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Grnrchst (talk) 09:54, 24 June 2024 (UTC).
--Grnrchst (talk) 09:32, 1 July 2024 (UTC)The colonial public was chilled by her [Wong Sau Ying's] exacting premeditation. The ‘bobbed-hair woman’ had arrived in Kuala Lumpur only that morning. Some reports said that she came from Canton; others that she was from Penang, and fluent in Malay. They were, above all, obsessed by the way she looked. [...]
The year 1925 was when the ‘Modern Girl’ became a global phenomenon, and in this the women of Asia took the lead. [...] There were stories of ‘bobbed-hair riots’ as far away as Mexico City, of rival ‘anti-bobbed-hair leagues’ and ‘bobbed-hair defence leagues’. [...]
The ‘Modern Girl’ was increasingly linked to a dangerous, disordered modernity; to nihilism and to anarchism. As one expatriate journal put it: ‘The now notorious “bobbed-haired” lady might just as well have turned up in Venezuela or Tibet for all the relation that her “mission” had to events in Malaya... Politics virtually do not exist in this country.’ The Straits Times brayed for a system of ‘identity tickets’ to indicate who was a loyal subject of His Majesty King George V and who was not. There were suddenly other sightings of ‘strange’ young women in Kuala Lumpur. [...]
At the root of the case was her ‘new style’.
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