Linda Chen

Linda Chen was born in 1928 in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, China and came as a child to Singapore with her parents.[1] Her father, Chen Yoh Shoo, was a wealthy businessman in Singapore.[2] She attended Chung Hwa Girls' School[3] and then in 1951, she began studying history at the University of Malaya in Singapore.[1] She joined the University Socialist Club[4] shortly after starting college. Becoming a leader in student politics, she was one of the founders of the Pan-Malayan Students’ Federation (PMSF)[5] After finishing her undergraduate degree, with a thesis on the Muslim scholar Syed Sheikh Syed Ahmad Al-Hadi,[6] she worked briefly as an English teacher at Chung Cheng High School[2] and then began work on her master's degree.[1] She compiled a Malay-Chinese dictionary during this period and translated several Chinese children's stories into Malay.[6][7]

Because she spoke English and Chinese, Chen was able to bridge the language divide for student groups and facilitate them working together. She also worked as an editor on the PMSF newsletter The Malayan Student Chinese edition. Her influence cause her to be placed under surveillance by the British authorities who feared communist expansion and saw the student activists creation of left-wing, united fronts as fertile ground for the spread of communism.[8] She became president of the Singapore Anti-Yellow Cultural Council (SAYCC),[9] which the students classified as an organized effort to rid society of hedonistic Western influence[10] and did not necessarily consider themselves to be communists.[11] The government saw the student movement as a threat to the existing government and a communist front.[12]

In 1956, Chen founded the Singapore Women's Federation (SWF)[3] as a group to press for women's rights and simultaneously fight against colonialism and a social order which favored the English. She and other radicals believed women's struggle for equality was linked to social change and class struggle. The organization was shut down immediately[13][12] and Chen was arrested, accused of being a security threat.[2] The government issued a statement that she was to be deported to China,[12] but some legislators argued that since she had lived in Singapore since she was five, she was not an alien.[14] Both Chen and her parents plead for her to be sent to Britain to finish her studies.[2] She spent 20 months in prison[15] before her release in 1958.[3] That same year she married Tan Seng Huat, who she had met during her student days.[7] She became a lecturer in the History of Southeast Asia at Nanyang University[1] and completed her masters with a thesis on Early Chinese Newspapers in Singapore: 1881-1912.[6] She returned to women's rights issues and participated in the debates and planning for the Women's Charter to revise the marriage laws of Singapore.[7]

In 1959, Chen was detained because security officials claimed she had been studying the history of the Soviet Union and communism.[16] They accused Chen of leading a network of students and infiltrating middle schools with radical ideas and material through her associations with the University of Malaya and Abdullah Majid, who headed the Socialist Club's Research Committee. Both she and Majid were kept under surveillance as suspected communists and by 1960, security was gathering on the activities of Chen's husband, sister and sister-in-law, as well.[17] The Special Branch believed that Chen was at the center of the communist web in Singapore[18] and she was re-arrested in February 1963[19] during "Operation Coldstore". She was released on 21 June 1964 and issued a statement that she was not a communist, though in her youth she had been in favor of socialism, and that she believed she had been fighting against colonial policies.[15]

After her release, Chen accompanied her husband to London where he completed his graduate studies.[5] The couple returned to Singapore in 1967 and Chen took over her family's business, the Shanghai Book Store, which had branches in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.[6] That same year, her master's thesis was published in English by the University of Malaya Press and became the standard text of the origin of Singapore's Chinese newspapers.[7] In 1990, for the Shanghai Book Store's 65th Anniversary, Chen published an article "65 years of China instrument industry in Singapore (1925-1990)", which appeared in the souvenir magazine.[20] Then in 1999, her work on Al-Hadi was published by the Asian Institute of Sociology of Kuala Lampur. In her later years, she became involved as volunteer staff for the women's organization Action and Research Association (AWARE), which she participated in until her death[6] on 29 December 2002, in Singapore.[7]

Chen's Malay-Chinese dictionary was widely used to teach those learning Malay in the 1950s and 1960s.[6] Her master's thesis was translated into Chinese in 2009 and a book launching ceremony to honor Chen was held by the China Institute of Malaysia and the Nanyang Technological University Education and Research Foundation.[21]