Not all old men and women are unproductively loquacious and assertively irritating. There are many exceptions. Veteran and real journalist Said Zahari is one of the shining examples of how the natural process of ageing, practical struggles in life, and trials and tribulations have produced human wisdom and moral qualities of an high order.

I feel happy for this grand old man of Malay-language journalism, fighter for Merdeka and a contemporary member of my neighbourhood in Subang Jaya USJ because his personal and political memoirs is finally going to be published and launched soon.

Dark Clouds at Dawn - A Political Memoir was originally written in Bahasa Malaysia and English simultaneously and then translated into Chinese for the maximum benefit of all races in Malaysia and Singapore.

I am also honoured because in the past several years, I have been often invited to his house to share a thought or two with him, or to make critical comments and suggestions on the drafts, over a cup of coffee or Chinese tea.

Very often, our conversations and dialogues continue into midnight, probably to the annoyance of his brave wife Makcik Salamah who has been standing faithfully by the side of her fighter-husband like a true heroine since the day they were married.

Jailed 17 years

Said Zahari is now already 72 years old and I am only 38. When I was studying in Standard One at the age of seven in Ipoh in 1969, he had already been detained without trial under the obnoxious Internal Security Act in Singapore for six years because the PAP authority in Singapore accused him of being a communist.

He spent another 11 years under detention. Finally he was restricted to an outer island in 1978 and then freed at the end of 1979. All through the 17 years of incarceration, there had been no open charges brought against him in any open court of law.

He was just thrown into jail for the most precious and productive portion of his life because the authority said, with proof, the quality of which was only acceptable to the period of the Spanish Inquisition, that he was a communist.

After keeping quiet with prudent dignity for so many years, he has finally decided to tell his side of the story, and to relate to us the situations and circumstances of his time. It spans from early 1930s when he was a poor and naughty boy in Singapore to March 1999 when he met Chin Peng again in a university seminar in Bangkok, Thailand.

The first time Said Zahari met the leader of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) was when, as a 27-year old Malay-language newspaper reporter, he was assigned to cover the historic peace talks between Chin Peng and the late Tunku Abdul Rahman in Baling, Kedah. Chin Peng or Ong Boon Hua was then only 33 years old, and was accompanied by Rashid Maidin and Chin Tian.

Heavy price

Said Zahari frankly admits at the outset of his memoir that he does not write as a professional historian, but only as a journalist who had witnessed a turbulent time in the history of Malaysia and Singapore, and who tries to recall those days as truthfully as possible.

Of course, he was no mediocre or apolitical journalist because he once led a three-month strike of Utusan Melayu journalists in 1961 in Kuala Lumpur, defending the independence of the newspaper and opposing the take-over by Umno. He failed and paid a heavy price, and we are still feeling the impact of his defeat 40 years ago.

The memoir is written with a lively style and in simple language. There is no academic jargon or mumbo-jumbo of the ivory-tower intellectuals. It is a real human story deserved to be read and thought about by all Malaysians and Singaporeans, and our friends all over the world.

There are, I believe, some moral lessons for those of us who aspire and strive to be better human beings in politics and other stations of life.

Kuan Yew's lacuna

For those who have read Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew's two-volume memoirs, Said Zahari's Dark Clouds at Dawn - A Political Memoir should be perused with even greater attentiveness to fill up the historical void and lacuna because in Lee's memoir, Said Zahari has never exited at all.

Maybe Lee is still writing another volume to account specifically for his relationships with Said Zahari, for the moral and intellectual benefit of young Malaysians and Singaporeans. Or perhaps Lee really and honestly has never known of such a person, or his earthly existence.

Two interesting questions can indeed be posed in this regard and at this juncture: One, if Said Zahari was not that important at that time in Singapore, as suggested by the lacuna, void or omission in Lee's memoir, why was it necessary for the Malay journalist to be detained without trial for 17 long years?

Two, if the 17-year no-trial detention suggests that somehow Said Zahari was an importantly dangerous person at the material time in Singapore, why is that he does not exist in Lee's memoir?

Anyhow, in Said Zahari's memoir, we can discover that almost all the labels and scripts we now read about in mainstream media in Malaysia were already there and being used frequently even at that time: 'communist', 'Chinese chauvinist', 'foreign agent', 'extremist' and 'foreign funded'.

Nothing is new and novel except the persons who use them. Said Zahari's memoirs are also, I believe, a good and useful book for young Malaysians and Singaporeans who wish to gain a more all-rounded sense of the modern histories of our nations, societies and peoples.

It corrects historical time line and global space-scale which are essential for sanity. A good knowledge of this kind of history helps us to overcome deficiencies of character resulting from material abundance and the idolatry of "secular" scientism, like pusillanimity, credulity and malleability.

Legendary image

However, young readers must always remember too that times have changed because the Cold War between East and West has already ended for 10 years. What remain are examples of some transcendental moral qualities of a real fighter for justice and human dignity: idealism, fortitude, disciplined valour, compassion, intellectual passions for truth and a spiritual capacity for critical self-reflections.

I heard about Said Zahari when I was reading political science and economics in Monash University in the mid-80s. His name and stories appeared in many alternative books and publications on Southeast Asian politics and history as well as human rights reports of Western countries.

