Chapter 11 Chapter Eleven Deciding to Do Something

Although English-educated people have always received favorable treatment from the government and monopolized government departments and professional jobs, there are some idealistic people who cannot withstand the temptation of the Communist Party to the anti-colonialists.If we ignore them, or fail to mobilize them into an effective political force, then the Communist Party of Malaya will ultimately benefit. When Mr. Fox asked me to wait in the first-class cabin of the "William Reuiss", I went to the deck and waved to my parents, Tianyao, Jinman and Xiangyao and other family members.They and a few friends, including Han Ruisheng, came to pick me up at the pier.Zhi's family is also waiting for her.But after we disembarked, we went home separately.She went back to Pasir Panjang with her parents, and I went back to my home on Oxley Road in an old blue Stubbs car driven by a Malay coachman.This car was bought by my mother, and even the driver was hired.My mother ran a boarding house and was the head of several bank associations, and the business was doing well.Bank associations were very popular among Chinese housewives back then, because participating in bank associations was more honorable than borrowing money from moneylenders.

I felt very uncomfortable for the first few days.In the UK for four years, I adapted to the cool and dry climate. The heat and humidity in Singapore in August made me feel sleepy.The first few nights were miserable.I turned the ceiling fan in the bedroom to the fastest setting and opened the two French windows.The door was ajar to allow more air to circulate, but it still didn't help.The first few nights, my pajamas were drenched with sweat, and I had to get up three or four times to take a cold shower and change into my pajamas, which was exhausting.As I had no clothes suitable for the tropics, the daytime was as hot as the nighttime, and I was uncomfortably hot.

But Singapore also has many positive phenomena.Since 1946, it has continued to improve.There are more cars on the streets, more items in the shops, and more food.The local food is especially delicious, and I haven't tasted it for four years.Although the cuisine of the "William Ruys" was greatly improved compared with the common food of England in the past, it still lacked the variety of flavors and characteristics of the dishes cooked with a lot of spices by the Straits Peranakans. I went out to visit old friends and new friends, and reconnected.One day, I was visiting a friend who worked in the judiciary. When I was about to leave the Supreme Court, I met Wang Changhui, a well-known Straits Chinese lawyer.The local newspaper once reported the news of my return, and also made a prominent report on Zhi and I's excellent results in Cambridge University, which attracted Wang Changhui's attention.He asked me if I would be interested in being a trainee lawyer in the Li Jue and Wang Lawyers Office established by him and Li Jue.I expressed interest.He immediately arranged for me to meet his senior partner Li Jue the next day.

Li Jue is a native of Yorkshire, England, about 60 years old.After he qualified as a lawyer in the UK, he began to practice law in Singapore in the early 1930s. He later married a Chinese woman. After marriage, he had no children and adopted several Chinese children.He was intelligent and irascible, but his voice was small, which seemed out of proportion to his stocky stature and large head.When he was angry, his face flushed and he spoke almost incoherently.He was full of energy and sweated profusely all day long, so he had to mop and mop with a large handkerchief.He suggested that I be his personal trainee solicitor.That way, I'd be sitting in his office with two big air conditioners pumping out cold air.The air conditioner is very noisy, but it is enough for two offices, so it is quite cool.When I was in the UK, I decided not to do an internship in a solicitor's office to qualify as a solicitor, so when I returned to Singapore, I had to do a one-year internship to qualify as a solicitor.During this period, Li Jue gave me a monthly salary of 500 yuan.

I went to work almost immediately.I started by ordering a few clothes for the tropics, white denim trousers and a lightweight seersucker jacket.I also bought a couple of cotton mesh shirts that let in the air, but that didn't help either, I was still drenched in sweat.Every time I come back from court, I'm always drenched.However, entering Li Jue's well-ventilated, air-conditioned room covered in stinking sweat had a bad outcome: I fell ill with a cold and cough.Before long, I learned to wash my face with cold water every time I came back to the office, and then put on the clean clothes I left there when my body cooled down.

Reckless young people come to propose marriage After I got a job, my second task was to visit Zhi's father, Ke Shouzhi.Tall, energetic and a self-taught man, he was the general manager of OCBC Bank at the time.He taught himself accounting and banking through correspondence courses.He didn't get promoted by nepotism or money.He was promoted to the position of general manager of the bank only by his own efforts.I begged him to marry his daughter to me, and negotiated with him the date of the marriage.He was stunned in amazement.He always thought that my parents would visit him in the traditional way and propose marriage to him. Unexpectedly, this reckless young man came to propose marriage in person, and he thought that he would definitely get consent.However, he didn't say anything to my face, but he complained for a while in front of Chi.We agreed to get engaged first and not get married until the end of September.After Li Jue saw our engagement notice in the newspaper, he expressed his willingness to hire Zhi as a trainee lawyer with a monthly salary of 500 yuan.I told Chi the news, and she accepted it right away.This is really convenient for us.The two of us can work together and see each other every day.

