The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (10 page)

I chanced upon this gory exhibition on my way to Bras Basah Road because I had decided to learn Chinese in order to be literate enough to understand such notices. My English was of no value under the new rulers. Learning Chinese would be better than learning Japanese; at least it was my own language, not that of a hated conqueror. I bought Chiang Ker Chiu’s
Mandarin Made Easy
, a thin booklet of some 30 pages that taught a basic 700 Chinese characters, how they were written, and how they were used in combination with each other.

I devoured this in a couple of weeks and went back for the advanced Book Two. Later, I bought a series of four books published by the Prinsep Street Chinese School that reached a higher standard. Working on them every day, I spent the next few months practising to write between 1,200 and 1,500 characters and trying to commit their meanings to memory. But I never learnt how they were pronounced. In Mandarin, each sound has one of four tones. My books did indicate them, but I did not know how to produce them and I had no one to teach me.

In the face of these difficulties, my resistance to the Japanese language lessened over the months. I discovered that it was not made up of Chinese characters alone. It had a syllabary system, written in two scripts:
katakana
and
hiragana
. If the Japanese were to be in Singapore as my lords and masters for the next few years, and I had not only to avoid trouble but make a living, I would have to learn their language. So in May 1942 I registered with the first batch of students at the Japanese language school the authorities had opened in Queen Street.
It was a three-month course. The students were of varying ages and abilities, some from secondary schools, some like me from college, and others young workers in their 20s. I passed and got my certificate. I found Japanese much easier than Mandarin because it was not tonal, but more complicated in its inflexions and grammar.

My grandfather, Lee Hoon Leong, had fallen gravely ill in July, and three weeks after I graduated he died. Before the end I visited him many times at Bras Basah Road, where he stayed with his adopted daughter. I felt very sad for him. It was not just that he was sick, but that he had lived to see his world crash: the British and all they had stood for had been humiliated and defeated. The British navy, the British ships’ captains, their discipline, their excellence, their supremacy at sea – these had all been demolished by the strange-looking Japanese. He could not understand how such a slovenly people could defeat straight-backed British officers. How could they have sunk the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
, scattered the British fleet, shot down the Royal Air Force, and captured 130,000 troops with only 60,000 of their own after laying siege to Singapore for only two weeks? As I watched him sinking into a coma, I thought it would have been kinder if he had died before it all happened.

His useful pre-war connections in British colonial Singapore had gone, but he did have one Japanese friend, a Mr Shimoda, whom my father looked up a few days after Kung died. The difficulties of the occupation had sobered my father. He became more responsible in hard times. He had a job with the military department in charge of oil supplies, and also got me my first job. At his request and out of regard for my grandfather, Shimoda offered me work in the new world in which the Japanese were now the masters.

I worked in his company as a clerk for a year, copying documents for internal office use and correspondence with other Japanese companies.
When Shimoda & Co folded up, I moved to the opposite side of Raffles Place where I got another job as a clerk-typist, in the
kumiai
or guild that controlled essential foods – rice, oil, sugar, salt – and tobacco and cigarettes. My salary was paid in currency issued by the Japanese military, bills with pictures of coconut and banana trees on them. These “banana notes”, as they were called, had no serial numbers, and were worth less and less every month. The value of my new job lay rather in the payment in kind that went with it – some 10 katis (about 15 pounds) of rice, sugar, oil and, most tradeable of all, cigarettes. These rations were better than Japanese money, for as the months went by they would get scarcer and cost more and more in banana notes.

I worked in the
kumiai
for about eight months, until late in 1943 when I read an advertisement in the
Syonan Shimbun
inserted by the Japanese information or propaganda department called the
Hodobu
, which was located in Cathay Building. It wanted English-language editors. I turned up to be interviewed by an American-born Japanese, George Takemura, a tall, lean, fair-skinned man who spoke English with an American accent and was called Ji-oh-ji by his fellow Japanese. He did not wear the uniform of a Japanese army officer, but of a civilian in the military administration with five blue stars – the equivalent of a captain. He was soft-spoken, and turned out to be a decent man. He was satisfied with my English, and I was relieved to have found a place where it was wanted.

My job was to run through the cables of allied news agencies: Reuters, UP, AP, Central News Agency of China, and TASS. These cables, sent out in morse code, had been intercepted by Malay radio operators. Radio signals were not clear in the late afternoons and early evenings, and because reception was poor, many words were garbled or lost. I had to decipher them and fill in the missing bits, guided by the context, as in a word puzzle. The cables then had to be collated under the various battle fronts and sent from the top floor of Cathay Building to the floor
below, where they would be revamped for broadcasting. I worked there for about 15 months until the end of 1944.

It was a strange life. My work would begin at 7 pm Tokyo time, which was 5:30 pm Singapore time and still daylight. Radio reception was poor until about midnight Tokyo time. So the first shift from 7 pm to 12 am was hard work, but one got home early to sleep. The period 12 am to 9 am was broken into two shifts, with a two- to three-hour break in between. Reception was better, and there was less puzzling over missing words or parts of words, but it meant sleeping at awkward hours.

There were two editors on duty at any one time. George Takemura, usually wearing his uniform without the jacket because of the warm and humid weather, would drop in several times in an evening, giving the other editor and me a packet of Japanese cigarettes from his rations. I had to stay awake, snatch some sleep from 4 to 6 am by arrangement with my fellow editor, then work until 9 am, when conditions again deteriorated. Radio reception became hopeless in bright sunshine, so the operators also packed up for the day. I would walk the one and a half miles from Cathay Building to Norfolk Road for brunch, then go off to bed in broad daylight for a few more hours of sleep.

