My grandfather had eleven siblings—or so we were led to believe. I visited them once a year during Chinese New Year. My parents led my siblings and me to their houses, starting with the oldest and ending with the youngest, along Bampfylde road, named after a British colonial administrator in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak. “This is fifth uncle’s house,” my mother would say to us in English as my three younger siblings and I walked inside, sweating under the tropical heat. Their names were never mentioned to us because it is customary in Chinese families to refer to each other by one’s position in the family and relationship to you. We never kept track of who was “first uncle” versus “fifth uncle,” as we figured we could rely on our parents for introductions and translations. We kids kept ourselves occupied sipping sodas and smelling the perfumed ang paos, while the adults spoke over us in Hokkien, the language of our ancestral province in China.

My family arrived to what is now Malaysia with the great wave of Chinese immigration at the turn of the 20th century. We settled among the indigenous populations of Dayaks, Malays, and South Asians in Sarawak, the largest state in Malaysia, located on Borneo island. The primary Chinese custom we kept up was the New Year and visiting my grandfather’s ten siblings. But when I was ten we stopped visiting their homes because my parents moved us from Malaysia to the United States so they could start a church. Our already vague relationships with these great aunts and uncles began to fade. But as we grew older, my mother began to speak of a twelfth sibling, one who never had a house that we could visit because Malaysian state officials killed her when my mother was in primary school.

Her name was Gan Ang Kiat (颜红结) in Hokkien, but my mom refers to her as Sei Ko, “youngest paternal aunt.” Sei Ko’s mother died months after her birth, and so her siblings raised her. As the youngest, she was the treasure of the family, a fact compounded when she graduated with a university degree—the first in the family to do so. She taught in a Chinese school. Until her death, she lived with her brothers, their families, and her father, who was a wealthy trader, in a large house surrounded by acres of land filled with bats, bullfrogs, and rabbits next to a whites-only colonial club.

Her nieces and nephews remember her as an independent, gentle, and generous aunty who bought them sweets and regularly threw parties with tapioca and sago kuih for her students. Sei Ko would tell them to “do good and be respectful to your elders.” They were shocked when they learned, after her death, that she had been involved in an underground, anti-colonial, communist secret society.

Today, my great aunt, the black sheep of my family, stares at me out of a 4×2 frame. She wears glasses with short curly hair not unlike my mother’s, dressed in a blouse and a long skirt. She sits in the middle of a white cabinet in my living room in Brooklyn, New York. The cabinet is bedecked with photos of deceased relatives, plants, incense sticks, and religious texts—my homage to my spiritual and ancestral saints.

She did not always occupy this hallowed position in my life. I had never met her, of course. And although I learned about her as a teenager, she claimed her place only after I came out as queer to my parents in my mid-twenties. They did not take the news well, and so I became the family’s new black sheep.

Coming out was an acculturation process. I left my parents’ church and started attending a progressive one. I marched with dykes down the streets of Manhattan, watched The L Word so I would understand in-group references, and went on day-trips with my partner to Fire Island. I immersed myself in the world that my religious upbringing had forbidden. But at the end of the day-trips and marches, I would take the subway back to my apartment, make a cup of tea, and think about how I missed my parents.

We were still close, but it was not the same. Something had severed, and it was not only the relationship between my parents and me. Like many second-generation immigrants, my parents were the gatekeepers to my home culture, language, and stories. Distancing myself from them meant distancing myself from the roots that grounded me in the strange land of America. The prospect of being cut off from a tree that had already been uprooted from its native soil terrified me. It did not help that I rarely saw a fellow Asian person in the queer spaces that were supposed to be my new home. Coming out felt like assimilation—stepping off a brown land into a sea of white.

And so I responded to these changes by obsessing about my ancestry. I exhaustively researched queer Asian histories and began looking for clues to understand my great aunt, the only other black sheep in my family’s annals. I wanted to find a spiritual connection without having to rely on my parents, to know if there was an ancestor out there who would be proud of me, my queerness, and my leftist politics included. I pored over academic articles, purchased obscure books, and interviewed family members so I could imagine the life of my great aunt and what motivated her double life.

I had the rough sketches of my great aunt’s life, so I began to fill in the gaps with historical materials. She was born in 1941, the year of Japan’s invasion of Borneo and the overthrow of British colonial troops. That incursion awakened Britain’s colonies to the fact that the Queen’s Empire was not, in fact, invincible, and after the war they began to clamor for independence. In Sarawak, Chinese schools — where my great aunt was educated — were the initial hotbeds for revolutionary politics; teachers and students alike were inspired by Mao’s re-making of China and anti-colonial revolutions in Asia. In 1963, while my great aunt was in university, Britain combined its colonies in Southeast Asia under one country, ‘Malaysia,’ in order to establish an anti-communist bulwark and ensure minimal disruption to its capital ownership of tin mines and rubber plantations. The communists saw Malaysia as a neo-colonial construction and fought as guerillas in the tropical jungles against the local government, which was supported by Britain, Australia, and the United States. The police tortured, deported, and imprisoned anyone upon mere suspicion that they were communist. The police commonly tied suspects to ice slabs until their skin went numb, and then poured warm water over them until they “confessed.”

