The biography of a controversial personality is finally written. Rose Chan’s life told today also tells us how illiberal Malaysian society has become since her heyday.
There was something that set Rose Chan apart from the average striptease dancer. Beguiling as she was, she was extremely adept at controlling the men in her life, both on and off the stage. To her, the striptease was an art, and she had mastered it. “Sometimes she’d strip completely, sometimes she wouldn’t, you know, and then of course there’d be a huge crowd cheering and booing,” says Cecil Rajendra, an eminent poet and lawyer from Penang who was a close confidante of hers in the latter years of her life.
Not only had she performed in Malaysia and Singapore, Chan had also travelled to France, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan after word of her had spread through newspapers and radio. She reached the height of her fame in the 1950s – in the days before television. But it wasn’t just her finesse for stripping that propelled the Suzhou-born striptease dancer into becoming the Queen of Striptease, a paramount figure in her line of work.
