The translators, Tan Jing Quee, Loh Miaw Gong and Hong Lysa have helped revive this almost lost Singapore novel - Ju Lang, was its original title - to add it to the country's literary heritage. The novel's central feature is the anti-colonial movement against the British in the Singapore of the early 1950s. It follows a group of middle class students who started campaigning in 1954 for exemption from national service imposed by their British rulers and ends with the triumph of their party in the 1959 elections.