From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

(SPH/Straits Times)

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2000. Financial/business hub with reclaimed land and container wharves in
the background. 
(SPH/Straits Times)

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Family reunion Chinese New Year’s eve, 4 February 2000. 
(SPH/Straits Times)

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42. My Family
The communists impressed me by the great importance they placed on the
woman a prospective cadre was attached to. They knew a wife could make an
enormous difference to a man’s reliability and commitment to the cause. They
had objected to my political secretary Jek Yeun Thong’s steady girlfriend, whom
they regarded as not politically suitable. He ignored this objection, and without
his knowledge they dropped him from their cell network. They were right; she
was not supportive of their cause.
I was fortunate. Choo never had any doubts or hesitation about my going on
with the fight, whatever the consequences. She told me she had absolute
confidence in my judgement. She was a great source of strength and comfort.
She has a keen intuition when judging people. While I make up my mind more
on analysis and reason, she decides more on “feel” and has an uncanny knack of
sensing the real feelings and positions of a person behind the smiles and friendly
words. She was often right about who not to trust, although she could not quite
explain why – maybe it was the expression on a person’s face, the way he
smiled, the look in his eyes or his body language. Whatever it was, I learnt to
take her reservations about people seriously. Early in 1962, when I was
negotiating with the Tunku to join Malaysia, she expressed her reservations over
whether we could work with the Tunku, Razak and the other UMNO and MCA
leaders. She said they were different in temperament, character and social habits,
that she could not see the PAP ministers getting along with them. I replied we
simply had to work with them, because we needed to. We had to have merger
and a broader base to build a nation. Within three years, by 1965, she was
proved right. We were incompatible and they asked us to leave Malaysia.
Meeting the wives of foreign leaders, she would give me a good reading of
the husband’s friendliness or otherwise from the way the wife acted or talked to
her. I never took her views as the last word, but I did not dismiss them.
She saved me much time and tedious work, correcting the drafts of speeches
that I dictated and the transcripts of what I said in Parliament and in interviews.

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She is familiar with my vocabulary and can guess my dictated words that my
stenographers cannot make out. I made a point, however, not to discuss the
formulation of policies with her, and she was scrupulous in not reading notes or
faxes that were sensitive.
For my part, the knowledge that she had her profession as a lawyer and if
necessary could look after herself and bring up the children on her own freed me
from worries about their future. The children were a source of joy and
satisfaction. She brought them up well-mannered and self-disciplined, never
throwing their weight around, although they had grown up as the prime
minister’s children. Our home at Oxley Road was only a seven-minute drive
from her office at Malacca Street. She hardly ever attended business lunches
with clients. Instead she would return home to have lunch with the children and
keep in touch. When she was away at the office she had reliable, long-serving
“black-and-white” Cantonese maids, so named for their black pants and white
blouses, to mind them. Choo used a cane when the children were particularly
naughty or disobedient. I did not physically punish them; a stern rebuke was
effective enough. Having a violent father turned me against using physical force.
We had decided in 1959, when I first took office as prime minister, not to
live at Sri Temasek, my official residence in the Istana domain. They were very
young and we did not want them to grow up in such grand surroundings with
butlers and orderlies to fuss over their needs. It would have given them an
unrealistic view of the world and their place in it. Watching them grow up
constantly reminded me of the need to build a safe and wholesome environment
for our children to live in.
All three – Hsien Loong (born 1952), Wei Ling (1955) and Hsien Yang
(1957) – were educated in Chinese schools, first Nanyang kindergarten, then
Nanyang Primary School for six years. The boys went on to Catholic High
School and then to National Junior College. Ling continued in Nanyang Girls’
High School then went to Raffles Institution. They were similar in their
academic performance – good at science and mathematics, fair in Chinese, poor
at drawing, singing, music and handwork.
We made it a point, and so did they, that they had to make it on their own.
All three won the President’s scholarship, awarded to the 5–10 best A level
students of their year. The two boys were also awarded SAF scholarships. This
required them to undergo military training during their university summer
vacations, and to serve the Singapore Armed Forces for at least eight years upon
graduation. Choo and I did not encourage them to do law; we left them to decide

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what they were good at and interested in doing. Loong enjoyed mathematics and
wanted to do it at university but was quite sure he did not want it as his career.
So he read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, became a “Wrangler”
(first-class honours in maths) in two instead of the usual three years, then took a
postgraduate diploma in computer science with a star for distinction. He was
trained in field artillery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, later spent a year at the
Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, then a year
on public administration at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard.
Yang liked engineering. Not intimidated by his brother’s record, he also
went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and took Firsts in both parts of the
engineering Tripos. He went to Fort Knox for armour training, later to
Camberley, England for Staff and Command, and to Stanford University,
California for a year in business administration.
Ling was fond of dogs and wanted to be a vet. Choo dissuaded her by citing
what a vet friend did in Singapore: inspecting pigs at the abattoir before and after
slaughter to make sure they were fit for human consumption. That settled her
choice. When she won the President’s scholarship, she chose to do medicine in
the University of Singapore and graduated as the Honours student, the top
student of her year. She specialised in paediatric neurology and was attached for
three years to Massachusetts General Hospital and later spent a year at Toronto’s
Children’s Hospital.
Loong was always interested in what was going on in the country and in
government. As a schoolboy of 11 he accompanied me when I went on
constituency visits to rally ground support in the months before we joined
Malaysia. He was old enough at 12 to remember the panic and turmoil of the
1964 race riots, including a sudden curfew that caught him at Catholic High
School in Queen’s Street wondering how he was to get home. The family driver
had the wit to drive my father’s small Morris Minor to take him home in chaotic
traffic. Loong had been studying Malay since he was 5, and after Singapore
joined Malaysia had started learning to read Jawi, Malay written in the Arabic
script. For practice he read the 
Utusan Melayu
, Umno’s Jawi newspaper, which
published wild communal accusations against the PAP and me. Politics was a