マレーシア研究第 12 号（2023 年）【Special Feature Articles: Chao Foon Magazine and the Chinese Publication Network
in East and Southeast Asia during the Cold War】

A Closer Reading of Chang Fuʼs Outside the Wall:
The First Collection of Poems in the Chao Foon Literary Series
Ng Kee Ong1

Introduction
Following the launch of Chao Foon（《蕉風》）in Singapore in early November 1955,
the Chao Foon Literary Series (蕉風文藝叢書)2 was launched. Its aim was similar to that of
Chao Foon, with an emphasis on getting deeply immersed in society and portraying its
authentic reality. “A Message from the Editor” on the first page of the series wrote:
In Malaya and Singapore, we Chinese descendants comprise half of the population,
and we will be living in harmony with our brethren of Malaya for many years to come.
If we do not understand Malaya, where we were born, where we live and where weare buried, then we will be laughed at! Understanding a people is not just a matter ofreading a few books on history and geography, or reciting a few propaganda texts.
You have to go deep into the heart of society and immerse yourself in real life before
you can find the right answers. The mountains and waters of the wilderness, the little
things in life, can all be clearly revealed to us through the brush of literature and art.
This is perhaps the best way to understand our environment and to live in peace withother peoples.
Chao Foon is a literary publication promoting Malayanisation, and the Chao Foon
literar y series is also focusing on literar y works on Malayanisation. There is no
denying that the literar y scene in Malaya is still a wilderness that has yet to be
cultivated. Let us sow the seeds of fiction, poetr y, prose, essays, fair y tales,12黃琦旺, Department of Chinese Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Southern
University College (南方大學學院).
The Chao Foon literary series was published from 1957 to 1999. Based on my research at the
Malaysian Chinese Literature Centre (馬華文學館), Southern University College, 84 titles
have been published in total. The publication of the Chao Foon literary series was particularly
active between 1960 and 1965; 46 titles were published in these five years, by 25 writers,
concentrating on the novel. In the 1970s, a variety of genres was introduced. The editors of
Chao Foon were ver y active in promoting the new generation of writers, and most of theauthors of the series were important writers in later Malaysian Chinese literature.

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マレーシア研究第 12 号（2023 年）

travelogues, scripts, literar y theories, and literar y works from Asian and Africancountries, all of which are suitable for this fertile field, waiting for them to grow andblossom into a splendid flower of Chinese literature and art of Malaya for everyone toenjoy!
The above declaration is a clear expression of the desire of the series to nurture theseeds of literature and art at a time of national independence in Malaya, and to lend an
artistic perspective to the circumstances and ways of life in this culturally diverse society.
From January to June 1957, the series published six books at the rate of one per month:
Jiang Ling (江陵)ʼs short story From Darkness to Dawn（《從黑夜到天明》）, Ma Moxi (馬摩西)ʼs prose collection Ji Yu Ji 《集愚集》(), Fang Tian (方天)ʼs short story The Whimpering of
the Black Nai River 《爛泥河的嗚咽》(), Xiao Yao Tian (蕭遙天)ʼs prose collection Essays fromthe Windy House 《食風樓隨筆》(), Gu Mei (古梅)ʼs short story Catching the Road 《趕路》(),
and Chang Fu (常夫)ʼs poetr y collection Outside the Wall（《牆外集》）. These earliest
publications became exemplar y works, which delved deep into the hear t of society,representing the stark realities of the times.
In other words, the writers who published in the first phase of the Chao Foon Literary
Series in 1957 and literary journal Chao Foon were not only influential literary figures but
were also involved in the practice of publishing aesthetic content. Among these early
publications in the series, only two were works of poetry: one was The Spark of Life 《生命的(火花》) by Tang Yong (堂勇) 3, and the other was Outside the Wall by Chang Fu. Bothrepresent the aesthetic perceptions of socialism and humanism.
Chang Fuʼs poems are important in the study of Chao Foon in its early years. The
lyricism and full-bodied irony of his poems show that literature or writing was the way inwhich Chao Foon and its contemporaries attempted to truly break free from arrogant andparanoid ethnocentrism. Comparable to what Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) called “passionate
thinking”4, Chang Fuʼs poems can be described as “the hard work of reason attempting to
3

