Lee Kuan Yew New York Times interview transcript

The previous post entitled Lee Kuan Yew comtemplates ageing, infirmity and loss apparently contains only part of Lee Kuan Yew's New York Times interview. Since many of the issues Lee Kuan Yew touched on also resides in the recesses of my heart, I think I will reproduce the full transcript of his interview below:

Transcripts – New York Times/International Herald Tribune interview Lee Kuan Yew
Posted by theonlinecitizen on September 13, 201022 Comments
The following is the transcript of the interview Seth Mydans had with Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. The interview was held on 1 September 2010.
Mr Lee: “Thank you. When you are coming to 87, you are not very happy..”
Q: “Not. Well you should be glad that you’ve gotten way past where most of us will get.”
Mr Lee: “That is my trouble. So, when is the last leaf falling?”
Q: “Do you feel like that, do you feel like the leaves are coming off?”
Mr Lee: “Well, yes. I mean I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality and I mean generally every year when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that is life.”
Q: “My mother used to say never get old.”
Mr Lee: “Well, there you will try never to think yourself old. I mean I keep fit, I swim, I cycle.”
Q: “And yoga, is that right? Meditation?”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “Tell me about meditation?”
Mr Lee: “Well, I started it about two, three years ago when Ng Kok Song, the Chief Investment Officer of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, I knew he was doing meditation. His wife had died but he was completely serene. So, I said, how do you achieve this? He said I meditate everyday and so did my wife and when she was dying of cancer, she was totally serene because she meditated everyday and he gave me a video of her in her last few weeks completely composed completely relaxed and she and him had been meditating for years. Well, I said to him, you teach me. He is a devout Christian. He was taught by a man called Laurence Freeman, a Catholic. His guru was John Main a devout Catholic. When I was in London, Ng Kok Song introduced me to Laurence Freeman. In fact, he is coming on Saturday to visit Singapore, and we will do a meditation session. The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts. It is most difficult to stay focused on the mantra. The discipline is to have a mantra which you keep repeating in your innermost heart, no need to voice it over and over again throughout the whole period of meditation. The mantra they recommended was a religious one. Ma Ra Na Ta, four syllables. Come To Me Oh Lord Jesus. So I said Okay, I am not a Catholic but I will try. He said you can take any other mantra, Buddhist Om Mi Tuo Fo, and keep repeating it. To me Ma Ran Na Ta is more soothing. So I used Ma Ra Na Ta. You must be disciplined. I find it helps me go to sleep after that. A certain tranquility settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping. I miss it sometimes when I am tired, or have gone out to a dinner and had wine. Then I cannot concentrate. Otherwise I stick to it.”
Q: “So…”
Mr Lee: “.. for a good meditator will do it for half-an-hour. I do it for 20 minutes.”
Q: “So, would you say like your friend who taught you, would you say you are serene?”
Mr Lee: “Well, not as serene as he is. He has done it for many years and he is a devout Catholic. That makes a difference. He believes in Jesus. He believes in the teachings of the Bible. He has lost his wife, a great calamity. But the wife was serene. He gave me this video to show how meditation helped her in her last few months. I do not think I can achieve his level of serenity. But I do achieve some composure.”
Q: “And do you find that at this time in your life you do find yourself getting closer to religion of one sort or another?”
Mr Lee: “I am an agnostic. I was brought up in a traditional Chinese family with ancestor worship. I would go to my grandfather’s grave on All Soul’s Day which is called “Qingming”. My father would bring me along, lay out food and candles and burn some paper money and kowtow three times over his tombstone. At home on specific days outside the kitchen he would put up two candles with my grandfather’s picture. But as I grew up, I questioned this because I think this is superstition. You are gone, you burn paper money, how can he collect the paper money where he is? After my father died, I dropped the practice. My youngest brother baptised my father as a Christian. He did not have the right to. He was a doctor and for the last weeks before my father’s life, he took my father to his house because he was a doctor and was able to keep my father comforted. I do not know if my father was fully aware when he was converted into Christianity.”
Q: “Converted your father?”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “Well this happens when you get close to the end.”
Mr Lee: “Well, but I do not know whether my father agreed. At that time he may have been beyond making a rational decision. My brother assumed that he agreed and converted him.”
Q: “But…”
Mr Lee: “I am not converted.”
Q: “But when you reach that stage, you may wonder more than ever what is next?”
Mr Lee: “Well, what is next, I do not know. Nobody has ever come back. The Muslims say that there are seventy houris, beautiful women up there. But nobody has come back to confirm this.”
Q: “And you haven’t converted to Islam, knowing that?”
Mr Lee: “Most unlikely. The Buddhist believes in transmigration of the soul. If you live a good life, the reward is in your next migration, you will be a good being, not an ugly animal. It is a comforting thought, but my wife and I do not believe in it. She has been for two years bed-ridden, unable to speak after a series of strokes. I am not going to convert her. I am not going to allow anybody to convert her because I know it will be against what she believed in all her life. How do I comfort myself? Well, I say life is just like that. You can’t choose how you go unless you are going to take an overdose of sleeping pills, like sodium amytal. For just over two years, she has been inert in bed, but still cognitive. She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night. She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day’s work, read her favourite poems.”
Q: ‘And what kind of books do you read to her?”
Mr Lee: “So much of my time is reading things online. The latest book which I want to read or re-read is Kim. It is a beautiful of description of India as it was in Kipling’s time. And he had an insight into the Indian mind and it is still basically that same society that I find when I visit India. “
Q: “When you spoke to Time Magazine a couple of years ago, you said Don Quixote was your favourite?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, I was just given the book, Don Quixote, a new translation.”
Q: “But people might find that ironic because he was fantasist who did not realistically choose his projects and you are sort of the opposite?”
Mr Lee: “No, no, you must have something fanciful and a flight of fancy. I had a colleague Rajaratnam who read Sci-Fi for his leisure.”’
Q: “And you?”:
Mr Lee: “No, I do not believe in Sci-Fi.”
Q: “But you must have something to fantasise.”
Mr Lee: “Well, at the moment, as I said, I would like to read Kim again. Why I thought of Kim was because I have just been through a list of audio books to choose for my wife. Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, books she has on her book shelf. So, I ticked off the ones I think she would find interesting. The one that caught my eye was Kim. She was into literature, from Alice in Wonderland, to Adventures with a Looking Glass, to Jane Austen's Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen was her favourite writer because she wrote elegant and leisurely English prose of the 19th century. The prose flowed beautifully, described the human condition in a graceful way, and rolls off the tongue and in the mind. She enjoyed it. Also Chaucer’s Cantebury Tales. She was an English Literature major.”
