Singapore: A Biography

Interview on Happyesque

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 04:25:00 +0000

Happyesque, 'a journal of ideas and things', has posted an interview with me: 'Historically speaking about Singapore', in which I ponder whether history is cool, how Singaporeans deal with their history (or not) and how I feel about the poor old Padang. There are also some neat photos of the inside of our book.

They're also running a competition where you can win a signed copy of our book, if you simply describe Happyesque via Twitter/Facebook/email. Deadline: 13 December. More details are available here.

Searching for Saint Jack

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 04:14:00 +0000

Speaking of the historical imagination, two weekends ago I went on the Jack of Hearts Mystery Tour, a bus tour of some of the shooting locations for the film Saint Jack, the only Hollywood film ever shot entirely in Singapore (and this was back in 1978). The tour was led by Saint Jack expert and film writer Ben Slater (above), who's meticulously chronicled the making of the film in his 2006 book Kinda Hot: The Making of Saint Jack in Singapore.

I didn't really have any expectations of the tour, just that it would be good fun for a public holiday afternoon. But after watching the film on the big screen and marvelling at what a character its Singapore was, then zipping around on the tour in the middle of a suitably moody wet afternoon, I was reminded afresh by how Singapore – as a person or a character, and one worthy of a biography – has experienced what Mark called the civic equivalent of a Michael Jackson-esque make-over.

Of the 15 or so stops on the tour (see A Nutshell Review for a blow-by-blow account), only the exteriors of Fullerton Building (now Fullerton Hotel), Raffles Hotel and Shangri-La Hotel are still immediately recognisable. Everything else has been demolished, stripped and/or sanitised. In some locations, such as the shophouse shown above, the dated hues of the streets captured in the film actually exude more insouciant panache than the self-conscious hyperreality of today's "conserved" and regularly repainted buildings.

And all this, since just 1978.

Of course, Saint Jack is no documentary and it plays up a certain seedy, exoticised Singapore that suits its purposes. At the same time that the film crew was mucking about in overcrowded Chinatown and colourful Bugis Street, some Singapore families were adapting to new and neat HDB housing estates, while others were living in relatively undisturbed kampungs. Our book only briefly describes Singapore in the early 1970s, but if we were ever to go back and extend that epilogue into a full section, it would not be merely Singapore-the-charming-rogue that defined that decade.

Although it would be deliciously tempting, from a storyteller's point of view, to let him do so.

Setting the record straight (the not so mystical 'Chinatown walkabout')

noreply@blogger.com (markrfrost) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 02:47:00 +0000

Yu-Mei's previous post about our appearance in the Straits Times prompts me to write a further clarification, largely because my 'mystical Chinatown walkabout' was anything but (which in itself is quite revealing).

However, before anyone leaps in to slam the ST for yet another feeble attempt at 'responsible' journalism, let's be fair. Yu-Mei and I had arranged to meet the paper's very nice journalist at a cafe off Club Street, where the music was a bit loud and the ambiance not exactly conducive to conversation. Both of us were probably also a bit psyched, as we were about to give our first ever book reading. And so as the interview got underway and we started to talk over each other a bit (and at speed), I sensed our friendly reporter was struggling to take it all in, and that what she was getting might not be enough for her story.

Given this, I was grateful we got any coverage at all, even if some of what we were quoted as saying bore only a tangential relationship to what we had actually said or had written.

Which brings me to that 'Chinatown walkabout', during which I mysteriously morphed into Yu-Mei and began to feel the district's 'ancient history' bursting into life around me.

Well, not exactly. As I recall, what I actually tried to get across in our interview was how hard it is to get any sense of Singapore's physical past today.

I'd set off on a solo heritage walk to try and recreate the route of the 'Kreta Ayer martyrs' (see Chapter 18 of Singapore: A Biography) who in 1927 had marched angrily from the Happy Valley amusement park on Anson Road and then attacked the Kreta Ayer police station, where policemen shot them dead in the street. Thanks to road diversions, the destruction of the old Kreta Ayer police station and the lack of accessible period maps, my attempt was a total failure. Yet luckily, I met a friendly old Chinese man selling prints and his own heritage booklets outside the Chinatown Heritage Centre. As he explained to me how the streets had once been laid out and where the old police station had once stood, he seemed pretty gobsmacked that anyone should care about the 'Kreta Ayer martyrs' or want to retrace their route.

The confusion in the ST piece originated with my effort to describe the one time during the writing of Singapore: A Biography when I did feel a very strong sense of the island's past returning to life. This happened, completely to my surprise, when I joined my two year-old daughter's playschool excursion to a fish farm in Chua Chu Kong (in the island's north). I'd tagged along to help out, but on the way over I noticed a sign pointing to the site of the Japanese landings on Singapore during the night of the 9 February 1942. Leaving the little ones to harass the koi, I slipped away for a closer look.

Wandering through the mangroves, I had my first, so far only, and at the time extremely visceral, sense of walking with historical ghosts: the soldiers who had fought on both sides as the whole area went up in flames during the Mandai inferno. I'm not saying I saw actual ghosts, nor heard phantom explosions, shouts of anguish or the like; what I felt, instead, was a powerful inkling that the area still retained a memory of the events that had once defined it. It also stuck me just how close Johor is to Singapore, how little distance the Japanese had to come, and how badly Percival (the British Commander in charge of the defence of Singapore) had got things wrong.

One has to be careful not to become too nostalgic for bygone streets and pathways that one has never walked down, smelled or got mugged in, places that in most cases now exist only in the historical imagination. And, of course, the rational explanation of my experience that morning was that my historical imagination had got the better of me.

Nonetheless, when people complain about the lack of rootedness they feel in Singapore today, not to say the lack of a collective Singaporean identity, I often think that what they are expressing is their deep lack of a sense of place. Obviously, economic development involves urban transformation - in Singapore's case, ceaseless urban transformation. But at the same time, historical buildings and landscapes remain the very essence of what makes a place distinctive and of what, over time, generates a sense of civic pride.

Modern spaces can do this as well, provided they are interesting (or even unintentionally humorous): a big tick for the Esplanade in this respect, a big cross next to the derivative 'woo, please look at us, we're a global metropolis' Singapore Flyer. In a weird way, the sheer 'in your face-ness' of ION Orchard currently does it for me too.

Yet nothing beats walking down a street or along a pathway that still somehow retains a continuity with what made the island distinctive in earlier days and still makes it so today. (Nothing, perhaps, save meeting a helpful old Chinese man for whom the memory of that place is still alive and vivid.)

For me, physical heritage is to a city what the face is to an individual's personality. Wrinkles will appear, the face will inevitably change, and on occasion a facelift and even reconstructive surgery might be deemed necessary to keep things in place or return them to their rightful place. But to destroy this face in an effort to reinvent it, as Singapore's Urban Renewal Authority explicitly set out to do from the mid-1960s (see page 430 of our book), seems to me the civic equivalent of doing a late Michael Jackson.

The Fajar Generation

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:04:00 +0000

It is quite something to write a book about the history of Singapore. It is quite something else to be in a room full of white-haired men and women who were there for some of that history.

Two Saturdays ago, I was at the book launch of The Fajar Generation. Fajar (which means 'dawn' in Malay) was the title of a publication by the University of Malaya Socialist Club in the 1950s. The British charged some Club members (that is, university students) with sedition because of the anti-colonial sentiments they expressed in the publication. While they were acquitted, the incident was arguably a seminal moment in the nascent development of political consciousness and direction in post-war Singapore.

(If you need a crash course in the Fajar trial, flip to pages 353-354 of our book. There also a handy chronology of events in Lim Cheng Tju's essay in s/pores, 'A Personal Journey In Search Of Fajar'.)

From the blurb on the back cover of The Fajar Generation:

The two decades from 1945 to 1965 was an extraordinary era of political turmoil in the modern histories of Malaya/Malaysia and Singapore. The end of the war unleashed concerted demands for greater political representation, self-rule and eventual independence in the face of British attempts to manage the decolonisation process. The character and direction of this struggle were deeply contested. Different strands of nationalist thinking and competing political formations battled to define and shape the character of the future nation states. The Fajar Generation tells the hitherto neglected story of a remarkable group of men and women who advanced a radical agenda of anti-colonialism, democracy, multiculturalism and social justice through the agency of the University of Malaya Socialist Club. Through personal memoirs and analytical essays the contributors to this collection illuminate their own roles in that struggle – the hopes and despairs, the triumphs and defeats. At the same time they remind us of just how much of that progressive political agenda is still to be won in contemporary Malaysia and Singapore.

The book comprises 13 essays by members of the University of Malaya Socialist Club, as well as Edwin Thumboo's poem 'May 1954', which was written in response to the Fajar trial. The volume was edited by Poh Soo Kai, Tan Jing Quee and Koh Kay Yew, who were all formerly in leading positions in the Club; Poh and Tan were later detained under the Internal Security Act in Operation Coldstore in 1963.