Given that I couldn’t find any primary documents published by communists from Sarawak in English, my research remained a degree removed — I was reading about communists — until last fall when I finally got a chance to meet my great aunt’s former communist comrades in person.

It began with a phone number. I had read a profile of surviving communist guerillas in a newspaper, The Borneo Post. The journalist provided me their phone number, and after a few phone calls with my mom acting as translator (the irony was not lost on me), we scored an invitation to the communists’ daily breakfast gathering in an open-air market in Kuching, the capital of Sarawak and my family’s home.

When we got to their table, the group — mostly white-haired men in their eighties — seemed wary of us until they realized who my mother’s aunt was.

“We know her as Wang Ling (王玲),” they explained in Hokkien to my mother, who then translated. Given the state’s use of torture, once someone was initiated, they adopted a new name so that their personal identity, and family’s, couldn’t be revealed.

Most of them simply knew of her; only one of them had actually spent time with her — one of her former students. Her student, Mr. Boon, looked younger than the rest; he had a full head of black hair and spoke a little English. My great aunt taught him Malay and helped introduce him, at age 13, to communism. She hosted secret meetings with him and a few students.

“She was a very good teacher. She helped us students — we were all poor then — by buying us food, cakes to eat, and other things, because her family,” he paused to smile at me, “was quite rich.” He mentioned how close she was to her family and how “they really, really loved her.”

The next morning, while my mom boarded a plane back to New York, Mr. Boon offered to drive me to my great aunt’s grave 30 minutes away. On the way there, he pulled out a gift wrapped in wax paper: Bak Kwa, Chinese pork jerky, with its darkly sweet and charred flavors. I thanked him and smiled. Perhaps it was his way of paying back my great aunt. Mr. Boon began to tell me how he heard she was killed. It had to do with her glasses. They had fallen off during an early morning ambush by a river near her school, leading to her disorientation and a fatal bullet through her head.

***

My great aunt was the only one in her family to wear glasses. She was the intellectual who never wore makeup or dresses, and who was always engrossed in reading Mandarin books. (“She was brainwashed,” my parents would often say. They would later imply that I, too, had been “influenced by my peers” when I argued that it was theologically possible for me to be both Christian and queer.)

According to historian Seng Guo Quan, many Chinese students were radicalized through left-wing literature in the 1950s. They read Chinese newspapers about national liberation struggles against the West as well as cartoons and novels starring Chinese communist and Russian revolutionary soldiers who sacrificed their lives in war. Initially, most communist recruits came through the Sarawak Advanced Youth Association. According to communist documents captured by the police and published in a book, The Danger Within, students were recruited through “study cells, picnic parties, singing and dancing classes,” then groomed for absorption into the organization through ideological education. When my great aunt was admitted as a member, this was part of the oath she had to swear:

“I will completely and unconditionally yield myself to the interest of the organization . . . I will try my best to study the theories and principles of Marxism/Leninism and the ideology of Mao Tse Tung, and make use of what I have learnt to educate the masses . . . There is no more glorious title than being called a revolutionary . . . I offer my whole life without the slightest hesitation.”

What stands out to me about this oath is how much its language reminds me, perhaps ironically, of the religion of my youth. Back in Malaysia, my parents told me stories of Christians in Indonesia who were forced to deny their faith or be killed. The lesson was clear: never renounce Jesus. When I was baptized as a child, I dedicated my life to Christ, studied the Bible daily, and told myself that nothing was more important than evangelism. Everyone in my church did the same.

Maybe what evangelical Christianity gave my parents was what communist politics gave my great aunt? A child of an immigrant who was born into wealth, she seemed to want a life of significance. She stood out from the norm; most communists were poor and lived near jungles (the Hokkien term for communists translates to “jungle rats”). But as historian Seng Guo Quan told me, “It was the people with ‘bourgeois’ backgrounds like your great aunt, who were the most committed revolutionaries. They were the ones who bought into the utopian vision of absolute social equality and justice, in spite of how it logically went against their own class or familial interests.”

While attending Singapore’s Nanyang University, a hub of radical politics for the Chinese in Southeast Asia, my great aunt was part of a communist cell group within the Sarawak Liberation League. After graduating in 1964 — a year when there were mass arrests of leftist students at Nanyang — she worked as a teacher and later principal, and began to spend nights away from home. She came back only once a month, sometimes with a bandage over her hand. She was staying with friends in a jungle closer to where she taught, she would say. Her job allowed her to carry out her real responsibilities, which was organizing food and supplies from civilian supporters, especially among her school’s students and their families, and funneling them to guerrilla units.