Q: “You are naming books on the list, not necessarily books you have already read, yes?”
Mr Lee: “I would have read some of them.”
Q: “Like a Jane Austen book, or Canterbury Tales?”
Mr Lee: “No, Canterbury Tales, I had to do it for my second year English Literature course in Raffles College. For a person in the 15th Century, he wrote very modern stuff. I didn’t find his English all that archaic. I find those Scottish poets difficult to read. Sometimes I don’t make sense of their Scottish brogue. My wife makes sense of them. Then Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
Q: “You read those?”
Mr Lee: “I read those sonnets when I did English literature in my freshman’s year. She read them.”
Q: “When you say she reads them now, you’re the one who reads them, yes?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, I read them to her.”
Q: “But you go to her.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, I read from an Anthology of Poems which she has, and several other anthologies. So I know her favourite poems. She had flagged them. I read them to her.”
Q: “She’s in the hospital? You go to the hospital?”
Mr Lee: “No, no, she’s at home. We’ve got a hospital bed and nurses attending to her. We used to share the same room. Now I’m staying in the next room. I have to get used to her groans and grunts when she’s uncomfortable from a dry throat and they pump in a spray moisture called “Biothene” which soothes her throat, and they suck out phlegm. Because she can’t get up, she can’t breathe fully. The phlegm accumulates in the chest but you can’t suck it out from the chest, you’ve got to wait until she coughs and it goes out to her throat. They suck it out, and she’s relieved. They sit her up and tap her back. It’s very distressing, but that’s life.”
Q: “Yes, your daughter on Sunday wrote a moving column, movingly about the situation referring to you.”
Mr Lee: “How did you come to read it?”
Q: “Somebody said you’ve got to read that column, so I read it.”
Mr Lee: “You don’t get the Straits Times.”
Q: “I get it online actually. I certainly do, I follow Singapore online and she wrote that the whole family suffers of course from this and she wrote the one who’s been hurting the most and is yet carrying on stoically is my father.”
Mr Lee: “What to do? What else can I do? I can’t break down. Life has got to go on. I try to busy myself, but from time to time in idle moments, my mind goes back to the happy days we were up and about together.”
Q: “When you go to visit her, is that the time when your mind goes back?”
Mr Lee: “No, not then. My daughter’s fished out many old photographs for this piece she wrote and picked out a dozen or two dozen photographs from the digital copies which somebody had kept at the Singapore Press Holdings. When I look at them, I thought how lucky I was. I had 61 years of happiness. We’ve got to go sometime, so I’m not sure who’s going first, whether she or me. So I told her, I’ve been looking at the marriage vows of the Christians. The best I read was,” To love, to hold and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, till death do us part.” I told her I would try and keep you company for as long as I can. She understood.”
Q: “Yes, it’s been really.”
Mr Lee: “What to do? What can you do in this situation? I can say get rid of the nurses. Then the maids won’t know how to turn her over and then she gets pneumonia. That ends the suffering. But human beings being what we are, I do the best for her and the best is to give her a competent nurse who moves her, massages her, turns her over, so no bed sores. I’ve got a hospital bed with air cushions so no bed sores. Well, that’s life. Make her comfortable.”
Q: “And for yourself, you feel the weight of age more than you have in the past?”
Mr Lee: “I’m not sure. I marginally must have. It’s stress. However, I look at it, I mean, it’s stress. That’s life. But it’s a different kind of stress from the kind of stress I faced, political stresses. Dire situations for Singapore, dire situations for myself when we broke off from Malaysia, the Malays in Singapore could have rioted and gone for me and they suddenly found themselves back as a minority because the Tunku kicked us out. That’s different, that’s intense stress and it’s over but this is stress which goes on. One doctor told me, you may think that when she’s gone you’re relieved but you’ll be sad when she’s gone because there’s still the human being here, there’s still somebody you talk to and she knows what you’re saying and you’ll miss that. Well, I don’t know, I haven’t come to that but I think I’ll probably will because it’s now two years, May, June, July, August, September, two years and four months. It’s become a part of my life.”
Q: “She’s how old now?”
Mr Lee: “She’s two-and-a-half years older than me, so she’s coming on to 90.”
Q: “But you did make a reference in an interview with Time magazine to something that goes beyond reason as you put it. You referred to the real enemy by Pierre D’Harcourt who talked about people surviving the Nazi, it’s better that they have something to believe in.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.”
Q: “And you said that the Communists and the deeply religious fought on and survived. There are some things in the human spirit that are beyond reason.”
Mr Lee: “I believe that to be true. Look, I saw my friend and cabinet colleague who’s a deeply religious Catholic. He was Finance Minister, a fine man. In 1983, he had a heart attack. He was in hospital, in ICU, he improved and was taken out of ICU. Then he had a second heart attack and I knew it was bad. I went to see him and the priest was giving him the last rites as a Catholic. Absolutely fearless, he showed no distress, no fear, the family was around him, his wife and daughters, he had four daughters. With priest delivering the last rites, he knew he was reaching the end. But his mind was clear but absolutely calm.”
Q: “Well, I am more like you. We don’t have something to cling to.”
Mr Lee: “That’s our problem.”
Q: “But also the way people see you is supremely reasonable person, reason is the ultimate.”
Mr Lee: “Well, that’s the way I’ve been working.”
Q: “Well, you did mention to Tom Plate, they think they know me but they only know the public me?”
Mr Lee: “Yeah, the private view is you have emotions for your close members of your family. We are a close family, not just my sons and my wife and my parents but my brothers and my sister. So my youngest brother, a doctor as I told you, he just sent me an email that my second brother was dying of a bleeding colon, diverticulitis. And later the third brother now has got prostate cancer and has spread into his lymph nodes. So I asked what’re the chances of survival. It’s not gotten to the bones yet, so they’re doing chemotherapy and if you can prevent it from going into the bones, he’ll be okay for a few more years. If it does get to the bones, then that’s the end. I don’t think my brother knows. But I’ll probably go and see him.”
Q: “But you yourself have been fit. You have a stent, you had heart problem late last year but besides that do you have ailments?”
Mr Lee: “Well, aches and pains of a geriatric person, joints, muscles but all non-terminal. I go in for a physiotherapy, maintenance once a week, they give me a rub over because when I cycle, my thighs get sore, knees get a little painful, and so the hips.”
Q: “These are the signs of age.”
Mr Lee: “Yeah, of course.”
Q: “I’m 64. I’m beginning to feel that and I don’t like it and I don’t want to admit to myself.”
Mr Lee: “But if you stop exercising, you make it worse. That’s what my doctors tell me, just carry on. When you have these aches and pains, we’ll give you physiotherapy. I’ve learnt to use heat pads at home. So after the physiotherapy, once a week, if I feel my thighs are sore, I just have a heat pad there. You put in the microwave oven and you tie it around your thighs or your ankles or your calves. It relieves the pain.”
