The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (5 page)

My father had been brought up a rich man’s son. He used to boast to us that, when he was young, his father allowed him a limitless account at Robinsons and John Little, the two top department stores in Raffles Place, where he could charge to this account any suit or other items he fancied. He was educated in English at St Joseph’s Institution, a Catholic mission school founded by the De La Salle Brothers in 1852. He said he
completed his Junior School Certificate, after which he ended his formal education – to his and my mother’s eternal regret. Being without a profession, he could only get a job as a storekeeper with the Shell Oil Company when the fortunes of both families were destroyed in the Great Depression.

My family history in Singapore began with my paternal great-grandfather, Lee Bok Boon, a Hakka. The Hakkas are Han Chinese from the northern and central plains of China who migrated to Fujian, Guangdong and other provinces in the south some 700 to 1,000 years ago, and as latecomers were only able to squeeze themselves into the less fertile and more hilly areas unoccupied by the local inhabitants. According to the inscription on the tombstone on his grave behind the house he built in China, Lee Bok Boon was born in 1846 in the village of Tangxi in the Dabu prefecture of Guangdong. He had migrated to Singapore on a Chinese junk. Little is known of him after that until 1870, when he married a Chinese girl, Seow Huan Neo, born in Singapore to a Hakka shopkeeper.

In 1882 he decided that he had made enough money to return to his ancestral village in China, build himself a large house, and set himself up as local gentry. His wife, however, did not want to leave her family in Singapore and go to some place she had never seen. According to my grandfather, who was then about ten, the children and their mother went into hiding with her family in Ah Hood Road. Lee Bok Boon went back to China alone. There he married again, built his large house, and duly bought a minor mandarinate. He had a portrait done of himself in mandarin robes, which he sent to Singapore, together with another painting of an impressive-looking Chinese traditional-style house complete with courtyard and grey-tiled roofs. The painting of the house has been lost, but the portrait of my great-grandfather still exists.

My grandfather, Lee Hoon Leong – whom I addressed as Kung or “grandfather” in Chinese – was born in Singapore in 1871, and according
to my father was educated at Raffles Institution up to standard V, which would be today’s lower secondary school. He himself told me he worked as a dispenser (an unqualified pharmacist) when he left school, but after a few years became a purser on board a steamer plying between Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. The ship was part of a fleet belonging to the Heap Eng Moh Shipping Line, which was owned by the Chinese millionaire sugar king of Java, Oei Tiong Ham.

In between his travels he married my grandmother, Ko Liem Nio, in Semarang, a city in central Java. There is a document in Dutch, dated 25 March 1899, issued by the Orphan’s Court in Semarang, giving consent to Ko Liem Nio, age 16, to marry Lee Hoon Leong, age 26. An endorsement on this document states that the marriage was solemnised on 26 March 1899. My father was born in Semarang in 1903, in the Dutch East Indies. But he was a British subject by descent, because his father – Kung – was from Singapore. Kung brought his wife and baby son back to the island for good soon after the child’s birth.

His fortunes rose as he gained the confidence of Oei Tiong Ham, who appointed him his attorney to manage his affairs in Singapore. Kung told me how he was so trusted that in 1926, on his own authority, he donated $150,000, then a princely sum, from Oei’s funds towards the foundation of Raffles College.

Between my father and my grandfather, there was no question as to whom I admired more. My grandfather loved and pampered me. My father, the disciplinarian in the family, was tough with me. My grandfather had acquired great wealth. My father was just a rich man’s son, with little to show for himself.

When the family fortunes declined during the Great Depression, which caused rubber prices to fall from a high of 80 cents per pound to some 20 cents between 1927 and 1930, Kung was badly hit. He must have had less business sense than my mother’s father, Chua Kim Teng. The Chua fortunes also suffered because Chua had invested in rubber
estates and had speculated on the rubber market. But he had gone into property as well. He owned markets and shophouses and he was not wiped out, as Kung was. So it was that by 1929 my parents had moved from Kung’s home to Chua’s large rambling house in Telok Kurau.

Kung was very Westernised, the result of his years as a purser on board ships with British captains, first officers and chief engineers. He used to recount to me his experiences, stories of how rigidly discipline was maintained on board a ship. For example, despite the heat and humidity of the tropics, the captain, the other officers and he, as purser, dressed in buttoned-up white cotton drill suits for dinner, which was served with plates, forks, knives and napkins, all properly laid out. From his accounts of his journeys in the region, the British officers left him with a lasting impression of order, strength and efficiency.

When I was born, the family consulted a friend knowledgeable in these matters for an auspicious name for me. He suggested “Kuan Yew”, the dialect rendering of the Mandarin
guang yao
, meaning “light and brightness”. But my grandfather’s admiration for the British made him add “Harry” to my name, so I was Harry Lee Kuan Yew. My two younger brothers, Kim Yew and Thiam Yew, were also given Christian names – Dennis and Freddy respectively. At that time few non-Christian Chinese did this, and at school later I was to find myself the odd boy out with a personal name like “Harry”. When my youngest brother, Suan Yew, was born in 1933, I persuaded my parents not to give him a Christian name since we were not Christians.