The Temasek Review has a more thorough account of the book launch and on YouTube there's a video of Dr Lim Hock Siew's speech at the event (he too was detained under Operation Coldstore --- for 19 years). Suffice to say that it's quite moving to hear the Fajar generation speak in person, yet it's difficult to imagine that these first-person accounts of 1950s and 1960s could have been published and/or distributed in Singapore 20 years ago (that would've been just after another Internal Security Department action, Operation Spectrum). Looking around the room at the book launch, it's clear that there's no shortage of eyewitnesses and voices to add to the multiplicity of how we view Singapore's recent history. It's just whether the conditions are right for them to speak (and for what it's worth, The Fajar Generation is published by the Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, an independent publishing house in Malaysia).

The Fajar Generation is available in English or Chinese. Pick it up at Select Books in Singapore, or contact the publisher: sird [at] streamyx.com.

Where to buy our book in Singapore

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:21:00 +0000

Christmas is only about a month away, so if you need to get gifts that say "Singapore!" with zest – why not pick up Singapore: A Biography? It looks pretty, has plenty of pictures so as not to scare off those who might be put off by walls of text, and has everything from swashbuckling adventure to war stories to scandal to political intrigue.

Here's your handy Christmas shopping guide if you're in Singapore:

Books Actually – 86 Club Street
Borders – Wheelock Place or Parkway Parade
Kinokuniya – Ngee Ann City
MPH – CityLink Mall or Raffles City
Museum Shop by Banyan Trip – National Museum of Singapore
Page One – VivoCity
Prologue – ION Orchard
Thambi Magazine Store – Holland Village

If you really really love our book and are thinking of buying 10 copies or more at a go (it makes a great corporate gift if you're from a Singapore organisation!), you can get a 25% discount from our publisher. Email me (tym [at] post [dot] com) for more details.

What the Singapore media said

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:36:00 +0000

Trust the timing of these things to happen when neither Mark nor I was in Singapore. The day after I took off to Vietnam on a short work-and-play trip, the Straits Times ran its coverage of our book, side by side with another new release Chronicles of Singapore.

(The article ran over two pages in the Life! section; to read it, click on part 1 or part 2.)
We'd been interviewed by the journalist Akshita Nanda a couple of weeks earlier, over coffee just before the reading at Books Actually. I think the report neatly highlights some of the stories that got us excited about writing the book (as you've no doubt heard us mention on this blog). Mark also got to use his soundbite about Singapore being a 'testosterone-laden system' before the 20th century and about the intensity of war accounts meaning that the war section 'practically wrote itself'.

The only blip was that another of Mark's lines was mistakenly attributed to me:

The audio recordings and written texts were so powerful that Balasingamchow found herself recreating ancient history while walking the modern streets of Chinatown.

I did find the various historical sources powerful and compelling, but the mystical Chinatown walkabout moment was Mark's and Mark's alone. (Ask him about it some time.) On his part, he doesn't quite recall the line about Mrs Siraj – it might've been me waxing lyrical about her. But that's the thing about a joint interview, perhaps: that two excited co-authors might start talking over each other's lines, and it gets a little hard to separate who said what.

(Click here to embiggen)

Just this past weekend, Singapore: A Biography got mentioned in Lianhe Zaobao (Singapore's main Chinese broadsheet), in an article about the recent surge in books about Singapore history and interest in the subject. The journalist Cindy Chia had contacted us when we were both not in Singapore, so I wound up writing her a quote while I was sipping Vietnamese coffee in Hoi An.

Q: Can you tell me what sort of approach did you adopt while writing the book? What went thru your thoughts in trying to make history digestible and approachable to the public? Who are your targeted readers?

A: The book is targeted at the general reader – not a specialist but someone who's simply curious to find out more about the stories and personalities in Singapore's history. At the same time, academics or specialists will find the book is substantive and rigorous. We generally tried to let the voices of the different historical personalities speak for themselves, whether it's a quote from Raffles's personal letters, or an oral history interview or radio broadcast by David Marshall. We tried to let readers step into the shoes of the various people throughout history and see events through their eyes.

It made it, more or less, into the last paragraph of the story.

We'll still waiting on a couple other media that have expressed interest in our book, so we'll keep you posted as other articles and reviews appear.

Cover art

noreply@blogger.com (markrfrost) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:15:00 +0000

One of the benefits of working with the Singapore-based publisher Editions Didier Millet (EDM) is that they really care about the way a book looks.

Another enjoyable aspect of working with them was that they were keen to consult with us (yes, the authors!) on the layout of Singapore: A Biography and especially on its cover. For this, we especially have to thank our editor at EDM, Ibrahim Tahir, whose overall contribution to the book made him effectively its 'third author'.

So how did the cover come about?

A while ago, Intuitive Studios (the exhibition design company I am closely involved with – see earlier post) was approached to design a historically-themed mural for a local museum. It seemed like this was the perfect opportunity to unleash an homage to Sir Peter Blake, the famous pop artist and one of my personal favourites, on the Singapore heritage scene.

For those of you who don't know his work, here's one of his pieces:

And his most famous piece:

Intuitive's historically-themed pop art mural never eventuated. But the idea of a Peter Blake pastiche was thrown into the hat once more when Yu-Mei and I started to discuss the book cover with EDM, partly because it reflected our philosophy when writing our history of Singapore: that it's all about a multitude of colourful personalities.

Most of all, we wanted to get away from the black and white and seemingly 'designed-by-committee' book covers that feature on many works of Singapore history, a typical example of which is found on a book we had both worked on earlier:

So, Ibrahim and EDM's in-house designer Annie Teo went off to work on the cover. Eventually, they came back with these preliminary efforts:

Version A

Version B

I didn't like Version A much (and not just because our names were so small). I found it a bit dull, especially the colours. Yu-Mei had a more extreme reaction to Version B, since it seemed to her like the very worst kind of school textbook cover that we were trying to avoid. I could see her point, but I also hoped EDM would keep trying with the Peter Blake-inspired approach. So I asked my designer friend Claire Fleetwood (who runs Intuitive Studios) to chime in with some further suggestions, while I sent Ibrahim and Annie what were probably rather annoying emails where I attempted to deconstruct why Blake's Sergeant Pepper's cover worked and why our Version B did not.

Yu-Mei, meanwhile, seemed to have resigned herself to her worst fear: a textbook cover! Arghhhh! OMG! (I think she really has spent too long in schools, you know).

Annie and Ibrahim now went back to the drawing board and at this point, Ibrahim later told me, Annie went 'a bit nuts' with the design, and started to spend hour after hour on it trying to perfect it. The eventual result (for which we will always be grateful) ...

Which was ultimately tweaked to become ...

Yet that wasn't the end of it. When it was time to launch our online marketing campaign, Yu-Mei asked her friends at ampulets to tweak the cover one last time for our flyer. And the final outcome ... a radiant, celestial Singapore: A Biography!

Let those cosmic rays bathe you in historical wisdom, people of the little red dot.
(And a big thank you to Ibrahim, Annie, Claire, ampulets and of course to – please don't sue us for copyright – Sir Peter Blake!)

We're back!

noreply@blogger.com (markrfrost) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:03:00 +0000

Yu-Mei and I have been away. (She went to Vietnam to eat, I had to go back to work). But now we are back - post-book launch - and ready to blog once more with a vengeance.

From now on we'll be using this site to publicise news, views, events and reviews related to Singapore: A Biography and as an occasional forum for our thoughts and talks on Singapore history.

Your contributions are also very welcome. So if you have some factual errors to report (there are a few we've noticed already), or you'd like to offer your alternative views on Singapore history, or you think there are other individuals who should also take their place in the island's life story, please email us.

But first up, coming soon, a post about the cover.

At the Singapore Writers Festival

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:58:00 +0000

(Photo credit – greyworks)
The thing about getting the first time-slot for the day at a writers festival is that the whole place is a little sleepy, and even the brave souls who turn up (thank you, all!) probably could use a jolt of caffeine to get their system going. Hearing me read about the Singapore Stone isn't quite the same ...

Nevertheless, after I made several hopefully not-too-convoluted points about "Finding the Singapore Story", people chimed in with both salient and surprising questions (and sometimes a combination of the two), and we ended up talking about Singapore and identity and citizenship and history. While citizenship is not a topic we really get into in Singapore: A Biography, with a book title like that and the perennial debates about what it means to 'be' Singaporean, it's a natural progression of ideas, perhaps.

(Photo credit – greyworks)
This was the last of our initial wave of book events in Singapore. Thanks to everyone who's come by an event, bought a book, spread the word and/or otherwise helped us out. It was great to see new faces and old.

We now return to our regularly scheduled blog programming ...

Introducing Comrade Shane

noreply@blogger.com (markrfrost) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:13:00 +0000

This blurry pic, taken in haste at Kinokuniya last weekend, provides the first documentary evidence of a new underground movement in Singapore: the People's Revolutionary Book Display Army.

