. She was thereupon hurriedly removed from Perak and sent to the State farthest from it.

Miss Lee and Ah Mei, living in the S.E.P. quarters, grew restless. The male S.E.P.s who lived there had little to do between adding to their confessions, remembering more details about their lives in the jungle and the people they knew, appearing at trials to give evidence against former comrades, or being planted in prisons and detention camps to break up the cells which were forming; or going to the films in police cars. They drew seventy dollars a month steady from government; they were eating much better than they had ever done. With hands in their pockets, they loitered about a great deal of the time. Not surprisingly, they wooed Ah Mei, and Miss Lee, fairly often.

Ah Mei complained of this to the Chief, and suggested being employed in the household of a police officer. Everyone thought this an excellent idea. Servants were scarce, and fairly inefficient. They were mostly Hainanese, cookies, and amahs whose profession was catering for the white families stationed in Malaya. All immigration of cheap labour from China had stopped, and since the rubber boom the young Chinese girls went tapping rubber for higher wages than domestic service could ever give them. At least three police wives competed, with well dissimulated frenzy, for Ah Mei’s services. Later on, when the rehabilitation camp started turning out young girls decommunized but jobless, the Chinese bourgeois families of the town also started grabbing cheap servants.