Q: “So you continue to cycle.”
Mr Lee: “Oh yeah.”
Q: “Treadmill?
Mr Lee: “No, I don’t do the treadmill. I walk but not always. When I’ve cycled enough I don’t walk.”
Q: “That’s your primary exercise, swimming?”
Mr Lee: “Yeah, I swim everyday, it’s relaxing.”
Q: “What other secrets, I see you drink hot water?”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “Tell me about it.”
Mr Lee: “Well, I used to drink tea but tea is a diuretic, but I didn’t know that. I used to drink litres of it. In the 1980s, I was having a conference with Zhou Ziyang who was then Secretary-General of the Communist Party in the Great Hall of the People. The Chinese came in and poured more tea and hot water. I was scoffing it down because it kept my throat moistened, my BP was up because more liquid was in me. Halfway through, I said please stop. I’m dashing off. I had to relief myself. Then my doctors said don’t you know that tea is a diuretic? I don’t like coffee, it gives me a sour stomach, so okay, let’s switch to water.”
Q: “You know you had the hot water when I met you a couple of years ago and after I told my wife about that, she switched to hot water. She’s not sure why except that you drink hot water, so she’s decided to.”
Mr Lee: “Well, cold water, this was from my ENT man. If you drink cold water, you reduce the temperature of your nasal passages and throat and reduce your resistance to coughs and colds. So I take warm water, body temperature. I don’t scald myself with boiling hot water. I avoid that. But my daughter puts blocks of ice into her coffee and drinks it up. She’s all right, she’s only 50-plus.
Q: “Let me ask a question about the outside world a little bit. Singapore is a great success story even though people criticize this and that. When you look back, you can be proud of what you’ve done and I assume you are. Are there things that you regret, things that you wished you could achieve that you couldn’t?”
Mr Lee: “Well, first I regret having been turfed out of Malaysia. I think if the Tunku had kept us together, what we did in Singapore, had Malaysia accepted a multiracial base for their society, much of what we’ve achieved in Singapore would be achieved in Malaysia. But not as much because it’s a much broader base. We would have improved inter-racial relations and an improved holistic situation. Now we have a very polarized Malaysia, Malays, Chinese and Indians in separate schools, living separate lives and not really getting on with one another. You read them. That’s bad for us as close neighbours.”
Q: “So at that time, you found yourself with Singapore and you have transformed it. And my question would be how do you assess your own satisfaction with what you’ve achieved? What didn’t work?”
Mr Lee: “Well, the greatest satisfaction I had was my colleagues and I, were of that generation who were turfed out of Malaysia suffered two years under a racial policy decided that we will go the other way. We will not as a majority squeeze the minority because once we’re by ourselves, the Chinese become the majority. We made quite sure whatever your race, language or religion, you are an equal citizen and we’ll drum that into the people and I think our Chinese understand and today we have an integrated society. Our Malays are English-educated, they’re no longer like the Malays in Malaysia and you can see there are some still wearing headscarves but very modern looking.”
Q: “That doesn’t sound like a regret to me.”
Mr Lee: “No, no, but the regret is there’s such a narrow base to build this enormous edifice, so I’ve got to tell the next generation, please do not take for granted what’s been built. If you forget that this is a small island which we are built upon and reach a 100 storeys high tower block and may go up to 150 if you are wise. But if you believe that it’s permanent, it will come tumbling down and you will never get a second chance.”
Q: “I wonder if that is a concern of yours about the next generation. I saw your discussion with a group of young people before the last election and they were saying what they want is a lot of these values from the West, an open political marketplace and even playing field in all of these things and you said well, if that’s the way you feel, I’m very sad.”
Mr Lee: “Because you play it that way, if you have dissension, if you chose the easy way to Muslim votes and switch to racial politics, this society is finished. The easiest way to get majority vote is vote for me, we’re Chinese, they’re Indians, they’re Malays. Our society will be ripped apart. If you do not have a cohesive society, you cannot make progress.”
Q: “But is that a concern that the younger generation doesn’t realize as much as it should?”
Mr Lee: “I believe they have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it. They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so. We have crafted a set of very intricate rules, no housing blocks shall have more than a percentage of so many Chinese, so many percent Malays, Indians. All are thoroughly mixed. Willy-nilly, your neighbours are Indians, Malays, you go to the same shopping malls, you go to the same schools, the same playing fields, you go up and down the same lifts. We cannot allow segregation.”
Q: “There are people who think that Singapore may lighten up a little bit when you go, that the rules will become a little looser and if that happens, that might be something that’s a concern to you.”
Mr Lee: “No, you can go looser where it’s not race, language and religion because those are deeply gut issues and it will surface the moment you start playing on them. It’s inevitable, but on other areas, policies, right or wrong, disparity of opportunities, rich and poor, well go ahead. But don’t play race, language, religion. We’ve got here, we’ve become cohesive, keep it that way. We’ve not used Chinese as a majority language because it will split the population. We have English as our working language, it’s equal for everybody, and it’s given us the progress because we’re connected to the world. If you want to keep your Malay, or your Chinese, or your Tamil, Urdu or whatever, do that as a second language, not equal to your first language. It’s up to you, how high a standard you want to achieve.”
Q: “The public view of you is as a very strict, cerebral, unsentimental. Catherine Lim, “an authoritarian, no-nonsense manner that has little use for sentiment”.”
Mr Lee: “She’s a novelist, therefore, she simplifies a person’s character, make graphic caricature of me. But is anybody that simple or simplistic?”
Q: “Sentiment though, you don’t show that very much in public.”
Mr Lee: “Well, that’s a Chinese ideal. A gentleman in Chinese ideal, the junzi (君子) is someone who is always composed and possessed of himself and doesn’t lose his temper and doesn’t lose his tongue. That’s what I try to do, except when I got turfed out from Malaysia. Then, I just couldn’t help it.”
Q: “One aspect of the way you’ve constructed Singapore is a certain level of fear perhaps in the population. You described yourself as a street fighter, knuckle duster and so forth.”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “And that produces among some people a level of fear and I want to tell you what a taxi driver said when I said I was going to interview you. He said, safer not to ask him anything. If you ask him, somebody will follow you. We’re not in politics so just let him do the politics.”
Mr Lee: “How old is he?’
Q: “I’m sorry, middle aged, I don’t know.”
Mr Lee: “I go out. I’m no longer the Prime Minister. I don’t have to do the difficult things. Everybody wants to shake my hands, everybody wants me to autograph something. Everybody wants to get around me to take a photo. So it’s a problem.
Q: “Yes but…”
Mr Lee: “Because I’m no longer in charge, I don’t have to do the hard things. I’ve laid the foundation and they know that because of that foundation, they’re enjoying this life.’
