I write this article in memory of Mr Lee Kuan Yew
Mr Lee Kuan Yew is the first Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959-1990. He presided over the growth of Singapore's economy, helping it develop from a third world into a first world nation. He is considered by many to be an astute statesman. I myself have great respect for his contributions to Singapore, and without doubt my country would have been very different without him
I believe just as King Cyrus was chosen by God to be his servant to preside over the new Persian empire (Isaiah 44:28 -45:5), God chose Mr Lee to guide the birth of Singapore from independence. He was given great authority over the nation even over his opponents and enemies. He had an exceptional foresight and the will to implement structural changes in society and economy. Many world leaders who know Mr Lee describe him as highly intelligent and insightful.
Mr Lee has the following traits that I deeply admire and often found lacking in many politicians. And for these I believed God blessed his rule greatly.
· He was a one man one woman. He fiercely loved his wife Deuteronomy 17:17
· He recognized the state of Israel Genesis 12:3
· He ruled by law Deuteronomy 17:18-19
· He kept most of his political promises Numbers 30:2
· He fought against corruption Proverbs 20:23
· He sought advice Proverbs 11:14, 12:15
· He established racial or gender equality Acts 17:26-28
· His instructions were clear and constant Matthew 5:37
· He recognized the link between hard work and economic prosperity Proverbs 28:19-21
I have collected a series of his reflections on health related issues which I publish unedited. They revolve around his ideas of staying healthy, aging, caring for his sick wife, and thoughts of dying. I have arranged them in a chronological order in which the words were recorded from earliest to latest. I have not commented on his ideas. You may read them and form your own opinion.
There are 5 articles/interviews by Mr Lee gave his personal opinions on heath and 1 eulogy by his daughter Dr Lee Wei Ling, a neurologist
1. Life is better when it is short healthy and full
2. Aging
3. Interview with the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune
4. Living till 89 years old
5. One man's view of the World
6. Eulogy by Dr Lee Wei Ling
1. Life is better when it is short healthy and full
Speech at the Fifth Asian-Pacific Congress of Cardiology Delegates Dinner at Shangri-La Hotel
13 October 1972
Mr. Chairman, Professor Charles Toh , Baron Professor Lequime , Sir Kempson Maddox , Distinguished Specialists, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am overawed to find myself in the presence of so many eminent heart specialists. It’s a daunting prospect to have to talk to some 500 people who, even as I speak, will run their professional eye up and down me, checking my age against my weight, height, the amount of alcohol I may be showing, either on my countenance or lack of crispness in my speech.
The reason I am here, of course, is that your Chairman gives me an annual check-up to see whether the old ticker is degenerating faster than it s should. Every year, we go through the routine: electrocardiogram (ECG) lying down; ECG sitting up; ECG, after going up and down steps at a certain speed for several minutes; ECG to discover how quickly the pattern returns to normal after this exercise. Each time I leave a little encouraged. He knows I am suspicious. So he never tells me that all is well. His is the subtle approach—a quiet nod, and a hum of satisfaction as he runs through the stream of paper graphing my heart-beat, and the very audible asides to my general physician about an athlete’s heart. It gladdens mine. He knows that I read up all the medical articles in magazines ostensibly meant for more than just the average layman. He knows I cut out saturated fat— lean meat, preferably beef, only selected parts of mutton and pork, and that only occasionally. Even in vegetable oils, some are to be avoided like coconut, which is saturated.
Yet despite all this hotch-potch collection of dos and don’ts from articles and tips from friends like Professor Monteiro, I had all this while laboured under a grave misconception—that the heart should never be strained, that as one gets older one should be careful not to push the ticker too hard. So violent exercises like badminton and squash are to be eschewed. More leisurely ones unlikely to induce cardiac failure like golf or swimming are for me.
Then one day I was playing golf with a surgeon friend. He had read up the latest on aerobics. He said the heart should be pushed to its uttermost limits to dilate all the arteries throughout the body and in the heart itself, and to increase the pulse rate to its maximum, for as long as possible. It will improve heart muscle tone, and after a few weeks, the lethargic feeling will go. I asked him if he had tried it out himself. Well, he said, running on the spot for him, bringing his knees as high up to his chest as possible, that was difficult because he was well in his 50s. So he walked on the spot. But he assured me that he had got quite a few friends who had complained of feeling lethargic and slothful to run on the spot, more and more minutes each day, and now they are almost bursting in song with a spring in their steps. None have dropped down dead. I asked him whether they were his friends or his guinea-pigs. He countered that it was the results of experiments by a Canadian heart specialist. He recounted a case of a Canadian pilot who was invalided because of heart problems. After one year of aerobics he had his pilot’s licence and status restored.
This sounded convincing. So I tried it, but cautiously. I walked on the spot. Nothing happened. So I began to run, but gently, on the spot. Still no ill-effects. So I increased it day by day. Then one day after a round of golf, I ran for five minutes. Before that I got my surgeon to take my pulse rate. He said it was normal, 70 plus. After five minutes ‘Marvellous, 140’. After three to four minutes, back to 70 plus. Marvellous! Young man’s heart was his verdict.
If only I had known earlier, I would have been younger at heart all these past years!
My belief: life is better short, healthy and full than long, unhealthy and dismal. We all have to die. I hope mine will be painless. As de Gaulle said, ‘Never fear, even de Gaulle must die’, and he did. And how lucky—heart failure during sleep.
Of course, it is preferable to die at home in one’s bed—not in a motel. Just think of the embarrassment to one’s children, all the gossip that the extra excitement of unaccustomed company caused a defective heart to falter.
When I was a young man, I considered the various professions that might be satisfying and fulfilling. I ruled out medicine. It was too noble. The oath of Hippocrates—to keep alive a patient as long as possible.
Sometimes, as I cast my mind back to my teenage years, I wonder, perhaps, whether I should not have been a doctor. Never mind the nobility. It’s a marvellous profession, the Hippocratic oath: everything should be done to keep the patient alive. Patients are kept alive longer with tremendous leaps in knowledge, breakthroughs in both medication and surgery. And, of course, it creates more demands for services of doctors. Like the car, so the body. When the carburettor gives way—repair or change it. When the piston rings wear out—change them. When the pistons get too small for the cylinder bore—grind-bore the engine block and put bigger pistons. If the piston block cracks, put in a new piston block. Better still, take the whole engine out and put a brand new one. Then door-hinges give way—change hinges, if necessary, change doors. Constantly repaint and retouch. With every passing year, it becomes more expensive to keep the car going. So beyond a certain point—I think the third year, it becomes more economical to sell the car and replace it. Now in America, the economics have been worked out one stage further: don’t buy a car, lease it for two years.
If only one could do that with life! There is no point in owning a decrepit body with daily deterioration making it ever more expensive to stay alive. But you cannot change the human body. So it is good for doctors. Your heart timing is wrong, they put in a timing device. Then something else like the kidney gives way, in which case a kidney machine will keep the patient alive for years and years. But for what purpose?
Then transplants, just like spare-parts in cars, and cortisones to prevent rejection of transplants, and sterile conditions to avoid infection which with cortisones will be hard to detect. It is a marvellous never-ending process. Each discovery prolongs life and moves the degenerative failure to some other part of the body.
The medical profession is the biggest and best trade union of all unions. It is a closed shop in all countries, and in some countries, even when you cross state boundaries, they make you become an intern or a houseman for many years before you are allowed to practise on your own. Every breakthrough in medical science prolonging life creates more patients, as degenerative failures take place in some other part of the human physiology. And now geriatrics and gerontology have become respectable, but not yet lucrative branches of medicine because pensioners get poorer with galloping inflation in so many Western countries.
So knowing this, the medical profession now promise, or hold out the prospect, not only of prolonging life but of prolonging youth. This is an entirely different proposition. That means the man or the woman can work, and make the money to pay his medical bills, which his pension cannot afford him to do.
Tonight, I have a unique occasion of some 500 heart specialists as a captive audience. Can I say that the kindest thing you can do for me—if ever I have a partial cardiac failure or a stroke—is to let me die as painlessly as possible. Nothing is more pitiful than to have stroke after stroke after stroke, with each one, both physical movement and intellectual capacity reduced until one becomes a vegetable.
One evening at dinner last year, I had a morbid discussion over coffee. My guest had coffee and liqueur. I stuck to my wine. We discussed the right to die—euthanasia. He was a very high-powered American executive. He had thought the whole question through. He said, ‘But after the first stroke and when the time has come to make the decision, one finds life is still sweet. And you will not make the request to die’. I said, ‘In that case, make the request before the event’. He said, ‘You will withdraw it when the event occurs, or you may not be in fit mental condition to exercise your judgement’. I countered, ‘In that case, let the decision be taken by a close relative or a friend’. He said, ‘A close relative? God forbid, he is after your money! He may believe he is in your will’. I said, ‘Then a friend’. He says, “He may be such a good friend that he believes, despite the fact that you are only 30% of what you were, it is still worth giving you that 30% and he will keep you alive’.
There will never be a final solution to the problem of life and death, other than death itself. And whether it is philosophy or logic or medicine or morality or law, we are all human beings with human imperfections, both as individuals and as societies. And Singapore is an imperfect society. But I hope, despite all the imperfections, you have found some pleasure in having come here.
2.Aging
Original source unknown, dated before 2010, before Mr Lee wife, Kwa Geok Choo was ill
Lee Kuan Yew on getting the best out of life
My concern today is, what is it I can tell you which can add to your knowledge about aging and what aging societies can do.
You know more about this subject than I do. A lot of it is out in the media, Internet and books. So I thought the best way would be to take a personal standpoint and tell you how I approach this question of aging.
If I cast my mind back, I can see turning points in my physical and mental health. You know, when you’re young, I didn’t bother, assumed good health was God-given and would always be there.
When I was about 1957 that was – I was about 34, we were competing in elections, and I was really fond of drinking beer and smoking. And after the election campaign, in Victoria Memorial Hall – we had won the election, the City Council election – I couldn’t thank the voters because I had lost my voice. I’d been smoking furiously. I’d take a packet of 10 to deceive myself, but I’d run through the packet just sitting on the stage, watching the crowd, getting the feeling, the mood before I speak.
