COMMENT Lee Kuan Yew, approaching 88 this year, won't go gently into that good night.

He's going to be shedding as much light as he can on a host of obscurities that have puzzled the political observers on both the Singapore and Malaysian sides of the causeway.

NONEThis can be inferred from initial gleanings of Lee Kuan Yew’s ‘Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going’, the latest installment of the memoirs of modern Singapore's progenitor.

The first two parts, ‘The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew’ and ‘From Third World to First’, were first-person narratives of the island republic's difficult birth and its evolution into a trading and financial power house that it is today.

It is reported that the initial run of the book, published by Singapore Press Holdings, have sold out. A second run is in the works.

Meanwhile, people can't wait to poke in its entrails for gleanings of interior realities - the sort that tells you that a life has been lived and in its self-description, the tangible truths of a character have emerged.

That didn't happen in the first two installments of Lee's memoirs, which is why the interested would scour ‘Hard Truths’ to see it can supply the lack.          

Unlike the first two installments, ‘Hard Truths’ is not a narrative story; its retails Lee's replies to questions posed to him.

He excels in this format as was demonstrated by his responses to questions the New York Times posed in an extensive interview last September.

The interview yet again exposed Lee's technique of self-representation to be of a high order: he is a high-octane riffer, a supreme monologist.

He furnished further evidence of this ability with the remarks he made when ‘Hard Truths’ was launched in Singapore over the weekend.

Apprehension of losing what he has worked

Consider what he said about his fondest creation:

"This precious, accidental, improbable, likely nation we have created should be nurtured, should be carefully strengthened and built upon. I do not deceive myself for one moment that our differences of race, culture, language, religion have disappeared.

"All we have succeeded in doing is to socially restructure society and by our determined policy of equality to all - to make everybody feel that he has a place in Singapore.     

"You must want to die for each other - we are trying that in national service. We have not been put to the test and I hope we won't be put to the test for a very long time."

Note his agonised apprehension at the possibility of losing what he has worked all his life at building.

NONEIt's quite a thing to have come this far in life, created an edifice of no small worth in the process, and feel in life's twilight, the poignant apprehension that it could all go to pieces.    

Reports say that Lee was asked in ‘Hard Truths’ questions that touched on Singapore's separation from Malaysia in 1965, an episode so encrusted with recrimination that the core of it does not matter anymore.

The question on why he cried at the separation drew this response:

"Why did I break down when we got out on the 9th of August? Because I left behind tens of thousands of people who had joined our rallies, and I knew that they were going to be handicapped, again a minority and leaderless...".

Lee's tears at separation puzzled his critics who felt that while he had done much to see to Singapore's merger with Malaya in 1963, he was accused of doing just as much to bring about the separation in August 1965.

This was viewed as one of the troubling enigmas of his career.

His explanation for his tearful reaction to separation will only ensure that the speculation about his behaviour will not cease with the publication of ‘Hard Truths’.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal profession for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.