Q: “So when you were the one directly in-charge, you had to be tough, you had to be a fighter.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course. I had to fight left-wingers, Communists, pro-Communist groups who had killer squads. If I didn’t have the guts and the gumption to take them on, there wouldn’t be the Singapore. They would have taken over and it would have collapsed. I also had to fight the Malay Ultras when we were in Malaysia for two years.”
Q: “Well, you don’t have a lot of dissidents in prison but you’re known for your libel suits which keeps a lot of people at bay.”
Mr Lee: “We are non-corrupt. We lead modest lives, so it’s difficult to malign us. What’s the easy way to get a leader down? He’s a hypocrite, he is corrupt, he pretends to be this when in fact he’s that. That’s what they’re trying to do to me. Well, prove it, if what you say is right, then I don’t deserve this reputation. Why must you say these things without foundation? I’m taking you to court, you’ve made these allegations, I’m open to your cross-examination.”
Q: “But that may produce what I was talking about, about a level of fear.”
Mr Lee: “No, you’re fearful of a libel suit? Then don’t issue these defamatory statements or make them where you have no basis. The Western correspondent, especially those who hop in and hop out got to find something to show that they are impartial, that they’re not just taken in by the Singapore growth story. They say we keep down the opposition, how? Libel suits. Absolute rubbish. We have opponents in Parliament who have attacked us on policy, no libel suits against them and even in Parliament they are privileged to make defamatory allegation and cannot be sued. But they don’t. They know it is not true.”
Q: “Let me ask a last question. Again back to Tom Plate, “I’m not serious all the time. Everyone needs to have a good laugh now and then to see the funny side of things and to laugh at himself”.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.”
Q: “How about that?”
Mr Lee: “You have to be that.”
Q: “So what makes you laugh?”
Mr Lee: “Many things, the absurdity of it, many things in life. Sometimes, I meet witty people, have conversations, they make sharp remarks, I laugh.
Q: “And when you laugh at yourself as you said?”
Mr Lee: “That’s very frequent. Yeah, I’m reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure and it’s an effort and is it worth the effort? I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just carry on.”
Q: “So it’s the whole broad picture of things that you find funny?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, life as a whole has many abnormalities, of course.”
Q: “Your public life together with your private life, what you’ve done over things people write about you and Singapore, that overall is something that you can find funny?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.
Q: “You made one of the few people who laugh at Singapore.”
Mr Lee: “Let me give you a Chinese proverb “do not judge a man until you’ve closed his coffin. Do not judge a man.” Close the coffin, then decide. Then you assess him. I may still do something foolish before the lid is closed on me.”
Q: “So you’re waiting for the final verdict?”
Mr Lee: “No, the final verdict will not be in the obituaries. The final verdict will be when the PhD students dig out the archives, read my old papers, assess what my enemies have said, sift the evidence and seek the truth? I’m not saying that everything I did was right, but everything I did was for an honourable purpose. I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.”
Q: “For the greater good?
Mr Lee: “Well, yes, because otherwise they are running around and causing havoc playing on Chinese language and culture, and accusing me of destroying Chinese education. You’ve not been here when the Communists were running around. They do not believe in the democratic process. They don’t believe in one man, one vote. They believe in one bullet, one vote. They had killer squads. But they at the same time had a united front exploiting the democratic game. It gave them cover. But my business, my job was to make sure that they did not succeed. Sometimes you just got to lock the leaders up. They are confusing the people. The reality is that if you allow these people to work up animosity against the government because it’s keeping down the Chinese language, because we’ve promoted English, keeping down Chinese culture because you have allowed English literature, and we suppress our Chinese values and the Chinese language, the Chinese press, well, you will break up the society. They harp on these things when they know they are not true. They know that if you actually do in Chinese language and culture, the Chinese will riot and the society must break up.”
Q: “So leadership is a constant battle?”
Mr Lee: “In a multiracial situation like this, it is. Malaysia took the different line; Malaysians saw it as a Malay country, all others are lodgers, “orang tumpangan”, and they the Bumiputras, sons of the soil, run the show. So the Sultans, the Chief Justice and judges, generals, police commissioner, the whole hierarchy is Malay. All the big contracts for Malays. Malay is the language of the schools although it does not get them into modern knowledge. So the Chinese build and find their own independent schools to teach Chinese, the Tamils create their own Tamil schools, which do not get them jobs. It’s a most unhappy situation.”
Mdm Yeong: “I thought that was the last question.”
Q: “This is the last part of the last question. So your career has been a struggle to keep things going in the right way and you’ve also said that the best way to keep your health is to keep on working. Are you tired of it by this point? Do you feel like you want to rest?”
Mr Lee: “No, I don’t. I know if I rest I’ll slide downhill fast. No, my whole being has been stimulated by the daily challenge. If I suddenly drop it all, play golf, stroll around, watch the sunset, read novels, that’s downhill. It is the daily challenge, social contacts, meeting people, people like you, you press me, I answer, when I don’t…. what have I got tomorrow?”
Mdm Yeong: “You have two more events coming up. One is the Radin Mas Community.”
Mr Lee: “Oh yeah. I got it.”
Mdm Yeong: “And then you have other call, courtesy call on the 3rd.”
Mr Lee: “We are social animals. Without that interaction with people, you are isolated. The worst punishment you can give a person is the isolation ward. You get hallucinations. Four walls, no books, no nothing. By way of example, Henry Kissinger wants to speak to me. So I said okay, we’ll speak on Sunday. What about? We are meeting in Sao Paolo at a J P Morgan International Advisory Board. He wants to talk to me to check certain facts on China. My mind is kept alive, I go to China once a year at least. I meet Chinese leaders. So it’s a constant stimulus as I keep up to date. Supposing I sit back, I don’t think about China, just watch videos. I am off to Moscow, Kiev and Paris on the 15th of September. Three days Moscow, three days Kiev, four days Paris. Moscow I am involved in the Skolkovo Business School which President Medvedev, when he wasn’t President started. I promised to go if he did not fix it in the winter. So they fix it for September. I look at the fires, I said wow this is no good.”
Q: “It’s not going to be freezing if there are fires.”
Mr Lee: “No but our embassy says the skies have cleared. Kiev because the President has invited me specially and will fly me from Moscow to Kiev and then fly me on to Paris. Paris I am on the TOTAL Advisory Board together with Joe Nye and a few others. They want a presentation on what are China’s strengths and weaknesses. That keeps me alive. It’s just not my impressionistic views of China but one that has to be backed by facts and figures. So my team works out the facts and figures, and I check to see if they tally with my impressions. But it’s a constant stimulus to keep alive, and up-to-date. If I stop it, it’s downhill.”
Q: “Well, I hope you continue. Thank you very much, I really enjoyed this interview.”

