From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

part of his extracurricular education.
From his student days in Cambridge he knew he wanted a part in deciding
what Singapore was to become and was willing to enter the political arena. After
his Maths Tripos examinations, his tutor in Trinity College had urged him to
reconsider returning to serve in the SAF, and pursue instead a career in

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mathematics in Cambridge, since he had done exceptionally well. The president
of the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Singapore, when presenting him with
the prize as the best Singapore student of the 1974 class, referred to a letter from
another tutor of Trinity College. He wrote that Loong had obtained “50 per cent
more alpha marks than the next first class candidate” and that “in the recorded
history of the Mathematical Tripos such a difference between the top man and
the next has never been known before”.
When I met his tutor at his graduation, he told me that Loong had written to
him a most rational, thorough and thoughtful letter explaining why he would not
go on with mathematics no matter how good he was at it. Later, I asked his tutor
for a copy of this letter that Loong had sent him in August 1972:
“Now the reasons for not becoming a professional mathematician. It is
absolutely necessary that I remain in Singapore, whatever I do, not only
because in my special position if I ‘brain-drained’ overseas the effect on
Singapore would be disastrously demoralising, but also because
Singapore is where I belong and where I want to be. … Further, a
mathematician really has little say in what goes on in the world around
him, in the way things are going on in the country. This does not matter
at all in a large developed country like Britain, but in Singapore it would
matter very much to me. It does not mean that I have to go into politics,
but an important member of the civil service or the armed forces is in a
position to do a great deal of good or harm. … I would prefer to be doing
things and perhaps be cursed by other people than have to curse at
someone else and not be able to do any more.”
He was then only 20 but he knew his mind and where his commitments
were.
Life is not without its tragedies. Loong married in 1978 Dr Wong Ming
Yang, a Malaysian he had met when she was in Girton College studying
medicine at Cambridge. In 1982 she gave birth to their second child, a boy,
Yipeng. He was an albino and visually handicapped. Three weeks later Ming
Yang died of a heart attack. Loong’s world collapsed. His mother-in-law looked
after his two children, with Choo pitching in. They had the help of a maid whom
Pamelia (my brother Suan’s wife) had immediately sent over to meet this
emergency. Later, we worried that Yipeng was slow in learning to speak and did
not relate to people. When Ling returned from her training in paediatric

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neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, she diagnosed him as autistic.
After some years in a preparatory school followed by a school for the visually
handicapped, Yipeng’s socialisation skills improved and he was able to join a
mainstream secondary school. Ling rediagnosed him as having Asperger’s
Syndrome (a mild form of autism) and he is intellectually normal. He has turned
out to be good-natured and the best-behaved and most likeable of my
grandchildren.
While Loong was still unsettled after his bereavement, Goh Chok Tong, then
the minister for defence and assistant secretary-general of the PAP, invited him
to stand for Parliament in the December 1984 general elections. At that time
Loong was a colonel on the general staff and the joint staff in the SAF. Chok
Tong, as his minister, had a high assessment of Loong’s potential in politics.
Loong was concerned that, as a widower with two young children, he would find
it difficult to manage the family as he would have to be absent much of the time
on political work. He discussed it with Choo and me. I told him that if he missed
the coming elections he would have to wait for four to five years before he
would have another chance. With every passing year he would find it more
difficult to change and adjust to political life, especially learning to work with
people in the constituencies and the unions. Most of all, he had to feel deeply for
people, be able to communicate his feeling for them and move them to go with
him. At the age of 32, Loong left the SAF and contested the elections in
December. He won one of the highest majorities of any candidate in the
elections.
I appointed Loong a junior minister in the ministry of trade and industry. His
minister immediately put him in charge of a private sector committee to review
the economy just as we entered a severe recession in 1985. The committee’s
proposals that the government take strong steps to reduce business costs and
strengthen competitiveness were a major political test for Loong and the other
ministers. In November 1990, when I resigned as prime minister, Loong was
appointed deputy prime minister by Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong.
Many of my critics thought this smacked of nepotism, that he was unduly
favoured because he was my son. On the contrary, as I told the party conference
in 1989, the year before I resigned, it would not be good for Singapore or for
Loong to have him succeed me. He would be seen as having inherited the office
from me when he should deserve the position on his own merit. He was still
young and it was better that someone else succeed me as prime minister. Then
were Loong to make the grade later, it would be clear that he made it on his own