4

70

Tang Yong: formerly known as Xie Rui Huai (谢瑞怀), is of Teochew ancestry and a graduateof Nanyang University (南洋大学). His first book of poems, The Spark of Life, was publishedby Sheng Li Bookstore (胜利书局) in Singapore in June 1957, a ninety-page collection of fifteen
poems and a preface poem. The themes that run through the book include: freedom andequality, a critique of war, a desire for peace but a celebration of suffering and struggle, avision of the world as a whole, and a desire to participate in nation-building on a local level butwith the priority of fighting for the rights and dignity of the Chinese.
Arendt writes: “People accept the legend about Hedger as a way of learning to think. Whatpeople feel is that thinking as a pure activity can become an emotion, without so many rules
and oppressions as other potentials and gifts, and that it is through these that emotionscommand them or overcome them. We have become so accustomed to the opposition between
reason and emotion, spirit, and life, that the idea of thinking with enthusiasm, of merging
thinking and vitality into one, comes as a bit of a surprise to us” (Arendt, 1971: 51)

A Closer Reading of Chang Fuʼs

: The First Collection of Poems in the Chao Foon Literary Seriesfind a path of recognition beyond cynicism and fanaticism” (Wu, 2013: 23).
Through a close reading of Outside the Wall, this paper analyses how the book, an
exemplar y work of Chao Foon, impacted the literar y milieu in Malaya in the run-up to
independence, which was under strong socialist influence, and how it maintained theaesthetic consciousness of pure and enlightened modernist literature.
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows: Chapter I provides an overview of
Chang Fuʼs career. Born in China in 1923, he moved to Singapore in 1947 where he wrote
poems and plays. Chapter II sets the context of the period when Malaya achieved
independence, but was still embedded in the Cold War structure. Chapter III presents somepoems from Outside the Walls to demonstrate the transformation of Chang Fuʼs social
consciousness and the role of intellectuals in the society of the time. In Chapter IV, through aclose reading of “The Wall”, I suggest that the message in the work is that people can get ridof the walls in their minds at will. Through these discussions, I argue that in Malaya on theeve of independence, breaking away from autochthonism to prevent Malaya from becoming
entangled in the Cold War, and that to this end, it was necessar y to work on peopleʼs
perceptions, which required both assertion and aesthetic practice.

I The relationship between Chang Fu and The Chao Foon
Chang Fu, alias Fan Timo (范提摩), was born on 21 March 1923 as Fan Jing (范經) in
Shaowu County (邵武縣), Fujian Province, China. He graduated from Shaowu High School
and Xiehe University (協和大學) in Fujian Province in 1946. He began writing in 1943 and his
early works were published in the Minbei Daily 《閩北日報》() in China. In 1947, he moved toSingapore and often published his works in Chao Foon and New Poetry Monthly 《新詩月刊》().
In 1957, he was one of the most diligent contributors to the semi-monthly Chao Foon. In thesame year, Chao Foon organised eight round-table talk (座談會) on literature and Chang Fu
attended each of them as Fan Timo, of fering his views on poetr y, novel, drama, andreportage. He was engaged with education for a long time, teaching at the Nanyang Girls”
High School (南洋女中) and Catholic High School (公教中學) as well as teacher training
schools such as the Teacher Training College (師訓學院) and Institute of Education (教育學院), as lecturer and Head of the Chinese Department, and later, a lecturer at the National
Institute of Education, Singapore (新加坡教育學院). He was an enthusiastic theatre director,
having directed such famous plays as The Wilderness (《原野》), The Peking Man (《北京人》),
Wang Zhaojun 《王昭君》() and Awakening 《醒悟》(). (Ma, 1984: 264)。
Yao Tuo wrote in Traces of Bygone Days 《雪泥鴻爪》():
Shen Qing (申青) initially founded the Chao Foon Publication with writers who had
71マレーシア研究第 12 号（2023 年）