Lee Kuan Yew contemplates ageing, infirmity and loss

Hi grandchildren,

This article in the New York Times Days of Reflection for Man Who Defined Singapore tells of the struggles of a man your grandpa admire with the inevitable passage of time and ageing plus the great unknown beckoning beyond upon the expiry date of a man.

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore
by Seth Mydans (published: September 10, 2010)

“SO, when is the last leaf falling?” asked Lee Kuan Yew, the man who made Singapore in his own stern and unsentimental image, nearing his 87th birthday and contemplating age, infirmity and loss.

“I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality,” said Mr. Lee, whose “Singapore model” of economic growth and tight social control made him one of the most influential political figures of Asia. “And I mean generally, every year, when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that’s life.”

In a long, unusually reflective interview last week, he talked about the aches and pains of age and the solace of meditation, about his struggle to build a thriving nation on this resource-poor island, and his concern that the next generation might take his achievements for granted and let them slip away.

He was dressed informally in a windbreaker and running shoes in his big, bright office, still sharp of mind but visibly older and a little stooped, no longer in day-to-day control but, for as long as he lives, the dominant figure of the nation he created.

But in these final years, he said, his life has been darkened by the illness of his wife and companion of 61 years, bedridden and mute after a series of strokes.“I try to busy myself,” he said, “but from time to time in idle moments, my mind goes back to the happy days we were up and about together.” Agnostic and pragmatic in his approach to life, he spoke with something like envy of people who find strength and solace in religion. “How do I comfort myself?” he asked. “Well, I say, ‘Life is just like that.’ ”

“What is next, I do not know,” he said. “Nobody has ever come back.” The prime minister of Singapore from its founding in 1965 until he stepped aside in 1990, Mr. Lee built what he called “a first-world oasis in a third-world region” — praised for the efficiency and incorruptibility of his rule but accused by human rights groups of limiting political freedoms and intimidating opponents through libel suits.

His title now is minister mentor, a powerful presence within the current government led by his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. The question that hovers over Singapore today is how long and in what form his model may endure once he is gone.

Always physically vigorous, Mr. Lee combats the decline of age with a regimen of swimming, cycling and massage and, perhaps more important, an hour-by-hour daily schedule of meetings, speeches and conferences both in Singapore and overseas. “I know if I rest, I’ll slide downhill fast,” he said. When, after an hour, talk shifted from introspection to geopolitics, the years seemed to slip away and he grew vigorous and forceful, his worldview still wide ranging, detailed and commanding.

