...what the Western world readership does not understand is that at the end of the day, I am not worried by how they judge me. I am worried by how the people I have governed judge me.
HE WALKS IN and slips me a nod, now closing in at about 15 feet away. But he lacks his chipper little step of yore.
LKY, it appears, has a cold.
We shake hands. I notice immediately that his office did pass along my request that we dress very casually (and that these sessions take place anywhere but in the formality of his office). I suppress a chuckle. This grungy level of casual I hadn’t quite expected. Here is this precise and even elegant statesman decked out in nondescript neo-warehouse clothes, shrouded in the trademark windbreaker, with workman’s trousers and some kind of generic slippers. The whole outfit seems as suited for a man about to clean out his garage as undergo the ordeal of questioning by a Western journalist!
Then you see the distress of pain. His stoic face has a look of weary persecution and his walk is a sort of gravity-challenging, leaning-forward step-by-step-without-falling mini-jog. This is from a vigorous man who has spent an adult lifetime in serious worship of an exercise machine. He does not favor the impediments of cold or injury. He coughs and this seems impossible. Since 1996 I’ve interviewed him three times. His first remark to me was always: “Tom, get on the treadmill, lose some weight.”
He was right—as is often the case.
For decades he has developed his brain as a mix of British positivism, classic Chinese Sun Tzu strategizing, and flat-out Singaporean nationalism. That brain has been honed and shaped inside a well-toned, healthy body made in Sparta-via-Singapore. Philosophers have often written of the ‘mind-body’ problem. But with LKY there has been no problem; it all seems to fit like a Singapore-made Swiss clock that just keeps on ticking.
But when he is obviously low like this, you almost joke: Singapore is such a small country, the place might well come to a stop if the founder were to slow down; everyone might just as well take the day off and stay in bed.
Of course, you remind yourself, he is no longer prime minister (his son is); of course he is off-to-the-side and well off the pitch (doubtful), and all of that. But as long as this legendary statesman is alive, he is to Singapore what the center is to a circle—in the middle of the whole deal.
And now he has a cold!
Seriously, I feel sorry for him, having never felt this from him before. They say LKY is a clammy methodical fish, but I never have found him that way. To people close to him and around him, he has been meticulous, demanding, impatient and, yes, sometimes brutally dismissive. But with me, at least, he has been a helpful and patient tutor in the all-important subjects of politics, governance and international relations. He is passionate about ideas (especially when they work or make sense), about Singapore’s uniqueness (as long as you don’t make fun of it, especially the chewing gum and caning part), about not tolerating political stupidity (unless it’s from the U.S. Congress—a rich source—and then he’ll try so hard to keep his mouth shut), about imbecility in governance (never—he hopes—his own), and about asserting an essential role for Asia on the world stage (dominated in recent centuries by the Americans and the Europeans, but perhaps this century, eventually, by Asia).
His own superiority complex arises in part from his sense of what’s required to help redress Asia’s long-suffering inferiority complex.
Lee, now titled ‘Minister Mentor’ (not my all-time favorite title for a serious official position!), and I are seated round a dining table, in the far corner of a very large room. It is called the State Room, and it is much larger than the Oval Office of the White House, though not in the same league as the Delegates’ Lounge off to the side of the General Assembly at the United Nations in New York. But it is in a league of its own as a reminder of the legacy of British colonialism. You could imagine Winston Churchill calling in his war cabinet, lighting a cigar, sitting down in one of the large yellow sofas and feeling right at home. That is, until he ventured outside—and got hit in the face by the climatic oven of the equator. Sunny Singapore, oh yes, is no gray London.
But in the afternoon, you might want to stay cool and remain inside, as we are right now: Lee Kuan Yew and myself, with two of his aides, in this gorgeous, chandeliered, cavernous room that is air-conditioned as severely as a warehouse of perishables.
So it is cool and slightly dark in the corner where we are, sectioned off to create a feeling of intimacy by a wide Chinese partition, mostly dark emerald and decorated elegantly with birds and flowers. It is easy on the eyes. Over against a panel of old-style rectangular floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the connecting corridor, a pair of physical rehab aides (he has his own physiotherapy team) stand still as statuettes, waiting to replenish the heat pad on the battered right leg of the ordinarily fit-to-a-tee statesman.
