Letter to Chin Peng

English

Dear Sir,

How are you?

We are a group of young Singaporeans working in areas of research and the media. We read your autobiography earlier this year and it inspired us to think about our history. We realized we had not given the role of the CMP its due place in history. This part of history has often been avoided or even eliminated. We hope to use this opportunity to share with you some afterthoughts on your book through the course of this letter.

From your book, we reacquainted ourselves with our history of independence and we were shaken by what actually happened. What we thought we knew of our history had been part of the colonial legacy and the necessities of economic development after independence. During this course of history, we had never heard of Chin Peng and Rashid Maidin, or of the struggles of the CMP for our independence today. Your struggles remind us of the spirit lacking in our society today, which is something we hope to rediscover and recover as well.

The past still affects the development of our society today. Therefore, we hope to be able to express this through the medium of a documentary beginning with your appeal to the Penang high court. We hope to use this current incident to make the issues of history relevant to our generation as well as to give it another perspective.

We have chosen to make a documentary to be able to reach out to a mass audience and to make it more accessible to the general public. We hope to be able to share this with everyone and not just the exclusive interested intellectuals. History belongs to everyone.

We hope to be able to meet you in person to further our discussion.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

Wang Eng Eng, Eunice Lau, Ho Choon Hiong, Christopher Len, Chan Keh Mei

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Chinese (PDF version: Letter to Chin Peng (Chinese))

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