In other words, there were three speeches a night. Three speeches a night, 30 cigarettes, a lot of beer after that, and the voice was gone. I remember I had a case in Kuching, Sarawak. So I took the flight and I felt awful. I had to make up my mind whether I was going to be an effective campaigner and a lawyer, in which case I cannot destroy my voice, and I can’t go on.
So I stopped smoking. It was a tremendous deprivation because I was addicted to it. And I used to wake up dreaming…the nightmare was I resumed smoking.
But I made a choice and said, if I continue this, I will not be able to do my job. I didn’t know anything about cancer of the throat, or oesophagus or the lungs, etc. But it turned out it had many other deleterious effects. Strangely enough after that, I became very allergic, hyper-allergic to smoking, so much so that I would plead with my Cabinet ministers not to smoke in the Cabinet room. You want to smoke, please go out, because I am allergic.
Then one day I was at the home of my colleague, Mr Rajaratnam, meeting foreign correspondents including some from the London Times and they took a picture of me and I had a big belly like that (puts his hands in front of his belly), a beer belly. I felt no, no, this will not do. So I started playing more golf, hit hundreds of balls on the practice tee. But this didn’t go down. There was only one way it could go down: consume less, burn up more.
Another turning point came in 1976, after the general election – I was feeling tired. I was breathing deeply at the Istana, on the lawns. My daughter, who at that time just graduating as a doctor, said: ‘What are you trying to do?’ I said: ‘I feel an effort to breathe in more oxygen.’ She said: ‘Don’t play golf. Run. Aerobics..’ So she gave me a book, quite a famous book and, then, very current in America on how you score aerobic points swimming, running, whatever it is, cycling.
I looked at it sceptically. I wasn’t very keen on running. I was keen on golf. So I said, ‘Let’s try’. So in-between golf shots while playing on my own, sometimes nine holes at the Istana, I would try and walk fast between shots. Then I began to run between shots. And I felt better. After a while, I said: ‘Okay, after my golf, I run.’ And after a few years, I said: ‘Golf takes so long. The running takes 15 minutes. Let’s cut out the golf and let’s run.’
I think the most important thing in aging is you got to understand yourself. And the knowledge now is all there. When I was growing up, the knowledge wasn’t there. I had to get the knowledge from friends, from doctors.
But perhaps the most important bit of knowledge that the doctor gave me was one day, when I said: ‘Look, I’m feeling slower and sluggish.’ So he gave me a medical encyclopedia and he turned the pages to aging. I read it up and it was illuminating. A lot of it was difficult jargon but I just skimmed through to get the gist of it.
As you grow, you reach 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, and 25 and then, thereafter, you are on a gradual slope down physically.
Mentally, you carry on and on and on until I don’t know what age, but mathematicians will tell you that they know their best output is when they’re in their 20s and 30s when your mental energy is powerful and you haven’t lost many neurons. That’s what they tell me.
So, as you acquire more knowledge, you then craft a programme for yourself to maximise what you have. It’s just common sense.
I never planned to live till 85 or 84. I just didn’t think about it.
I said: ‘Well, my mother died when she was 74, she had a stroke.. My father died when he was 94.’
But I saw him, and he lived a long life, well, maybe it was his DNA.
But more than that, he swam every day and he kept himself busy! He was working for the Shell Company.
He was in charge; he was a superintendent of an oil depot.
When he retired, he started becoming a salesman. So people used to tell me: ‘Your father is selling watches at BP de Silva.’ My father was then living with me. But it kept him busy. He had that routine: He meets people, he sells watches, he buys and sells all kinds of semi-precious stones, he circulates coins.
And he keeps going. But at 87, 88, he fell, going down the steps from his room to the dining room, broke his arm, three months incapacitated.
Thereafter, he couldn’t go back to swimming. Then he became wheelchair-bound. Then it became a problem because my house was constructed that way.
So my brother – who’s a doctor and had a flat (one-level) house – took him in.
and he lived on till 94. But towards the end, he had gradual loss of mental powers.
So my calculations, I’m somewhere between 74 and 94. And I’ve reached the halfway point now. But have I? Well, 1996 when I was 73, I was cycling and I felt tightening on the neck. Oh, I must retire today. So I stopped. Next day, I returned to the bicycle. After five minutes it became worse. So I said, no, no, this is something serious, it’s got to do with the blood vessels. Rung up my doctor, who said, ‘Come tomorrow’. Went tomorrow, he checked me, and said: ‘Come back tomorrow for an angiogram.’
I said: ‘What’s that?’ He said: ‘We’ll pump something in and we’ll see whether the coronary arteries are cleared or blocked.’ I was going to go home.
But an MP who was a cardiologist happened to be around, so he came in and said: ‘What are you doing here?’
I said: ‘I’ve got this.’ He said: ‘Don’t go home.
You stay here tonight. I’ve sent patients home and they never came back.
Just stay here. They’ll put you on the monitor.
They’ll watch your heart. And if anything, an emergency arises, they will take you straight to the theatre.
You go home. You’ve got no such monitor. You may never come back.’
So I stayed there. Pumped in the dye, yes it was blocked, the left circumflex, not the critical, lead one. So that’s lucky for me. Two weeks later, I was walking around; I felt it’s coming back. Yes it has come back, it had occluded. So this time they said: ‘We’ll put in a stent.’
I’m one of the first few in Singapore to have the stent, so it was a brand new operation. Fortunately, the man who invented the stent was out here selling his stent. He was from San Jose, La Jolla something or the other. So my doctor got hold of him and he supervised the operation. He said put the stent in. My doctor did the operation, he just watched it all and then that’s that. That was before all this problem about lining the stent to make sure that it doesn’t occlude and create a disturbance.
So at each stage, I learnt something more about myself and I stored that. I said: ‘Oh, this is now a danger point.’ So all right, cut out fats, change diet, went to see a specialist in Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital. He said: ‘Take statins.’ I said: ‘What’s that?’ He said: ‘(They) help to reduce your cholesterol.’ My doctors were concerned. They said: ‘You don’t need it. Your cholesterol levels are okay.’ Two years later, more medical evidence came out. So the doctors said: ‘Take statins.’
Had there been no angioplasty, had I not known that something was up and I cycled on, I might have gone at 74 like my mother. So I missed that decline. So next deadline: my father’s fall at 87. I’m very careful now because sometimes when I turn around too fast, I feel as if I’m going to get off balance. So my daughter, a neurologist, she took me to the NNI, there’s this nerve conduction test, put electrodes here and there.
The transmission of the messages between the feet and the brain has slowed down. So all the exercise, everything, effort put in, I’m fit, I swim, I cycle. But I can’t prevent this losing of conductivity of the nerves and this transmission. So just go slow.
So when I climb up the steps, I have no problem. When I go down the steps, I need to be sure that I’ve got something I can hang on to, just in case. So it’s a constant process of adjustment.
But I think the most important single lesson I learnt in life was that if you isolate yourself, you’re done for. The human being is a social animal – he needs stimuli, he needs to meet people, to catch up with the world.
I don’t much like travel but I travel very frequently despite the jetlag, because I get to meet people of great interest to me, who will help me in my work as chairman of our GIC. So I know, I’m on several boards of banks, international advisory boards of banks, of oil companies and so on. And I meet them and I get to understand what’s happening in the world, what has changed since I was here one month ago, one year ago.
I go to India, I go to China. And that stimulus brings me to the world of today. I’m not living in the world, when I was active, more active 20, 30 years ago. So I tell my wife. She woke up late today. I said: ‘Never mind, you come along by 12 o’clock. I go first.’
If you sit back – because part of the ending part of the encyclopedia which I read was very depressing – as you get old, you withdraw from everything and then all you will have is your bedroom and the photographs and the furniture that you know, and that’s your world. So if you’ve got to go to hospital, the doctor advises you to bring some photographs so that you’ll know you’re not lost in a different world, that this is like your bedroom.
I’m determined that I will not, as long as I can, to be reduced, to have my horizons closed on me like that. It is the stimuli, it is the constant interaction with people across the world that keeps me aware and alive to what’s going on and what we can do to adjust to this different world.
In other words, you must have an interest in life. If you believe that at 55, you’re retiring, you’re going to read books play golf and drink wine, and then I think you’re done for. So statistically they will show you that all the people who retire and lead sedentary lives, the pensioners die off very quickly.
So we now have a social problem with medical sciences, new procedures, new drugs, many more people are going to live long lives..
If the mindset is that when I reach retirement age 62, I’m old, I can’t work anymore, I don’t have to work, I just sit back, now is the time I’ll enjoy life, I think you’re making the biggest mistake of your life. After one month, or after two months, even if you go traveling with nothing to do, with no purpose in life, you will just degrade, you’ll go to seed.
The human being needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in Singapore and elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge. If you’re not interested in the world and the world is not interested in you, the biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli, that’s real torture.
So when I read that people believe, Singaporeans say: ‘Oh, 62 I’m retiring.’ I say to them: ‘You really want to die quickly?’ If you want to see sunrise tomorrow or sunset, you must have a reason, you must have the stimuli to keep going..’
3. Interview with the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune
The following is the transcript of the interview Seth Mydans had with Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
The interview was held on 1 September 2010, just 1 month before Mr Lee's wife. Kwa Geok Choo passed away
Mr Lee: “Thank you. When you are coming to 87, you are not very happy..”
Q: “Not. Well you should be glad that you’ve gotten way past where most of us will get.”
Mr Lee: “That is my trouble. So, when is the last leaf falling?”
Q: “Do you feel like that, do you feel like the leaves are coming off?”
Mr Lee: “Well, yes. I mean I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality and I mean generally every year when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that is life.”
Q: “My mother used to say never get old.”
Mr Lee: “Well, there you will try never to think yourself old. I mean I keep fit, I swim, I cycle.”
Q: “And yoga, is that right? Meditation?”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “Tell me about meditation?”
