"In less than a year, I managed to slip through the net twice. Once when Nan Chiao Jit Poh was raided. The other time was when Freedom News was smashed. On both occasions, 'heaven keeps the good out of harm's way'. I got away without trouble."

Fong Chong Pik, or Fang Chuang Pi or Lee Ping, or "The Plen", as he was variously known, spent his twilight years, post-1989 Peace Accord, contemplating and writing about his life on the flip side of Malayan history. Longing to return home at last but never allowed to, he was acutely aware of how he—and the Left—had been written out, or excoriated, in the official accounts of Singapore's independence struggles.

Raised in Singapore, Fong Chong Pik saw himself as a Malayan, and a patriot, in the footsteps of the brave World War 2 anti-Japanese resistance heroes. In turns humorous, exuberant, savagely bitter, and nostalgic, his memoirs sharply recall the moral and political dilemmas and struggles of growing up in the 1950s. Here are vignettes of risky underground propaganda work; a Kafkaesque arrest and interrogation by the British colonial Special Branch; the difficulties of mass mobilization; exile; and life as a Communist guerrilla in the jungles straddling the border of Malaysia and Thailand. Significantly, he tries to set the record straight about his secret meetings with Lee Kuan Yew. His writing is shot through with his sheer love of life: adventure, schoolboy reminisces, pranks, and a deep affinity with nature.

The vividly told episodes of courage, treachery, honour, and loss here will leave you wanting to know more about the true history of Singapore as part of Malaya, and the men and women who have been forgotten.