Philip Holden
The author teaches at the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore.
WWII Hero Lim Bo Seng founded Force 136 with Captain John Davis of Britain's Special Operations Executive.
Towards the end of the National Day Rally speech in English, something changed. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong put aside statistics and figures, and the appeals to reason that had marked the earlier part of the speech and the speeches in Malay and Mandarin, and started telling stories.
Stories with local heroes, PM Lee noted, quoting a response to a speech he recently gave at the Singapore Heritage Fest, are “what Singapore needs”. As he told such stories, the emotional intensity of the speech increased markedly.
Perhaps most interesting for me, as someone who studies storytelling and memory, were accounts drawn from MICA’s Singapore Memory Project: James Seah’s eyewitness account of the Bukit Ho Swee fire, and Muhammad Raydza’s recollections of Singapore’s last victory in the Malaysian cup.
As with all good stories, the latter brought back memories of my own – of spending a night with a group of Singaporean and Malaysian divers moored off Pulau Hantu in 1994, watching the match on a tiny television screen powered by our boat’s generator, and fighting off clouds of hungry mosquitoes.
Such stories are comforting, but in their comfort they carry a danger. As any storyteller knows, the same story can be told in a thousand different ways. Heroes in one version can become villains in another. We can exaggerate the role of a character, change the point of view, or even leave out an event we feel insignificant.
Often, we mould stories unconsciously to fit the world as we see it. In the changed world we live in after the General Election, it seems particularly important to tell a variety of stories of Singapore, even if they do not have clear heroes and tell inconvenient truths. Such stories may be seen as awkward, even unconstructive, but if attended to carefully they promote a self-reflection that enriches.
Only a few days ago, the National Day Parade used a fictional story to represent the nation’s history. Yet in the press the day after, there were two examples of what happens when one fails to attend to stories in their complexity. A newspaper report described the journey from independence to the present, symbolised through the growth of a child, as how a “five-act musical … showed how a mother and son stuck it out as Singapore went from small fishing village to big city.”
But the starting point of the story was independence, and Singapore was not a fishing village in 1965. And as historians such as Kwa Chong Guan and Derek Heng have shown, Singapore’s current development parallels its past. Singapore was a major port city long before Raffles arrived in 1819, going through several long cycles of expansion and contraction: Raffles just happened to land in a period of decline.
Similarly, an article in the Straits Times titled “China and Taiwan can look to the S’pore Model,” in praising elements of the Singapore model, claimed that Lee Kuan Yew had created the Central Provident Fund system. Yet the CPF was introduced in 1955 just after David Marshall became Chief Minster, and a central plank of the PAP’s manifesto in 1959 was a commitment to abolish the institution.
To insist on such stories being told in all their complexity is not simply a pedantic obsession with detail. In two decades of teaching literature in Singapore, I’ve found that students are most interested in competing stories of uncertainty, conflict, and moral ambiguity, in which many people show heroism, but in which few are heroes without flaws. Such stories bring history alive in the present, and empower their listeners and readers to act while remaining conscious of the limits of their knowledge.
If Singapore is the tapestry of which PM Lee spoke, it is a tapestry with many loose threads and at times contrasting colours, and is all the better for this. Understanding that Singapore in the past has been a place of many kinds of contradiction and conflict, the vast majority of which have not led to violence, is surely important in negotiating the challenges of the present.
Not all stories are true, but we should not demand that all stories should always tend towards unity or give a simple moral message. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the truth is rarely plain and never simple.
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Photo courtesy of Dee Kay Dot As Gee. This article was first published on 15 August 2011 by TODAYonline.
“Singapore was a major port city long before Raffles arrived in 1819, going through several long cycles of expansion and contraction: Raffles just happened to land in a period of decline.”
History does not just flow along…. there are certain actors which changed the course of history…. Without Hitler would there be a holocaust? Without Deng, would China be what it is today? Things do not just happen by themselves. To deny that would be to deny all the important people who made a difference to this world (for better or for worse).