Mr Lee: “Well, I started it about two, three years ago when Ng Kok Song, the Chief Investment Officer of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, I knew he was doing meditation. His wife had died but he was completely serene. So, I said, how do you achieve this? He said I meditate everyday and so did my wife and when she was dying of cancer, she was totally serene because she meditated everyday and he gave me a video of her in her last few weeks completely composed completely relaxed and she and him had been meditating for years. Well, I said to him, you teach me. He is a devout Christian. He was taught by a man called Laurence Freeman, a Catholic. His guru was John Main a devout Catholic. When I was in London, Ng Kok Song introduced me to Laurence Freeman. In fact, he is coming on Saturday to visit Singapore, and we will do a meditation session. The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts. It is most difficult to stay focused on the mantra. The discipline is to have a mantra which you keep repeating in your innermost heart, no need to voice it over and over again throughout the whole period of meditation. The mantra they recommended was a religious one. Ma Ra Na Ta, four syllables. Come To Me Oh Lord Jesus. So I said Okay, I am not a Catholic but I will try. He said you can take any other mantra, Buddhist Om Mi Tuo Fo, and keep repeating it. To me Ma Ran Na Ta is more soothing. So I used Ma Ra Na Ta. You must be disciplined. I find it helps me go to sleep after that. A certain tranquility settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping. I miss it sometimes when I am tired, or have gone out to a dinner and had wine. Then I cannot concentrate. Otherwise I stick to it.”
Q: “So…”
Mr Lee: “.. for a good meditator will do it for half-an-hour. I do it for 20 minutes.”
Q: “So, would you say like your friend who taught you, would you say you are serene?”
Mr Lee: “Well, not as serene as he is. He has done it for many years and he is a devout Catholic. That makes a difference. He believes in Jesus. He believes in the teachings of the Bible. He has lost his wife, a great calamity. But the wife was serene. He gave me this video to show how meditation helped her in her last few months. I do not think I can achieve his level of serenity. But I do achieve some composure.”
Q: “And do you find that at this time in your life you do find yourself getting closer to religion of one sort or another?”
Mr Lee: “I am an agnostic. I was brought up in a traditional Chinese family with ancestor worship. I would go to my grandfather’s grave on All Soul’s Day which is called “Qingming”. My father would bring me along, lay out food and candles and burn some paper money and kowtow three times over his tombstone. At home on specific days outside the kitchen he would put up two candles with my grandfather’s picture. But as I grew up, I questioned this because I think this is superstition. You are gone, you burn paper money, how can he collect the paper money where he is? After my father died, I dropped the practice. My youngest brother baptised my father as a Christian. He did not have the right to. He was a doctor and for the last weeks before my father’s life, he took my father to his house because he was a doctor and was able to keep my father comforted. I do not know if my father was fully aware when he was converted into Christianity.”
Q: “Converted your father?”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “Well this happens when you get close to the end.”
Mr Lee: “Well, but I do not know whether my father agreed. At that time he may have been beyond making a rational decision. My brother assumed that he agreed and converted him.”
Q: “But…”
Mr Lee: “I am not converted.”
Q: “But when you reach that stage, you may wonder more than ever what is next?”
Mr Lee: “Well, what is next, I do not know. Nobody has ever come back. The Muslims say that there are seventy houris, beautiful women up there. But nobody has come back to confirm this.”
Q: “And you haven’t converted to Islam, knowing that?”
Mr Lee: “Most unlikely. The Buddhist believes in transmigration of the soul. If you live a good life, the reward is in your next migration, you will be a good being, not an ugly animal. It is a comforting thought, but my wife and I do not believe in it. She has been for two years bed-ridden, unable to speak after a series of strokes. I am not going to convert her. I am not going to allow anybody to convert her because I know it will be against what she believed in all her life. How do I comfort myself? Well, I say life is just like that. You can’t choose how you go unless you are going to take an overdose of sleeping pills, like sodium amytal. For just over two years, she has been inert in bed, but still cognitive. She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night. She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day’s work, read her favourite poems.”
Q: ‘And what kind of books do you read to her?”
Mr Lee: “So much of my time is reading things online. The latest book which I want to read or re-read is Kim. It is a beautiful of description of India as it was in Kipling’s time. And he had an insight into the Indian mind and it is still basically that same society that I find when I visit India. “
Q: “When you spoke to Time Magazine a couple of years ago, you said Don Quixote was your favourite?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, I was just given the book, Don Quixote, a new translation.”
Q: “But people might find that ironic because he was fantasist who did not realistically choose his projects and you are sort of the opposite?”
Mr Lee: “No, no, you must have something fanciful and a flight of fancy. I had a colleague Rajaratnam who read Sci-Fi for his leisure.”’
Q: “And you?”:
Mr Lee: “No, I do not believe in Sci-Fi.”
Q: “But you must have something to fantasise.”
Mr Lee: “Well, at the moment, as I said, I would like to read Kim again. Why I thought of Kim was because I have just been through a list of audio books to choose for my wife. Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, books she has on her book shelf. So, I ticked off the ones I think she would find interesting. The one that caught my eye was Kim. She was into literature, from Alice in Wonderland, to Adventures with a Looking Glass, to Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen was her favourite writer because she wrote elegant and leisurely English prose of the 19th century. The prose flowed beautifully, described the human condition in a graceful way, and rolls off the tongue and in the mind. She enjoyed it. Also Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. She was an English Literature major.”
Q: “You are naming books on the list, not necessarily books you have already read, yes?”
Mr Lee: “I would have read some of them.”
Q: “Like a Jane Austen book, or Canterbury Tales?”
Mr Lee: “No, Canterbury Tales, I had to do it for my second year English Literature course in Raffles College. For a person in the 15th Century, he wrote very modern stuff. I didn’t find his English all that archaic. I find those Scottish poets difficult to read. Sometimes I don’t make sense of their Scottish brogue. My wife makes sense of them. Then Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
Q: “You read those?”
Mr Lee: “I read those sonnets when I did English literature in my freshman’s year. She read them.”
Q: “When you say she reads them now, you’re the one who reads them, yes?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, I read them to her.”
Q: “But you go to her.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, I read from an Anthology of Poems which she has, and several other anthologies. So I know her favourite poems. She had flagged them. I read them to her.”
Q: “She’s in the hospital? You go to the hospital?”
Mr Lee: “No, no, she’s at home. We’ve got a hospital bed and nurses attending to her. We used to share the same room. Now I’m staying in the next room. I have to get used to her groans and grunts when she’s uncomfortable from a dry throat and they pump in a spray moisture called “Biothene” which soothes her throat, and they suck out phlegm. Because she can’t get up, she can’t breathe fully. The phlegm accumulates in the chest but you can’t suck it out from the chest, you’ve got to wait until she coughs and it goes out to her throat. They suck it out, and she’s relieved. They sit her up and tap her back. It’s very distressing, but that’s life.”
Q: “Yes, your daughter on Sunday wrote a moving column, movingly about the situation referring to you.”
Mr Lee: “How did you come to read it?”
Q: “Somebody said you’ve got to read that column, so I read it.”
Mr Lee: “You don’t get the Straits Times.”
Q: “I get it online actually. I certainly do, I follow Singapore online and she wrote that the whole family suffers of course from this and she wrote the one who’s been hurting the most and is yet carrying on stoically is my father.”
Mr Lee: “What to do? What else can I do? I can’t break down. Life has got to go on. I try to busy myself, but from time to time in idle moments, my mind goes back to the happy days we were up and about together.”
Q: “When you go to visit her, is that the time when your mind goes back?”
Mr Lee: “No, not then. My daughter’s fished out many old photographs for this piece she wrote and picked out a dozen or two dozen photographs from the digital copies which somebody had kept at the Singapore Press Holdings. When I look at them, I thought how lucky I was. I had 61 years of happiness. We’ve got to go sometime, so I’m not sure who’s going first, whether she or me. So I told her, I’ve been looking at the marriage vows of the Christians. The best I read was,” To love, to hold and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, till death do us part.” I told her I would try and keep you company for as long as I can. She understood.”
Q: “Yes, it’s been really.”
Mr Lee: “What to do? What can you do in this situation? I can say get rid of the nurses. Then the maids won’t know how to turn her over and then she gets pneumonia. That ends the suffering. But human beings being what we are, I do the best for her and the best is to give her a competent nurse who moves her, massages her, turns her over, so no bed sores. I’ve got a hospital bed with air cushions so no bed sores. Well, that’s life. Make her comfortable.”
Q: “And for yourself, you feel the weight of age more than you have in the past?”
Mr Lee: “I’m not sure. I marginally must have. It’s stress. However, I look at it, I mean, it’s stress. That’s life. But it’s a different kind of stress from the kind of stress I faced, political stresses. Dire situations for Singapore, dire situations for myself when we broke off from Malaysia, the Malays in Singapore could have rioted and gone for me and they suddenly found themselves back as a minority because the Tunku kicked us out. That’s different, that’s intense stress and it’s over but this is stress which goes on. One doctor told me, you may think that when she’s gone you’re relieved but you’ll be sad when she’s gone because there’s still the human being here, there’s still somebody you talk to and she knows what you’re saying and you’ll miss that. Well, I don’t know, I haven’t come to that but I think I’ll probably will because it’s now two years, May, June, July, August, September, two years and four months. It’s become a part of my life.”
Q: “She’s how old now?”
Mr Lee: “She’s two-and-a-half years older than me, so she’s coming on to 90.”
Q: “But you did make a reference in an interview with Time magazine to something that goes beyond reason as you put it. You referred to the real enemy by Pierre D’Harcourt who talked about people surviving the Nazi, it’s better that they have something to believe in.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.”
Q: “And you said that the Communists and the deeply religious fought on and survived. There are some things in the human spirit that are beyond reason.”
Mr Lee: “I believe that to be true. Look, I saw my friend and cabinet colleague who’s a deeply religious Catholic. He was Finance Minister, a fine man. In 1983, he had a heart attack. He was in hospital, in ICU, he improved and was taken out of ICU. Then he had a second heart attack and I knew it was bad. I went to see him and the priest was giving him the last rites as a Catholic. Absolutely fearless, he showed no distress, no fear, the family was around him, his wife and daughters, he had four daughters. With priest delivering the last rites, he knew he was reaching the end. But his mind was clear but absolutely calm.”