Although Kung had lost the money that had enabled him to live and dress in style, he still retained remnants of his former wealth, including some handsome solid furniture of the early 1910s imported from England. He was, moreover, a gourmet. A meal with him was a treat. My grandmother was a good cook. She would fry a steak seasoned with freshly grated nutmeg to a succulent, sizzling brown, and serve it with potato chips, also fried to a golden brown but never oily, something Kung
was particular about. I was impressed: here was a man who had made his way up in the world, who knew how to live the good life.

He was in marked contrast to my maternal grandfather. Chua Kim Teng had no formal English schooling nor had he associated with British sea captains and Chinese sugar millionaires. He was born in Singapore in 1865, into a Hokkien Chinese family that came from Malacca. He had grown wealthy through hard work and frugal living, saving his money for judicious investments in rubber and property.

He had married three times. His first two wives had died and the third was my grandmother, Neo Ah Soon, a large, broad-shouldered Hakka from Pontianak in Dutch Borneo, who spoke the Hakka dialect and Indonesian Malay. When she married Chua, she was a young widow with two children by her first husband, who had died soon after the younger son was born. She bore Chua seven children before dying in 1935. He died in 1944 during the Japanese occupation of Singapore.

My mother was the eldest child of this union, and when she was married in 1922 at the age of 15, the fortunes of both families were still healthy. She even brought with her, as part of her dowry, a little slave girl whose duty, among other things, was to help bath her, wash her feet and put on and take off her shoes. All such symbols of wealth had disappeared by the time I became conscious of my surroundings at the age of 4 or 5. But memories of better times survive in old photographs of me – an infant over-dressed in clothes imported from England, or in an expensive pram. Chua’s house in Telok Kurau was a large wood and brick bungalow. He and all the children by his third wife lived in that house, my mother, as the eldest daughter, together with my father and five of us children occupying one big bedroom. Ours was a large and reasonably happy household, all of us living together harmoniously but for occasional friction, mostly over mischievous and quarrelling grandchildren. I thus grew up with my three brothers, one sister and seven cousins in the same house. But because they were all younger than I was, I often played with the children of the Chinese fishermen and of the Malays living in a nearby kampong, a cluster of some 20 or 30 attap or zinc-roofed wooden huts in a lane opposite my grandfather’s house. The fishermen worked along Siglap beach, then about 200 yards away.

Grandfather or “Kung”, Lee Hoon Leong, the Anglophile, complete with waistcoat in the hot tropics.

After his return to Dapu, Guangdong province, in 1882: great-grandfather Lee Bok Boon, in the robes of a Qing official Grade 7.

It was a simpler world altogether. We played with fighting kites, tops, marbles and even fighting fish. These games nurtured a fighting spirit and the will to win. I do not know whether they prepared me for the fights I was to have later in politics. We were not soft, nor were we spoilt. As a young boy, I had no fancy clothes or shoes like those my grandchildren wear today.

We were not poor, but we had no great abundance of toys, and there was no television. So we had to be resourceful, to use our imagination. We read, and this was good for our literacy, but there were few illustrated books for young children then, and these were expensive. I bought the usual penny dreadfuls, and followed the adventures of the boys at Greyfriars – Harry Wharton and Billy Bunter and company. I waited eagerly for the mail boat from Britain, which arrived at Tanjong Pagai wharf every Friday, bringing British magazines and pictorials. But they too were not cheap. When I was a little older, I used the Raffles Library where books could be borrowed for two weeks at a time. I read eclectically but preferred westerns to detective thrillers.

For holidays, the family would spend up to a week at a wooder house in my grandfather Chua’s rubber estate in Chai Chee. To get to the estate from Changi Road, we rode down a track in a bullock cart its two bullocks driven by my grandmother’s gardener. The cart had wooden wheels with metal rims and no shock absorbers, so that half mile ride on the rutted clay track was hilariously bumpy. Fifty years later in 1977, as I travelled in a Concorde from London to New York and crossed the Atlantic in three hours, I wondered if any of my fellow passengers had ever experienced the joy of a bullock-cart ride.

Myself, age 4, as a page boy at my aunt’s wedding, dressed in the traditional costume of the time.

Life was not all simple pleasures, however. Every now and again my father would come home in a foul mood after losing at blackjack and other card games at the Chinese Swimming Club in Amber Road, and demand some of my mother’s jewellery to pawn so that he could go back to try his luck again. There would be fearful quarrels, and he was sometimes violent. But my mother was a courageous woman who was determined to hang on to the jewellery, wedding gifts from her parents. A strong character with great energy and resourcefulness, she had been married off too early. In her day, a woman was expected to be a good wife, bear many children, and bring them up to be good husbands or wives in turn. Had she been born one generation later and continued her education beyond secondary school, she could easily have become an effective business executive.