By TAN SAI SIONG
BOTH Gianni Versace and The Plen have been in the news in the past 10 days, with the slain Italian fashion designer hogging more column space than the former underground communist leader.
Versace made headlines because his murder was as hugely shocking as his hugely successful tart-inspired fashion wear.
The Plen and Mrs Fang in a recent interview
in Malaysia. Pic/ Nanyang Siang PauThe Plen aka Fang Chuang Pi (or Fong Chong Pik as he was known earlier before hanyu pinyin became popular) made news thanks to a lengthy and wide-ranging interview he gave in Chinese to Nanyang Siang Pau, a Malaysian newspaper.
The Straits Times carried summaries of that interview and English translations of extensive excerpts.
I dare wager that even before the media spotlight focused so sharply on Versace, more Singaporeans knew about him than The Plen. That is the irony and the pity.
While information or knowledge about Versace may be interesting, it is not critical to the memory bank of the average Singaporean, whether young or old.
It is a different story where The Plen and his activities are concerned. They played a role at a critical point in our history.
Yet, the young in Singapore know little to nothing about him. A survey last year by the Ministry of Education, covering some 2,500 students from primary and secondary schools all the way up to polytechnics and universities, had revealed that almost all didn't have a clue about The Plen.
Only two out of 1,538 post-secondary students could say that he was the communist underground leader who contacted Mr Lee Kuan Yew to try to persuade the People's Action Party to work with the communists.
One howler from the survey was that a respondent even thought Mr Lee was The Plen. On reflection, it is no laughing matter.
It is with something of a red face that middle-aged me have to confess to learning about him quite recently from an anecdote told over lunch by a former member of the Legislative Council.
Even then, The Plen was a side dish to the main course of the conversation, which was Lai Teck, the secretary-general of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) before Chin Peng.
Lai absconded with the party's funds after he was discovered to be a spy for the Japanese and the British.
As for The Plen, it is short for Plenipotentiary, an apt nickname given to Fang by Mr Lee. Plenipotentiary, according to the dictionary, is a representative of a ruler with absolute or discretionary powers to deal on the ruler's behalf. It was as an emissary of the CPM that he met Mr Lee four times before the 1959 election that was to give Singapore internal self-government.
The meetings were to discover if the leader of the People's Action Party was prepared to let the communists work with the PAP in an united anti-colonial front.
At that time, it was not the sort of help which Mr Lee could dismiss.
As recorded by Singapore, An Illustrated History, published in 1984 by the Ministry of Culture, the PAP in 1956 and 1957 was a "virtual prisoner of the communists who had strong influence in trade unions, Chinese schools and PAP branches".
That influence also has the testimony of Dr Goh Keng Swee, quoted in Dennis Bloodworth's The Tiger And The Trojan Horse as saying that certain machinations which The Plen set off "showed that by far the strongest political power in Singapore at that time was the underground Communist Party".
At his meetings with The Plen, Mr Lee had hinted to him to prove his bona fide by getting Chang Yuen Tong, whom the communists had planted in David Marshall's Workers' Party, to resign from that party.
Soon after, not only did Chang resign from the party but also from his city council seat, the WP was routed in the by-election and the PAP secured that trophy convincingly.
Dr Goh, who was privy to the Lee-Fang discussions, told Bloodworth that that event gave him a powerful insight into the tremendous strength of the CPM.
Although Fang was a wanted man on the run from the colonial authorities and without the normal office apparatus of telephones, filing cabinets, files and staff, he could control events to an extent which even the governor could not.
For Dr Goh, this realisation was a very chastening, "very creepy" experience.
Now that Fang, yesterday's shadowy man, has stepped out of the shadows after 40 years of being in the woodworks, what should today's Singaporeans -- who know him not at all, or very little and mostly from hearsay or books on Singapore's struggle for independence - make of him?
How should one evaluate his qualified praise of Singapore's success in the Nanyang newspaper interview and his insinuation that if not for him and his party, there might not have been this success?
Are any kudos due to the communists for supporting the PAP - and in that tenuous way providing Singapore with an uninterrupted and stable leadership -- or should one look more closely at what motivated them into providing that support?
Was that support not based on their calculation that they could put the PAP in their pockets after the victory?
As such, was that motive not unworthy and undeserving of gratitude?
Fang may no longer look like "the mystery underground man or the guerilla fighter" but he may also not be the avuncular retiree with the eyes of the frightened doe that his latest photograph in the newspapers shows him to be.
Now that he has taken into the open what appears to me to be a campaign for him and his comrades to be let back into Singapore on their terms, perhaps it is time for those who know his other persona well to share that knowledge.
Reader Philip Goh Siew Hock, a former journalist colleague of The Plen, has started the ball rolling, giving a picture of a charming dissembler in the Forum page.
May others follow.
First published in The Straits Times, Jul 25, 1997
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