Q: “Well, I am more like you. We don’t have something to cling to.”
Mr Lee: “That’s our problem.”
Q: “But also the way people see you is supremely reasonable person, reason is the ultimate.”
Mr Lee: “Well, that’s the way I’ve been working.”
Q: “Well, you did mention to Tom Plate, they think they know me but they only know the public me?”
Mr Lee: “Yeah, the private view is you have emotions for your close members of your family. We are a close family, not just my sons and my wife and my parents but my brothers and my sister. So my youngest brother, a doctor as I told you, he just sent me an email that my second brother was dying of a bleeding colon, diverticulitis. And later the third brother now has got prostate cancer and has spread into his lymph nodes. So I asked what’re the chances of survival. It’s not gotten to the bones yet, so they’re doing chemotherapy and if you can prevent it from going into the bones, he’ll be okay for a few more years. If it does get to the bones, then that’s the end. I don’t think my brother knows. But I’ll probably go and see him.”
Q: “But you yourself have been fit. You have a stent, you had heart problem late last year but besides that do you have ailments?”
Mr Lee: “Well, aches and pains of a geriatric person, joints, muscles but all non-terminal. I go in for a physiotherapy, maintenance once a week, they give me a rub over because when I cycle, my thighs get sore, knees get a little painful, and so the hips.”
Q: “These are the signs of age.”
Mr Lee: “Yeah, of course.”
Q: “I’m 64. I’m beginning to feel that and I don’t like it and I don’t want to admit to myself.”
Mr Lee: “But if you stop exercising, you make it worse. That’s what my doctors tell me, just carry on. When you have these aches and pains, we’ll give you physiotherapy. I’ve learnt to use heat pads at home. So after the physiotherapy, once a week, if I feel my thighs are sore, I just have a heat pad there. You put in the microwave oven and you tie it around your thighs or your ankles or your calves. It relieves the pain.”
Q: “So you continue to cycle.”
Mr Lee: “Oh yeah.”
Q: “Treadmill?
Mr Lee: “No, I don’t do the treadmill. I walk but not always. When I’ve cycled enough I don’t walk.”
Q: “That’s your primary exercise, swimming?”
Mr Lee: “Yeah, I swim everyday, it’s relaxing.”
Q: “What other secrets, I see you drink hot water?”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “Tell me about it.”
Mr Lee: “Well, I used to drink tea but tea is a diuretic, but I didn’t know that. I used to drink litres of it. In the 1980s, I was having a conference with Zhou Ziyang who was then Secretary-General of the Communist Party in the Great Hall of the People. The Chinese came in and poured more tea and hot water. I was scoffing it down because it kept my throat moistened, my BP was up because more liquid was in me. Halfway through, I said please stop. I’m dashing off. I had to relief myself. Then my doctors said don’t you know that tea is a diuretic? I don’t like coffee, it gives me a sour stomach, so okay, let’s switch to water.”
Q: “You know you had the hot water when I met you a couple of years ago and after I told my wife about that, she switched to hot water. She’s not sure why except that you drink hot water, so she’s decided to.”
Mr Lee: “Well, cold water, this was from my ENT man. If you drink cold water, you reduce the temperature of your nasal passages and throat and reduce your resistance to coughs and colds. So I take warm water, body temperature. I don’t scald myself with boiling hot water. I avoid that. But my daughter puts blocks of ice into her coffee and drinks it up. She’s all right, she’s only 50-plus.
Q: “Let me ask a question about the outside world a little bit. Singapore is a great success story even though people criticize this and that. When you look back, you can be proud of what you’ve done and I assume you are. Are there things that you regret, things that you wished you could achieve that you couldn’t?”
Mr Lee: “Well, first I regret having been turfed out of Malaysia. I think if the Tunku had kept us together, what we did in Singapore, had Malaysia accepted a multiracial base for their society, much of what we’ve achieved in Singapore would be achieved in Malaysia. But not as much because it’s a much broader base. We would have improved inter-racial relations and an improved holistic situation. Now we have a very polarized Malaysia, Malays, Chinese and Indians in separate schools, living separate lives and not really getting on with one another. You read them. That’s bad for us as close neighbours.”
Q: “So at that time, you found yourself with Singapore and you have transformed it. And my question would be how do you assess your own satisfaction with what you’ve achieved? What didn’t work?”
Mr Lee: “Well, the greatest satisfaction I had was my colleagues and I, were of that generation who were turfed out of Malaysia suffered two years under a racial policy decided that we will go the other way. We will not as a majority squeeze the minority because once we’re by ourselves, the Chinese become the majority. We made quite sure whatever your race, language or religion, you are an equal citizen and we’ll drum that into the people and I think our Chinese understand and today we have an integrated society. Our Malays are English-educated, they’re no longer like the Malays in Malaysia and you can see there are some still wearing headscarves but very modern looking.”
Q: “That doesn’t sound like a regret to me.”
Mr Lee: “No, no, but the regret is there’s such a narrow base to build this enormous edifice, so I’ve got to tell the next generation, please do not take for granted what’s been built. If you forget that this is a small island which we are built upon and reach a 100 storeys high tower block and may go up to 150 if you are wise. But if you believe that it’s permanent, it will come tumbling down and you will never get a second chance.”
Q: “I wonder if that is a concern of yours about the next generation. I saw your discussion with a group of young people before the last election and they were saying what they want is a lot of these values from the West, an open political marketplace and even playing field in all of these things and you said well, if that’s the way you feel, I’m very sad.”
Mr Lee: “Because you play it that way, if you have dissension, if you chose the easy way to Muslim votes and switch to racial politics, this society is finished. The easiest way to get majority vote is vote for me, we’re Chinese, they’re Indians, they’re Malays. Our society will be ripped apart. If you do not have a cohesive society, you cannot make progress.”
Q: “But is that a concern that the younger generation doesn’t realize as much as it should?”
Mr Lee: “I believe they have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it. They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so. We have crafted a set of very intricate rules, no housing blocks shall have more than a percentage of so many Chinese, so many percent Malays, Indians. All are thoroughly mixed. Willy-nilly, your neighbours are Indians, Malays, you go to the same shopping malls, you go to the same schools, the same playing fields, you go up and down the same lifts. We cannot allow segregation.”
Q: “There are people who think that Singapore may lighten up a little bit when you go, that the rules will become a little looser and if that happens, that might be something that’s a concern to you.”
Mr Lee: “No, you can go looser where it’s not race, language and religion because those are deeply gut issues and it will surface the moment you start playing on them. It’s inevitable, but on other areas, policies, right or wrong, disparity of opportunities, rich and poor, well go ahead. But don’t play race, language, religion. We’ve got here, we’ve become cohesive, keep it that way. We’ve not used Chinese as a majority language because it will split the population. We have English as our working language, it’s equal for everybody, and it’s given us the progress because we’re connected to the world. If you want to keep your Malay, or your Chinese, or your Tamil, Urdu or whatever, do that as a second language, not equal to your first language. It’s up to you, how high a standard you want to achieve.”
Q: “The public view of you is as a very strict, cerebral, unsentimental. Catherine Lim, “an authoritarian, no-nonsense manner that has little use for sentiment”.”
Mr Lee: “She’s a novelist, therefore, she simplifies a person’s character, make graphic caricature of me. But is anybody that simple or simplistic?”
Q: “Sentiment though, you don’t show that very much in public.”
Mr Lee: “Well, that’s a Chinese ideal. A gentleman in Chinese ideal, the junzi (君子) is someone who is always composed and possessed of himself and doesn’t lose his temper and doesn’t lose his tongue. That’s what I try to do, except when I got turfed out from Malaysia. Then, I just couldn’t help it.”
Q: “One aspect of the way you’ve constructed Singapore is a certain level of fear perhaps in the population. You described yourself as a street fighter, knuckle duster and so forth.”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “And that produces among some people a level of fear and I want to tell you what a taxi driver said when I said I was going to interview you. He said, safer not to ask him anything. If you ask him, somebody will follow you. We’re not in politics so just let him do the politics.”
Mr Lee: “How old is he?’
Q: “I’m sorry, middle aged, I don’t know.”
Mr Lee: “I go out. I’m no longer the Prime Minister. I don’t have to do the difficult things. Everybody wants to shake my hands, everybody wants me to autograph something. Everybody wants to get around me to take a photo. So it’s a problem.
Q: “Yes but…”
Mr Lee: “Because I’m no longer in charge, I don’t have to do the hard things. I’ve laid the foundation and they know that because of that foundation, they’re enjoying this life.’
Q: “So when you were the one directly in-charge, you had to be tough, you had to be a fighter.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course. I had to fight left-wingers, Communists, pro-Communist groups who had killer squads. If I didn’t have the guts and the gumption to take them on, there wouldn’t be the Singapore. They would have taken over and it would have collapsed. I also had to fight the Malay Ultras when we were in Malaysia for two years.”
Q: “Well, you don’t have a lot of dissidents in prison but you’re known for your libel suits which keeps a lot of people at bay.”
Mr Lee: “We are non-corrupt. We lead modest lives, so it’s difficult to malign us. What’s the easy way to get a leader down? He’s a hypocrite, he is corrupt, he pretends to be this when in fact he’s that. That’s what they’re trying to do to me. Well, prove it, if what you say is right, then I don’t deserve this reputation. Why must you say these things without foundation? I’m taking you to court, you’ve made these allegations, I’m open to your cross-examination.”
Q: “But that may produce what I was talking about, about a level of fear.”
Mr Lee: “No, you’re fearful of a libel suit? Then don’t issue these defamatory statements or make them where you have no basis. The Western correspondent, especially those who hop in and hop out got to find something to show that they are impartial, that they’re not just taken in by the Singapore growth story. They say we keep down the opposition, how? Libel suits. Absolute rubbish. We have opponents in Parliament who have attacked us on policy, no libel suits against them and even in Parliament they are privileged to make defamatory allegation and cannot be sued. But they don’t. They know it is not true.”
Q: “Let me ask a last question. Again back to Tom Plate, “I’m not serious all the time. Everyone needs to have a good laugh now and then to see the funny side of things and to laugh at himself”.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.”