Comprised of loyal readers of Singapore: A Biography, and led by Comrade Shane (an ex-pat with nothing better to do on his Sunday afternoons), the PRBDA has set out on a mission to liberate the book-buying public of Singapore from its false consciousness.

The PRBDA has announced that it will be infiltrating all major bookstores in the near future to radically subvert their book displays to ensure that the people's will is listened to and Singapore: A Biography gets noticed.

Join Comrade Shane in his revolution now!

(P.S. Comrade Shane will be working hard on his fieldcraft in future so as not to appear so conspicuous.)

They came, they saw, they dissented

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:33:00 +0000

At last week's talk at the National Library, a friend – who's a big comics aficionado – asked who we thought were the 'superheroes and supervillains' of our story. That neatly pre-empted Mark's lecture at the National Museum last Saturday, 'Heroes, villains and ordinary citizens: a short history of Singaporean dissent'.

(Photo credits – Marcus [top], Deanna [bottom])
Nothing like having the word 'dissent' in the title to bring out some of Singapore's current dissenters. They chimed in avidly during the Q&A session that followed, highlighting further examples of dissenting figures in Singapore's history, as well as questioning different modes of or approaches to dissent (and the relative success thereof).

The last question of the session came from (surprise) a geographer, who wondered about about physical spaces of or for dissent in Singapore throughout its history. Our book alludes to these spaces, certainly – Chinatown was always a good place for a riot – but there's more still left to be explored. And then there are the modern-day spaces: not just Hong Lim Park and its government-designated Speaker's Corner, but also places where new behaviours impose themselves on prevailing orthodoxies. Just on Monday, a newspaper report highlighted the discomfort in HDB estates between Singaporeans residents and new immigrants:

Singaporeans' complaints range from the smell of alien cuisines wafting through their flats, the noise levels and the hanging of clothes along the common corridors. [...] When one Chinese national hung his country's flag outside his flat, netizens blasted him for being culturally insensitive.
'PR distribution in HDB estates to be monitored'
in Today (26 October 2009)

Of course, a full history of Singaporean dissent would merit a whole other book or two, and as Mark mentioned in his lecture, '[it] would have to answer the question of why repertoires of dissent were not just suppressed, but basically went out of fashion.' Who's itching to write that, now?

Book preview: The Barisan's downfall

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:38:00 +0000

This is the fifth and final book preview of Singapore: A Biography, which was launched in Singapore last week. The first four previews were 'Farquhar and Raffles fall out', 'The education of Singapore girls', 'Captain Mohan Singh's dark night of the soul' and 'Staging merdeka'.

This preview takes place amidst the politically heady years of the early 1960s. In 1961, members of the People's Action Party (PAP) left to form a new leftist political party, the Barisan Sosialis. The key issue that had prompted their split was the manner in which the Singapore government was then negotiating with Kuala Lumpur to join a new Federation of Malaysia. In September 1962, the people of Singapore voted in favour of the government's Merger proposal in the country's only referendum (so far). In February the following year, key members of the Barisan were detained under the Internal Security Act following Operation Coldstore.

The Barisan's downfall
Meanwhile, in late November 1962, Lee [Kuan Yew] began what became a one-man, 11-month election campaign, the likes of which Singaporeans had never before seen. David Marshall might have held ‘meet the people’ sessions as at his Chief Minister’s office in Empress Place, but no elected leader had ever taken to the road to visit every one of the island’s 51 constituencies (Lee went first to those that had registered the most blank votes in the referendum) nor pushed themselves so far out of their own comfort zone to talk to the people in their own languages. As the Prime Minister toured Singapore, giving speeches in English, Mandarin, Malay and sometimes stumbling Hokkien (occasionally with a few words of Tamil greeting thrown in) he appeared to his supporters a kind of Singapore ‘everyman’. Invariably, his message was simple and direct:

The government’s got to do the job. Homes must be built, clinics must be built, roads must be made, money must be saved – the people must be taken care of.

You’ll get more: better roads, better drains, better schools, and better jobs for your children. But most important of all … whatever our faults – and I don’t say we’ve got no faults – we have never put our fingers in the kitty and put a few gold coins in the pocket.

Looking back, Lee described these 11 months of constituency visits as ‘the most hectic’ in his life. Sometimes he was heckled, on occasions he was shoved, many times he was garlanded (especially when he honoured various temples with his presence); always, he made an impression. As Judy Bloodworth, a sound recordist with the TV crew that followed Lee on his visits, remembered:

[T]he people would cheer and boo and in the middle of all the noise he would be elated, push his way down among them, laugh at the lion dancers around him, careless of the roaring fireworks, never showing fear – he was burned in the face once but took no notice. We really felt like a team, like an army unit; we felt proud of him. You couldn’t help it.

Indeed, television, just as radio had been, proved fundamental to Lee’s success. He later recalled in a speech: ‘People watched on TV the spontaneous response of the crowds to the speeches made. The visits gathered steam;’ and in his memoirs he wrote, ‘I became a kind of political pop star!’ An unscripted, unrehearsed drama of national proportions was taking place and coming soon, to a community centre near you, was its on-screen idol – live in the flesh!

Of course, Lee’s televised encounters were not entirely spontaneous. Concerned with how fierce his rabble-rousing merdeka persona came across on screen, he sought advice from the famous BBC interviewer Hugh Burnett to help him appear more calm, collected and natural. By contrast, television transformed the Barisan’s speakers – still accustomed to projecting themselves from the podium out into the crowd – into demented wild men. When the camera zoomed in for close ups, it picked out their every exaggerated mannerism and contorted facial expression (much as it does today when inexperienced actors bring their theatrical techniques direct from the stage to the screen).

And not long after, those remaining Barisan leaders who had not been detained appeared to live up to their on-screen image. On 22 April 1963, the party marched on City Hall to protest their comrades’ detentions. A confrontation with the police ensued, following which 12 more Barisan leaders were arrested. Their court case began in early August and ended on the 29th, just a few days before Lee announced snap elections. Remembered Dr Lee Siew Choh (who was one of those arrested): ‘And, almost immediately … General Election! You see, we were completely occupied with the trial’.

The Plebian, the Barisan’s newsletter, called these elections ‘the most unfair and undemocratic in the history of Singapore’. The party again had trouble obtaining police permits for its rallies; on nomination day 17 potential Barisan candidates were held for questioning by Special Branch until it was too late for them to file their nomination papers (which then, as now, they had to do in person); three days earlier, three of the largest unions loyal to the Barisan had their bank accounts frozen to prevent their funds being used for political purposes. Finally, on the eve of the vote, Goh [Keng Swee] played on electoral anxieties once more by claiming that a Barisan victory would mean Malaysian troops in Singapore the following day.

However both sides played equally hard, such were the high stakes on offer. Earlier, while canvassing in Hong Lim, Lee Kuan Yew found himself drowned out by music blaring from the offices of a Barisan-loyal trade union located above him. Later, Toh Chin Chye and his colleagues were barracked by opponents who reportedly yelled: ‘Don’t let them get away. You! The day of your death has arrived!’ In areas where Barisan support was strong, PAP canvassers were reportedly insulted, threatened and sometimes physically assaulted.

Importantly, the imprisonment of the Barisan’s ‘first team’ leadership was not the inevitable death knell for the party as it has sometimes been portrayed. As photographs of the Barisan's election campaign reveal, massive portraits of Lim Chin Siong adorned practically every party event. Lim was a hero, a martyr, his unjust incarceration the party’s cause célèbre. Behind bars, he remained a major threat to the PAP’s hold on power.

In the lead-up to what was without doubt the most important election in Singapore’s history thus far, the outcome seemed too close to call. The Australian High Commission told Canberra that the Barisan privately expected to win 35 seats, while the PAP believed it would win 30; British officials in Singapore began to seriously contemplate how to deal with a new Barisan government. However, on 21 September 1963, the PAP won a resounding 37 seats and the Barisan just 13 (the final seat in the Assembly went to the belligerent candidate for Hong Lim, Ong Eng Guan). For the PAP the result was a vindication for its social revolution – the jobs, hospitals, schools and utilities it brought to Singapore – as well its successful negotiation of Merger.

For the Barisan the result was shattering.

© Mark Ravinder Frost & Yu-Mei Balasingamchow 2009. Singapore: A Biography was published in October 2009 by National Museum of Singapore & Editions Didier Millet.

The week in which we talked (an awful lot) about our book

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 03:04:00 +0000

(Photo credit – ampulets)
It's been a hectic week, but Singapore: A Biography is off and running at the bookstores.

On Sunday, Mark and I spoke on 'History as literature: the writing of Singapore: A Biography' at the National Library. There was talk of historiography and Orlando Figes (which Mark has written about before, on this blog), complexity and national narratives, and questions about historians being ironic and the development of national consciousness (Malaya, ho?).

