One Day We’ll Understand
The title, One Day We’ll Understand, suggests hope – hope that, in the future, we will find the truth – all of it – and then we’ll understand. But what this dazzling and moving presentation shows us is how hard a task that is. The ‘truth’ depends on the teller and on what is left behind. It is twisted, hidden, erased, covered, lost in dusty archives, and the witnesses who remain are fearful or ashamed... And even then, were all to be revealed, would we understand?
Here, One Day We’ll Understand begins with something puzzling, the rich and sad ironies of which only become clear at the end. We’re looking out from an old, dark, disused railway tunnel. We see luxuriant jungle vegetation in bright sunshine; a group of cheerful tourists chatter and take selfies. They were recommended to come there, as somewhere to come, but we don’t hear why or what they think this tunnel is or was. As we look, the tunnel somehow becomes ominous. What was this tunnel? What is it now? What was it then?
From 1948 until 1960, in what was called the ‘Malayan Emergency’, the largely communist forces of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) fought a nationalist guerrilla war against the Federation of the Malayan Commonwealth – that is, the British, with their usual allies, tag-alongs, and supporters, including Australia. The British aim was to contain Communism, and, of course, to regain control of Malaya’s very lucrative oil and rubber...
The core of the MNLA was those who had resisted the Japanese occupation in WWII, and the major supporters and fighters were the 3.12 million ethnic Chinese, drawn to the struggle by denial of their rights by the colonial powers, and the victory of communist forces in China. The British, et al. threw enormous military might into their struggle against these jungle guerrillas – army, navy and air force. By 1957, there were maybe only a couple of thousand MNLA fighters left. One British measure – along with carpet bombing, burning villages, internment camps, and the use of an early version of Agent Orange - was the deportation of Chinese communists to mainland China. And there, they seemed to disappear...
One of those Chinese deportees was Sim Chi Yin’s grandfather. One Day We’ll Understand is about her search for him. One photograph survives. Any other personal effect was destroyed or hidden by those left behind to avoid recriminations.
Sim Chi Yin is a diminutive figure who moves about the stage at speed and with focussed purpose as she shares with us her patient discoveries of a past before she was born. Her forceful stage presence seems the epitome of energy and determination. She narrates, but this very personal documentary presentation is primarily visual. There are projections of image and text, in English and Chinese text. There are moving images. To take just one that is particularly resonant and touching: a video of an elderly woman trying to remember – and singing what she can remember – of the Internationale. During the Emergency, that stirring song was banned, and it was dangerous to sing it – driven underground until forgotten.
Chi Yin’s struggle to find and understand is emphasised by percussion artist Cheryl Ong. Her drumming evokes – to me – an angry frustration, an emotional counter to Chi Yin’s deliberately restrained, objective detective work.
But perhaps the most intriguing and gripping sequence is when Chi Yin – and no doubt in close collaboration with director Tamara Saulwick – lays sheet after sheet of paper on the stage floor space, in shifting patterns, lifting one sheet to reveal another beneath, and another and another, and projected on each an image uncovered by Chi Yin’s investigations – from archives, from forgotten albums, from the Imperial War Museum in London. The process is the perfect visual metaphor for Chi Yin’s searching and finding. But rich, suggestive and allusive as these images are, we realise that they are not enough, that they do not tell her – and us – more about her elusive grandfather. That is, the grandfather made elusive by history. There is development and a progression in this sequence, but at its climax light does not dim but contracts to the only piece of evidence that remains.
One Day We’ll Understand moves at a rapid pace – at times perhaps so rapid, so rich that we don’t know where to look. But this is an almost overwhelming presentation – an intricate collaboration between writer/photographer and director. Beside Cheryl Ong’s music, there is dramaturgy by Kok Heng Leun, video design and audio engineering by Nick Roux, and lighting design by Andy Lim.
The choreography, so to speak, of movement, speech, images, and of its structured revelations is breathtaking and beautiful in its sadness. And it is a high artistic achievement, a ‘mixed media’ presentation of a largely forgotten history in which Australia is implicated. It deserves to be widely seen. It will fit many venues, and it will be a revelation wherever it is shown.
Michael Brindley
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