But at that time, Said Zahari was to me just another legendary image of the yesteryear's Left in Malaya and Singapore, just like Che Guevara to the Latin Americans. I forgot about the image very soon after I graduated and returned in early 1987 to plunge myself into a busy public life.

When I covered the memorial service of the late Lim Chin Siong, held by his former comrades and friends in a hotel in Kuala Lumpur several years ago, I was introduced to Said Zahari, the real man, in flesh.

I was instantly perplexed and surprised to see a legendary image I had only hitherto read in history books smiling in front of me, holding out his right hand and saying in Chinese: " Ni hao ma, Yong An? " ("How are you, Wing On?).

(The late Lim Chin Siong was a leading and popular leader of the democratic Left in Singapore whom the PAP accused to be a 'Chinese chauvinist', but whom Said Zahari defended and still defends to this day in his memoirs as a promoter of Malay language and Malay-Chinese fraternity in the predominantly Chinese city-state. I never knew him personally.)

I later gave him a lift back to his house which is not far away from mine. From that day onwards, we have become good friends and good neighbours. From him, I learn many moral, not statistical or theatrical lessons, of true political life.

Inter-generational dialogue

His stoic equanimity has been an inspiration to me ever since. Unlike other self-perceived or self-styled political giants, Said Zahari never tries to loquaciously impose his will on young people like me. He has always been cheerfully thoughtful and humbly articulate.

He convinces people with the soundness and reasonableness of his ideas, analyses and arguments, not by tyrannical appeal to age and aged experiences. We share thoughts and experiences like friends and equals.

There is no feeling of generation gap between him and me. Although I am too young to be part of Cold War politics and journalism in Malaysia and Singapore, I can understand what he always tries to recall because I studied Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian histories under Professor Herbert Feith while I was an undergraduate in Monash University.

I know something about his times. It may not be very much but it is certainly enough for me to listen to him with great interest and enthusiasm.

On his part, he understands that I am too young to accept everything he opines because his time and mine are vastly different. Nevertheless, we keep on conversing with each other. It is a kind of inter-generational dialogue that both of us think is useful to re-establish a certain sense of historical continuity in the politics, culture and societies of Malaysia and Singapore, and also to sort out and accept some real breaks.

Said Zahari is quite updated both technologically and intellectually. He knows and actually uses a computer although he still cannot afford to install an Internet system in the house. However, he is updated through meetings with and by talking to all kinds of friend, young and old.

As a citizen of Singapore and only a permanent resident of Malaysia, he always tries to avoid commenting publicly on the current politics in Malaysia. But I sometime manage to 'trick' and 'trap' him into giving some hints or clues.

Well-traveled

Said Zahari also never mixes up personal likes and dislikes, hatred or love, with rational analyses and public comments. For example, I once asked him for comments on Lee Kuan Yew's allegedly provocative statement that "Singapore welcomes any attack from any quarter" now that it had acquired one hundred AIM-120 air-to-air missiles from the United States, and his reply was: "Singapore needs psychological defence, as every sovereignty country is entitled to legitimate self-defence."

Despite his personal sufferings under the PAP regime, he still gives credit where credit is due. For Said Zahari, Singapore under the rule of PAP and Lee Kuan Yew has indeed made economic and social advances for Singapore.

To him, Malay is certainly an important language but other languages should be respected and even appreciated. He himself set personal examples by mastering Chinese, English and Japanese. His proficiency of Chinese not only enables him to read, write and speak, but also establish long and lasting friendship with many Chinese-speaking intellectuals, some of whom also shared the trials and tribulations of being incarcerated under the obnoxious law.

Said Zahari even enjoys Chinese poems, and has always been interested in the modern history of China and the people of China. One of his first foreign visits after his release was the People's Republic of China.

He has always been impressed by religious tolerance of the people of China. He saw with his own eyes how Islam and Muslims are respected and appreciated in traditional Chinese culture, and how Chinese Muslims live harmoniously and peacefully with people of other faiths, beliefs and creeds. He prayed to Allah in a mosque in Beijing.

Before he was detained in 1963, he also visited the United States, the whole of Indochina, India, Pakistan and Europe as a journalist. After his release, he visited Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong. But above all, Said Zahari is a God-fearing Muslim who is respected by people of other faiths.

Triumph of memory

Every year, fellow Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Taoists and secular friends and neighbours - brown, yellow, black and white - visit him on the occasion of his Hari Raya open house. He enjoys talking to them all, and entertains them with a variety of delicious Malay food.

Knowing the man and after reading his memoirs, the cynics and faint-hearted would probably concur with Edward Gibbon, the 18th century British historian and author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire who remarked that history is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind".

However brave Malaysians and Singaporeans would appreciate what Czech poet and playwright Milan Kundera once said: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Despite the unbridgeable chasms of age and race, Said Zahari and I agree without debate that we should thank and praise God for giving him a life long and healthy enough for memory to finally triumph over forgetting.

JAMES WONG WING ON, a former Member of Parliament (1990-1995) and now a leading Mandarin-Chinese opinion writer and columnist, read political science and economics at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia from 1983 to 1986. All views expressed herein are his own.