already been resident in Singapore and Malaya for several years, including Li Rulin(李汝琳, alias Li Hong Ben, 李宏賁), Chen Zhen Ya (陳振亞, alias 白蒂 Bai Ti and 江陵, Jiang Ling), Fan Jing (范經, alias Chang Fu, 常 夫 ), Ma Moxi (formerly Ma Jun
Wu, 馬俊武) and Zeng Tie Chen (曾鐵枕), who together formed the editorial board as
non-members, including Fang Tian (Yao, 2005: 570).
The British colonial anti-communist policy led to the return of the “expatriate” writers
who had been supporting the literary tradition at the time and attracted non-left- or rightleaning literary figures from Hong Kong to the South. In November 1955, Shen Qing andFang Tian of the Hong Kongʼs Union Press (友聯機構), together with the southern cultural
figures Ma Moxi, Fan Jing, Li Rulin and Chen Zhenya, began a five-year campaign to“Malayanise” the literature of Chao Foon and demonstrated their political stance and culturalawareness (Wen, 1965; Ng, 2022) .
It can be seen that Chang Fu, together with Shen Qing and Fang Tian, as members of
the first editorial board of the Chao Foon Publication, under the consensus of“Malayanisation” and “pure literature and art”, responded to the crisis caused by the overly
subjective leftist ideology that pervaded all literary fields during the decolonisation period in
Malaya. At the same time, they also attempted to separate “Malayanisation” and “pureliterature and art” from ideas that were overly politicised or exploited racial divisions.
Around 1958-59, the Chao Foon Publication was relocated to Kuala Lumpur, and fromissue 78 onwards, the editorial team was revised to include Yao Tuo, Huang Sicheng ( 黃思騁 ) and later Huang Ya ( 黃涯 ). Under the new editorial team, Chao Foon not too eager inemphasize its political stance and cultural awareness, but transformed it into a “giant regional
literary journal of Southeast Asia”.
Under these circumstances, Chang Fu published his works in Chao Foon, among
which were his masterpieces. The following table summarises his works published in Chao
Foon from 1955 to 1957, when he was involved with the Chao Foon Press.
Table 1. List of Chang Fuʼs work, from 1955 to 1957
Year. Month Issue Modern Poetry

1955.124 One Faculty
一教員

1956.820 I should learn from you
我該向你學習72

Literary Theory

Talk sessions (speaking
under the pseudonym
Fan Timo, 范提摩 )Talking about Chinese
Literature and Arts in
Malaya
漫談馬華文藝A Closer Reading of Chang Fuʼs

: The First Collection of Poems in the Chao Foon Literary Series

1956.922 Written on the night ofthe moon寫在月亮的晚上

Talking about Chinese
Literature and Arts in
Malaya again
再談馬華文藝

1956.1024

Love and Pornography
愛情與色情1956.1125

1956.1126 The Blind school
worker (servant)
盲校工1957.1227 Suspension
懸思Current Issues in
Chinese School Drama
當前華校戲劇問題

1957.129 Heart
心Prospects for the
Chinese Literary Scene
in Malaya in 1957
一九五七年馬華文壇的展望

1957.1

30 You said你説

1957.231 Racecourse Horse
馬場馬1957.232 Death
死1957.333 For
給The Creation of Poetry
詩的創作問題1957.435 Wall墻On Newspaper
Literature
談報告文學

1957.4

36

Themes and charactersof the script
劇本的主題與人物

1957.6

39

Xu Zhi Mo, the greatpoet of the Crescent
School
新月派大詩人徐志摩

On Drama Criticism
談戲劇批評

On the Problems of
Fiction Writing
論小説創作的問題* Grey cells indicate periods when Chang Fu frequently published his work.

