Hiding fandom in the underwear drawer since 1977

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.

( let us run down the biographical facts )

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.