Her siblings noticed that she was being followed by government spies and tried to warn her. But she ignored them, and they didn’t push too much — she was the respected and learned one, after all. One day, Kong Kong was reading the newspaper when he saw, on the front page, the name of his youngest sister.

“Two terrorists killed last weekend . . . had [sic] been positively identified,” the article started. “31-year-old Singapore Nanyang University graduate and former teacher of Kuching Chung Hua Middle School No. 4 Yuen Hung Kiet (female).” It was her name, rendered in an amalgamation of Mandarin and Hokkien, and the street — Bampfylde road — where her family lived. To the right was an article on Henry Kissinger’s meeting with North Vietnamese officials; it was July 1972, in the middle of the Cold War.

So little is known about my great aunt’s last moments, and as is often the case, those who survived cling to their own version of events. Her comrades claimed she was running away when she was shot, but the police said they shot her in response to her firing at them. One of my uncles believes the police’s version rings truer. “I tell you, she will never surrender. She is a tough lady. If she knows she is going to die, she will not run away, she will shoot back. She was the head of her unit, so I think she protected her friends and shot so they could escape,” he said. Many of my family members described her as a “sacrificial martyr,” which surprised me because martyrdom was how surviving communists also portrayed their slain comrades.

It was risky for families to claim bodies of dead communists because the state prosecuted anyone who aided the left. According to Professor Kee How Yong, the government rounded up 5,000 rural poor Hakka Chinese, who sometimes aided the guerrillas who hid in nearby jungles, and relocated them to ‘new villages,’ or concentration camps fenced with barbed wire. But my great aunt’s siblings claimed her body anyways. They did not bury her in the family plot, but in a Hakka cemetery with other slain communists. Her story remained hushed for decades, until long after communist resistance died down in the 1990s.

***

Mr. Boon drove us under a tall grimy archway, inscribed with Mandarin characters that said, “Fifth-mile-and-a-half Hakka Cemetery.” Our car was the only one there on a Wednesday afternoon. After parking, Mr. Boon got out and started walking towards the back of the cemetery. I followed him as we weaved through colorful curvy Chinese tombs scattered over hills thick with mosquitoes. I felt like a pilgrim, waiting to touch the relics of a saint. Finally, we reached my great aunt’s tombstone in the back. At the top was a photo of her in a university cap-and-gown, her glasses and a slight gap between her front teeth visible. At the bottom was a stone plaque:

In Loving Memory of Our Dear Sister
Gan Ang Kiat
Born 13-2-1941       Died 17-7-1972
Ever Remembered by Brothers & Sisters

Dazed, I sat down on the tiled steps leading up to her tombstone, unbothered by mosquitoes for the first time. She was a communist, yes, but a sister too, an aunt, a daughter. She was beloved and irrevocably gone. And although her family did not agree with her choices, they loved her and claimed her as theirs at great risk.

But it occurred to me that I could only find her gravesite because of her communist comrades. My mom and her cousins couldn’t remember the location. As much as her siblings loved their youngest sister, they hadn’t transmitted the tradition of QingMing — where Chinese families visit relatives’ graves annually to clean their tombs and honor them — to their children.

Tombstone of author’s great aunt, Gan Ang Kiat. (Photo: Sarah Ngu)

I looked up at Mr. Boon. He was taking a moment to pay his respects at the graves of other comrades, some of whom he had never met, bound together only by shared beliefs. These deaths had occurred decades ago, but he and his comrades remained steadfast and even did what some families had neglected to do: visit the gravesites every year to remember and honor their sacrifice. It was Mr. Boon and his comrades who raised funds to build graves for those unclaimed by their families. It was they who set up a welfare fund to assist comrades in need, especially those who were imprisoned for decades and released with little social support. It was they who led me to my great aunt’s grave.

I had searched for my great aunt to learn more about my family, but instead I met her chosen family — one that she had kept secret for so long. In the jungle, many communists had run away from their homes to enlist in war as teenagers. Some fell in love, got married, and even had children in the jungle. They possessed entire worlds unbeknownst to their families of origin. My great aunt had clearly cast her lot with her fellow comrades, but she kept a tether to her family’s world, showing up occasionally to play with her nieces and nephews and to eat with her older siblings. She was bonded by blood and by choice, straddling both worlds until the day she crumpled over, a bullet through her left eye.

I think about what she would say now, peering from her photo frame into my apartment. What would she think of my life? My partner and our cat? The mess of my bookshelf standing across from her, lined with photos of my family, Bibles, queer texts, Southeast Asian histories, and Communist memoirs — each of them worlds unto themselves?

Perhaps she would say, gently but firmly, “Sarah, you choose to whom you belong.”

Sarah Ngu is a writer born in Borneo, Malaysia, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Find them on Twitter (@sarahngu) and read their writing at sarahngu.com.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.