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merit.
For several years Chok Tong had to endure the jeers of foreign critics that he
was a seat warmer for Loong. But after Chok Tong won his second general
elections in 1997 and consolidated his position as his own man, the jeering
stopped. As Chok Tong’s deputy, Loong has established his standing as a
political leader in his own right – determined, fast and versatile in ranging over
the whole field of government. Almost every difficult or taxing problem in any
ministry had his attention. Ministers, MPs and senior civil servants knew this. I
could have stayed on a few years longer and allowed him to gather support to be
the leader. I did not do so.
When Choo and I were in Johannesburg in October 1992, Loong phoned
from Singapore while I was addressing a conference. I immediately rang back,
fearing bad news. It was, devastating. A biopsy of a polyp found in his colon had
been diagnosed as cancer, a lymphoma. Subsequent news gave us some grounds
for relief; the form Loong suffered from was intermediate grade lymphoma
which usually responded to chemotherapy. Loong underwent a three-month
course of intensive chemotherapy. It cleared up his cancer cells and brought him
a remission. The specialists advised that if it did not recur within five years his
remission could be considered a cure. We waited anxiously for the five years to
elapse. October 1997 came and passed without mishap. Loong had gone through
two major crises.
In December 1985 Loong married Ho Ching whom he had known as an
engineer in the ministry of defence. She had won the President’s scholarship in
1972 and taken first-class honours in engineering at the University of Singapore.
She is now a hands-on chief executive of a government-linked company,
Singapore Technologies. It was a happy choice. They have two sons and Ho
Ching embraced Loong’s two other children as her own.
Yang married a girl from Singapore, Lim Suet Fern, who was studying law
at Girton College, Cambridge and also took a First. They have three sons. After
15 years in the SAF Yang was seconded to Singapore Telecom. He had been
asked by his permanent secretary to join the civil service as an administrative
officer with the prospect of soon becoming a permanent secretary, and the
potential to be head of the civil service. He preferred the challenge of the private
sector, and opted to join SingTel. When he was promoted to CEO, my critics
again alleged nepotism. It would have been a disaster for him and for the system
of meritocracy that I had set up if he had been promoted because of me. The
officers he served with and his peers knew better. So did the fund managers.

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SingTel shares did not weaken. After several years dealing with chairmen and
CEOs of major international telecom companies, all talk of favouritism
evaporated.
When our children were still in school, years before I raised the unmarried
graduate women issue in 1983, Choo and I had told them that when they marry
they must be happy to have their children as bright only as their spouses. They
married their equals.
Ling, a neurologist, is a deputy director (clinical services) of the National
Neuroscience Institute at Tan Tock Seng Hospital. She is unmarried, like many
other graduate women of her generation. She lives with us, as is normal in Asian
families, and travels extensively to conferences on neurology, pursuing her
interest in epilepsy and learning disabilities in children.
The family has remained close. When they come for lunch on Sundays, the
younger boys work each other up and create boisterous bedlam in the dining
room. Most people dote on their grandchildren, spoiling them in the process. We
are fond of ours, but feel that their parents are overindulgent. Perhaps we were
too strict with their parents, but it has served them well.
My three brothers, Dennis, Freddy and Suan Yew, a sister, Monica, and I
have all benefited from a strong, resourceful and determined mother who
ensured that we were educated to the best of our abilities and her resources.
Dennis followed me to read law at Fitzwilliam House in Cambridge. Later,
together with Choo, we practised law in partnership as Lee & Lee, and after a
year Eddie Barker, an old friend at Raffles College and in Cambridge, joined us.
Freddy became a stockbroker. Suan went to Fitzwilliam to read medicine and
came back to build a successful practice. Monica married early. They rallied
around to help in many ways when the family was in trouble, as when Loong
lost Ming Yang in 1982, and again when he had cancer in 1992.
My siblings and I are especially close to each other. I was not just the eldest
brother but also the one who helped our mother to make the major decisions. My
father was carefree by nature and early in my teens my mother had coopted me
as the substitute head of the family. My brothers and sister still regard me as
head of the family as much as the eldest brother. The extended family meet at
least twice a year, on Chinese New Year’s Eve for a reunion dinner and on New
Year’s Day at my home in Oxley Road. We keep in touch whenever there is
anything important, like the arrival of new grandchildren. Now in our 70s and
60s, we are reminded how much we share of our parents’ genes as with each
illness our doctors check to confirm that our siblings are not similarly afflicted.

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We are grateful that three of us have already exceeded the biblical three score
and ten.

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