When he reveals he’s a professor of history, they’re surprised he doesn’t know more about them, and he has to confess his expertise is more the Hapsburgs. He has done some quick Internet research around the subject, but much of the literature is about the Emergency itself, not the decades after. He was vaguely aware that these men and women were in the jungle all the while he was growing up, but they barely figured in the papers, unless they had one of their occasional skirmishes with the Thai army. Yet from 1948 to 1987, there they were, for forty years. He asks, but none of them were inside all four decades; the ones who joined earlier on have all been martyred by now.

“Martyred?”

“Yes, if they were part of the Ma Gong when they died, we call them martyrs, even if it was from sickness or old age.”

Gaolan particularly wants him to know about the great purge in 1970—when the leadership sent down lists of traitors to be terminated. By this point, they had radio equipment—no need for messages to be smuggled in tubes of toothpaste. “They said that was why there’d been no progress after twenty years of struggle, these traitors,” she says. “But we knew these people, we’d grown up with them. They were just different, maybe livelier or more opinionated than the rest, that’s all. So many of them were strangled or stabbed—they didn’t want to waste bullets on them. Our own people.”

“It was because of the Cultural Revolution,” says a thin-lipped woman who was introduced only as “Ah Chang’s lover”. She shuts her eyes for a moment. “Central always wanted to copy China. They never understood that this country is different. It was a mistake to go into the jungle—that made us irrelevant. We should have been
urban guerrillas.”

Siew Li’s last letter is dated 1974. Suddenly, Henry has a vision of the woman in the photographs—his mother, though he still can’t quite think of her that way—being taken into a little shack, questioned by some uniformed thug with a machete in his hand, and then—

Before he has even thought about it, the picture is on the table—the one he’d been carrying around in his wallet. The best one—the rifle in one hand, her other shading her eyes as she stares proudly into the sunlit day. “Is this— Do you know—” He gestures helplessly.

Gaolan picks it up and stares, and they pass it around. Their eyes are not good, he realises. A couple have glasses, but with the nearest optician a bumpy ride down the hill, most of them probably haven’t bothered. They peer at her so hard he feels strangely protective, and then they are saying a name. Lifeng. A couple are uncertain, after so many years, but Gaolan and others nod, definite. “It’s her, it’s our Lifeng.”

“That’s not her,” he says, warily. Could this all be some sort of mistake? No, they explain, they all changed their names when they went inside.