And yet, he said, he sometimes takes an oblique look at these struggles against age and sees what he calls “the absurdity of it.”

“I’m reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure, and it’s an effort, and is it worth the effort?” he said. “I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just carry on.”

HIS most difficult moments come at the end of each day, he said, as he sits by the bedside of his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, 89, who has been unable to move or speak for more than two years. She had been by his side, a confidante and counselor, since they were law students in London.

“She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night,” he said. “She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day’s work, read her favorite poems.” He opened a big spreadsheet to show his reading list, books by Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Caroll as well as the sonnets of Shakespeare.

Lately, he said, he had been looking at Christian marriage vows and was drawn to the words: “To love, to hold and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse till death do us part.”

“I told her, ‘I would try and keep you company for as long as I can.’ That’s life. She understood.” But he also said: “I’m not sure who’s going first, whether she or me.”

At night, hearing the sounds of his wife’s discomfort in the next room, he said, he calms himself with 20 minutes of meditation, reciting a mantra he was taught by a Christian friend: “Ma-Ra-Na-Tha.”

The phrase, which is Aramaic, comes at the end of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, and can be translated in several ways. Mr. Lee said that he was told it means “Come to me, O Lord Jesus,” and that although he is not a believer, he finds the sounds soothing.

“The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts,” he said. “A certain tranquillity settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping.”

He brushed aside the words of a prominent Singaporean writer and social critic, Catherine Lim, who described him as having “an authoritarian, no-nonsense manner that has little use for sentiment.”

“She’s a novelist!” he cried. “Therefore, she simplifies a person’s character,” making what he called a “graphic caricature of me.” “But is anybody that simple or simplistic?”

The stress of his wife’s illness is constant, he said, harder on him than stresses he faced for years in the political arena. But repeatedly, in looking back over his life, he returns to his moment of greatest anguish, the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965, when he wept in public.

That trauma presented him with the challenge that has defined his life, the creation and development of a stable and prosperous nation, always on guard against conflict within its mixed population of Chinese, Malays and Indians.

“We don’t have the ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors,” he said three years ago in an interview with the International Herald Tribune, “a homogeneous population, common language, common culture and common destiny.”

Younger people worry him, with their demands for more political openness and a free exchange of ideas, secure in their well-being in modern Singapore. “They have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it,” he said. “They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so.”

The kind of open political combat they demand would inevitably open the door to race-based politics, he said, and “our society will be ripped apart.”

A political street fighter, by his own account, he has often taken on his opponents through ruinous libel suits.

He defended the suits as necessary to protect his good name, and he dismissed criticisms by Western reporters who “hop in and hop out” of Singapore as “absolute rubbish.”

In any case, it is not these reporters or the obituaries they may write that will offer the final verdict on his actions, he said, but future scholars who will study them in the context of their day.

“I’m not saying that everything I did was right,” he said, “but everything I did was for an honorable purpose. I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.”

And although the leaves are already falling from the tree, he said, the Lee Kuan Yew story may not be over yet.

He quoted a Chinese proverb: Do not judge a man until his coffin is closed.“Close the coffin, then decide,” he said. “Then you assess him. I may still do something foolish before the lid is closed on me.”

Lee Kuan Yew in books
Lee Kuan Yew biography
Lee Kuan Yew memoirs
Lee Kuan Yew the man & his ideas

Lee Kuan Yew on Ageing (and getting the best out of life)

Hi grandchildren,

Grandpa has to be realistic, that we are all mortals subject to ageing with time and we need to adjust, stay active as long as we can physically and mentally. Came across this article on Lee Kuan Yew speaking about ageing and thought that how he cope with ageing will be how your grandpa need to get the best out of the remainder of life ahead of me:

Lee Kuan Yew On Getting the Best out of Life.

Lee Kuan Yew
李光耀

Photo of Lee Kuan Yew courtesy of Wikipedia

“The human being needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in Singapore and elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge. If you’re not interested in the world and the world is not interested in you, the biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli, that’s real torture.”

MY CONCERN today is, what is it I can tell you which can add to your knowledge about ageing and what ageing societies can do. You know more about this subject than I do. A lot of it is out in the media, Internet and books. So I thought the best way would be to take a personal standpoint and tell you how I approach this question of ageing.

If I cast my mind back, I can see turning points in my physical and mental health. You know, when you’re young, I didn’t bother, assumed good health was God-given and would always be there.

When I was about 57 that was – I was about 34, we were competing in elections, and I was really fond of drinking beer and smoking. And after the election campaign, in Victoria Memorial Hall – we had won the election, the City Council election – I couldn’t thank the voters because I had lost my voice. I’d been smoking furiously. I’d take a packet of 10 to deceive myself, but I’d run through the packet just sitting on the stage, watching the crowd, getting the feeling, the mood before I speak.

In other words, there were three speeches a night. Three speeches a night, 30 cigarettes, a lot of beer after that, and the voice was gone. I remember I had a case in Kuching, Sarawak . So I took the flight and Ifelt awful. I had to make up my mind whether I was going to be an effective campaigner and a lawyer, in which case I cannot destroy my voice, and I can’t go on. So I stopped smoking. It was a tremendous deprivation because I was addicted to it. And I used to wake up dreaming…the nightmare was I resumed smoking.

But I made a choice and said, if I continue this, I will not be able to do my job. I didn’t know anything about cancer of the throat, or oesophagus or the lungs, etc. But it turned out it had many other deleterious effects. Strangely enough after that, I became very allergic, hyper-allergic to smoking, so much so that I would plead with my Cabinet ministers not to smoke in the Cabinet room. You want to smoke, please go out, because I am allergic.

Then one day I was at the home of my colleague, Mr Rajaratnam, meeting foreign correspondents including some from the London Times and they took a picture of me and I had a big belly like that (puts his hands in front of his belly), a beer belly. I felt no, no, this will not do. So I started playing more golf, hit hundreds of balls on the practice tee. But this didn’t go down. There was only one way it could go down: consume less, burn up more.

