It was one of the first major events of the cold war in Southeast Asia. The “Malayan Emergency” paralyzed the economy and deepened racial divisions that still exist. Malayan Communists, almost exclusively from the colony’s ethnic Chinese community, waged a violent guerrilla campaign in the hopes of establishing an independent socialist republic. The exhibition, “One Day We’ll Understand,” forms the major part of Sim’s extensive visual art project examining the aftermath of the war between British colonial forces and Communist fighters in Malaysia, which started in 1948 and lasted twelve years.

Seeing these places I knew intimately from childhood, in a gallery thousands of miles from home, I found almost unbearable. This is where I grew up, and where my extended family still lives.

It had at its heart the town of Gerik, in the north of the state of Perak, which runs from the west coast of Malaysia all the way to the country’s northern border with Thailand. Then in a corner of the exhibit’s final room I saw a fragment of a hand-drawn map, enlarged to show an intricate network of hills, dams, and rivers traced out like veins. All the people in the photographs-Chinese Malayan Communists photographed mainly by the British Army in the 1950s-had been either executed or deported. In an image of exhausted war prisoners, I felt I saw my own face staring into the camera in terror and resignation. In some photographs I could almost see my parents, growing up in communities on the edge of the Malaysian jungle. Too many of the faces displayed-whether of eighty-year-olds exiled from their homeland or rural families dressed neatly for studio portraits-resembled those of people I’ve known. Visiting the photographer Sim Chi Yin’s show in Berlin was, for me, an exercise in keeping focus.

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