LKY turns his head a little to the left and looks at me as if to say, let’s get going. He keeps tightening the thigh-warming pad and looking over to a male physical therapist in white who will keep running in with ones freshly warmed. An injury suffered while dismounting an exercise bike (a daily ritual) has suddenly turned this otherwise physically vigorous former head-of-government into something more like an old man finally looking his age.
To lighten the atmosphere I try to ease into my Cool-Complimentary-Mode. I float out a silly comment—something along the lines of how well the recent trek to neighboring Malaysia went. It doesn’t work, it seems off-key, and I should have known better. This much-celebrated and much-criticized guru of modern successful Singapore, this high priest of traditional Asian/Confucian values, this bête noire of Western human rights groups, this hard-nosed exponent of what Westerners have termed ‘soft authoritarianism’, this formidable intellect—is not one for gratuitous brown-nosing. Even as he plows on deep into the eighth decade of his life, he gives you the feeling that he is a man in a hurry, wherever it is he is still going. Generally, flattery gets you nowhere: it’s as if he feels such fluff only slows him down, distracts him from seeing the end point, and perhaps even is aimed at lulling him into some kind of rhetorical ambush.
He glances back at me with eyes that usually seem to hide so much—because they have seen so much over the decades—but this time convey only the slightest of irritation. Yes, there’s a fearsome side to LKY, and he is not exactly a role model for everyone. He is always knocked about by human rights organizations of the West for Singapore’s near-automatic death-to-drug-dealers policy and general stern sentencing policies. Few Westerners find charming his wily ways of manhandling serious political opponents. Scores tend to be settled in the courts, where, almost miraculously, LKY never loses a case, and the inevitable losers find themselves plunged into financial doom. Outsiders have described this approach as a ‘soft authoritarian’ style of governance.
For many Westerners, in fact, Singapore is little more than a technologically psyched-up, soft-core gulag of caning, don’t walk on the grass (and don’t smoke any grass), no chewing gum allowed, don’t do anything unless we tell you it’s not specifically prohibited, and be careful if you openly criticize the founder of modern Singapore because the inherited and still-used British anti-defamation laws tilt toward representatives of the state.
So all I am expressing to LKY as we start is my hope that this little book of our conversations will attract enough curiosity in the West to take us all beyond clichés and half truths, prompting us all to begin thinking out of the conventional political box. We in the West might even wind up appreciating Singapore for what it is—triumphs, warts, whatever.
For just a second, the old cocky and defiant LKY surfaces amid the coughs and sighs and pangs of pain. His face, though well lined, is animated; he is grinning now, so very alert: “Well, I think what the Western world readership does not understand is that at the end of the day, I am not worried by how they judge me. I am worried by how the people I have governed judge me. I owe them this responsibility when I put myself up for election in the 50s, won it, took them into Malaysia and took them out of Malaysia. We had to make an independent Singapore work.”
He is suddenly on his first roll; there will be many today and tomorrow. He is a master explainer and convincer, so watch out! He’s hard to resist! He continues: “It was an enormous burden I thought I could not discharge. We had to create a new economy. But I had a good team. Empirically, we tried one approach after the other and finally succeeded. After succeeding, my next job [he resigned as PM in 1990] was to find successors who would carry on the system because if it breaks down, then all that I have done will come to naught.
“So, I had a successor in [former PM] Goh Chok Tong [now senior minister] and a team with him. I stayed behind to show him how he can change things. If he wants to change this, this is the way to do it. No crushing of gears. Within six months, three ministers left because they didn’t like his style. I talked them out of it. I said, give him time, he needs to settle in. They stayed on and he carried on for 14 years. I helped him. He appointed my son deputy who helped him succeed.
“Goh’s success means I have succeeded, not that he has succeeded only. His success reflects creditably on me. He has decided to help my son [Lee Hsien Loong] succeed because that will reflect favorably on him. We have evolved a system, a virtual cycle. At some point, it may break down because the ablest and the brightest may not come in to do the job because they think all is well, why should they expose themselves to press publicity, constrict their family life? If that happens, we will have an alternative government.”