(Photo credit – Sarah Lin)
On Tuesday, we did a reading and discussion at the fabulous indie bookstore Books Actually (now co-located with its non-fiction arm Polymath & Crust at 86 Club Street). It was our first time reading aloud from our book: pirates and frontline soldiers got some airtime, alongside the Singapore Stone and Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan. The audience was curious and enthusiastic, and most unexpectedly, we were invited to predict the future for Singapore.

(Photo credit – ampulets)
In between all that, we did some media interviews and figured out more publicity plans.

Tomorrow Mark will be speaking on 'Heroes, villains and ordinary citizens: a short history of Singaporean dissent' at the National Museum of Singapore (registration required). The talk will take place in the Salon on Level 1 (not in the Seminar Room on Level 2 as earlier announced).

Regular blog entries on history, Singapore and the meaning of life will resume next week!

Tune in to 938LIVE on 21 Oct

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:49:00 +0000

(Photo credit – Sarah Lin)
Two book events down for this month, two to go. If you missed us at the National Library or Books Actually (pictures forthcoming), you can still catch us at the National Museum and Singapore Writers Festival.

We're also going to be talking about Singapore: A Biography on the Living Room programme on Singapore's MediaCorp radio station 938LIVE. Tune in on Wed, 21 Oct from 10.30 a.m. to 11 a.m., or you can listen to the station online.

Book preview: Staging merdeka

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:47:00 +0000

This is the fourth book preview of Singapore: A Biography, which is being launched next week. The first three previews were 'Farquhar and Raffles fall out', 'The education of Singapore girls' and 'Captain Mohan Singh's dark night of the soul'. A new preview will be published on this website every Monday in October.

This preview introduces David Marshall, who was elected Singapore's first Chief Minister in 1955.

Staging merdeka
On 21 March 1956, a tall, Mediterranean-looking man, who carried a pipe and whose bushy eyebrows seemed to attempt an escape from his forehead each time he emphasised a point, spoke into a microphone in front of a crowd of supporters. He was standing underneath the 'apple tree' at Empress Place (next to what is today Old Parliament House) from where his words were broadcast live by Radio Malaya. In a present age, in which politicians try hard to appear natural and approachable, his performance serves as something of a master class:

Merdeka! People of Singapore! Last year, this time, in the month of March: a time of agony. I came before you, day after day at lunchtime, to speak to you of the dangers that the future held and to put before you a blueprint for a miracle. I did not dream, I did not dare believe, that you would give us an opportunity to make that miracle possible.

The man was David Marshall, a brilliant lawyer, a Sephardic Jew and one of the most colourful personalities Singapore politics has ever known. Then in his late 30s, Marshall had served for the previous year as the island’s first elected Chief Minister. He now appeared before his supporters to declare his government’s achievements, to relate the hurdles that it had overcome, and to explain the dangers that it faced in the future:

I think you know, when I was first elected and appointed Chief Minister, I was told I had no office, no clerk, no thambi [a boy or male servant]. And oh they couldn’t give me any office – it took a long time – government offices were extremely overloaded – and there was a lot of difficulty. I had to threaten to bring a desk here and set it up here or in my flat [laughter] before I could get an office!

I was told that, of course, the heaven-born, including the Chief Secretary, was the man who would coordinate government policy; that I was just the, the sort of the – the senior thambi among the thambis! [more laughter] I made it very clear and very soon that I was either Chief Minister or not. Finally, they accepted the position that I could coordinate policy.

Superior colonial officials were not the only obstacle Marshall and his government faced. Recalling another source of opposition, the Chief Minister felt clearly in his element:

To read the English press, we are a group of baboons who are trying to impose independence on you against your will. The Standard came out on Sunday with an article – not written by a Malayan, thank god. Well, he said, please don’t give us independence: we want Papa and Mama colonialism! [loud laughter, then Marshall imitates a child] Mama colonialism! Mama! A lost boy!

Finally, Marshall laid the jokes aside to conclude with a more serious message:

The communists are the ultimate danger to this country. And whether it is today or it is tomorrow, whatever the threat to my own personal safety may be and to my friends and to my colleagues, we intend to act with all the firmness possible against those disruptive elements that call themselves communists.

You don’t want, I don’t want, the people of Singapore don’t want a yanko merdeka. We want a Malayan merdeka! [Loud applause] And we will get it!

For all these fine words three months later Marshall was to resign, his dreams of steering Singapore to independence in tatters. His rapid rise and then equally sudden demise tell us much about the high drama (and sometimes high farce) of what was then a new style of politics on the island. But his story is equally important because of the leading players who shared his stage. For it was these other rising stars in the political firmament – the young Hakka Chinese lawyer Lee Kuan Yew and the even younger Hokkien Chinese bus worker Lim Chin Siong – who not only matched Marshall for charisma, but who ultimately presented him with far greater challenges than the British.

The outsider comes in
Looking back over his career in an oral history interview, Marshall claimed that the main motivation that drove him to enter politics was anger: ‘Anger at the leprous concept of racial superiority and it had been mounting in my belly since my schooldays’. He explained that he was never ‘anti-British’; rather, he wanted to ‘break through the sonic barrier against Asians and especially Jews’. Nor, he admitted, was he especially ideological. Though he moved in Singapore’s socialist circles during the early 1950s he never became especially grounded in socialist dogma. His personal understanding of socialism was that it simply meant ‘an effort to create the foundations of the opportunity of all our people to attain conditions of living compatible with human dignity’.

Marshall received his clarion call when in mid-1953 the British governor John Nicoll, in an effort to speed up Singapore’s progress towards self-government, announced the formation of a new constitutional commission. The outcome of the 1954 Rendel Commission (named after its chief convener Sir John Rendel) was that popular elections would be held the following year for a newly constituted Legislative Assembly made up of 32 members, 25 of whom would be elected. For Marshall, the political dawn that beckoned was so exciting as to be almost palpable:

‘Hey we are human beings! Hey, we’ve got the right to vote! Hey, we’ve got a right to elect our own representative! We’ve got a right to a voice in how we are to live.’ Now that is something you don’t understand today. But that was very, very radical at that time. You know it’s like the four-legged animal suddenly finding himself standing straight and looking upwards instead of looking to the ground. It really was a radical change of psychological atmosphere … ‘Hey we are standing on two legs!’

Hot off the press

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:45:00 +0000

The book is in from the printer's! (Pictured here with my MacBook for scale.)

Mark and I got our first copies today, and we're ecstatic. As you can imagine, we spent a fair bit of time this afternoon flipping through them.

The book will be available in Singapore bookstores from next week, so look out for it. It'll also be on sale at our upcoming events:

"History as literature: the writing of Singapore: A Biography" – a talk at the National Library at 2 p.m. on Sun, 18 Oct
A reading and discussion Books Actually/Polymath & Crust (86 Club Street) at 7.30 p.m. on Tue, 20 Oct
"Heroes, villains and ordinary citizens: a short history of Singaporean dissent" – a talk at the National Museum of Singapore at 2 p.m. on Sat, 24 Oct
"Finding the Singapore story" – a discussion at the Singapore Writers Festival at the Arts House at 11 a.m. on Sat, 31 Oct

Click here for more info on our events. If you've enjoyed our ramblings on this website, please come for the events and say hello!

For those of you who placed pre-orders, the books will be delivered to me next week. I'll get in touch with you then.

Wondering how the book reads? Check out our book previews and look out for a new one next Monday.

My top three history lit. idols

noreply@blogger.com (markrfrost) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:03:00 +0000

Yu-Mei and I had discussed writing some serious pieces about literary influences, but I think we've done quite enough of that kind of stuff already. Instead, and in the glorious cause of dumbing down wherever and whenever possible, here are (in no particular order) MY ALL TIME TOP THREE HISTORY LIT. IDOLS!

(My apologies now to all those concerned.)

1. SIMON SCHAMA: or simply 'The Schama' as he is known in my house (Sunday nights are reserved for his highly recommended Power of Art documentary series).

With his sassy delivery, cool jackets and his increasingly camp asides ('Well, he would say that wouldn't he?' seems a current favourite), 'The Schama' has emerged as the new Truman Capote of the TV dons world. His books aren't half bad either, and his personal philosophy when writing about the past, itself taken from his old Cambridge supervisor, is one with which I fully concur: to write history 'with the play of the imagination' and to 'bring a world to life, rather than entomb it in erudite discourse'.

Schama takes a bit of flak these days for being so popular (see the grilling he got in the American Historical Review recently for his hugely successful TV series A History of Britain). But although he might often cut to the chase, he rarely dumbs down and is never less than interesting.

Schama, we salute thee! (And yes, that was me hanging around Columbia last fall trying to get an autograph. The campus security are fascists!).

For more on Simon Schama see his bio on the PBS website.

