Lee Kuan Yew

Prewar shophouses in the "Chinatown" district of downtown Singapore in the Kodachrome years, 1960s or 70s?

One feature of the 50-odd years of People's Action Party rule over Singapore that I don't disapprove of the way I did in my first couple of years there in the early 1980s is the replacement of most of the island's "colorful" old neighborhoods with gigantic high-rise new towns, gray slabs of concrete looking from a distance like Clockwork Orange nightmare environments.

Ang Mo Kio estate in the northeastern part of the island.

They're for people to live in, some kind person explained to me (kind because he didn't add, "Not for tourists to photograph"). The rich people's houses are nice, but most of them are plaster, cute on the outside but crumbling on the inside and impossible to keep clean, and there wasn't enough space on the island to house everybody that way in any case: if they were going to keep a few hectares of rainforest (disclosure: they were keeping it for military uses as much as they were for love of nature), they had to build upwards.

Also, as I acquired some friends and in-laws, I realized that the new towns weren't as ugly from the inside as they were from the outside; everybody's owning their flats, something that wouldn't have been possible for a vast majority before independence, and making a personal space that spills into the common corridor with birdcages, bicycles, and family altars.

Via therealsingapore.

It was my wicked colonial heart wanting the island to be cute for my own sentimental purposes. This wasn't one of the PAP's bad things but just about the best thing they did.

In 1989, my last year there and, as it happened, Lee Kuan Yew's last year as prime minister, they went and landmarked some of the cutest old neighborhoods anyway, in Chinatown and in my favorite east side neighborhood of Joo Chiat. Naturally it was the signal for gentrification: the very wealthy took over Joo Chiat, and the Singapore River south bank was taken over by restaurants and ad agencies, renovating the interiors of the old places and air conditioning them.

Lee Kuan Yew was a wicked colonial himself in many ways. He always tried to put a positive spin on it, talking about the superiority of the old Confucian culture and its loyalty and discipline as opposed to the craziness and immorality of the West, but he really believed the West was better, and for the oddest of reasons, because the Southeast Asian brain was filled with all the different languages it needed to learn, and would never have the brain cells available to the proudly monolingual Englishman. (He was brought up bilingual himself in the good old Straits Chinese fashion, speaking Malay and English, and learned Mandarin and Hokkien in adulthood to campaign with, but never showed much concern about his own brain capacity after he took a First at Cambridge.)

It was his fear of the disorderliness of the Southeast Asian mob, its chaotic multiculturalism, that made him feel Singapore was not meant for democracy in the full sense of the term and had to be ruled sternly; the inclination toward an uncritical Marxism, the un-Marxist greed, the tendency to run riot and push senior politicians into the storm drains (as happened to him, if I'm remembering right, in a campaign of the early 60s). It's what made him insist on the most rigorous population control program, not noticing that fertility would decrease of its own accord if the island was prosperous enough (as happened, indeed, in Hong Kong, with no population control policy at all), until population growth was so slow that he panicked, and the government started importing immigrants from China who have now more or less totally taken over the local crime, prostitution, and general low-class occupations (the funny part was the government's role in setting itself up as a dating agency to persuade persons with high IQs to go out with each other, marry, and procreate).

And yet, and yet. He was always a true socialist, even when his foreign policy was most intensely aligned with Richard Nixon and the Indonesian counter-revolution of General Suharto. There were never a lot of political prisoners, and there was never torture as it was defined at the time (techniques were learned from Israeli friends of "psychological pressure" that had worked on Palestinians, of sleep deprivation and inhibited motion and loud music and cold—later the Israeli courts would decide they were torture too). There was the housing program, which was really great, and the Central Provident Fund to provide for retirement (better than US Social Security, in providing people with a real income), and free education for all, and great cheap medical care, and tons of money (though since my time, and I guess especially since growth began to slow, inequality has grown to surpass that of all the OECD countries, which is pretty shocking). And his theory about preventing government corruption by paying all the ministers international-CEO salaries seems to have worked.

What I'm trying to say here is, I hope this doesn't sound too crazy, I haven't changed my mind about him at all, I'm as irritated as ever by his cockamamie theories and arrogant self-belief and lack of interest in anything the intellectuals might say, but I have sort of changed my heart. Above all he proved, quite contrary to his beliefs, that that crazy mixed-up cultural pluralism that has defined the island since 1819 could indeed form a community. He didn't think it could be done, but he worked to make it so, and it did happen. RIP.