Chang Fuʼs poetry has been described as distinctive and far superior to that of his
predecessors; “…reading his poems is like a challenge to the mind, a natural occurrence of73

マレーシア研究第 12 号（2023 年）

noble love and far-reaching ideals, and a search for the meaning of life” (Ma, 1984: 264). Fiveof Chang Fuʼs new poems, “Racecourse Horse”, “The Road” 《( 路》), “Iʼm Running in the
Wilderness of Malaysia” 《( 我在馬來西亞的原野奔馳》), “Lake Taiping” 《( 太平湖》), and“Fifteen Years” 《( 十五年》) are included in the Encyclopaedia of Singaporean and Malayan
Chinese-language Literature, Collection 6: Poetry, compiled by Zhou Can (周粲) (1971).
According to Chang Fu, he was writing only for fifteen years but wrote no more than thirty
poems, including twelve old works he wrote in his hometown, Shaowu, Fujian.
Ⅱ An Overview of Malaya in the 1950s: Contextualising Chang Fuʼs Writing
Chang Fu moved to Singapore in 1947 after World War II. He was actively writing
during the 1950s, when Malaya and other Southeast Asian countries were fighting forindependence from their colonial masters. It can also be described as the first decade afterWorld War II, when intellectuals were passionate about independence of Malaya and thefounding of a state in Malaya. In terms of the world landscape, it was the Cold War period
when the leftist and right winger were in conflict with each other, and the Third World, which
had just gained independence from its colonies, was getting entangled in the Cold War
structure. Southeast Asian countries were compelled to encounter the new postcolonial
geopolitics5.
The currents of thought during this period flowed around the Cold War andmodernism. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) described post-World War I thought as ruins – theaesthetics of disillusionment. He urges the metaphorical angel of history to leave what it hasgazed at and rise from the ashes, lamenting what the “progress” experienced by scholars at
the end of the century meant at that time. The work he cites as an example is the poem
“Gruss vom Angelus” by the Jewish scholar Gerhard Scholem (1897-1982): “My wing isready for flight, / I would like to turn back. / If I stayed timeless time, / I”d still have littleluck”. Another example is the artwork “Angelus Novus” by German painter Paul Klee (18791940). Benjamin analysed this work as follows:
It [Angelus Novus] shows an angel who seems about to move away from something
he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how
the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of
events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps pilingwreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken
574This refers to realpolitik: the formation of the Association of South East Asia (ASA) in late July
1961 and the anti-communist Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in early August
1967, which were both paved over in the 1950s.

A Closer Reading of Chang Fuʼs

: The First Collection of Poems in the Chao Foon Literary Series

the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from
Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer
close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back isturned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we callprogress is this storm (Benjamin, 1969: 257-258).
People involved with the Chao Foon Publication were in the “historical ruins” of the
post-World War II reorganisation of the world landscape. Literary intellectuals were facing
the storm of progress, realising that the rationality of historical geography and naturalscience may still need the vision of literar y aesthetics to moderate the modernisation
process. If one understands the idea of the Malayanisation of Chao Foon from 1955-57 and its
expansion into a regional mega literary journal of Southeast Asia in 1958-59 in this light, one
might say that what they had to face was not the external wings of distorted flesh andhumanity, but the challenge of balancing inner emotions (including thoughts, memories, andidentity) in the midst of the storm.
Through the experiences of Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) in Southeast Asia̶theauthor of Imagined Communities

let us try to understand the inner thoughts of Chao Foon

intellectuals during the age of ruins and storms. Anderson believed that the duty at the time
was to historicise and relativise ethnic identity. In other words, he recognised that the core of
the problem of ethnicity and nationalism was not “fact and fiction” but recognition andunderstanding. All national identities are products of histor y. Only by objectively
understanding the historical processes and mechanisms of the formation of each unique
national identity (including the identity of the self and that of “the other”), can we break awayfrom arrogant and paranoid ethnocentrism and pave the way for peaceful coexistence
between different imagined communities (Wu, 2013: 22).
Literature, or writing, is the way in which Chao Foon and its generation have tried tobreak free from the ethnocentrism of arrogance and bigotry. The greatest effort must be
made to strike a balance between emotion and reason, compassion and caution, and action
and knowledge. No matter how intensely the capacity of reason is challenged in the nihilismof “anything goes, no matter how reason is the last resort of the humble, capricious, andpassionate man, reason cannot lose emotion. Just as Arendtʼs” passionate thinking” quoted in
the previous section attempted to find a path to identity through the struggle of reason
beyond cynicism and fanaticism, so too did Chao Foon, through its emphasis on entering theinner layers of society and immersing itself in the reality of the stormy waters of the left andright conflict.