2. JUNG CHANG

Dear Jung Chang,

I adored Wild Swans, even if one eminent historian I used to work with did dismiss it as merely 'a good beginner's guide to 20th-century Chinese history'. He's just jealous, of course, just like those other academics who got so upset when your Mao: The Unknown Story came out – especially those sentimental lefties who had preferred to think of Mao as an idealistic poet who had been lured to the dark side and were then made to look a bit foolish by all your new research. So what did these academics do? They attacked you for ... for your endnotes.

(Well, sister, we're behind you on that one – Singapore: A Biography has similarly un-academic endnotes.)

Next time you are passing through Hong Kong do drop by HKU and perhaps we can go for a coffee. My office is in the old quadrangle of the old building – you know, the one where Ang Lee filmed those romantic scenes of innocence about to be lost in Lust, Caution?

Not that I mean anything by that, of course.

For more on Jung Chang see this profile in the Guardian.

3. PETER ACKROYD

(Oh damn, I've used up my Truman Capote analogy already).

Well, in that case, Peter Ackroyd is like the Philip-Seymour-Hoffman-playing-Truman-Capote of the history lit. world - a camp old darling who, when he isn't working himself into another heart attack by writing too hard, can be found propping up the bar in one of his favourite East London pubs or wine bars.

Ackroyd has a special place in the genesis of Singapore: A Biography for being the root cause of not one but two cases of severe writer's block. The first instance was when my sister lent me his London: The Biography while I was staying with her in Cape Town and trying to work on our own Singapore: A Biography.

You see, Ackroyd is particularly known for his almost mystical belief in what he calls the 'territorial imperative', whereby a patch of ground, a house or even a city, influences the behaviour of its inhabitants, sometimes over several centuries. Inspired by the man, I tried playing with this idea for weeks before chucking it in when I finally conceded that the only territorial imperative in Singapore seemed to be to ceaselessly demolish, upgrade and develop.

Anyway, my sister then gave me his Shakespeare: The Biography as a birthday present, which I then lent to Yu-Mei. This led to the second instance of apparently Ackroyd-induced writer's block, Yu-Mei's account of which can be found on her blog.

All the same, I still love Ackroyd's work even though there is no point trying to emulate him.

P.S. Ackroyd has just written a book about Venice, the first time he's ventured beyond London and Britain for ages. What next? Surely not another book on another Renaissance City? Surely not ... Singapore: The Biography? (No, he wouldn't, he couldn't).

Follow those footnotes! (er... endnotes, actually)

noreply@blogger.com (markrfrost) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:54:00 +0000

It's inevitable that some things had to be left out of Singapore: A Biography, for the sake of brevity, readability and to keep at least one of our publishers in Singapore from choking on their morning coffee and brioche. That is why we place such emphasis on the references in this book – which, if they are followed through with, ought to lead eager readers ever deeper down the path of that extraordinary thing called the 'Singapore Story'.

Here are a couple of the value-added extras which anyone can locate if they go through our endnotes (some of the sources are only just a mouse-click away).

(WARNING: The following assumes that the reader has some prior acquaintance with certain aspects of Singapore's post-war history. For those not yet familiar with this period, why not buy our book?)

1. If Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew were ousted

OUR TEXT (from page 397):

Any glance through Colonial Office reports from this period [the late 1950s and early 1960s] will certainly confirm that dealings between the British and Singaporean governments were devious.

OUR ENDNOTE:

For more on such deviousness see the chapters by Tim Harper and Greg Poulgrain in Tan and Jomo (eds.), pp. 3-55, 114-124; see also Stockwell (ed.).

What does the 'more' in this case mean?

Tan and Jomo (eds.) refers to the groundbreaking collection of revisionist essays and personal reminiscences, Comet in Our Sky: Lim Chin Siong in History. For instance, Tim Harper's essay in this collection recounts a plan allegedly aired by Lee Kuan Yew in the middle of 1961 to deal with the looming split within the People's Action Party. The root of the crisis: Lee's failure to secure the release of those leftists (28 in all) still detained in prison after 1959. According to a senior British official, Lee had 'lived a lie about the detainees for too long, giving the Party the impression that he was pressing for their release while, in fact, agreeing in the ISC [Internal Security Council] that they should remain in detention'.

By July 1961, the PAP had lost the Hong Lim by-election and was now facing the prospect of another defeat in the Anson by-election of that same month. Thus, when Lee went for dinner with Goh Keng Swee, Lord Selkirk (the British Commissioner) and Philip Moore (the senior British official quoted above) he was a deeply troubled man. As Harper continues, again citing Colonial Office records, Lee at this meeting proposed,

... a more desperate scenario: he would order the release of detainees whilst requiring the British to block it through the ISC; he would then prorogue parliament for three weeks, and announce a plebiscite on Merger. When opposition was provoked, he would expel Fong, Woodhull, Dominic Puthucheary and Jamit Singh to the Federation. This 'would force Lim Chin Siong to reveal his hand completely and resort to direct action, in which event the Singapore Government would relinquish power and allow the British or the Federation to take over Singapore'. Selkirk, however, would have nothing to do with this 'unsavoury' scheme.

Unsavoury? Necessary? Inevitable? Immoral?

Well, it all depends on your personal point of view (and, as we've said earlier, we prefer readers to make up their own minds on such matters). But the interesting thing is, you don't have to search very far to find more stories like this. Stockwell (ed.) refers to A. J. Stockwell (ed.), Malaysia: British Documents on the End of Empire, parts of which are available at Google Books. Go to page 374 of that volume, for instance, and you'll discover why we've claimed in our book that Operation Cold Store 'had been planned for some time'. It seems a major round-up was first discussed in late July 1962 by Lee, Tun Razak and the Tunku, during a visit to London – between rounds of golf and tea at the Ritz.

2. Lim and Fong are suddenly lost for words

Of course, Colonial Office records have an equal amount to say about Lee's opponents during this same period. So, in the interests of 'balance', here's another passage from our book where the endnotes reveal some value-added extras once more. Again, our story comes from the middle of 1961, but this time the spotlight is on the radical leftists – Lim Chin Siong, Fong Swee Suan, Sandra Woodhull and James Puthucheary – and on what would later become known as the 'Eden Hall Tea Party'.

OUR TEXT (from page 396):

Still mulling over their response to the merger discussions, Lim, Fong, Woodhull and Puthucheary (following a phone enquiry from the latter) went to see Lord Selkirk ... at his Eden Hall Residence. They asked him point-blank whether the British would arrest them and suspend Singapore's constitution should Lee Kuan Yew be voted out of office. Selkirk replied that the constitution was a fair one which the British would respect, as long as any new party stuck to constitutional means and refrained from violence.

OUR ENDNOTE:

See Stockwell (ed.), pp. 145-147. Often the second part of this conversation is overlooked. Apparently, Selkirk then told his guests that for Singapore to survive it would need economic stability and he asked Lim and Fong whether they were communists. The Colonial Office report of the meeting reads: 'They [Lim and Fong] seemed to be embarrassed by this question and failed to give a clear reply. Mr Woodhull, on the other hand, stated categorically that he was not a communist.'

I've long been intrigued by why Lim and Fong, at this critical moment, 'failed to give a clear reply' to Selkirk's question and why they suddenly 'seemed to be embarrassed'. Only a little while later, Lim would make a categorical statement in front of the press that he was 'not a communist, or a communist front-man, or for that matter anybody's front-man'. So why were he and Fong so tongue-tied when talking to Selkirk back at Eden Hall?

Were both men at that time still concerned about how such a disavowal of communism might go down with some of their supporters? Were they simply put on the spot by the question and lost for words – not sure how to articulate what might have been a very complex answer? Or are we giving the eyewitness testimony of British officials too much credence and forgetting that Lim and Fong might simply have been struggling with their English?

Ah, the multiple joys of endnotes and sources.

Book preview: Captain Mohan Singh’s dark night of the soul

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:39:00 +0000

This is the third book preview of Singapore: A Biography, which will be launched next week. The first two previews were 'Farquhar and Raffles fall out' and 'The education of Singapore girls'. A new preview will be published on this website every Monday in October.

This preview is from the World War II section, where we recount the Battle of Malaya through the eyes of soldiers in the field. The following story begins just three days after the Japanese launched their ground-based assault on the Malay Peninsula, after the fall of Jitra.