Q: “How about that?”
Mr Lee: “You have to be that.”
Q: “So what makes you laugh?”
Mr Lee: “Many things, the absurdity of it, many things in life. Sometimes, I meet witty people, have conversations, they make sharp remarks, I laugh.
Q: “And when you laugh at yourself as you said?”
Mr Lee: “That’s very frequent. Yeah, I’m reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure and it’s an effort and is it worth the effort? I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just carry on.”
Q: “So it’s the whole broad picture of things that you find funny?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, life as a whole has many abnormalities, of course.”
Q: “Your public life together with your private life, what you’ve done over things people write about you and Singapore, that overall is something that you can find funny?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.
Q: “You made one of the few people who laugh at Singapore.”
Mr Lee: “Let me give you a Chinese proverb “do not judge a man until you’ve closed his coffin. Do not judge a man.” Close the coffin, then decide. Then you assess him. I may still do something foolish before the lid is closed on me.”
Q: “So you’re waiting for the final verdict?”
Mr Lee: “No, the final verdict will not be in the obituaries. The final verdict will be when the PhD students dig out the archives, read my old papers, assess what my enemies have said, sift the evidence and seek the truth? I’m not saying that everything I did was right, but everything I did was for an honourable purpose. I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.”
Q: “For the greater good?
Mr Lee: “Well, yes, because otherwise they are running around and causing havoc playing on Chinese language and culture, and accusing me of destroying Chinese education. You’ve not been here when the Communists were running around. They do not believe in the democratic process. They don’t believe in one man, one vote. They believe in one bullet, one vote. They had killer squads. But they at the same time had a united front exploiting the democratic game. It gave them cover. But my business, my job was to make sure that they did not succeed. Sometimes you just got to lock the leaders up. They are confusing the people. The reality is that if you allow these people to work up animosity against the government because it’s keeping down the Chinese language, because we’ve promoted English, keeping down Chinese culture because you have allowed English literature, and we suppress our Chinese values and the Chinese language, the Chinese press, well, you will break up the society. They harp on these things when they know they are not true. They know that if you actually do in Chinese language and culture, the Chinese will riot and the society must break up.”
Q: “So leadership is a constant battle?”
Mr Lee: “In a multiracial situation like this, it is. Malaysia took the different line; Malaysians saw it as a Malay country, all others are lodgers, “orang tumpangan”, and they the Bumiputras, sons of the soil, run the show. So the Sultans, the Chief Justice and judges, generals, police commissioner, the whole hierarchy is Malay. All the big contracts for Malays. Malay is the language of the schools although it does not get them into modern knowledge. So the Chinese build and find their own independent schools to teach Chinese, the Tamils create their own Tamil schools, which do not get them jobs. It’s a most unhappy situation.”
Mdm Yeong: “I thought that was the last question.”
Q: “This is the last part of the last question. So your career has been a struggle to keep things going in the right way and you’ve also said that the best way to keep your health is to keep on working. Are you tired of it by this point? Do you feel like you want to rest?”
Mr Lee: “No, I don’t. I know if I rest I’ll slide downhill fast. No, my whole being has been stimulated by the daily challenge. If I suddenly drop it all, play golf, stroll around, watch the sunset, read novels, that’s downhill. It is the daily challenge, social contacts, meeting people, people like you, you press me, I answer, when I don’t…. what have I got tomorrow?”
Mdm Yeong: “You have two more events coming up. One is the Radin Mas Community.”
Mr Lee: “Oh yeah. I got it.”
Mdm Yeong: “And then you have other call, courtesy call on the 3rd.”
Mr Lee: “We are social animals. Without that interaction with people, you are isolated. The worst punishment you can give a person is the isolation ward. You get hallucinations. Four walls, no books, no nothing. By way of example, Henry Kissinger wants to speak to me. So I said okay, we’ll speak on Sunday. What about? We are meeting in Sao Paolo at a J P Morgan International Advisory Board. He wants to talk to me to check certain facts on China. My mind is kept alive, I go to China once a year at least. I meet Chinese leaders. So it’s a constant stimulus as I keep up to date. Supposing I sit back, I don’t think about China, just watch videos. I am off to Moscow, Kiev and Paris on the 15th of September. Three days Moscow, three days Kiev, four days Paris. Moscow I am involved in the Skolkovo Business School which President Medvedev, when he wasn’t President started. I promised to go if he did not fix it in the winter. So they fix it for September. I look at the fires, I said wow this is no good.”
Q: “It’s not going to be freezing if there are fires.”
Mr Lee: “No but our embassy says the skies have cleared. Kiev because the President has invited me specially and will fly me from Moscow to Kiev and then fly me on to Paris. Paris I am on the TOTAL Advisory Board together with Joe Nye and a few others. They want a presentation on what are China’s strengths and weaknesses. That keeps me alive. It’s just not my impressionistic views of China but one that has to be backed by facts and figures. So my team works out the facts and figures, and I check to see if they tally with my impressions. But it’s a constant stimulus to keep alive, and up-to-date. If I stop it, it’s downhill.”
Q: “Well, I hope you continue. Thank you very much, I really enjoyed this interview.”
4.Living till 89 years old
An interview with Mr Lee when he was 89 years old
An editorial team from The Straits Times comprising Han Fook Kwang, Elgin Toh, Zuraidah Ibrahim, Chua Mui Hoong and Shashi Jayakumar (an administrative Officer on secondment to the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy)
Q: You have said before that you consider yourself a nominal Buddhist. Would you still describe yourself as such?
A: Yes, I would. I go through the motions and the rituals. I am not a Christian. I am not a Taoist. I do not belong to any special sect.
Q: When you say "rituals”, what do you mean?
A: On set days you've got to give offerings to your ancestors --- food and so on. All that is laid out by the servants. But it will go off after my generation. It is like clearing the graves during Qing Ming. With each passing generation, fewer people go. It is a ritual.
Q : Where do you draw your comfort from, if not from religion?
A : It is the end of any aches and pains and suffering. So I hope the end will come quickly. At 89, I look at the obituary pages and see very few who have outlived me. And I wonder: How have they lived? How have they died? After long illness? Incapacity? When you are 89 you will think about these things. I would advise that if you do not want to be comatose or half-comatose in bed and fed through a tube, do an AMD. Do not intervene to save life.
Q : The number of people who do this in Singapore is still very low, for some reason.
A : Well, because they don't want to face up to it.
Q : Are you in favour of euthanasia, which some countries have legalised?
A : I think under certain conditions where it is not used to get rid of old people and it is a personal decision of a man taken rationally to relieve himself from suffering, I would say yes, like the Dutch. So in my AMD, I am in fact saying: "Let me go."
Q : If a grandchild of yours comes to you and asks you what a good life is, what do you say to him?
A : I have grandchildren in their 20s. They don't ask me what a good life is. They know what it is. There's been a change in the physical world they live in, the people they meet, a change in generations and different objectives to what people do in life.
Q : Are you saying that it is not possible to influence young people these days?
A : No, you can influence the basic attitudes from the day they are born to about 16 or 17. After that --- sometimes earlier --- they have a mind of their own and they are influenced by what they see around them and by their peers.
Q : You spoke about not believing you would meet your wife in the hereafter. Do you not hold out such a hope, even in your quieter moment? Is it not human to do so?
A : No, it goes against logic. Supposing we all have a life after death, where is that place?
Q : Metaphysical, perhaps?
A : So we are ghostly figures? No, I don't think so.
Q : How often do you think of Mrs Lee?
A : I have an urn with her ashes and I have told my children to put my ashes next to hers in a columbarium, for sentimental purposes.
Q : And hope?
A : Not really. She's gone. All that is left behind are her ashes. I will be gone and all that will be left behind will be ashes. For reasons of sentiment, well, put them together. But to meet in after life? Too good to be true. But the Hindus believe in reincarnation, don't they?
Q : It is in the Hindu creed, yes.
A : If you lead a good life, you come out in a better shape in the next world. You lead a bad life, you become a dog or something.
Q : So do the Buddhists.
A : But they are not so sharp in their conceptions of the hereafter.
Q : Is your routine these days very different compared to when you were still in Cabinet?
A : Of course. The pressure is not there.
Q : But you are somebody who has always coped very well with pressure.
A : Well, the pressure of office means a decision has to be made. And when several decisions come at the same time, you've got to look at the questions carefully and decide. Once you have decided, you cannot back track. It is a different kind of pressure.
Q : Do you miss having that sort of pressure?
A : No, no. Why should I miss it? I have done my share.
Q : And would you say you miss attending Cabinet meetings, and the opportunity to interact with younger Ministers?
A : No, I think the time has come for me to move on. I am 89. Compared to my world and the reference points that I have fixated in my mind, the map of Singapore --- the psychological map of Singapore --- has changed. I used to visit the housing estates. I used to know people from the residents' committees well. I interacted with them. I had a good feel of the ground. Now I do not have that. I have to go by reports, which is not the same thing. So I have to leave it to the people in charge who do go around.
Q : Do you regret the decision to step out of government shortly after the 2011 General Election?
A : No. How can I carry on making decisions when I am losing the energy to make contact with people on the ground? It requires a lot of physical energy. The mental effort does not bother me because I have not had a stroke nor am I going into dementia. But I lack the physical energy. Before this interview, I had a light lunch, did my treadmill routine and then rested for 15 minutes. I did not need that in the past.
Q : So you have no unfinished business that you had wanted to...
A : No, I have done what I had wanted to do. I gave up my duties as Prime Minister to Gob Chok Tong. I helped him. He passed them on to Lee Hsien Loong. It is a different generation now. So my contributions are less meaningful --- except when they want to go back on dialects.
Q : How is your health, if I may ask?
A : I was recently hospitalised after experiencing what the doctors said was a transient ischaemic attack. But I have since recovered fully and have returned to work. If you take into account the fact that I am in my 90th year... the doctors have told me there is no benchmark for people of that age.
Q : You set the benchmark. So you are reasonably happy with your physical and mental state at the moment?
A : No, you have to accept the gradual decline in your physical abilities. So far the mental capabilities have not declined, which has happened to some of my friends. I am grateful for that. I think it is largely due to inherited genes. But the physical ageing --- you cannot stop it.
