Silences in history and nation‐state: Reluctant accounts of the Cold War in Sarawak

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of rural Chinese Hakkas in Sarawak, Malaysia, just like millions of others throughout the Third World during the Cold War, were targeted as communists or communist sympathizers and were detained at correction centers or relocated into barbed wire–controlled villages. However, given such a past, most of these Hakkas remained extremely reluctant to give their representations of this history. As an anthropologist, I wanted to do something with this history that is contrary to the wishes of most of these Chinese Hakkas, and it is within the struggle with this evidential paradox that I attempt to engage social issues of memory intersubjectively, historically, and politically.