Abridged

A memoir without the detail

The Singapore Story (abridged) by Lee Kuan Yew

Blame me entirely for buying this one without noticing its reduction in size. I think, although I can’t now remember, that I congratulated myself on getting a copy for such a low price. How little I knew.

But in my own defence, for a moment, I will contend that an abridgement is not the worst way to read a political memoir. They tend to be such long books, laden with self-justification and minutiae of no value to the ignorant outsider. And that’s what I am, readers, in this one. That’s just what I am.

Imagine yourselves to be what I was: lacking, unsure, in need of a guiding hand. And there, the abridged book extends its own contented grasp; it is not a six hundred or even a seven hundred page monster; it does not disdain you. For the abridged copy has rooms at the inn of all, for the mentally feeble, for the elderly, for the very young children (all of which I am, or have been described as from time to time).

This is thus the job, abridger. What does someone as foolish and ignorant of the facts as me need to know about Lee Kuan Yew and his country?

Because this is a memoir, we must learn quite a lot about the early life of the author. Growing up to a Chinese family in British-occupied Singapore. We learn a little about the culture of the time: Lee and his family: his powerful grandfather; the fact that, because the British ruled Singapore, many of the family members were given English names; and the subsequent push, when Lee came of age to attend school, that he ought to work hard and to go far.

All of this ended by the war.

A brief detour into the war years: a time of hunger, of hardship, of strangeness and dislocation. For many Singaporeans, seeing Japanese occupation, following the Commonwealth surrender, was an odd, unimagined thing. That the racial hierarchies of the past (whites at the top, with perhaps the Chinese following along close behind) were upended was one thing. The scientific justification for colonialism disappeared, Lee writes, that instant.

And yet the Japanese were not kind rulers. They did not govern in the interests of all Asiatic peoples. Instead, they shot civilians who trespassed or operated in the grey economy. And put many others in jails where they might be tortured at the very least.

Lee, all this time, had to work to feed his family. He talks a little about the various rackets he and his nearest relatives were involved in, cooking things in big drums for industrial or culinary purposes. And there was the endless search for food, the traversing of the city on a bicycle, hoping not to run into some aggressive soldiers, intent on making their troubles yours.

When liberation came it was ambivalent. The Japanese were not adored. Few people in Singapore would miss them. And the British were not as bad as all that. They could return, for a few years. But in Lee’s mind and in the minds of many others, this was the line. The English may return, but they must go again. If they’re not superior, what right do they have to rule? If they cannot keep the colony safe, as they failed to do in 1941, why should they be given another chance?

All of these are good questions.

But it was still to England that Lee goes for education: first to the London School of Economics (which he does not like), and then to Cambridge. Lee talks a little about education; he does not like the weather much. He is indifferent, it seems, to the people. Among his fellow Asian students from British colonies past and present, Lee is strident, an advocate. He becomes a socialist. He believes in rapid, nay immediate, withdrawal of the British from the east. And he falls in love and gets married, in scenes which, though they are abridged, are still touching, at least for this reader.

Soon Lee must return to Singapore, get married again (formally this time), and begin work. He settles upon the law. After freezing Cambridge, Singapore is sweltering, burning. And the politics is heating up, too. Lee is now not only a lawyer of slowly growing skill. He is an agitator. He defends those accused by the British of sedition. He visits them in prison.

And he is close to men like David Marshall who are, in their time, to run Singapore. Before formal independence.

We get quite a lot of the process. The formation of new parties, the arguments, the legislative council scraps. Elections. Communist infiltration; deals made with communist agents; special branch and the intelligence boys. And then, finally, Singapore is out, out and into the wider world. But there remains something new to confront. Lee is now prime minister. All of this is his to deal with, to figure out.

The sections dealing with Singapore’s temporary (and ill-fated) merger into Malaysia are a little difficult, for an ignorant foreigner, to follow. That said, I found them fascinating. The details of Lee’s interlocutor, the Tunku (a playboy nobleman), and of Lee’s own campaigning are worth reading in detail. All I will say is that anyone interested really ought to listen to a series of radio broadcasts, contemporaneous to these events, that Lee made in several languages under the title ‘The Battle for Merger.’

But I mustn’t detain you too long. This book is abridged, after all. No need to reduce it further. Or to go on immoderately. All told, I believe the abridgement did the job well. And I believe I’m almost ready to read the real thing.