Another turning point came when -this was 1976, after the general election – I was feeling tired. I was breathing deeply at the Istana, on the lawns.

My daughter, who at that time just graduating as a doctor, said: ‘What are you trying to do?’ I said: ‘I feel an effort to breathe in more oxygen.’ She said: ‘Don’t play golf. Run. Aerobics..’ So she gave me a book , quite a famous book and, then, very current in America on how you score aerobic points swimming, running, whatever it is, cycling.

I looked at it sceptically. I wasn’t very keen on running. I was keen on golf. So I said, ‘Let’s try’. So in-between golf shots while playing on my own, sometimes nine holes at the Istana, I would try and walk fast between shots. Then I began to run between shots. And I felt better. After a while, I said: ‘Okay, after my golf, I run.’ And after a few years, I said: ‘Golf takes so long. The running takes 15 minutes. Let’s cut out the golf and let’s run.’

I think the most important thing in ageing is you got to understand yourself. And the knowledge now is all there. When I was growing up, the knowledge wasn’t there. I had to get the knowledge from friends, from doctors.

But perhaps the most important bit of knowledge that the doctor gave me was one day, when I said: ‘Look, I’m feeling slower and sluggish.’ So he gave me a medical encyclopaedia and he turned the pages to ageing. I read it up and it was illuminating. A lot of it was difficult jargon but I just skimmed through to get the gist of it.

As you grow, you reach 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 and then, thereafter, you are on a gradual slope down physically. Mentally, you carry on and on and on until I don’t know what age, but mathematicians will tell you that they know their best output is when they’re in their 20s and 30s when your mental energy is powerful and you haven’t lost many neurons. That’s what they tell me.

So, as you acquire more knowledge, you then craft a programme for yourself to maximise what you have. It’s just common sense. I never planned to live till 85 or 84.! I just didn’t think about it. I said: ‘Well, my mother died when she was 74, she had a stroke.. My father died when he was 94.’

But I saw him, and he lived a long life, well, maybe it was his DNA. But more than that, he swam every day and he kept himself busy.. He was working for the Shell company. He was in charge, he was a superintendent of an oil depot.

When he retired, he started becoming a salesman. So people used to tell me: ‘Your father is selling watches at BP de Silva.’ My father was then living with me. But it kept him busy. He had that routine: He meets people, he sells watches, he buys and sells all kinds of semi-precious stones, he circulates coins. And he keeps going. But at 87, 88, he fell, going down the steps from his room to the dining room, broke his arm, three months incapacitated.

Thereafter, he couldn’t go back to swimming. Then he became wheelchair-bound. Then it became a problem because my house was constructed that way. So my brother – who’s a doctor and had a flat (one-level) house – took him in. And he lived on till 94. But towards the end, he had gradual loss of mental powers.

So my calculations, I’m somewhere between 74 and 94. And I’ve reached the halfway point now. But have I? Well, 1996 when I was 73, I was cycling and I felt tightening on the neck. Oh, I must retire today. So I stopped. Next day, I returned to the bicycle. After five minutes it became worse. So I said, no, no, this is something serious, it’s got to do with the blood vessels. Rung up my doctor, who said, ‘Come tomorrow’. Went tomorrow, he checked me, and said: ‘Come back tomorrow for an angiogram.’

I said: ‘What’s that ?’ He said: ‘We’ll pump something in and we’ll see whether the coronary arteries are cleared or blocked.’ I was going to go home. But an MP who was a cardiologist happened to be around, so he came in and said: ‘What are you doing here?’ I said: ‘I’ve got this.’ He said: ‘Don’t go home. You stay here tonight. I’ve sent patients home and they never came back. Just stay here. They’ll put you on the monitor. They’ll watch your heart. And if anything, an emergency arises, they will take you straight to the theatre. You go home. You’ve got no such monitor. You may never come back.’

So I stayed there. Pumped in the dye, yes it was blocked, the left circumflex, not the critical, lead one. So that’s lucky for me. Two weeks later, I was walking around, I felt it’s coming back. Yes it has come back, it had occluded. So this time they said: ‘We’ll put in a stent.’

I’m one of the first few in Singapore to have the stent, so it was a brand new operation. Fortunately, the man who invented the stent was out here selling his stent. He was from San Jose, La Jolla something or the other. So my doctor got hold of him and he supervised the operation. He said put the stent in. My doctor did the operation, he just watched it all and then that’s that. That was before all this problem about lining the stent to make sure that it doesn’t occlude and create a disturbance.

So at each stage, I learnt something more about myself and I stored that. I said: ‘Oh, this is now a danger point.’ So all right, cut out fats, change diet, went to see a specialist in Boston , Massachusetts General Hospital . He said: ‘Take statins.’ I said: ‘What’s that?’ He said: ‘(They) help to reduce your cholesterol.’ My doctors were concerned. They said: ‘You don’t need it. Your cholesterol levels are okay.’ Two years later, more medical evidence came out. So the doctors said: ‘Take statins.’

Had there been no angioplasty, had I not known that something was up and I cycled on, I might have gone at 74 like my mother. So I missed that decline. So next deadline: my father’s fall at 87.

I’m very careful now because sometimes when I turn around too fast, I feel as if I’m going to get off balance. So my daughter, a neurologist, she took me to the NNI, there’s this nerve conduction test, put electrodes here and there.

The transmission of the messages between the feet and the brain has slowed down. So all the exercise, everything, effort put in, I’m fit, I swim, I cycle. But I can’t prevent this losing of conductivity of the nerves and this transmission. So just go slow.

So when I climb up the steps, I have no problem. When I go down the steps, I need to be sure that I’ve got something I can hang on to, just in case. So it’s a constant process of adjustment. But I think the most important single lesson I learnt in life was that if you isolate yourself, you’re done for. The human being is a social animal – he needs stimuli, he needs to meet people, to catch up with the world.

