Abstract
At the end of Lau Kek Huat’s documentary, Absent Without Leave (2016), the narrator’s father wanders around his childhood home, seemingly lost. His corporeality is emphasized by a series of shuffling steps, as he is unable to pinpoint his exact location. This inability to recognize his home, which is now a plantation, represents a larger issue, concerning the exilic remnants of the rural ethnic Chinese in the Cold-War conflict known as the Malayan Emergency. Specifically, the documentary depicts communist fighters exiled from modern-day Malaysia, showing the impact of the Cold War through their corporeal displacement from the Malayan ecology. The documentary’s shots of the Malayan landscape and jungle are visual depictions of the land, which commemorate the past homes of these documented subjects.
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Notes
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Chang (2011: 254) quotes a United Nations Command announcement about repatriation that was broadcasted in the POW camp:
If your final decision is that you are violently opposed to repatriation, you may undoubtedly be held in custody here on Koje-do for many long months. However, the U.N.C. cannot house and feed you forever. The United Nations Command can make no promises regarding your future. In particular, the U.N.C. cannot and will not guarantee to send you to any certain place. This is a matter which you should consider most carefully … Prisoners of war will move to the interview point when called by the clerks, where they will be asked to express their decisions. They will carry their equipment and clothing with them. Depending upon each individual’s decision, he will remain in his present compound or be moved immediately.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Asia Culture Center for generously supporting my research on the Korean War as part of a residency fellowship from September to November 2019. Parts of this chapter appeared previously in a Korean-language volume entitled <경계지의 중국인: 냉전 시대 서사에서 영토는 어떻게 상상되었는가> (Chinese Borderlands: Imagined Lands in Asian Cold War Narratives) as part of the Cross-over Asia Series by the Asia Culture Center.
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Liew, Z.H. (2023). Ecology as a Cold-War Scale: Lau Kek Huat’s Absent Without Leave and Ha Jin’s War Trash. In: Tan, K.P. (eds) Asia in the Old and New Cold Wars. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7681-0_3
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