Searching for Identities: Lau Kek Huat’s Films and Memories of the Malayan Communist Struggle

This paper focuses on two films by the Chinese Malaysian filmmaker Lau Kek Huat—Absent Without Leave (2017) and Boluomi (2019)—and discusses how they scrutinise memories of the Malayan Communist Party’s struggle while confronting the official, state-sanctioned version, which is intertwined with ethnic-based, preferential practices espoused by the ruling regime. Furthermore, these films interrogate ethnic Chinese Malayan identities—including the communists’ identities in particular—by highlighting their pluralism, as torn between Chinese and Malayan nationalism. Through this analysis, I argue that these films also reflect an “authorial intention” to locate and negotiate his diasporic ethnic Chinese identity vis-a-vis Malaysia’s ethnocentric socio-political system. Lau has endeavoured to pluralize the memories of the communist struggle, perpetuating the contestation for the Emergency’s meanings and legacies to enable the emergence of new identities and political subjectivities that challenge the dominant nation-building discourse and ethnic politics of Malaysia.