The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (11 page)

The gum turned a decent profit, and we made it in two centres. One was my home, with my mother and sister helping; the other was Nyuk Lin’s home, where he was helped by his wife and his wife’s younger sister, Kwa Geok Choo, the girl who had done better than me at Raffles College. I had seen her again when I first looked for Nyuk Lin in his flat in Tiong Bahru, riding my bicycle with its solid tyres. She was sitting on a veranda when I arrived, and when I asked where I could find him, she smiled and pointed out a staircase around the corner. Now we were meeting under different circumstances. She was at home, at a loose end, doing domestic chores as there were no maids. Making gum was one chore that
gave her pin money, and my visits to check on production led to a friendship that developed over the months.

By September 1944, we knew each other well enough for me to invite Nyuk Lin, his wife and Geok Choo (now simply Choo) to my 21st birthday dinner at a Chinese restaurant at the Great World, an amusement park. It was the first time I had asked her out. True, she was escorted by her brother-in-law, but in the Singapore of that era, if a girl accepted an invitation to a young man’s 21st birthday dinner, it was an event not without significance.

The gum-making lasted for some six to seven months until late 1944. By then, the war was going badly for the Japanese. Few merchant ships came through and trade was at a standstill; business dwindled and offices did not need gum. I discontinued gum-making, but continued to visit Choo at her Tiong Bahru home to chat and keep up the friendship.

By May, the Japanese attempt to invade India from Burma had failed at Imphal and Kohima. This time it was the Japanese who were on the run. They fought tenaciously and ferociously even as they retreated, and I read dispatches of the stubborn resistance they put up as the British advanced towards Mandalay and down the Arakan coast. I felt certain the British would soon push their way down the Malayan peninsula in the same way, and feared that, with the Japanese fighting to the last man, the recapture of Singapore would mean street-to-street and house-to-house fighting to the bitter end, with enormous civilian casualties. It was only a matter of time before it happened – one to two years.

I decided it would be better to get out of Singapore while things were still calm, and I could resign from the
Hodobu
without arousing suspicion over my motives. I applied for leave and went up to Malaya to reconnoitre Penang and the Cameron Highlands, to find out which was the safer place. I travelled from Singapore to Penang and then to Tapah by train, but from Tapah to the Cameron Highlands I got a lift in a vegetable lorry
and sat next to the driver. After two nights in the Camerons, I went back to Tapah by the same means. It was a scary ride. To save petrol, the driver switched off the engine and freewheeled for the better part of two-and-a-half hours down the steep, winding road.

In Penang, I stayed with Hon Sui Sen. In 1942, some four months into the occupation of Singapore, Hon had sent his wife and baby daughter back to Penang and boarded with my family in Norfolk Road as a paying guest. We shared a room and became friends, but after nine months he decided it was not worth staying in Singapore. He was the best science graduate of his year, and one of the two annually recruited into the Straits Settlements Civil Service. (He was later to become our minister for finance.) But his government pay was paltry, his rations were inadequate, and he could not earn enough to keep his family. So he joined them in Penang.

Although I saw little military activity as I wandered around Penang, I ruled it out. It would be a logical stepping stone for the British forces on their way down to Singapore. There would be street fighting, building by building. So I went on to the Cameron Highlands where Maurice Baker, my friend at Raffles College, had his home in Ringlet village at 3,200 feet. He and some friends were living off their savings, planting vegetables and root crops. I paid for my whole trip by selling at an enormous profit half a dozen steel hoes purchased in Singapore. The farmers needed them badly. On my return journey I bought a basket of beautiful vegetables unobtainable in Singapore, and spent a day and a half guarding them on the train.

Once back, I discussed the next move with my mother. We decided it would be best to move to the Cameron Highlands. As a first step, we sold the tenancy of the house at Norfolk Road to a group of Japanese men who worked for a
kumiai
. They paid us the handsome sum of $60,000 in banana notes for vacating this rent-controlled property and handing it over to them. Then I gave one month’s notice to the
Hodobu
.

As I took the lift down in Cathay Building the day before I stopped work, the lift attendant, whom I had befriended, told me to be careful; my file in the
Kempeitai
office had been taken out for attention. I felt a deep chill. I wondered what could have provoked this, and braced myself for the coming interrogation. From that moment, I sensed that I was being followed. Day and night, a team tailed me. I went through all the possible reasons in my mind, and could only conclude that someone had told the
Kempeitai
I was pro-British and had been leaking news that the war was going badly for the Japanese, and that was why I was leaving. At least two men at any one time would be outside the shophouse in Victoria Street where we stayed after moving from Norfolk Road. My father had obtained the tenancy of this house from his employers, the oil authority in Alexandra Road.

To discover if I was indeed being followed, I asked my brothers Dennis and Fred to station themselves at the upstairs windows and watch the two Chinese men at the corner of Bras Basah Road and Victoria Street with two bicycles parked nearby. Then I cycled around the block. When I came back, they confirmed that the moment I left, so did the men, and when I returned, so did they. My heart sank. I told my mother, and decided that it would be best if I did not leave Singapore after all. If I attempted to do so, the
Kempeitai
would probably pull me in for a nasty interrogation. If I stayed behind and acted openly, leading a harmless life operating on the black market and making gum to get by, they might leave me alone.