On September 30, 1950, almost three years after our secret marriage, we had our second wedding at the Registrar of Marriages.Chi then moved to 38 Oxley Road.Mother bought us some new furniture, and our official married life began.But Chi found it difficult to adjust herself; she now had to adjust to life in the Li family, which, in addition to my grandmother, parents, sister and three younger brothers, had several relatives from Indonesia.These relatives stayed at my house and helped supplement my mother's income. I joined the Island Club in Singapore to continue my golf practice so that I could carry on with the game I had learned in Tintagel, England.For a while I was an avid golfer.One afternoon, despite the rain, Chi and I drove to the golf course.When I came to Thomson Road, my Studback suddenly slid to one side, made a U-turn and turned a corner, rolled twice and overturned on the soft grass slope.I was dumbfounded, and so was Chi.I asked her how she was doing and she said it was fine.We were lucky that we didn't get hurt at all.If we had gone a little further and overturned on the side of the road, the car would have crashed into a big water main instead of overturned in the wetlands, and my political career, which I love, would have been over.

I was restless and restless.Politics in Singapore is frustrating, even outrageous.Power is concentrated in the hands of the Governor, the Colonial Secretary and the Attorney General.They live in the Governor's Mansion, a symbol of power.The Governor lives in the largest building, the Governor's Palace.The Colonial Secretary lived in a mansion only smaller than the Governor's Mansion, and the Attorney General lived in a second-class mansion.As for the Deputy Colonial Secretary and the Governor's Private Secretary, they lived in two other mansions respectively.There is a 24-hour, daily, private telephone connection service between the five buildings.

This is the real center of government power.Under the Governor there is a Legislative Assembly, of which only 6 of the 25 members are locally elected.The rest are either appointed by the British government or government officials, headed by the Counselor. In 1951, the number of elected members increased to nine, but they had no decision-making power.In the eyes of the people, they have no status at all, so every time the municipal council or the legislative assembly elections, the number of voters is pitifully small. My boss, Li Jue, is the planner of Singapore's main political party, the Progressive Party. Most of the party's leaders are foreign students who studied law or medicine in the UK in the 1930s.They admire British values, like my grandfather, everything British is perfect.They have no confidence in themselves, let alone the abilities of the Chinese, Indians and Malays here.

While I was in the UK, I read a report by Patrick O'Donovan, the London Sunday newspaper Observer's South East Asia correspondent.He described the older generation of Asian international students as not emotionally or psychologically fighting for freedom.Their starting point is that they believe that they are not capable of taking over and governing an independent country immediately, and that they need to accumulate years of experience to do so.I think since they can't stand up to fight for their own rights, let alone stand up against the British.The only influential figure locally is Lim Yew Hock, who serves as the secretary-general of the Singapore Federation of Secretarial and Administrative Workers.