Captain Mohan Singh’s dark night of the soul
For Captain Mohan Singh, a Sikh officer with the 14th Punjab regiment in Malaya, the defeat at Jitra proved to be the major turning point in his life. In his memoirs, he recalled that on 11 December the heavy Japanese bombardment and the withdrawal of his regiment’s transport sowed immediate confusion. ‘Some men jumped into the trucks to escape. I lost my temper, got hold of a stick and used it freely on any man trying to slip away’. Shortly afterwards, Japanese tanks burst into sight, tanks which Mohan Singh’s British commanding officer had assured him the enemy did not possess. The defenders dispersed ‘in utter confusion’ in a case of ‘everyone for himself’. By the time night fell,

Blind firing had started from all directions. Panic and chaos spread like wild fire … The morning of the 12th found British and Japanese troops terribly mixed up all over the place … So fell Jitra, the Maginot line of Malaya …

Over the next three days, tired and demoralised, Mohan Singh and his men staggered through jungle, padi field and leech-infested swamp as they tried to rejoin the main force of the retreating Allied army. For the Sikh captain personally, the circumstances of the defeat triggered an additional ‘intense inner struggle’. It was clear that while the Japanese ‘had come fully prepared and were ready to pay the price for their objective, a definite mission to do or die’, British-led forces ‘had no patriotic motives to fight with their backs to the wall’. But this realisation merely brought to mind an even deeper concern:

Throughout night, a panorama of those four days’ fighting was repeatedly appearing before my eyes … The horrible scenes of the drama of death and destruction witnessed during those few days deeply distressed my soul. I began to ponder over the real worth of life. Within a second or two, one could be no more. Like a bubble, the life of an individual could be pricked in a moment and it would vanish forever …

… If life could be abruptly snapped in a split second, as seen on the battlefield, would it not be better to direct and dedicate it to something better and nobler?

When Japanese planes dropped leaflets, ‘expressing their war aims in pithy slogans, assuring the coloured races of their immediate liberation and beseeching them to join hands in that mighty undertaking’, Mohan Singh felt ‘violently shaken’:

In a normal situation, no one would have given any serious heed to the shibboleths [sic] of the invading hordes, but at that moment their effect on me was tremendous. I felt as if they were voicing my inner feelings …

He emerged from three days in the swamp-filled jungle with a mission. He intended to approach the Japanese to obtain their help ‘to start a movement for Indian independence’, one that would ‘cut deep at the roots of the British policy of exploiting Indians for their wars all over the world.’ On the 14th, having drawn other Indian stragglers to his cause, he sent a local Indian to make contact with the Japanese on his behalf.

Mohan Singh admitted that his decision was not an easy one: ‘It was, indeed, a long drawn-out struggle between two loyalties—one to my own Commission, which meant allegiance to the British Crown, and the other, unwritten yet much more biding—my duty to my beloved country.’ In the end he joined the enemy ‘simply because, as an Indian, I felt that it was my duty to contribute my humble share to the service of my country’. On 15 December, he met with Japanese military officials at Alor Star and a few days later with Yamashita himself, who assured him that the Japanese had no territorial ambitions in India.

‘I was now going to raise an army for India’s liberation,’ wrote Mohan Singh. ‘In the very first week of our joining the Japanese side, I had decided that the name of this force would be ‘THE INDIAN NATIONAL ARMY’.

© Mark Ravinder Frost & Yu-Mei Balasingamchow 2009. Singapore: A Biography will be published in mid-October 2009 by National Museum of Singapore, Editions Didier Millet & Hong Kong University Press.

Writing without authority - PS

noreply@blogger.com (markrfrost) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:33:00 +0000

I should just add to my last post that the actual reason I was invited to South Africa was to speak on the wider theme of cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean world (a subject on which I've published a bit) and on where South Africa fits into this story. In particular, is South Africa able to draw parallels, comparisons and even lessons from the experience of other post-colonial states in the region, states that have tried and often failed to build inclusive, multi-ethnic democracies, i.e. Sri Lanka, Malaysia, India and even Singapore?

(It was, nonetheless, still a surprise to be invited to Jo'burg, as well as a great privilege. When the invite came through over email, the subject read 'A fan letter and an invitation' - which I took to be from some nice and extremely polite Nigerian man about to ask me to invest in his intercontinental chicken farm.)

Singapore's own dream of a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic utopia is a major theme that we also explore in Singapore: A Biography. Singificantly, it's a story that begins well before the creation of the PAP in 1954, with a history going back to the late 1920s.

Writing without authority

noreply@blogger.com (markrfrost) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:06:00 +0000

Back in early 2008, literally half-way through the writing of Singapore: A Biography, I was asked to give a lecture at a conference in Johannesburg entitled 'South African democracy at the crossroads'. Anyone who knows me will know that when it comes to Africa (past or present) I'm not exactly an authority, so the immediate question was 'why me?'

The conference, held at the University of the Witwatersrand, was a bold and timely affair which sought to bring together academics, journalists, filmmakers, artists and activists, all concerned that Mandela's utopian dream of an inclusive South African democracy was being wrecked by his successors. It became quite a controversial affair in other ways too. One journalist, feeling slighted that she did not get the interview she had wanted during our party on the first night, complained in the national press of those academics who still live in a world of 'chardonnay and char-grilled prawns', notwithstanding their professed desire to step down from the ivory tower and mingle with the people. (The chardonnay and char-grilled prawns were, by the way, delicious!).

But for me this conference was special for two other reasons. Firstly, before I gave my address, I was introduced – by one of South Africa's most eminent living scholars, no less – as a 'leading public intellectual in Singapore', which almost caused me to fall off my seat! You see, to be a 'public intellectual' you kinda need a 'public', and in early 2008 I didn't even have a proper job let alone an audience in Singapore beyond my immediate family.

More importantly, the discussion at the conference turned eventually (and quite aptly, in my case) to the whole notion of 'writing without authority'.

The idea of 'writing without authority' comes from a self-reflective meditation on his work by the Nobel Prize-winning South African author and academic J. M. Coetzee (see Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews), and some critics have subsequently used it to describe his entire oeuvre. In his novels, so I'm told (I've so far only read a few of his essays), Coetzee makes a self-conscious attempt to dismantle his own authority writing as a white, South African male. To escape all the authoritarian connotations that such a status represents, his fiction embraces the narrative voices of the marginalised – the blind, the disabled and, in several instances, women.

Some people might think that this project sounds like yet more of that indulgent, intellectual navel-gazing for which white, liberal academics are so famed. (For though they might get all angsty and guilt-ridden about their privileged status, they still know where to find the best char-grilled prawns and chardonnay when it really counts.) Certainly, the irony of Coetzee's own effort to write without authority is that the more he does so, the more prizes he seems to win, and the more his international authority as a white, male, South African writer seems to grow.

Yet for those white South African liberals at the conference – who felt compelled to voice their concerns over the challenges facing their country's young democracy, while being acutely aware of how their voices might come across (given nearly half a century of apartheid) – their dilemma remained a real one. Writing without authority might ultimately be an impossibility, but it still appeared to be worth the attempt.

So what has all this got to do with Singapore: A Biography?

At first, the idea that historians ought to have a go at writing without authority might seem faintly ridiculous. Who's going to listen to a historian who consciously tries to marginalise his/her own voice, or who implicitly raises the question 'Who am I to speak?' (before other people raise it for them)? Generally, the historians I know enjoy speaking and writing as authorities, and their readers and listeners expect them to do so.

Which is why the British historian Orlando Figes is such an interesting exception.

Like Coetzee, Figes is a multi-award winning author, and also like Coetzee, Figes likes to withdraw himself from his own narratives. In mid-2008, during an interview with the Guardian about his new book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, he had this to say:

Look, the days have – or should have – long passed when the historian stands in his Olympian position and tells you: this is what happened, this is what it means, this is what you should think about. I structure my history in a literary way in which different readers can get different responses out of it. [...] I'm not the sort of historian who says, bluntly, this is the meaning of these experiences. I've tried to convey those experiences in a way that allows people to engage with them, and imagine themselves in those situations, and come up with their own meaning.
'Russian revelations'
in the Guardian (14 July 2008)

Naturally, the way Figes structures his narratives ought to give us a hint as to how he hopes they will be read. Nonetheless, he remains quite unperturbed in the face of the criticism that he never really tells us what he thinks, or that he fails to provide an over-arching political narrative or moral interpretation that might better hold the multiple stories featured in his work together. Instead, as the Guardian's interviewer puts it, Figes's work represents a new kind of democratic history where readers are expected 'to do their bit, to forge their own critical relation to, and emotional engagement with, his subject, rather than swallow a narrative and set of judgements whole'.

The attempt by Figes to write history without authority – or perhaps, to be more precise, to write history with multiple authorities (leaving readers to form their own intepretations) – proved a great inspiration when it came to the writing of the post-war sections of Singapore: A Biography. In these chapters, we used the device of placing the stories and testimonies of multiple (often opposed) historical actors side by side to explore what remains a still hotly contested period from Singapore's political past. We didn't completely remove the authoritative voice of the historian from these chapters, but we did try to restrict ourselves from the kind of over-arching moral and political judgements that might have got in the way of readers making up their own minds for themselves.

Were we successful? A veteran of the Barisan Sosialis to whom I showed these chapters wrote to me to say that such is the continued dominance of PAP-sponsored narratives of post-war Singapore (the recent volume Men in White being, in his mind, no exception) that the only real 'alternative' history that can be written at this time has to be an explicitly partisan one. Perhaps he is right. But perhaps, also, Singapore: A Biography will say something about this period that will encourage further thought as well – even as its authors appear on the surface to keep their own thoughts to themselves.