Q : Your mental faculties --- could that be due to your mental habits as well? You are someone who has kept himself mentally very occupied and interested in what is happening.
A : Yes, of course. And I keep on learning new words and phrases in Chinese, so that I am forced to. It is like playing mahjong.
Q : Have your dietary habits changed over the years?
A : Well, I no longer eat to my heart's content. I stop before I am full. I also try to eat more vegetables and less protein.
Q : At an interview with The Straits Times when you turned 80, you said one worry you had was the narrowing window that people who are ageing tend to have, and that it gets smaller and smaller, that would be the end of existence. Is that something that you still think about --- keeping that window open?
A : Yes. Otherwise I would be sitting alone. Why should I meet you and talk to you?
Q : Are you afflicted by loneliness sometimes?
A : You have to distinguish between loneliness and solitude. I had a friend who was one of the brightest students in Cambridge. He is dead now. His name was Percy Cradock. He had a wife who was Danish and had diabetes. She had lost two legs. Percy used to say: "I enjoy my solitude." And I said: "Get hold of the computer and go on Google. You can get all the poems that you have read and enjoyed, purple passages from works of literature. You just type in the keywords. It will come out.” And he did.
Q : What newspapers or Internet sites --- do you read regularly?
A : I read The Straits Times and Lianhe Zaobai. I used to read Berita Harian also but now I don't. I used to be very good with my Malay but it is not necessary now that most Malays in Singapore speak English. I follow closely on the Internet news on Singapore, the region, China, Japan, Korea, America, India and Europe. The Middle East --- occasionally. Latin America --- almost zero, because it is not relevant to us. Too far away.
Q : What particular Internet sites?
A : Google. I pre-arrange for news from the various regions to be automatically passed on.
Q : What books or movies have you read or watched recently?
A : I do not watch movies.
Q : And books?
A : Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels --- make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be.
Q : Any recent one that you enjoyed particularly?
A : One on Charles de Gaulle. France was lost. He was a nobody. He went to London and said: "I am France." And he went to Algiers and told Alphonse Juin, who had obeyed the Vichy government and was in charge there: "As a Marshal of France, you ought to be ashamed of yourself." That was a pretty bold man. And he walked back to Paris, of course, with the Allied troops having cleared the way for him.
Q : What are your foremost pre-occupations these days? What are the things that keep you awake?
A : I think our changing population. With an overall fertility rate of 1.2 --- we have no choice but to take in migrants. It is difficult to get Singaporeans to change their mindsets. The women are educated. They want a different lifestyle, not to be stuck with early marriages and children. They want to travel first, see the world, enjoy life and marry later, by which time they will have trouble having children.
Q : Any hopes for Singapore?
A : Well, the hope is that it will keep a steady course and uphold all these institutions which make it different from the rest of the region.
5. One's man view of the World
All the passages below are taken from Lee Kuan Yew’s book, “One man’s View of the World,” Published 2013
There is an end to everything and I want mine to come as quickly and painlessly as possible, not with me incapacitated, half in coma in bed and with a tube going into my nostrils and down to my stomach,
"I wouldn't call myself an atheist. I neither deny nor accept that there is a God," he said.
"So I do not laugh at people who believe in God. But I do not necessarily believe in God - nor deny that there could be one."
Asked where he drew comfort from if not from religion, he said: "It is the end of any aches and pains and suffering. So I hope the end will come quickly."
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My daily routine is set. I wake up, clear my email, read the newspapers, do my exercises and have lunch. After that, I go to my office at the Istana, clear more papers and write articles or speeches. In the afternoons and evenings, I sometimes have interviews scheduled with journalists, after which I may spend an hour or two with my Chinese teachers.
I have made it a habit to exercise daily. At the age of 89, I can sit up and I do not need a walking stick. When I was in my 30s, I was fond of smoking and drinking beer. I quit smoking because it was causing me to lose my voice at election campaigns. That was before medical research linked smoking to lung and throat cancer, among other things. Oddly enough, I later became hyper-allergic to smoke. The drinking gave me a beer belly and it was showing up in pictures appearing in the press. I began to play more golf to keep fit, but later on turned to running and swimming, which took me less time to achieve the same amount of aerobic exercise. Now, I walk on the treadmill three times a day ---12 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes after lunch and 15 minutes after dinner. Before dinner, I used to swim for 20 to 25 minutes. Without that, I would not be in my present condition physically. It is a discipline.
I continue to make appointments to meet people. You must meet people, because you must have human contact if you want to broaden your perspective. Besides people in Singapore, I meet those from Malaysia, Indonesia, and, from time to time, China, Europe and the United States. I try not to meet only old friends or political leaders, but people from a variety of fields, such as academics, businessmen, journalists and ordinary people.
I have cut down on my overseas trips significantly, because of the jetlag, especially when travelling to the US. Until 2012, I was still travelling to Japan once a year to speak at the Future of Asia Conference --- now into its 19th year, organised by the Japanese media corporation, Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei). For a time, I was going to China nearly once a year, although I am reluctant to go to Beijing now because of the pollution. But the leaders are there, so you have to go there to meet them. The JP Morgan International Council, which I am on, did me the honour of holding its 2012 annual meeting in Singapore, so did the Total Advisory Board. Going to France is all right. It is a 12-hour direct flight on an Airbus 380, there and back. But to go to New York is much more tiring --- especially because of the time change, from night into day and day into night. Travelling overseas helps me widen my horizons. I see how other countries are developing. No country or city stays static. I have seen London and Paris change, over and over again.
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Life is better than death. But death comes eventually to everyone. It is something which many in their prime may prefer not to think about. But at 89, I see no point in avoiding the question. What concerns me is: How do I go? Will the end come swiftly, with a stroke in one of the coronary arteries? Or will it be a stroke in the mind that lays me out in bed for months, semi-comatose? Of the two, I prefer the quick one.
Some time back, I had an Advanced Medical Directive (AMD)) done which says that if I have to be fed by a tube, and it is unlikely that I would ever be able to recover and walk about, my doctors are to remove the tube and allow me to make a quick exit. I had it signed by a lawyer friend and a doctor.
If you do not sign one, they do everything possible to prevent the inevitable. I have seen this in so many cases. My brother-in-law on my wife’s side, Yong Nyuk Lin, had a tube. He was at home, and his wife was lying in bed, also in a poor shape. His mind was becoming blank. He is dead now. But they kept him going for a few years. What is the point of that? Quite often, the doctors and relatives of the patient believe they should keep life going. I do not agree. There is an end to everything and I want mine to come as quickly and painlessly as possible, not with me incapacitated, half in coma in bed and with a tube going into my nostrils and down to my stomach. In such cases, one is little more than a body.
I am not given to making sense out of life --- or coming up with some grand narrative on it ---other than to measure it by what you think you want to do in life. As for me, I have done what I had wanted to, to the best of my ability. I am satisfied.
Different societies have different philosophical explanations for life and the hereafter. If you go to America, you will find fervent Christians, especially in the conservative Bible Belt covering much of the country's south. In China, despite decades of Maoist and Marxist indoctrination, ancestral worship and other traditional Buddhist or Taoist-based religious practices are commonplace. In India, belief in reincarnation is widespread.
I wouldn't call myself an atheist. I neither deny nor accept that there is a God. The universe, they say, came out of the Big Bang. But human beings on this earth have developed over the last 20,000 years into thinking beings, and are able to see beyond themselves and think about themselves. Is that a result of Darwinian evolution? Or is it God? I do not know. So I do not laugh at people who believe in God. But I do not necessarily believe in God -- nor deny that there could be one.
I had a very close friend, Hon Sui Sen, who was a devout Roman Catholic. When he was dying, the priest was there next to him. At 68, he was young, but he was also absolutely fearless. As a Roman Catholic, he believed that he would meet his wife in the hereafter. I wish I can meet my wife in the hereafter, but I don't think I will. I just cease to exist just as she has ceased to exist---otherwise the other world would be overpopulated. Is heaven such a large and limitless space that you can keep all the peoples of the world over the thousands of years past? I have a large question mark on that. But Sui Sen believed that and it gave him a certain tranquillity of mind as he went through his last moments with his priest. His wife, who died in November 2012, believed they would meet again.
Those around me who may have tried to proselytise to me no longer do so because they know it is a hopeless case. My wife had a friend she knew from school who was very religious and kept trying to convert her. In the end, she stayed away from her friend, saying: "It is absurd. Every time we meet she wants to convert me into a Christian." She did not believe in the afterlife --- although, admittedly, it is comforting if you believe there is an afterlife even if there is none.
With every passing day I am physically less energetic and less active. If you ask me to go out in the heat of the sun at two o'clock to meet people, shake hands and kiss babies, I will not be able to do it. I could do it 20, 30 years ago, but not anymore. You take life as it comes, with your physical capabilities declining over the years. Sometimes my secretary would see me resting in my office and would ask me whether they should cancel the next meeting. Sometimes, I would say: "No, let's get on with it." I need 15 minutes for a shut-eye, so that my mind can concentrate after that. But if I cannot, I would say: "Yes, put it off: Let me have a nap." You cannot predict what your physical condition will be like. However rigorous and disciplined I am, it will still be a downhill slide.
In the end, my greatest satisfaction in life comes from the fact that I have spent years gathering support, mustering the will to make this place meritocratic, corruption-free and equal for all races --- and that it will endure beyond me, as it has. It was not like that when I took office. The Lim Yew Hock government was already going corrupt. Younger Singaporeans may not be familiar with a man by the name of Mak Pak Shee, a member of that government. He was an Indian Cantonese with a moustache, and he was what you would call a fixer --- somebody who facilitated the fulfilment of favours for a fee.
Singapore, as it stands, is the one corruption-free spot in a region where corruption is endemic. The institutions have been created to keep it that way, with the anti-corruption bureau. People are promoted on the basis of merit, not of race, language or religion. If we uphold these institutions, we will continue to make progress. That is my greatest hope. [295-301]
6. Eulogy by Dr Lee Wei Ling at Cremation Service of the Late Mr Lee Kuan Yew
29 March 2015
Family and friends, thank you for being here with us today.
