The only thing she knew for sure was that the Party had been the only one fighting back. Later, when she saw photos of the British being taken prisoner, the straggly line of pallid men and women being marched east to Changi, she was struck by how ineffectual they looked, how easily they must have toppled as soon as they were challenged. By contrast, the Ma Gong, the Communists, were stealthy, operating in the cover of the jungle. No one knew how many of them there were, only that they were the one force the enemy still feared. And after the surrender, in the three weeks it took the British to return, they were the ones who kept order. The British stayed for a long time after that, trying to pretend the last few years hadn’t happened, or that they’d been a mistake and this was the natural order reasserting itself. Some people went along with it, but mostly it seemed clear they were on their way out.

That was her childhood understanding, which she saw nothing to challenge as she got older. These were the agreed-upon facts on Kreta Ayer Road, where everyone spoke Chinese in one dialect or another, and the doings of the English elite seemed to come from a great distance away. One or two people they knew were trying to cram their children full of the foreign language, so they could go to the schools with fancy ang moh names and maybe get into the civil service, but that seemed incomprehensible to most right-thinking people—not just because the British surely couldn’t be around much longer, but also who would want to raise kids unable to speak to their parents?

Siew Li’s mother was glad her daughter was young enough that her schooling hadn’t been touched by the war, unlike those in their late teens or as old as twenty only now returning to the classroom. Even better, Siew Li hadn’t been forced to learn Japanese, the occupier’s language. So why would I want her to learn English now, she was fond of saying, wouldn’t that be just the same? She only had a primary school education herself, and was determined that her daughter would do better. She pushed Siew Li to study hard, to come back early and go over her homework instead of playing zero point with the other girls in the alleyway. Even when Siew Li’s books passed the point her mother could understand them, she was happy just to see her daughter staring hard at them, making marks with her pencil.