75

マレーシア研究第 12 号（2023 年）

Ⅲ Stylistic Expression of Chang Fuʼs Outside the Wall
Despite Zhouʼs (1971) inclusion of five of Chang Fuʼs poems in the encyclopaedia,
there is no commentary on these five poems in the preface. The earliest and only relatively
complete review of Outside the Wall is a review by Du Ming (杜明) 6 in Issue 47 of Chao Foon
in October 1957. Du Ming identified two distinctive features in Chang Fuʼs poetry:
The reflection of Chang Fuʼs writing style is from his personal relationship between
friends and family to the actual living in various strata of society, from the expressionof purely personal emotions to the exposure and satire of the ugly side of society.
The master y of the writing technique and the sophisticated vocabular y areparticularly valuable (Du, 1957: 12).
These two lines are quite apt in stating that Chang Fu is good at using lyrical but
powerful forms, and that his emotions penetrate into the inner layers of society and immerse
him in real life, infecting the reader with the inner meaning of the life he touches, to produce
the effect of expressing inner feelings and generating an allegorical effect, these are ofcourse derived from the refinement of its writing skills and rhetoric.
1. The Opportunity for Chang Fu to Devote Himself to Literary and Artistic Creation
In his postscript of Outside the Wall, Chang Fu writes:
During my secondary school years, I was fond of literature and poetry, and I wanted
to develop my career in this field, but things did not go as I wished. I studied
agriculture at university. After coming to Malaya, I made a career out of writing, but
the deadlines gave me no time to catch my breath. The hot and humid climate mademe too lazy to write. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would remember
forgotten interests in my dreams, which made me a little sad, but I decided to let it be.
Last year, Ru Lin (汝琳) published Rebirth 《再生集》(), which aroused my interest in
writing poetry, so I had the courage to ask him for advice on the poems I had written,
and he gave me a lot of guidance and encouragement. He encouraged me at first to
write more, and then suggested that my poems be published in June this year as away to reprimand me so that I would not be lazy again. ...... (Chang, 1957: 119)676

Du Ming is a young writer from Sarawak, East Malaysia. He writes short stories and essays,
and in 1986 he published a novel entitled Love in the Batang Lupar 《魯巴河之戀》().

A Closer Reading of Chang Fuʼs

: The First Collection of Poems in the Chao Foon Literary Series

In September 1962, he published another collection of poems, A Handful of Earth 《一把土》(),
which summarised the majority of the poems that had been included in Outside the Wall andsubsequent poems, as a summary of fifteen years. In the postscript, he wrote:
On October 12, 1947, I first set foot in this land of coconut winds and banana rains,
where summer is always in full swing, and in the blink of an eye, fifteen years is
passing, as fast as a shooting star breaking through the dark sky!
Fifteen years is not a short time, but the number of poems I have written is only
twenty something. The hot weather and the busy schedule are certainly obstacles tocreativity, but I cannot help but blame myself for my laziness. Looking back on thefifteen years that have passed, I feel sad and ashamed. ...... (Chang, 1962: 123)
As a fellow of the Chao Foon Publication, he agrees with its philosophy and literary
strategy; however, as a poet himself, Chang Fu repeatedly emphasises his laziness anddistress owing to the hot and humid weather. This is almost the cry of his poetic heart, asense of powerlessness in the face of the aesthetics of ruin and disillusionment for a shorttime “as fast as shooting star breaking through the dark sky”. These twenty or so poems are
the result of fifteen years of “angel wingsʼstruggling against the ʻstorms of heaven”.
2. Closer Reading of
Outside the Wall is divided into three parts. The first part consists of seven pieces, andthe second comprises five pieces, all of which were written between 1940 and 1945. The
second part is devoted to anti-war themes. The third part includes ten new pieces publishedin Chao Foon in 1957.

