Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

S. Rajaratnam, The Authorised Biography, Volume One: The Singapore Lion by Irene Ng

Anyone with sense is wary of a biography labeled an “authorised” one. That holds true here, where the life of one founder of the People’s Action Party (PAP), the still-ruling party of Singapore, is documented by an author who was both a PAP MP herself and whose journalism career was in SPH, the state-owned newspaper corporation. The writing itself is rather middling.

Those caveats aside, I enjoyed learning about this guy, to the extent that I might give volume two of the propaganda a shot the next time I’m in the country. Like, I’ll be fully transparent, my vague knowledge of him was “wrote the national pledge” and “the one Indian guy who isn’t Devan Nair among the PAP 1st gen” and I now feel pretty damn embarrassed about that.

The guy’s born in 1915 to Sri Lankan (then Ceylonese under the British) immigrants, who live in (British) Malaya. His father’s a central figure in an extended familial network of these immigrants, wealthy and high-status enough to give out loans, arrange marriage, resolve disputes, etc. He’s got set plans for his two sons, one will become a lawyer and one will become a doctor and they will both establish themselves in those careers, marrying wives of the same caste and wealth who the family have picked out.

Rajaratnam’s brother does this. Raja...does not. He goes to London on his parents’ dime and enrolls in law school, sure, right around when WWII kicks into gear, but he soon ignores school in favour of reading as much as he can, discussing politics with the influx of anti-colonialists and marxists and whoever else, writing short stories that get published, and falling in love and marrying a white Hungarian Roman Catholic. (His wife, Piroska, left continental Europe due to being displeased by the Nazism, moves back to Malaya with him, where she gets told by her in-laws that they wouldn’t accept any ‘half-caste descendants’. They never have children. The only subsequent meaningful mention of her is that she once kicked one of Rajaratnam’s fellow PAP ministers out of their house during dinner for making anti-semitic remarks on David Marshall)

After the war, he returns, his family not very happy about that lack of degree and inappropriate wife, but he dives into journalism, moving from Malaya to the big big city of Singapore. He’s extremely prolific, writing nonstop polemics against the British colonial authorities, who are not doing so hot in popular sentiment, especially so given the whole y’know, letting the Japanese take over Malaya bit. Lee Kuan Yew and co. bring him into the their fold, history ensues, he serves as Minister of Culture, then partially simultaneously Minister of Labour and Minister for Foreign Affairs?? And other portfolios.

The polemical journalist becomes Minister of Culture and then slams down restrictions on the press, expressing himself just as vigorously on the supposed necessity of that. Classic, isn’t it.

And yet the thing that’s stuck with me, a month later, is this constant sincere yearning of his for multiracialism, pluralism, whatever it is one wants to call a society that isn’t so fundamentally demarcated by race. He was one of the last holdouts on Singapore’s separation from Malaysia, because he was Malaya-born himself and wanted to believe this was a federation that could work without racial animosity being so destabilizing as to make it impossible.

I dunno. It’s a throughline that made me morose because like, in the 80s and 90s (not covered in this volume but the next one), he’s going to be publicly dismayed about the government emphasizing race more — in what your second language is, in which group you go to if you need economic/other assistance, in immigration quotas, and so on. And one can go, well yeah, natural consequence of PAP, but if we’re talking about the 50s, everyone’s crazy about race. The communists are. UMNO is. There’s no fucking escape. I get why an English-speaking Indian guy is looking around going okay, I’m sticking with LKY.

But some of the stuff he’ll get dismayed about will happen while he’s still holding office, and I suspect there is a certain political ineffectualness at work too, a kinda guy who cannot play the game beyond expressing himself and then sticking with his party.

Interesting fella, all in all.

The Singapore I recognize: Essays on home, community, and hope by Kirsten Han

On the other end of the time scale, we have here a series of essays by a writer whose work I used to read online all the time back in high school. The most surprising thing was learning she accidentally stumbled face-first into anti-death-penalty activism after college — she just got a journalism job, was assigned to cover a death penalty case, and found herself horrified by a part of the Singapore legal system that she’d previously dismissed without much thought as “probably necessary”.

A good read all around, with insights on how journalism and/or activism functions (or doesn’t) in Singapore’’s specific environment.

The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie

Another Christie thriller, a quasi-sequel to The Secret of Chimneys. Much better than that one, and I am so mad at myself for not figuring out the bad guy. Such a classic Christie move, ugh!

Saving Central Park: A History and a Memoir by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Realizing that the books in this post have self-explanatory titles and so make me feel like a dummy when I write these first sentences, but I shall bravely forge on anyway: we’ve got here a memoir by the woman who helped found the Central Park Conservancy, a private nonprofit that did a lot of work in the restoration of Central Park in the 1980s and 1990s and basically manages the park today.

It was cool to hear about folks trying to restore some of the landscape design principles that Central Park was originally laid down by, while still making space for new practical purposes people were using the park for —- sports, playgrounds, and so on. My logistics-brain loved hearing about the acre-by-acre plans for maintenance and improvements. The rigor of the planning combined with the donations of a fair number of very rich people worked out well for Central Park. Not the sort of framework that seems extensible to many city parks, but there’s something to be said about going oh, you’d like to donate to our park, here’s our detailed list of projects we’ve already mapped out, pick your favorite.