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The four Chinese student activists of Yeng Pway Ngon’s Unrest were revolutionaries only for a moment; in the three decades that the novel spans, they struggle with what it means to become ordinary people Guoliang and Weikang grow up in southern Malaysia amid the brutality of the violent post-war struggle by the Malayan Communist Party against British rule On the outskirts of the new villages where the colonial government has sequestered their families, the boys witness British soldiers leaning the bodies of Communist guerrillas against a fence ‘like suckling pigs ready to be roasted’ They attend a Chinese-language school in Singapore, where they learn the principles of revolution along with literacy, and join a radical student group with their classmates, the beautiful Ziqin and her political mentor and lover, Daming When the police attempt to ban leftist student organisations, they march in the streets, chanting ‘Unity is Strength’, even as the police beat them with truncheons and fire tear gas to disperse them, one girl ‘choking so hard as she sang, she sounded like she was weeping’ But in Malaysia and Singapore, the other side wins The last handful of Communist guerillas, isolated and decimated by a successful counterinsurgency, wandered out of the jungle in 1998 In Singapore, the Cambridge-educated lawyer Lee Kwan Yew came into power on the backs of the student movement, and then, once in full control, subjected his former allies to harassment and imprisonment   For Yeng’s characters, life goes on Daming and Ziqin plan to emigrate to the People’s Republic of China, but once in Hong Kong, they get cold feet Daming becomes a philanderer, a capitalist, and a devoted hypocrite ‘Those students were going too far The government had to deal with them,’ he says of the PLA firing on the 1989 student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square Expelled from university, Guoliang struggles to make ends meet in Singapore Weikang is arrested by the secret police, who stamp his identity card with an indelible mark indicating that he is a radical Unable to find employment in Singapore, he emigrates to China, where his foreign roots make him a