77

マレーシア研究第 12 号（2023 年）

Table 2 The component parts of Outside the WallFirst Part (1941-1945)

Second Part (1940-1945)

Third Part (1957)

1

Send 寄Mourn 悼A teacher 一敎員

2

In Dreams 夢中

Written on a moonlit night寫在月明的晚上

The Red Headscarf Woman
紅頭巾的女工3

Autumnal Thirst
秋天的渴念

Sending new warriors
送新戰士

I should learn from you
我該向你學習4

The Quiet Green House靜靜的綠屋

Before you leave school
離校之前

The blind school worker
盲校工5

Suspension
懸思

A night of revelry
狂歡之夜

Heart
心

6

Dusk - A River of Melancholy黃昏̶一道憂鬱的河You said你說

7Star 星Racecourse Horse
馬場馬

8

Death 死

9

To 給

10

Wall 墻

Du Ming points out that the first poem in the first part of Outside the Wall, ʻsend”, and thesecond last poem in the third part, “To”, are two contrasting poems. The former poem,
written in 1941, is set as a letter from a young student to a beloved teacher; the latter is a newpiece written in 1957 and is set as a letter from a teacher to his/her students.
These two pieces reflect the authorʼs transition from his student years to his middleaged years as a teacher. In 1945, the author was a confident, vigorous student withhigh ideals and was very pure and frank towards his favourite teacher. Although hefeels emptiness and disappointment in real life, and knows that his youth will neverreturn like a stream down a hill, he is determined to become a useful person, and tells
his teacher: “I know that the past is gone, / and that the future can be pursued, /facing the raging winds, / I will press on, / and in pursuit of a brighter ideal, / I will
never be discouraged”.
… In his 120-line poem “To”, the author speaks from the heart, of his nine years ofteaching, which he has never expressed before. … During these nine long years, heand his young students have been together, working diligently, fearing that they might
become delinquent in their studies, and devoutly leading them to “climb theintellectual cliff”. …
“Your joy is my joy, / Your pain is my pain, / For you I”ll stop having fun, / I readtasteless and lifeless reference books for you / I want to be the dirt, / laid out in front78

A Closer Reading of Chang Fuʼs

: The First Collection of Poems in the Chao Foon Literary Seriesof you / I want to be the road, / leading you to the shining goal, / I want to be an oil
lamp, / in darkness, / shining a faint light for you. (Du, 1957: 12).
If one reads ʻsend”, written to a beloved teacher, multiple times, one realises that itmatches with what Benjaminʼs new angel implied. The phrase “I know that the past is gone, /and that the future can be pursued, / facing the raging winds”, in ʻsend”, we find a firm will
not to falter, recognising that the future is in the storm. This is in line with what Benjamincalls “a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong thatthe angel can no longer close them”. This phrase is also in line with the passage from “Gruss
vom Angelus”, which wrote “My wing is ready for flight, / I would like to turn back. / If I
stayed timeless time, / I”d still have little luck”. Chang Fu was clearly aware that he wasleading his students “over the cliff of intelligence” and that he was “an oil lamp, / in darkness,/ shining a faint light” for them.
3. Satire: “I Should Learn from You”
The impor tant works among the poems in Outside the Wall are the ten poems
published in 1957, compiled in the third part. These poems are both, representative of Chang
Fuʼs work and among the best contemporary poems of the late 1950s; in particular, Du Ming
highlights the satirical style of this series of poems:“I Should Learn from You” is a profound satire on the two-faced people of high social
status. The author unmasks them in the briefest of phrases, and hits them like a
dagger in the heart; People who denounce porn culture but secretly watch strip
theatre, education experts who make money out of education, and the heroes of ourtime who are good at flattering them. You people should read “I should Learn from
You” !
“Racecourse Horseʼsympathises with the horse in the racecourse that has become amoney-making tool of humanity, revealing the ugly side of the “kingʼs game” andreflecting human cruelty. “What happens when you slip and fall? The bullet pierced
the skull. That is your masterʼs reward for your lifetime hard work!”. What piece ofwork strikes a manʼs heart? (Du, 1957: 13).
“I Should Learn from You” is a 47 -line poem about the heroes of our time in aparadoxical rhetoric. “You” are the defenders of the old morality who watch strips, the devout
Christians who sack sick workers, the corruption crackdown officers who accept gifts, theopportunistic education experts, those who seek fairness, freedom and democracy but get79