Getting down to sources

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:55:00 +0000

People have begun to ask me what makes Singapore: A Biography different from other histories of Singapore. Notwithstanding the tongue-in-cheek tagline "Pirates! Prostitutes! Secret societies!" (which I slapped onto some email publicity last week), one of the most important elements we like to emphasise is that it is, by and large, an eyewitness history of Singapore. Naturally, some (but not all) of the events it recounts appear in other works, but with our book we make it a point to give prominence to first-person accounts in almost every instance.

This approach came out of our work on the Singapore History Gallery of the National Museum of Singapore. As Mark has already written about this earlier project:

The preoccupation with primary sources was driven as much by artistic considerations as our dedication to historical accuracy. ... What the visitor therefore encounters in most cases in the Singapore History Gallery are the thoughts and actual words of the historical characters featured. When they meet Raffles, they hear what Raffles said and wrote, or what he was reported to have said and written, or what others said and wrote about him, all drawn from a range of primary sources.

'The Making of the Singapore History Gallery: Some Personal Reflections'
in s/pores (26 February 2009)

Likewise, in writing our book, while we have had to provide an overarching narrative and enough context to stitch all the individual eyewitness accounts together, we've also tried, where possible, to let the historical figures speak for themselves. They don't always sound too musty or archaic either – many have left lively and enthusiastic accounts of life in Singapore, even when they were complaining about the heat (some things just don't change through the centuries).

Of the sources we drew on, many represent the usual suspects: C.E. Wurtzburg's Raffles of the Eastern Isles, which contains letters written by Sir Stamford Raffles, Song Ong Siang's One Hundred Years' History of the Chinese in Singapore (self-explanatory), the first-hand accounts of soldiers and civilians during World War II, and so on. Several of these sources are, in fact, what many people think of today when you say the word 'history': dusty tomes, set out in beautiful serif fonts, with idiosyncratic titles longer than most blurbs featured in the New York Times Book Review (for example, John Crawfurd's Journal of an Embassy from the Governor-General of India to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China: exhibiting a view of the actual state of those kingdoms)

But these weren't the only sources we drew on. For the late 19th and 20th century galleries of the Singapore History Gallery, 'we' (in this case, the National Museum curators, our research team, Mark and myself) frequently went beyond the printed record to delve into a variety of other media sources: oral histories, radio and television broadcasts, as well as grainy news footage, most of which is stored at the National Archives of Singapore. When it came to our book, Mark and I fell back on these sources once again and for obvious reasons. They invoke the personal immediacy of what happened in the past; they also evoke something of the broader zeitgeist – occasionally even the joie de vivre – of the times: the audience clapping and laughing as David Marshall holds forth under 'the old apple tree' during the mid-1950s, or, during Lee Kuan Yew's early 1960s tour of constituencies (on one occasion, at least), answering back.

It's worth remembering that the modern mass media was a tool of persuasion that Singapore's main political actors were highly adept at manipulating from the outset. And this is another aspect of Singapore: A Biography that we believe makes it quite distinctive – its focus on the impact of modern mass media in determining the course of Singapore's post-war history (caveat: I haven't read the new book Men in White, so I cannot vouch for whether it covers this angle of analysis). Listening to and watching recordings of political rallies from the 1950s and 1960s, it's hard not to notice how charged the atmosphere frequently was, and how theatrical the performances of those behind the microphone became. Success hinged not just on who had the better political arguments, but on who had the better delivery.

Take, for example, the People's Action Party's 12 radio talks in the series 'Battle for Merger', broadcast in late 1961. In our account, we note that Lee Kuan Yew's voice was 'calm and collected' and that it resonated as 'the patriarchal voice of reason in deeply troubled times'. (To hear just how patriarchal he sounded in the 1960s, almost like your warm-natured grandfather telling you a bedtime story, check out the Companion audio guide in the 'New Nation' section of the Singapore History Gallery.) Lee was, it was said, a 'master story-teller'. Cheong Yip Seng – then a schoolboy, later the editor of the Straits Times – recalled how 'every broadcast ended with the listener in suspense, and anxious for the next installment, the way ordinary folk at that time lapped up the kung-fu serials broadcast over Rediffusion by Lei Tai Sor in Cantonese.'

For better or for worse, the rival Barisan Sosialis party declined to join 12 subsequent radio forums on the merger issue, and were denied equal airtime to Lee for 12 talks of their own. In 1960, television coverage had aided John F. Kennedy's triumph over his less photogenic and less charismatic opponent Richard Nixon in the US presidential elections; in Singapore, between 1961 and 1963, did not the rapt attentiveness of the microphone or the fawning gaze of the camera have a similar impact? (In our book, and for all the charisma of Lee's opponents, we suggest so).

The above example also reminds us that modern mass media generated new cultural products to which people of the time responded passionately, often more passionately than in their response to the printed word. Historian Timothy Barnard has observed:

If Southeast Asians originally obtained their literature orally, today they consume it both visually and orally through television and cinema. While the average Malay youth has never read Hikayat Hang Tuah, they are undoubtedly familiar with the 1956 film version of the tale, which is constantly shown on television in Malaysia and Singapore and easily available in VCD format in these nations as well as in Indonesia.

'Film, Literature and Context in Southeast Asia: P. Ramlee, Malay Cinema, and History'
in Southeast Asian Studies: Debates and New Directions (2006)

Our book doesn't weigh in heavily on either the Hikayat Hang Tuah or its filmic counterpart, but you get the idea. These media products were the means by which people in recent history communicated and/or consumed their ideas. Like printed matter, these media sources can be critiqued, not just quoted from, and woven accordingly into a narrative of history.

So while you'll find us referring to autobiographies and memoirs in Singapore: A Biography, as our story winds its way into the 20th century you'll find more and more references to radio and television broadcasts and more use of oral histories or personal interviews, albeit all in print form (sorry, we can't follow Entertainment Weekly's example and have snazzy embedded video excerpts in our book).

All of which dovetails nicely with a talk I'll be giving at the Singapore Writers Festival, 'Finding the Singapore Story', on Sunday, 31 October, 11 a.m. at Earshot at The Arts House. Come by and hear more about the sources we used, how we used them and what kind of Singapore (hi)story emerged at the end of it. Watch this blog as well: a few of our favourite 'media-focused' excerpts will be featured soon.

Click here for further details on this and our other book events in October.

Book preview: The education of Singapore girls

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:51:00 +0000

This is the second book preview of Singapore: A Biography, which will be launched in mid-Oct 2009. Last week's preview was 'Farquhar and Raffles fall out'. A new preview will be published on this website every Monday in October.

The education of Singapore girls
Modern female education in Singapore had begun in 1887, when an Australian Methodist missionary by the name of Sophia Blackmore opened the Methodist Girls’ School in a shop-house on Short Street. Two and a half years later, Blackmore joined forces with the American Methodist Mission to target the Nonya daughters of the Straits Chinese. She herself went door-to-door in Straits Chinese neighbourhoods to recruit new students. As she later recalled:

One mother would say, ‘We do not want our girls to ‘makan gaji’ (earn their livelihood). Another woman told me that if her daughter studied from the same book as her son, the girl would get all the learning out of it; there would be none for the boy, and he would be ‘bodoh’ (stupid). The girl might be stupid—that did not matter, but the boy must be clever.

Certain Nonya were even suspicious that Blackmore might be a government spy sent to investigate household gambling (still, at that time, illegal). Others, once her identity as a missionary had been established, were more concerned that she was unmarried when she was already a woman in her 30s. Such attitudes were typical of the cloistered, tradition-governed world that Blackmore and other educationalists sought to enter and overturn.

Impressed by their efforts, Straits Chinese progressives led a campaign for female education themselves. In 1899, Lim Boon Keng and Song Ong Siang established the Straits Chinese Girls’ School (later called the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School), to ‘encourage and provide every facility for a suitable education for the Chinese girls … under the direction and control of their own people.’ ‘Direction’ and ‘control’ were the operative words here since such ‘suitable’ education had little to do with female empowerment – the objective was to make Straits Chinese girls into better wives and mothers. As an article in the Straits Chinese Magazine made clear:

[The mother’s] duty is to see that the children do not play the truant; to help them with their lessons so that they may not lag behind in the class; to instill into them the truths of morality and religion; and to inculcate the duty due to the family, to the State and to mankind. … As a wife, if she is well educated, the husband will always find in her a delightful companion who is ever ready to give him her advice, persuasion or warning with intelligence and reason …

Partly, the Straits Chinese Girls’ School was founded because of the embarrassment felt by progressive young Baba at the public impression made by their womenfolk. While letters to the Straits Times characterised as ‘reprehensible’ the penchant many Nonya had for popular forms of gambling such as chap-ji-ki and che-ki, articles in the Straits Chinese Magazine castigated them for their general ignorance (even though the latter was largely a result of their domestic confinement). The clearly exasperated outpouring of the colonial Director of Public Instruction in 1906 was typical of such criticism:

There is no more absolutely ignorant, prejudiced and superstitious class of people in the world than the Straits-born Chinese women. It is about hopeless to expect to be able really satisfactorily to educate the boys while their mothers remain stumbling blocks to real enlightenment.

