The Yearning Years

About the Book

A Malay boy of Johor Baru recounts the living hardship in British Malaya during the post-Second World War and Korean War period of the 1940s and 1950s. He describes the the re-opening of schools in his Johor Bahru hometown after the war, and his education based on the colonial education system. He flips through the pages of his early chilhdhood, the games played by the boys and girls of his generation. As a young boy, he idolizes Abraham Lincoln and emulates Mark Twain’s adventurous Mississipi riverine characters; as a teenager, he absorbs American pop culture in comics, rock and roll music and movies during the pre-TV era. He runs away from home, joins the army to avoid an arranged marriage. Finally, he finds true love in a girl who was swept away by another suitor. Heart-broken, he sheds his adolescent yearning and becomes a ‘man’ as a result of peer pressure.

About the Author

Nordin Yusof, born in Johor Bahru in 1940, served in the Malaysian Armed Forces from 1960 until 1995, and retired as a major-general. During his 34- military career, he served the country during the post-First Malayan Communist Emergency (1948-1960), Indonesian Confrontation (1963-1966), Second Communist Emergency (1968-1989) and the Sarawak Communist Emergency (1966-1990). He attended several overseas professional courses in Australia, India, New Zealand, UK and US. In 2002, he was conferred philosophy doctorate from Saint Regis University in Washington DC. Currently, he is an executive director of Megan Media Holdings, a Malaysian public-listed manufacturing company.