SHE NEVER RODE THAT TRISHAW AGAIN
By Sim Chi Yin
Self-published, 2021
There are two curiously juxtaposed narratives in photographer Sim Chi Yin’s . On the one hand, excerpts from Sim’s interviews with her relatives tell of her paternal grandparents’ tragic love story. The political activities of her grandfather, an anti-colonialist and Communist, caught the attention of the British government in postwar Malaya. He chose to stay with his family—despite realizing he was being monitored—until he was detained and forcibly deported to China in 1949. Sim’s late grandmother once lamented: “We kept saying we did not want to be apart, we did not want to be split apart; in the end, we [were] parted forever.” When the news that the Kuomintang had killed Sim’s grandfather during the Chinese Civil War reached the family, it devastated all of them. Sim’s grandmother “fell ill on getting that letter
