Silent Army – Chin Kee Onn (1st Edition)

S$86.00

Silent Army – Chin Kee Onn (1st Edition)

S$86.00

Title: Silent Army: A Novel of Guerrilla Warfare in Malaya
Author: Chin Kee Onn
Publisher: Longmans, Green and Company, 1953. Stated First Edition.
Condition: Hardcover, in dust jacket. In very good condition. Dust jacket wrapped with protective cover.

SKU: chin-silentarmy Categories: , , ,

Title: Silent Army: A Novel of Guerrilla Warfare in Malaya
Author: Chin Kee Onn
Publisher: Longmans, Green and Company, 1953. Stated First Edition.
Condition: Hardcover, in dust jacket. In very good condition. Dust jacket wrapped with protective cover. Tears to top edge of dust jacket. Edges tanned, binding tight, text clean.

About the author (from dust jacket):

The author was born in 1908 at Ipoh, the center of Malaya’s rich tin district, and received his education there. His father had come to the country as a pioneer from China in the 1880s, and Chin Kee Onn was one of eight children reared under conditions of hardship and austerity by a widowed mother.

My. Chin began schoolteaching in 1928, and took up a post in Singapore ten years later. As tennis champion of Malaya his sporting services were much in demand, and he was able to visit Batavia and South China for participation in international games.

When the Japanese occupied Malaya the author had a wife and four children to maintain, but he refused to work in what became “Japanese schools,” and tried his hand at all manner of jobs. His experiences, combined with naturally acute powers of observation and deduction, gave him unusual understanding of the Japanese, the guerrillas, and the whole situations.

About the book (from jacket flap):

There are too few novels by Asians in troubled areas telling the Western world about themselves. Silent Army is a swift-paced exciting novel of Malayan warfare and the underground. It tells us what the Malayans have to say and how they think.

Chin Kee Onn, a Malayan Chinese, has drawn on personal experience of life under the Japanese reign of terror to recreate in his characters the dazed reaction of the people. In the very soul of the young Chinese guerrilla whose murdered relatives and search for wife and child take him to dangerous Ipoh and Singapore, one reads the difficulty, for those who have seen their family exterminated, of separating the motive of pure vengeance from the higher, more objective purpose of fighting to regain freedom.