マレーシア研究第 12 号（2023 年）

on with the momentum of the moment, the scumbags who behave based on better bend thanbreak spirit. A distortion of humanity in the turbulent world of survival of the fittest pervades
the entire poem. When you start reading it, you feel angry, but when you read the last twolines, “In short, you are wonderful, I want to learn from you”, you feel an irresistible sadness
and shame. It is truly like a dagger in the heart.
The 83-line poem “Racecourse Horse” has “you” as the protagonist. The narrator isdeeply critical of horses. Horses should be running in the wilderness or ser ving theircountr y on the battlefield, but the horse on the racecourse circles the track without
understanding why, stimulating gambling and greed and causing corruption in the humanmind. It is an absurdity that if the horse steps out of line, “a bullet will pierce your skull”. The
whole poem is a metaphor for the alienation of modern society. The first half of the poem has
a consistent tone of blame, while the last part, about a bullet piercing skull, is what Ardent
calls a “passionate thought” that combines thought and vitality. Readers learn from their own
experience that if you step out of line, you will be pierced by a bullet, that is true to everyone
in modern society. The poetic language is explosive, penetrating into our everyday lives andenlightening the reader to wake up from a dream.
In these two poems, for example, one can indeed feel Chang Fuʼs shift from theromantic lyricism of the Crescent School of the 1920s (中國二十年代新月派) to thehumanism of the Nine Leaves School modern poetry in the 1940s ( 四十年代九葉派的現代
詩的人文主義 ), with his rhetorical approach being mainly narrative and descriptive. This isvery much in line with Chao Foon s philosophy of “reaching out to the inner layers of society
and immersing oneself in real life”.
In addition, Chang Fuʼs poems demonstrate the wisdom of life and illuminate
stereotypes or narrow-minded perspectives, and Du Ming holds these philosophical poemsin high esteem:“Death is an / unpredictable myster y, / mysterious, cold, / but just”. This is theauthorʼs view of death, which is often perceived as an inscrutable mystery, mysterious
and cold, but to understand how just it is, one must first have a transcendent conceptof life. The author is not an expert the thought of Laozhuang (老莊), but his religious
beliefs have made him realize the justice of death. The death of the poor is apermanent rest and liberation, while the death of the rich is the end of sins; deathcomes from natural disasters, war, epidemics, chance or light life, and cannot be
avoided, intimidated, bribed or pleaded for, for it is an extremely just judgment on
mankind. (Du, 1957: 13)80

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There is also a 106-line poem, “You Said”, which describes and laments the situationof the humiliated and despised at the bottom of society. The ugliness, cruelty and misery of
the real world are all there for us to see: the elderly are trampled on by their young bosses,
young girls are willing to sell themselves for money, hard labourers are treated like dogs andpigs, the prostitutes who have lost their youth have to pretend to be little girls, and the poor
trishaw drivers, unlicensed hawkers and shoe-shine boys etc., whose miserable lives touch
the readerʼs conscience. By writing about the lives of the lower strata of society in his poems,
Chang Fu encourages people to think about their life and inspires them to face life with
passion.