The speeches delivered by these politicians are conformist and have never dared to challenge the authority of the United Kingdom.But when they said anything critical of the colonial officials, they swelled with pride.My friend Beth described them as "people brought up in slavery."Beth and I returned to Singapore on the "William Ruys".He worked in the government secretariat, and every time I visited him in the government dormitory after dinner, the two of them would vent their grievances to the fullest.He was of Eurasian descent, a heavy build, who spoke slowly and walked slowly.He never forgot the insults he received from the British and resented the behavior of some of his British colleagues in the civil service. I decided to do something to change this sad situation, so I can't wait for other friends, especially Wu Qingrui and Du Jincai, to come back from England sooner. One day in November 1950, John Iba, the former main leftist leader of the defunct Democratic League of Malayan Union, came to see me at Oxley Road without warning.We talked for half an hour in the corridor.I asked him, what can we do about the constitutional politics that cannot be achieved in Singapore? Why not form a political party, do something practical, and challenge the power of the colonial government.He was noncommittal and said, "You know, the emergency decree is in effect and we have to be very careful." I believe he may have heard from Lin Fengmei about the meeting between the two of us in London.He's trying to figure out what I mean, whether I might be one of their recruits. In January 1951, newspapers reported the detention of a group of English-educated communists.Among those arrested were former Malayan Democratic League vice-president John Ibba, Singapore Teachers' Union secretary Devan Nah and editorial director of Malay-language daily Utusan Malay Utusan Samad Ismail.This is the first time the powers of detention under the emergency decree have been used against English-educated groups. It is evident that the Mamiya Communist Party has also won new members among the English-educated intellectuals.Although English-educated people have always received favorable treatment from the government and monopolized government departments and professional jobs, there are some idealistic people who cannot withstand the temptation of the Communist Party to the anti-colonialists.If we ignore them, or fail to mobilize them into an effective political force, then the Communist Party of Malaya will ultimately benefit. acting as an election agent I continued to work in the lawyer's office and followed Li Jue to the Supreme Court to handle his lawsuits.Every time he has to appear in court, he does not drink and is sane.But on other occasions it was unbearable.When he took me out for lunch and dinner, he always drank a lot.For example, he ate oysters at the Kallang Airport Hotel, or ate T-bone steak at Stanford Restaurant and Adafi Western Restaurant, all of which were washed down with dark beer and white beer.Sometimes he got so drunk at noon that he couldn't work effectively in the afternoon; at night he drank whiskey, often until he was too drunk.Following him, I ate too much and drank too much.He must have thought that I would be a new member of his Progressive Party and could do things for him, so in February 1951 he asked me to act as his proxy for the Legislative Assembly elections.I agreed.This will give me a chance to get a cursory look at the electoral landscape and usual practice in Singapore. The nomination day is scheduled for March 8, but there is nothing exciting to see in the market.No wonder.When the last Legislative Council election was held in 1948, only 23,000 of the 200,000 eligible voters went to vote, and nearly half of them were Indians, who accounted for only 6% of the total population of Singapore at most. Lai Kyaw was elected with a slim majority.The Progressive Party won a total of six seats, the Labor Party two and the Independents one.The campaign was modeled on what I saw in the UK, only poorly imitated.Lai Kyaw is running for the Katong constituency seat.This constituency is on the east coast, where his hometown is located, and is populated by a large number of English-speaking Straits Chinese, who all serve the King and the British Empire.As his campaign agent, I hired a group of assistants to put up campaign slogans in the constituency with his photo, name and the words "Please vote for Progressive Party candidate Lai Kyaw".He also directed me to arrange nightly gatherings and hire professional Malay dancers to pair up with the men in Javanese dances, while providing food and drink to the audience, even though this is prohibited by law. The Director of Elections said in his Singapore Legislative Assembly election report to the British Colonial Secretary: "Those responsible party leaders understand that when only 24,693 votes were cast from some 250,000 eligible voters, immediate strides are made towards the foundations of self-government. It doesn't exist." These voters are generally believed to be Singapore Straits Peranakans and Indians.Most of the former were educated in English; the latter came from India and were British citizens.Most people on the island of Singapore are neither involved nor interested in elections.The reason is simple, they have no voting rights.What's more, the elections are all conducted in English, and they don't speak English at all. I feel that the colony is an imaginary world.is out of touch with reality.Government officials only care about their own interests and those of English-educated people.English-educated people can exert some pressure on government officials through English-language newspapers, but they are not the economic driving force of Singaporean society.I feel extremely uneasy.I kept these thoughts to myself, discussing them only with Bane.I have to move on with my law career, but I also want to see if that opens the door to a career in politics. a small world On August 7, 1951, the one-year apprenticeship ended.For the bar ceremonies, Chi and I donned dark suits and barrister's robes with white flaps, and I had to add a winged collar.This is an important occasion.The Law Society of Singapore has a total of 140 members, and only 10 new lawyers are admitted each year.Rene Iba, a well-respected old Eurasian lawyer, applied for membership on our behalf and gave a short, beautifully worded speech.John Iba, a secret Communist Party member, was his son and had been arrested seven months earlier.Singapore is indeed a small world. Since my English name listed on my birth certificate is Harry Lee Kuan Yew, I cannot ask Middle Temple or Cambridge University to remove Harry from my registered name, so in my Cambridge University Diploma and Bar Certificate, my English name is Harry Kuan Yew Lee. When I decided to qualify as a lawyer in Singapore in 1950, I only used the pinyin of my Chinese name and moved my surname to the front of my first name and changed it to Lee Kuan Yew.This time, I succeeded.Since then, Lee Kuan Yew has become the name I use in public.It stands for what I stand for, and it's a sign that I see myself as a left-wing nationalist.Since then, when newspapers reported my appearance in court, they called me Lee Kuan Yew.However, these days, my wife and a group of close friends still call me Harry. When I started getting involved in politics in the 1950s, I was always a little annoyed at the occasional newspaper calling me Harry Lee.Politically, this designation can have negative repercussions.However, by the mid-1960s, I overcame the discomfort after I had stood the test of politics.In fact, this name does not reflect who I am and what I value, nor did I choose it myself.I have never given my child a foreign name, nor have my children given theirs a foreign name. My first boy was born on Sunday 10th February and I asked an interpreter from the Supreme Court to name him.This interpreter has helped many lawyers' children choose Chinese names.My child was born on the fifteenth day of the first month of the Year of the Dragon, which is the most auspicious date of birth in the lunar calendar.So we decided to name him Hsien Loong.He is a lanky baby.Weighing about 37O0 grams, painted us a great joy.