I slip a word in: “But you are pretty proud of what you have?” I do not dredge up the well-known Singapore jibe that the triumphant triad is sometimes labeled as ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Goh’.
“It was the best that I could do with the people that I had.”
I explain that this is the story—the amazing ‘Singapore’ movie—that needs to hit America’s movie screens. We in the West need to know more about this place, rejecting what is not right for America but keeping our minds open to borrowing and adapting what might still work for us.
He shakes his head—slowly, with a little fatigue—then tightens the warming pad around his right thigh, sips a bit of water from a small glass on the card table put in front of us, and tells me that he doesn’t think much of that possibility.
“No,” he replies in his characteristic pessimist-realist tone, with that overlay of British accent that fogs over centuries of Chinese heritage. “Only those interested in international affairs and in East Asia will bother, no matter what you do. The average American only knows Singapore as some faraway place, unless they have visited it. If they did, they would have been surprised that it was not the sort of place they expected!”
Cued by the boss, a rehab aide jets toward the senior statesman with another heat pad. LKY tightens it almost fiercely, as if only a painful vice-like grip will expunge the pain.
I look at him: “You’re right, dismay might attend modern Singapore’s failure to live up to the old cliché.”
He nods: “They don’t know where Singapore is, they are not interested. They think of only Michael Fay [the infamous graffiti teen delinquent who in 1994 went on a spray painting spree in Singapore and was thus caned], then maybe caning, chewing gum … strange odd place this Singapore.”
For too long a time, the issue of banned chewing gum (now largely legally chewable) clouded up Western media lenses whenever they focused on this island city-state. Reports spun chewing gum into a metaphor for Singapore’s peculiar ways, and/or for its lockstep, police-state proclivities. For many years as a visiting columnist, I too chewed over the puzzle of the chewing gum conundrum, but came to understand that the tendency to stick the remains of the gum in every which place was viewed by the authorities as a palpable attack on Singapore’s ambition to be perfect. That is, it was anti-utopian. It was gumming up the works. As far as LKY and his team were concerned, the yucky habit, commonplace in the old days, was a palpable enemy of progress. The way to edge forward toward utopia was simple: simply outlaw chewing gum.
...what the Western world readership does not understand is that at the end of the day, I am not worried by how they judge me. I am worried by how the people I have governed judge me.
But hasn’t the Western media moved beyond the chewing gum nonsense, all the same? Surely these past impressions have been overtaken by enlightened new perspectives on Singapore?
Lee, fiddling with the latest heat pad as he replies, looks at me and then down at his right leg: “I am not sure we are past history. But the media have stopped flogging the dead horse. They can see that there is a different Singapore. It is no longer sterile, it’s no longer an absence of fun.”
He starts to warm up here, as if looking both backwards and forwards: “We have put on a colorful gloss and buzz. For high culture, we have many museums, art galleries, rap and whatever else they are doing in the discos, beer and wine-drinking by the riverside. They boost the tourist trade. It is part of a world culture.”
The Clarke Quay waterfront span near Singapore’s downtown area is a major tourist attraction. Somehow—you have to chuckle—it’s very hard to imagine LKY leaning against a bar in the wee hours watching the street action and running up a tab.
I try once again—one last time. I explain that the challenge in writing this book is to reach people who are unaware of the change, and who he really is, and so I add: “I want to get to that interior LKY. I don’t have to convince Singaporeans that you are important, and I don’t have to convince even the neighboring Malaysians that you are important, or perhaps anyone in this region of this.”
Lee, coughing heavily (he’s a non-smoker), starts to interrupt, but I am determined to finish my point and plunge on: “But if I do this book right, it could be a great help to Americans trying to understand what you stand for. Look, people in Singapore know you are an important man but...”
He stops me in my tracks with a bit of negative body language. Referring to my comment about how well Singaporeans know him, he hits me with this: “They think they know me, but they only know the public me.”
It seems we have hit a nerve.