Lim and Song’s remedy for such ignorance and superstition was a curriculum that included basic mathematics, reading and writing (in both English and Mandarin), as well as what we would today call ‘domestic science’: sewing, cooking, hygiene and childcare skills. Lim hoped that the educated Nonya would emerge from school having ‘learnt the importance of cleanliness and the proper way to conduct herself in the different spheres of life she will eventually enter—as daughter-in-law, wife and mother.’ Echoing the concern of the Director of Public Instruction, he also wanted students at the Straits Chinese Girls’ School to raise enlightened Chinese sons who would ultimately (as we saw him exhort earlier) reap their rewards as both ‘sons of Han’ and British imperial subjects.

Not everyone in the Straits Chinese community was supportive of this new direction. Lim noted that ‘with a few honourable exceptions’ elder Baba refused to give their patronage to the Straits Chinese Girls’ School, and that even the fathers and grandfathers of those girls already enrolled at the school adhered to the same ‘conservative and unreasonably prejudiced policy’. Yet a generation later, the efforts of Lim, Song and other female educators had largely vanquished such conservatism. The Methodist Girls’ School, the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School and a host of other English and Chinese-language girls’ schools were all flourishing. In 1935, Sophia Blackmore could affirm that the days when women ‘were kept behind closed doors and only saw what was going on outside through a “peep hole”’ had well and truly passed.

© Mark Ravinder Frost & Yu-Mei Balasingamchow 2009. Singapore: A Biography will be published in mid-October 2009 by National Museum of Singapore, Editions Didier Millet & Hong Kong University Press.

Co-publication by Hong Kong University Press

noreply@blogger.com (markrfrost) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:09:00 +0000

We always intended Singapore: A Biography to be a 'crossover' work of history, and so it's nice to be able to confirm that the book will be co-published in Hong Kong, China, Australia and the United States by Hong Kong University Press (and distributed in the US through the University of Washington Press).

This means that the book is now officially academic popular history.

(For history students, this also means that if our book gets onto some reading lists you might have to read it, or at least pretend you have read it. Why not be cool and get ahead of the pack? Who wants to be lining up in the university library for the book to finally become available 'on reserve', and then for only a few hours? Invest in a copy now!)

Seriously though, while the references will remain tucked away at the end of the book with the bibliography, so that readers won't have to be bothered by them while gripped by the flow of the narrative, we still believe they are well worth following up on – especially if you want an even fuller picture of the island's history.

For more on the joys of venturing down the murky trail of footnotes in this book (be careful of where they might lead you), watch this blog.

Book preview: Farquhar and Raffles fall out

noreply@blogger.com (Tym) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:57:00 +0000

In the run-up to the launch of our book Singapore: A Biography in mid-October 2009, we'll be releasing a short book preview on this website every Monday. Today's preview is from the 'Settlement' section, which covers the years 1819 to 1824.

In 1819 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles founded a British port in Singapore. But ‘like a man who sets a house on fire and then runs away’ (as one contemporary observed, but read our book for more details), Raffles returned to his post in Bencoolen, Sumatra, leaving the settlement to its first Resident Major William Farquhar. Farquhar was Raffles's trusted aide, but things didn't quite work out smoothly. Our story picks up in 1823, on Raffles's last visit to Singapore.

Farquhar and Raffles fall out
Within a year of Raffles’s return, relations had soured between both men to the extent that not even Farquhar’s near-fatal stabbing at the hands of Sayid Yassin could salvage them. In January 1823, Raffles wrote a letter to his East India Company (EIC) superiors in which he felt compelled to tell them that he considered Farquhar ‘totally unequal to the charge of so important and peculiar a charge as that of Singapore has now become’. He then struck out at Farquhar’s undesirably close involvement with the locals. In a thinly-veiled reference to Farquhar’s Melakan wife Nonio Clement, Raffles argued that the Resident’s ‘Malay connexion’ afforded ‘an opening for such an undue combination of peculiar interests as not only to impede the progress of order and regularity but may lay the foundation of future inconvenience which may hereafter be difficult to overcome’.

The growing distaste that Raffles felt towards Farquhar even extended to the Resident’s appearance. In March 1823, Raffles commented to Farquhar on his ‘departure from the usual etiquette in dispensing with the Military Dress of his rank’. The next month, he told Farquhar that he had written to Calcutta on the matter and was awaiting the Company’s judgment. Farquhar’s response was to claim that he was only required to wear his uniform when he acted in his capacity as military Commandant. Presumably, he felt that when acting as Resident he should be allowed to forego clothes that made him uncomfortable in the local humidity. However, the matter of the Resident’s dress was perhaps symptomatic in Raffles's mind of a general lack of discipline. By the end of the month, Raffles had Farquhar informed (by proxy!) that he was to be relieved from his official duties.

The way Raffles treated Farquhar certainly invites condemnation. But to be fair to Raffles, he returned to Singapore in 1822 practically a broken man, worn down by his grief and seemingly subject to the onset of brain disease. To find his ‘almost only child’, as he called Singapore during his final visit, in a less than ideal state, bustling with activity, yet unkempt and vice-ridden – apparently through the decisions of a colleague who seemed to have let himself go a little too ‘native’ – was an added pressure on an overwrought mind. And, in one respect, Raffles was justified in his condemnation of Farquhar. The Scot had chosen to turn a blind eye to slave-trading and thus to a practice outlawed across the British Empire. One slave-trader had been so delighted to carry out his business undisturbed in Farquhar’s Singapore that he sent both Raffles and Farquhar the gift of a couple of slaves as a mark of gratitude.

The acrimony between both men continued after they returned to Britain – and in Farquhar’s case even went on after Raffles’s death. Though the EIC formally decided in Raffles’s favour over Raffles’s assertion that he was the sole founder of the settlement at Singapore, Farquhar continued to fight for equal recognition, publicly criticising Sophia Raffles’s Memoir for the way it accorded Raffles ‘exclusive merit’ for Singapore’s establishment. Indeed, Farquhar might be said to have literally carried his case to the grave. When he died in Scotland in 1839, his tombstone read:

During 20 years of his valuable life he was appointed to offices of high responsibility under the civil government of India having in addition to his military duties served as Resident in Melaka and afterwards at Singapore which latter settlement he founded…

Unfortunately for Farquhar, it took at least another century for historians to sit up and take notice. Sophia Raffles’s heroic narrative, combined with the prevailing ‘great man’ theory of history (in which, with his untidy appearance and Eurasian mistress, Farquhar must have appeared a raggedy misfit) ensured that Raffles continued to receive the sole credit as modern Singapore’s founder. Today, the island city-state bears no street or place or edifice which remembers Farquhar, whereas those dedicated to Raffles are numerous. Ironically, the one street that did bear Farquhar’s name used to lie in the Malay suburb of Kampong Glam, but it was demolished by the inheritors of Raffles’s urban legacy – Singapore’s modern town-planners.

Yet modern scholars have begun to re-appraise Farquhar’s contributions. If Raffles was the founding father of the Singapore settlement then, as historian Ernest Chew puts it, ‘it was really Farquhar who had to play the role of mother and nurse to the infant during its first four years’. Or as another scholar Karl Hack argues, it was Farquhar’s knowledge of the Malay rulers and their dynastic disputes that provided Raffles with his vital ‘entry-point’. Though Raffles was brilliant he was also ‘utterly impractical’ and it would have been ‘a disaster’ if he had set about the establishment of the modern entrepôt by himself. Indeed, the trust that local people had in the Raja Melaka was what brought many of them to Singapore in the first place, and ensured the settlement’s survival.

We perhaps gain a glimpse into the judgment of the time when we compare what we know about both men’s departures from the island. Munshi Abdullah tells us that Raffles departed Singapore on 9 June 1823 with tears in his eyes, sent on his way by ‘hundreds’. Mr Farquhar eventually left six months later and in Abdullah’s account was bade adieu with much greater fanfare. Thousands came to say farewell, bearing different kinds of gifts, including ‘some who did not have a dry eye for the whole of those two days’. As Farquhar’s ship pulled out of harbour ‘people of all races put out in their boats’, gaily decorated with ‘flags flying’ and with ‘bands playing’, trying to follow him as he set sail for the horizon.

© Mark Ravinder Frost & Yu-Mei Balasingamchow 2009. Singapore: A Biography will be published in mid-October 2009 by National Museum of Singapore, Editions Didier Millet & Hong Kong University Press.