Shamsiah Fakeh was born in 1924 in Kampung Gemuruh, a village in in the Malaysia state, Negeri Sembilan. She started her studies in Malaysia at an Islamic High School but was eventually sent overseas to was is now Indonesia and it was there she began to be influenced by Lebai Maadah, an Islamic reformer and scholar. Upon completing her studies, Shamsiah joined the Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malay or the Malay Nationalist Party (PKMM), which was formed after the Japanese occupation of Malaysia. In 1946, at the age of 22, she became the leader of the PKMM’s women’s wing, Angkatan Wanita Sedar or Cohort of Awakened Women. Just two years after she was tasked with leading the women’s wing of the PKMM, the PKMM was banned from Malaysia and Shamsiah escaped to the jungles, joining the Malayan People’s Liberation Army, a communist guerrilla army led by the Malayan Communist Party, fighting for independence from the British. She eventually left Malaysia, going first to Thailand and then on to China, where she and her husband broadcast for Radio Peking in Malay, before briefly going to Indonesia where they were arrested during an anti-communist purge. Shamsiah and her husband spent two years in prison before being released and settling in China (they were forbidden from entering Malaysai) where they worked in a steel factor. In 1994, after years of petitioning the government, Shamsiah and her family were finally allowed to return to Malaysia. She and her family were forbidden from engaging in politics in the years after her return and she was barred from giving academic speeches. Shamsiah published her memoirs in 2004 but they were quickly withdrawn from circulation after criticism from the government, only to be published three years later in Chinese. She died in 2008, 9 years after suffering a stroke that had left her in poor health.