After Mama died in October 2010, Papa’s health deteriorated rapidly. The past five years have been challenging. But as always, Papa was determined to carry on as normal as possible, as best as he could.
He developed Parkinson's disease three years ago which severely limited his mobility. He had great difficulty standing and walking. But he refused to use a wheel chair or even a walking stick. He would walk, aided by his SOs.
Papa was also plagued by bouts of hiccups that could only be controlled by medication which had adverse side effects. Over and above the frequent hiccups, his ability to swallow both solids and liquids was impaired, a not uncommon problem in old age. Papa searched the Internet and tried a wide variety of unorthodox hiccup therapies. For example, he once used rabbit skin and then chicken feathers to induce sneezing, so as to stop the hiccups. Although the sneezing sometimes stopped his hiccups, it did not do so consistently enough. Papa also tried reducing his food intake, because he felt that eating too much could precipitate hiccups, hence he lost a lot of weight, and appeared thin and gaunt.
Papa was stubborn and determined. He would insist on walking down the steps at home, from the verandah to the porch where the car was parked. Ho Ching had a lift installed so Papa need not negotiate those steps. But when he was aware and alert, he refused the lift though it was a struggle for him to walk down those steps even with 3 SOs helping.
But the lift was not installed in vain. On several occasions when he was ill and needed to be admitted to SGH, he did not protest when the SO guided him onto the lift. Still, even when ill, if he was asked if he wanted to use the lift, the answer would invariably be "no".
The SOs were an integral part of Papa’s life, even more so in the last five years. They looked after him with tender loving care, way beyond the call of duty. One doctor friend who came to help dress a wound Papa sustained when he fell, noticed this and said to me: "The SOs look after your father as though he is their own father.”
Papa believed that goodwill goes both ways. He was very considerate towards his SOs. Once while in Saudi Arabia on an official trip, one SO came down with chicken pox. The doctors decided that the SO should be isolated in some hospital in Saudi Arabia for two weeks. Pa thought that very unkind to the SO and insisted that the SO return to Singapore together with the rest of the delegation. He wasn't going to leave any Singaporean behind, not least an SO.
Sensing he was special, all the SOs have been very kind to Papa. On behalf of my family, I would like to thank all of them. I know each of them well, even the number of children they have. To me, they were not only staff whose job was to look after Papa, but also friends of the family. They helped me pull out the SIM card from my blackberry when it hung; they were friends for me to share food and goodies with whenever the opportunity arose.
Soon after my father died, Yak called to inform me. After being in my room alone and unable to go back to sleep, I went downstairs to the SOs room, and sat with the two SOs on duty, watching black and white footage of Papa in his younger days. I needed the company of friends. Jun zi zhi jiao dan ru shui. There is a Chinese saying that the relationship between two honorable gentlemen is as understated as plain water. That was the relationship between the SOs and me.
One occasion, while having lunch at home, Papa choked on a piece of meat. It went down his trachea and obstructed his airflow. Fortunately the SOs knew what to do. ASP Yak and Kelvin together carried out the Heimlich manoeuvre several times, but to no avail, because Pa’s abdominal muscles were very tense. Yak then called for help over his walkytalky. Liang Chye was the only senior SO downstairs, and sensing something strange in Yak’s voice, he came running up. They formed a human chain. Liang Chye, the shortest and probably the strongest, was positioned behind Papa; the tallest, Yak, at the furthest end of the human chain; and Kelvin, the one of middle height, between the two. They coordinated their pull, and after several attempts, the piece of meat was finally ejected. By this time, Papa had already turned purple. But within seconds of the meat being dislodged, he was mentally alert.
I would like to give special thanks to Liang Chye and Kelvin, and especially ASP Yak, whose presence of mind saved Papa's life. To all the SOs who have served Papa over the years, I thank you on behalf of my family.
I would also like to thank all the nurses, doctors and specialists who have looked after Papa over the years, especially those who were involved in the last five years of his life, when his medical problems multiplied and became more complicated. At a ripe old age of 91, he had multiple medical problems and many specialists, so the list of people to thank is a very long one. I am grateful to each and every one of them for all the care they have provided to Papa.
When Pa was not well at home, I was the first line of defense. I would handle on my own what I could at home. At other times though, I had to call the relevant specialists outside of office hours when Papa had a medical emergency. Since the most common emergency was pneumonia, one particular doctor was called most frequently. He doesn’t wish to be named so I’ll call him Dr X. After several calls, I learned that Dr X would be up by 5:45am to send his children to school. One morning at 5am, I had to call him. I apologized for waking him up, and asked him to tell his registrar on duty at SGH what to do, adding: "You don't need to rush in to see Pa. You can see him after you have sent your children to school." Dr X replied, “Today is Sunday.” But even on Sundays, he made his rounds at SGH.
During his last illness, Pa had to be cared for in the medical ICU of SGH. This was a very difficult time for Papa, the medical staff, as well as for the family. The MICU staff were diligent and meticulous in their care, and no effort was spared to help Papa and tend to his every need. The doctors had meetings twice a day to discuss how to proceed, including on weekends and Chinese New Year.
Again, I thank all the doctors involved in this last fight. That includes not only the respiratory specialist who ran the ICU, who played the most important role, but also Dr X who decided on what antibiotics to use, the cardiologists, and others who advised on how to maintain nutrition whilst Pa was sedated and intubated on respirator. Thank you all doctors, nurses and physiotherapists who
have helped Papa be as comfortable as possible in his final days. My family is extremely grateful to all of you.
I also want to thank the PMO office staff who kept the office running smoothly in Papa’s absence. Thank you all for being with Papa and for helping to ease his suffering in the last five years of his life. Thank you for being here with us today, to bid farewell to Papa.
My brothers have said much about Papa. I just want to focus on one point: what have I learnt from Pa? What is the biggest lesson he taught me?
The influence parents have on children depends on many things. To a certain degree, it depends upon the temperament of the parent and the child.
Temperamentally, I am very similar to Papa. So similar that in a given situation, I can predict how he would feel and respond. For example, the SOs would look on with some amusement at the way Pa struggled to complete his 12 minutes on the treadmill, even on days that he was tired. He may rest in between bouts on the treadmill, but he was always determined to hit 12 minutes. The SOs were amused because they knew I was equally fanatical about exercise. Today, I have run up and down my 20 meter corridor 800 times, making it to 16 km.
Once, about 15 years ago, my father told me: “Mama and I should be very happy that you remain single and hence will be able to look after us in our old age. But you will be lonely. Also, you have inherited my traits but in such an exaggerated way that they are a disadvantage to you.”
Papa, I know you would have preferred if I had married and had children. But I have no regrets, no regrets I was able to look after you and Mama in your old age.
What is the most important lesson I have learnt from Papa? It is never to push around anyone simply because he or she is weaker than me or in a socially inferior position. And never to let anyone bully someone else if I am in a position to stop such bullying. If I saw someone being bullied unfairly by his superior, I should have no hesitation to come to the rescue of the victim. Since I am by nature pugnacious like my father, and I enjoy a fight so long as it is for a just and good cause, I learnt these lessons readily.
We have seen an astonishing outpouring of emotion on the passing of my father this week. There are many reasons why people feel this way about Papa. But I think one reason is that they know Papa was a fighter who would always fight for them no matter what the odds were. They know that he was ready to fight for them till his last breath.
This morning I noticed that the maid, in setting the dining table, had moved away Papa's chair and placed it against the wall. It was a poignant reminder that this farewell is for ever. I have been controlling my feelings for this past week, but looking at this unexpected scene, I nearly broke down. But I can't break down, I am a Hakka woman.
Farewell Papa. I will miss you. Rest in peace.
Mr Lee Kuan Yew is the first Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959-1990. He presided over the growth of Singapore's economy, helping it develop from a third world into a first world nation. He is considered by many to be an astute statesman. I myself have great respect for his contributions to Singapore, and without doubt my country would have been very different without him
I believe just as King Cyrus was chosen by God to be his servant to preside over the new Persian empire (Isaiah 44:28 -45:5), God chose Mr Lee to guide the birth of Singapore from independence. He was given great authority over the nation even over his opponents and enemies. He had an exceptional foresight and the will to implement structural changes in society and economy. Many world leaders who know Mr Lee describe him as highly intelligent and insightful.
Mr Lee has the following traits that I deeply admire and often found lacking in many politicians. And for these I believed God blessed his rule greatly.
· He was a one man one woman. He fiercely loved his wife Deuteronomy 17:17
· He recognized the state of Israel Genesis 12:3
· He ruled by law Deuteronomy 17:18-19
· He kept most of his political promises Numbers 30:2
· He fought against corruption Proverbs 20:23
· He sought advice Proverbs 11:14, 12:15
· He established racial or gender equality Acts 17:26-28
· His instructions were clear and constant Matthew 5:37
· He recognized the link between hard work and economic prosperity Proverbs 28:19-21
I have collected a series of his reflections on health related issues which I publish unedited. They revolve around his ideas of staying healthy, aging, caring for his sick wife, and thoughts of dying. I have arranged them in a chronological order in which the words were recorded from earliest to latest. I have not commented on his ideas. You may read them and form your own opinion.
There are 5 articles/interviews by Mr Lee gave his personal opinions on heath and 1 eulogy by his daughter Dr Lee Wei Ling, a neurologist
1. Life is better when it is short healthy and full
2. Aging
3. Interview with the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune
4. Living till 89 years old
5. One man's view of the World
6. Eulogy by Dr Lee Wei Ling
1. Life is better when it is short healthy and full
Speech at the Fifth Asian-Pacific Congress of Cardiology Delegates Dinner at Shangri-La Hotel
13 October 1972
Mr. Chairman, Professor Charles Toh , Baron Professor Lequime , Sir Kempson Maddox , Distinguished Specialists, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am overawed to find myself in the presence of so many eminent heart specialists. It’s a daunting prospect to have to talk to some 500 people who, even as I speak, will run their professional eye up and down me, checking my age against my weight, height, the amount of alcohol I may be showing, either on my countenance or lack of crispness in my speech.