Stranger than its schedule were the psychological implications of the work. For hours my head would be filled with news of a war that was going badly for the Japanese, as for the Germans and Italians. But we talked about this to outsiders at our peril. On the ground floor of Cathay Building was a branch of the
Kempeitai
. Every employee who worked in the
Hodobu
had a file. The
Kempeitai
’s job was to make sure that nobody leaked anything.

From the end of 1943, food became scarcer and scarcer. The Japanese navy had suffered defeats with heavy losses at the battles of Midway and Coral Sea. They had lost control of the oceans and their ships were being sunk by Allied submarines. Even Thailand, a traditional rice exporter, could not get its rice to Singapore, either because the Japanese did not
want to pay the Thais for it or because they could not transport it to the island.

Reduced to eating old, mouldy, worm-eaten stocks mixed with Malayan-grown rice, we had to find substitutes. My mother, like many others, stretched what little we could get with maize and millet and strange vegetables we would not normally have touched, like young shoots of sweet potato and tapioca plants cooked in coconut milk. They could be quite palatable, but they had bulk without much nutrition. It was amazing how hungry my brothers and I became one hour after each meal. Meat was a luxury. There was little beef or mutton. Pork was easier to buy and we could raise chickens ourselves, but there were no leftovers to feed them.

My mother’s resourcefulness was sorely tested during the occupation. When the combined salaries of my father, my brother Dennis and myself became negligible because of inflation, she started all manner of businesses. As a daughter in a Straits Chinese family, she had learnt how to cook and bake. Now she made cakes for sale. Wheat flour and butter were soon unobtainable, so she used tapioca flour, rice flour, sago flour, coconut milk and palm sugar. She also made sweetened condensed milk from fresh milk. She was a good cook. Later, when I was prime minister, she filled in her time teaching Straits Chinese cooking to expatriate wives, including wives of the diplomatic corps. She wrote
Mrs Lee’s Cookbook
, which sold well even after she died.

Everything was in short supply. Motorcars had disappeared, except for those used by the military and important Japanese civilians. The few local people who had their own cars could not get petrol for them. Taxis were converted to run on charcoal and firewood. Stocks of bicycle tyres and tubes soon ran out. Local manufacturers could only produce solid bicycle tyres, which made for bumpy going, but that was better than riding on steel rims. Textiles were scarce, so we converted curtain fabrics and tablecloth into trousers and shirts. All imported goods had become
precious. Liquor kept well and was much sought after by wealthy black marketeers and Japanese officers.

Meanwhile, inflation had been increasing month by month, and by mid-1944 it was no longer possible to live on my salary. But there was a solution to this. Although I received the usual rations of rice, oil, other foodstuff and cigarettes, there were better and easier pickings to be had as a broker on the black market. There was a lively trade in ever-diminishing supplies of British medicines, pre-war stocks that had been hoarded, the most valuable of which was Sulphonamide Pyridine M&B (May and Baker) 693. Other profitable commodities were spirits like Johnnie Walker whisky and Hennessy brandy, British cigarettes in hermetically sealed tins of 50, jewellery, landed property and Straits Settlements currency.

The brokers operated mainly in High Street or Chulia Street, off Raffles Place. I joined them in 1944, and learnt how to hoard items, especially small pieces of jewellery going cheap. I would buy them, hold them for a few weeks, and then sell them as prices inevitably went up. It was easy to make money if one had the right connections. At one end were those among the old middle class who were parting with family heirlooms in order to stay alive. My mother knew many women from previously wealthy families who needed to sell their jewellery and properties in a Singapore that was running short of food. Brokers like me would sell them to people at the other end who wanted to sell them to Japanese civilians anxious to convert their banana notes into something of more lasting value, or give them to Japanese military officers who handed out contracts.

The key to survival was improvisation. One business I started changed the course of my life. While brokering on the black market, I met Yong Nyuk Lin, a Raffles College science graduate who was working in the
Overseas Assurance Corporation in China Building, in Chulia Street. Nyuk Lin and I both frequented a goldsmith’s shop in High Street run by two Hakkas, another Raffles College graduate and his elder brother. The shop was a meeting place for brokers like myself who traded in little bits of jewellery. I had been asked by Basrai Brothers, Indian stationers in Chulia Street, if I could get them stationery gum, which was in short supply – there was little left from pre-war stock. Could I perhaps make some myself? I asked Nyuk Lin whether he could make gum. He said he could, using tapioca flour and carbolic acid. So I financed his experiments.

Nyuk Lin’s method was to take a big cylindrical pot, fill it with tapioca flour, and place the pot in a big wok of boiling oil. He used palm oil, which was freely available and cheap. He kept the oil at a constant high temperature to heat the tapioca flour, which needed to be stirred all the while until it became a deep golden brown dextrine. It looked and smelt like beautiful caramel. He added water to the “caramel”, which dissolved it into mucilage or gum, and finally carbolic acid as a preservative to prevent mould from setting in. The gum was poured into empty Scotts Emulsion bottles, which I discovered were plentiful and cheap. I marketed the gum under the name “Stikfas”, and had an attractive label designed by an artistic friend with the word in light brown brushwork against a white background.