Reading Japanese Occupation in Malaya in The Rice Mother Through the Lens of Social Memory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the reconstruction of social memory as portrayed in The Rice Mother, a historical fiction of the 21st century which appropriates the history of Japanese Occupation in Malaya from 1941 to 1945. Social memory is defined as a unifying force that envisions the past through which cultural and communal influences are derived and handed down through generations. The studies on social memory raise questions about the transmission of the system, preservation of experience and knowledge, and alteration of culture during the historical period in which based on these premises, we emphasise on the small unit of a Ceylonese family. We discuss the process of commemorating history within individual identity and communal relations in the novel which takes on a dark history as the setting of the stories of a Ceylonese immigrant family and the generations that make Malaysia their homeland. Unlike No Dram of Mercy, a memoir by Sybil Kathigasu, a survivor of the occupation, Manicka’s novel is based on remnants of history as creative background to a tale that runs several generations. We shall identify the ways in which the history of Japanese Occupation in Malaya is being represented through the lens of social memory to show how a contemporary Malaysian writer still remembers afresh the traumatic memory of our war in our history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".