Fearless Fan: The principled politician

I couldn’t help feeling a sense of loss over Fan Yew Teng’s passing. He was one of a kind, a freedom fighter with a strong passion for justice, tempered with a hearty laugh and a friendly disposition.

He was a politician but a principled one – which may explain why he never struck fame or fortune. He may have quit his party, started a new party and then left formal politics – not because he was a katak or for personal gain. As always with Fan, it was on a matter of principle, a matter of conscience.

After his departure from politics, he led a fairly secluded lifestyle. But he never truly left the scene. Every now and then, he would send articles to Aliran, which the social reform group happily carried in its publication, Aliran Monthly.

A fearless writer, he would fire stinging broadsides at the Mahathir administration at a time when large sections of the the Malaysian public were either complacent or carried away by the former premier’s top-down model of development, which was riddled with croynism and plagued by financial scandals.

This was long before the reformasi era of the late 1990s.

But even though his distance from the rough-and-tumble world of politics gave him a refreshing perspective of the Malaysian landscape, Fan felt compelled to return to politics when the reformasi phenomenon erupted. Putting aside his differences with his former colleagues in the DAP, Fan re-entered politics – not because he wanted to ride on the bandwagon but because he took a decision to come forward and be counted. I suspect he saw it as his patriotic duty as a Malaysian, a human being, to take a stand for justice and freedom at a crucial time in the nation’s history.

Fan continued to write until recent years and broadened his worldview to look at environmental protection – saving the limestone hills of Ipoh became a major concern – and global issues especially US imperialism.

Whenever I saw the envelopes containing the manuscripts from him arriving at Aliran, I knew instantly they were his. As an editorial board member, I would have the pleasure of reading them: the pages would be painstakingly type-written – not keyed in using a PC. In a sense, the black carbon ink against the white sheets of paper mirrored Fan’s ability to emphatically distinguish between right and wrong and to call a spade a spade. His attachment to his typewriter, his basic tool, reflected his romance with the written word – in the same way an artist might prefer a paint brush and canvas rather than a computer graphics software tool.

And it was on those typewritten sheets of paper that Fan came into his own – in the most powerful way imaginable. He did not mince his words even after all those years had passed since, as editor of the Rocket in the early 1970s, he paid a heavy price for publishing articles that upset the government of the day. His life was one long love affair with the written word as a means of putting across his commitment to the cause of justice.

From someone I admired for his fearlessness and passion for justice, Fan became a friend and an inspiration. I never knew him as having an email address or a cellphone. Over the last couple of years I tried a few times to reach him on his land line in Perak to no avail. So news of his passing in Bangkok came as a shock.

Fan Yew Teng was definitely a ‘towering Malaysian’.

May his soul rest in peace.