Ⅳ “Wall”: Chang Fuʼs most meaningful masterpiece of the time
In his review of the 1957 volume, Du Ming comments on the 100-line poem “The Wall”
as follows:[“The Wall”] is a poem of the highest quality in terms of consciousness, subject
matter, creative technique, and from any point of view. The vocabulary is well-honed,
the voice is strong and power ful, the mood is power ful and majestic, and it isparticularly rare to find a poem that is deeply observed and correctly themed. In thefirst twenty-five lines, the author makes the existence of the wall very clear in very
simple lines: The wall divides the world into many small circles; walls block vision,
obstruct paths, separate bodies and prevent people from communicating with eachother; it abandons the poor child, it rejects the worker, it imprisons the cowardly, it
encloses the poor; it is a man-made and irrational social system (Du, 1957: 13).
The main theme of “Wall” is clear: a hundred lines of poetry contrasting the insideand outside worlds divided by a wall, ostensibly the wall of exter nal reality, andmetaphorically the two poles of human good and evil forming the inside and outside of thehuman world/hell:
Inside the wall: / there is the feast of luxury, / the shamelessness of debauchery, /the madness of throwing a thousand dollars. / Outside the wall: / the wails of hunger,/ the groans of sickness, / the cries of those struggling for life and death.
Behind the wall: / The selfish man, / Weaving beautiful dreams for himself, / The
treacherous man, / Carrying out his plots. / Outside the wall: / The mass of people, /working for the happiness of the masses, / the labouring man / sweating for thebuilding of society. / Walls block the sunlight, / and casts a great shadow on the81マレーシア研究第 12 号（2023 年）

ground; / Walls will shelter sin, / so that the evil-doer may do what he pleases, / And
yet there are more / And more terrible walls in the world, / Which exist between
husband and wife, / Between father and son, / Between brothers, / Between friends.
As Du Ming points out: inside the walls of an irrational social system are two different
worlds - inside the walls are the shameless, treacherous and selfish; outside the walls are theblood and sweat of countless people struggling to live and die (杜, 1957:13). The shadows ofevil people in the shadows of the wall are reflected in sunlight and emerge, and the wall andpeople become one. It is manʼs selfish and greedy desires that build the terrible wall. A world
with many walls is the result of peopleʼs narrow minds. Chang Fu firmly believes that if one
can break their own narrow-mindedness, one can break down walls. As Du Ming wrote withhonesty and sincerity, man-made walls will cease to exist in this world.

Conclusion
In the 1950s, Chinese literature in Malaya was at a critical point in its post-World War
II transformation: the colonial government declared an emergency in June 1948, and the anticommunist policy led to the repatriation of large numbers of literati engaged in Chinese
literature in Malaya, and a number of others moved back to China driven by their own
decision to return to China. More importantly, the gradual separation of Southeast Asian
countries from their colonial masters and the new atmosphere of nation building inspired
intellectual enthusiasm. It was at this time that Chang Fu moved south to Singapore, alreadywriting poetry, and became actively involved in the literary strategies and aesthetic ideas that
the Chao Foon Press gave to the Chinese community in Malaya. As a poet in his own right,
he also practiced his own aesthetic style, demonstrating a poetic language that penetrated
deeper into society, folklore, and humanity in response to the strong socialist consciousnessof the decade after World War II.
Chang Fu concentrated his work in the period of the ʻstorm” just before Malayaʼs
independence and the height of the Cold War, depicting the sense of powerlessness in thesetimes of change, but hoping that his work would be a light in the ʻstorm”. The content of his
work depicted the distortions of human beings struggling to survive in times of change, andwas close to those who were oppressed in the lower strata of society, in line with Chao Foonʼsphilosophy.
Chang Fu also firmly believed that selfish and greedy human desires create barriers
between people, and that by breaking down the narrow-mindedness of the mind, thesebarriers can be broken down. Such works were also in line with Chao Foonʼs philosophy ofthe promotion of Malayanisation, a society with diverse cultural backgrounds, origins,82

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political orientations, and ideologies.
It is thus fair to conclude that Chang Fuʼs work was one of the greatest proponents of
Chao Foonʼs philosophy.

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