I don’t much like travel but I travel very frequently despite the jetlag, because I get to meet people of great interest to me, who will help me in my work as chairman of our GIC. So I know, I’m on several boards of banks, international advisory boards of banks, of oil companies and so on. And I meet them and I get to understand what’s happening in the world, what has changed since I was here one month ago, one year ago. I go to India , I go to China .

And that stimuli brings me to the world of today. I’m not living in the world, when I was active, more active 20, 30 years ago. So I tell my wife. She woke up late today. I said: ‘Never mind, you come along by 12 o’clock. I go first.’

If you sit back – because part of the ending part of the encyclopaedia which I read was very depressing – as you get old, you withdraw from everything and then all you will have is your bedroom and the photographs and the furniture that you know, and that’s your world. So if you’ve got to go to hospital, the doctor advises you to bring some photographs so that you’ll know you’re not lost in a different world, that this is like your bedroom.

I’m determined that I will not, as long as I can, to be reduced, to have my horizons closed on me like that. It is the stimuli, it is the constant interaction with people across the world that keeps me aware and alive to what’s going on and what we can do to adjust to this different world.

In other words, you must have an interest in life. If you believe that at 55, you’re retiring, you’re going to read books, play golf and drink wine, then I think you’re done for. So statistically they will show you that all the people who retire and lead sedentary lives, the pensioners die off very quickly.

So we now have a social problem with medical sciences, new procedures, new drugs, many more people are going to live long lives.. If the mindset is that when I reach retirement age 62, I’m old, I can’t work anymore, I don’t have to work, I just sit back, now is the time I’ll enjoy life, I think you’re making the biggest mistake of your life. After one month, or after two months, even if you go travelling with nothing to do, with no purpose in life, you will just degrade, you’ll go to seed.

The human being needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in Singapore and elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge. If you’re not interested in the world and the world is not interested in you, the biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli, that’s real torture.

So when I read that people believe, Singaporeans say: ‘Oh, 62 I’m retiring.’ I say to them: ‘You really want to die quickly?’ If you want to see sunrise tomorrow or sunset, you must have a reason, you must have the stimuli to keep going..’

Have a purpose driven life and finish well, my friends.

Lee Kuan Yew in books
Lee Kuan Yew biography
Lee Kuan Yew memoirs
Lee Kuan Yew the man & his ideas

Mother tongue. Why Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew says it is important

Hi Lewis,

Just read this news report about what Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore advised his fellow citizens. Mr. Lee is the former Prime Minister of Singapore who led Singapore from a resource poor country with only its human capital to become one of the richest country around this region. Mr. Lee is a very intelligent man. When Singapore got separated from Malaysia, they were about the same level as Malaysia, but Malaysia had the advantage of having very rich natural resources like petroleum, plenty of land, tin deposits, even a little bit of gold deposits, wide expenses of rubber estates and now oil palm estates. Singapore had none of these. But because of good leadership and hard working citizens and a pretty much corruption free government and private sector, they are way ahead of Malaysia now. The previous national airline split into two. Malaysia's part became Malaysia Airline System (MAS) and Singapore's part became Singapore Airlines (SIA). The former CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of SIA (now retired), Dr. Cheong Choong Kong (better known as Dr. C.K. Cheong), actually is/was a Malaysian, in fact was my former Statistics lecturer in my university, University of Malaya. He very likely have taken up Singapore citizenship, I don't know. He led SIA to become one of the top airlines in the world while MAS had to depend on the Malaysian government for survival.

Back to the subject of this post. Mr. Lee Kuan Yew advised the citizens of Singapore to make an effort to keep their mother tongue. So Chinese can speak Engiish and Chinese. Indians and speak English and one of the Indian languages. Malay can speak English and Malay. In this way, Singapore will have a huge advantage in this globalised world, and Chinese can interact easily with China (now a fast growing economy and world power), Taiwan and many parts of the world where there are Chinese migrants. Some have estimated 1 in 4 people in the world are ethnic Chinese. Malays can interact easily with Malaysia and Indonesia and the rest of the world, and Indians can interact with India, also a fast growing country, and with the rest of the world. (Whether things like fast growing economy is a good or bad thing, your grandpa have a double mind, but a country with a growing population need a growing economy so that its growing population can find and keep jobs, but it has other effects I would rather not talk about here. Maybe you will understand your grandpa when you grow up). With this multi-lingual population, Singapore will have a huge advantage over lots of countries.

Malaysia too can have this advantage if it so choose (in fact it do have it, but to a lesser degree than Singapore because of racial pride).

English is not the best language to be the international language as its way of spelling and pronouncing English words is atrocious. Have you ever heard someone trying to speak English according to the spelling (phonetically), like the Japanese? You will have a hard time understanding what they are trying to say. In fact, one of your aunt's name is spelled in a way that can be considered as a kind of "parody" of the English spelling. English only became the de facto international language by circumstances, not because it is best suited to become one. But not every country's citizen are master of the English language, and if you are able to converse with them in their tongue, you normally would be able to get along very much better.

Your grandpa sent your mom to a Chinese primary school for about the same reason as Mr. Lee Kuan Yew. She can now speak Chinese, English and Malay. China was a poor, backward communist country then, but is a sleeping giant waiting to wake up. It was not an easy decision because when you have to learn more than one language, you have to be hard working. There is a danger that if you do not work hard, you do not master any of them, and then you have a problem. You are neither here nor there, and may end up not not been able to keep up with the rest.

I do not know if your mum found that being multi-lingual is an advantage or not, but I think very likely it do give her an advantage over those who know only one language. I do not know what decision your parents will make for you, but whatever it is, I am sure you will grow up to become a hard working chap.

Mother tongue in books etc

Lee Kuan Yew in books
Lee Kuan Yew biography
Lee Kuan Yew memoirs
Lee Kuan Yew the man & his ideas