I endured this cat-and-mouse game for some eight weeks. At times, in the quiet of the early morning, at 2 or 3 am, a car would pass by on Victoria Street and stop near its junction with Bras Basah Road. It is difficult to describe the cold fear that seized me at the thought that they had come for me. Like most, I had heard of the horrors of the torture inflicted by the
Kempeitai
. They wore white armbands with the two Chinese characters in red for
Kempei
, military police, and their powers
of arrest and interrogation could not be challenged, even by high-ranking Japanese officers. They had their headquarters in the YMCA building in Stamford Road, and branches in Oxley Rise, Smith Street and the Central Police Station in South Bridge Road. People living nearby reported hearing their victims’ howls of pain, sounds calculated to fill their hearts with dread, and their fears were spread by word of mouth. It was a deliberate method to terrorise the locals; a cowed population was easier to control.

I had no links with any underground or any network for spreading Allied news. I had no reason to listen secretly to any radio broadcast because it was anyway my job to deal with Western news reports. I made up my mind that if I were arrested, I would tell them what I feared: that after clearing Burma, the British would re-invade Malaya and push their way down to Singapore with the Japanese fighting to the last man. I had therefore planned to leave the island to plant tapioca, sweet potato and vegetables in the Cameron Highlands, which would not be in the path of any military invasion. I would provide proof of my visit to Penang and the Camerons, which was followed by that of my mother and my brother some two months later to confirm my assessment that it was the best area for the family to move to. But one day, two months after it began, the surveillance ceased. It was an unnerving experience.

After I stopped making gum for lack of demand, I teamed up with a Shanghainese called Low You Ling. He was a small contractor in the construction business, in his mid-30s. He had no partners. I could speak Japanese; he could not. Between us we got odd jobs from Japanese companies and from the
butai
, the regiments that garrisoned Singapore. To increase my contacts in the civilian sector, I teamed up with a Mr Kageyama, a Japanese civilian, also in his mid-30s, who had been employed by the
kumiai
. When there was little work for him in the
kumiai
because Japanese ships were being sunk and commodities became scarce, he decided to strike out on his own as a middleman between the big Japanese companies, the military and local suppliers. He and I
complemented each other, with Low providing the construction capability and the connections with the subcontractors, carpenters, masons and bricklayers whom we needed. Together, we all made something of a living.

I continued to operate on the black market, acting as a broker for anything and everything tradeable. It was a no-lose situation. Every item was in short supply and getting scarcer. Hyperinflation meant nothing ever went down in price. But one needed capital to get richer. I was able to raise some money and quickly accumulated more. I knew that the moment I had cash, the important thing was to change it into something of more permanent value or it would melt away in my hands. In this mad urge to convert banana notes into assets, I bought myself a full-size billiard table, had it restored and revarnished, the green baize top recovered, and installed it – adjusted and levelled – in the upstairs flat at Victoria Street. In March or April 1945, a friend of my parents had moved out of his flat in China Building and had offered us the use of it. So I was able to use Victoria Street for business and recreation: business, because next to it was a red-brick corner building, a confectionery and bakery, where brokers would gather to exchange information and close deals; recreation, because the billiard table was there. It was an existentialist life, with each day another day nearer to a re-invasion that spelt danger for the locals. Meanwhile, one had to live and carry on as usual.

In May, news came of Germany’s defeat and surrender. Now the whole war effort would be turned against the Japanese. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Japan would be defeated. Having edited the Burma campaign press despatches while I worked for the
Hodobu
, I was fearful of the price civilians would pay. But there was no way out. For me to leave was still to invite detention and interrogation.

Then out of the blue, on 6 August, a strange bomb was exploded over Hiroshima. The news was only carried in the
Syonan Shimbun
of 11 August in the form of a masthead report – “Nippon protests against
the attack on Hiroshima with a new kind of bomb last Monday” – but those who had listened to shortwave broadcasts from the BBC spread the news that Japan had been hit with a powerful new radiation weapon. We felt the end was close.

On 15 August, the Japanese emperor broadcast to his subjects and announced the surrender. We heard this almost immediately, because people had become bold and many were listening to Allied radio broadcasts, especially the BBC. The news did not appear in the
Syonan Shimbun
until 20 August, when it published the whole “Imperial Rescript”. The war had come to an end without further fighting. We were spared the fiery ordeal that had been the fate of Rangoon and Mandalay.

For three weeks after the emperor’s broadcast, there were no signs of the British arriving. It was an unnatural situation. It was different from what had happened three and a half years earlier, when the British had surrendered and the Japanese had not yet taken effective control. Unlike the British, the Japanese troops had not been defeated and demoralised in battle. They were despondent and confused, but still very much in charge, and still had the power to hurt us. When locals who could not contain their elation celebrated their defeat, Japanese soldiers passing by would gate-crash their parties and slap the merrymakers. The Japanese army expected to be called to account by the British and punished for its misdeeds, but it was also resentful and apprehensive that the population would turn on its officers when they arrived. Shots were reported to have been heard from Japanese officers’ messes, for several could not accept the surrender and preferred to commit
hara-kiri
, either Japanese-style with a dagger or, less painfully, with a revolver. But the locals were fortunate. The Japanese did not kill civilians, as far as I know, nor were there ugly or brutal incidents. They left the population alone until the British took over. Their military discipline held.