The reason I am here, of course, is that your Chairman gives me an annual check-up to see whether the old ticker is degenerating faster than it s should. Every year, we go through the routine: electrocardiogram (ECG) lying down; ECG sitting up; ECG, after going up and down steps at a certain speed for several minutes; ECG to discover how quickly the pattern returns to normal after this exercise. Each time I leave a little encouraged. He knows I am suspicious. So he never tells me that all is well. His is the subtle approach—a quiet nod, and a hum of satisfaction as he runs through the stream of paper graphing my heart-beat, and the very audible asides to my general physician about an athlete’s heart. It gladdens mine. He knows that I read up all the medical articles in magazines ostensibly meant for more than just the average layman. He knows I cut out saturated fat— lean meat, preferably beef, only selected parts of mutton and pork, and that only occasionally. Even in vegetable oils, some are to be avoided like coconut, which is saturated.
Yet despite all this hotch-potch collection of dos and don’ts from articles and tips from friends like Professor Monteiro, I had all this while laboured under a grave misconception—that the heart should never be strained, that as one gets older one should be careful not to push the ticker too hard. So violent exercises like badminton and squash are to be eschewed. More leisurely ones unlikely to induce cardiac failure like golf or swimming are for me.
Then one day I was playing golf with a surgeon friend. He had read up the latest on aerobics. He said the heart should be pushed to its uttermost limits to dilate all the arteries throughout the body and in the heart itself, and to increase the pulse rate to its maximum, for as long as possible. It will improve heart muscle tone, and after a few weeks, the lethargic feeling will go. I asked him if he had tried it out himself. Well, he said, running on the spot for him, bringing his knees as high up to his chest as possible, that was difficult because he was well in his 50s. So he walked on the spot. But he assured me that he had got quite a few friends who had complained of feeling lethargic and slothful to run on the spot, more and more minutes each day, and now they are almost bursting in song with a spring in their steps. None have dropped down dead. I asked him whether they were his friends or his guinea-pigs. He countered that it was the results of experiments by a Canadian heart specialist. He recounted a case of a Canadian pilot who was invalided because of heart problems. After one year of aerobics he had his pilot’s licence and status restored.
This sounded convincing. So I tried it, but cautiously. I walked on the spot. Nothing happened. So I began to run, but gently, on the spot. Still no ill-effects. So I increased it day by day. Then one day after a round of golf, I ran for five minutes. Before that I got my surgeon to take my pulse rate. He said it was normal, 70 plus. After five minutes ‘Marvellous, 140’. After three to four minutes, back to 70 plus. Marvellous! Young man’s heart was his verdict.
If only I had known earlier, I would have been younger at heart all these past years!
My belief: life is better short, healthy and full than long, unhealthy and dismal. We all have to die. I hope mine will be painless. As de Gaulle said, ‘Never fear, even de Gaulle must die’, and he did. And how lucky—heart failure during sleep.
Of course, it is preferable to die at home in one’s bed—not in a motel. Just think of the embarrassment to one’s children, all the gossip that the extra excitement of unaccustomed company caused a defective heart to falter.
When I was a young man, I considered the various professions that might be satisfying and fulfilling. I ruled out medicine. It was too noble. The oath of Hippocrates—to keep alive a patient as long as possible.
Sometimes, as I cast my mind back to my teenage years, I wonder, perhaps, whether I should not have been a doctor. Never mind the nobility. It’s a marvellous profession, the Hippocratic oath: everything should be done to keep the patient alive. Patients are kept alive longer with tremendous leaps in knowledge, breakthroughs in both medication and surgery. And, of course, it creates more demands for services of doctors. Like the car, so the body. When the carburettor gives way—repair or change it. When the piston rings wear out—change them. When the pistons get too small for the cylinder bore—grind-bore the engine block and put bigger pistons. If the piston block cracks, put in a new piston block. Better still, take the whole engine out and put a brand new one. Then door-hinges give way—change hinges, if necessary, change doors. Constantly repaint and retouch. With every passing year, it becomes more expensive to keep the car going. So beyond a certain point—I think the third year, it becomes more economical to sell the car and replace it. Now in America, the economics have been worked out one stage further: don’t buy a car, lease it for two years.
If only one could do that with life! There is no point in owning a decrepit body with daily deterioration making it ever more expensive to stay alive. But you cannot change the human body. So it is good for doctors. Your heart timing is wrong, they put in a timing device. Then something else like the kidney gives way, in which case a kidney machine will keep the patient alive for years and years. But for what purpose?
Then transplants, just like spare-parts in cars, and cortisones to prevent rejection of transplants, and sterile conditions to avoid infection which with cortisones will be hard to detect. It is a marvellous never-ending process. Each discovery prolongs life and moves the degenerative failure to some other part of the body.
The medical profession is the biggest and best trade union of all unions. It is a closed shop in all countries, and in some countries, even when you cross state boundaries, they make you become an intern or a houseman for many years before you are allowed to practise on your own. Every breakthrough in medical science prolonging life creates more patients, as degenerative failures take place in some other part of the human physiology. And now geriatrics and gerontology have become respectable, but not yet lucrative branches of medicine because pensioners get poorer with galloping inflation in so many Western countries.
So knowing this, the medical profession now promise, or hold out the prospect, not only of prolonging life but of prolonging youth. This is an entirely different proposition. That means the man or the woman can work, and make the money to pay his medical bills, which his pension cannot afford him to do.
Tonight, I have a unique occasion of some 500 heart specialists as a captive audience. Can I say that the kindest thing you can do for me—if ever I have a partial cardiac failure or a stroke—is to let me die as painlessly as possible. Nothing is more pitiful than to have stroke after stroke after stroke, with each one, both physical movement and intellectual capacity reduced until one becomes a vegetable.
One evening at dinner last year, I had a morbid discussion over coffee. My guest had coffee and liqueur. I stuck to my wine. We discussed the right to die—euthanasia. He was a very high-powered American executive. He had thought the whole question through. He said, ‘But after the first stroke and when the time has come to make the decision, one finds life is still sweet. And you will not make the request to die’. I said, ‘In that case, make the request before the event’. He said, ‘You will withdraw it when the event occurs, or you may not be in fit mental condition to exercise your judgement’. I countered, ‘In that case, let the decision be taken by a close relative or a friend’. He said, ‘A close relative? God forbid, he is after your money! He may believe he is in your will’. I said, ‘Then a friend’. He says, “He may be such a good friend that he believes, despite the fact that you are only 30% of what you were, it is still worth giving you that 30% and he will keep you alive’.
There will never be a final solution to the problem of life and death, other than death itself. And whether it is philosophy or logic or medicine or morality or law, we are all human beings with human imperfections, both as individuals and as societies. And Singapore is an imperfect society. But I hope, despite all the imperfections, you have found some pleasure in having come here.
2.Aging
Original source unknown, dated before 2010, before Mr Lee wife, Kwa Geok Choo was ill
Lee Kuan Yew on getting the best out of life
My concern today is, what is it I can tell you which can add to your knowledge about aging and what aging societies can do.
You know more about this subject than I do. A lot of it is out in the media, Internet and books. So I thought the best way would be to take a personal standpoint and tell you how I approach this question of aging.
If I cast my mind back, I can see turning points in my physical and mental health. You know, when you’re young, I didn’t bother, assumed good health was God-given and would always be there.
When I was about 1957 that was – I was about 34, we were competing in elections, and I was really fond of drinking beer and smoking. And after the election campaign, in Victoria Memorial Hall – we had won the election, the City Council election – I couldn’t thank the voters because I had lost my voice. I’d been smoking furiously. I’d take a packet of 10 to deceive myself, but I’d run through the packet just sitting on the stage, watching the crowd, getting the feeling, the mood before I speak.
In other words, there were three speeches a night. Three speeches a night, 30 cigarettes, a lot of beer after that, and the voice was gone. I remember I had a case in Kuching, Sarawak. So I took the flight and I felt awful. I had to make up my mind whether I was going to be an effective campaigner and a lawyer, in which case I cannot destroy my voice, and I can’t go on.
So I stopped smoking. It was a tremendous deprivation because I was addicted to it. And I used to wake up dreaming…the nightmare was I resumed smoking.
But I made a choice and said, if I continue this, I will not be able to do my job. I didn’t know anything about cancer of the throat, or oesophagus or the lungs, etc. But it turned out it had many other deleterious effects. Strangely enough after that, I became very allergic, hyper-allergic to smoking, so much so that I would plead with my Cabinet ministers not to smoke in the Cabinet room. You want to smoke, please go out, because I am allergic.
Then one day I was at the home of my colleague, Mr Rajaratnam, meeting foreign correspondents including some from the London Times and they took a picture of me and I had a big belly like that (puts his hands in front of his belly), a beer belly. I felt no, no, this will not do. So I started playing more golf, hit hundreds of balls on the practice tee. But this didn’t go down. There was only one way it could go down: consume less, burn up more.
Another turning point came in 1976, after the general election – I was feeling tired. I was breathing deeply at the Istana, on the lawns. My daughter, who at that time just graduating as a doctor, said: ‘What are you trying to do?’ I said: ‘I feel an effort to breathe in more oxygen.’ She said: ‘Don’t play golf. Run. Aerobics..’ So she gave me a book, quite a famous book and, then, very current in America on how you score aerobic points swimming, running, whatever it is, cycling.
I looked at it sceptically. I wasn’t very keen on running. I was keen on golf. So I said, ‘Let’s try’. So in-between golf shots while playing on my own, sometimes nine holes at the Istana, I would try and walk fast between shots. Then I began to run between shots. And I felt better. After a while, I said: ‘Okay, after my golf, I run.’ And after a few years, I said: ‘Golf takes so long. The running takes 15 minutes. Let’s cut out the golf and let’s run.’
I think the most important thing in aging is you got to understand yourself. And the knowledge now is all there. When I was growing up, the knowledge wasn’t there. I had to get the knowledge from friends, from doctors.
But perhaps the most important bit of knowledge that the doctor gave me was one day, when I said: ‘Look, I’m feeling slower and sluggish.’ So he gave me a medical encyclopedia and he turned the pages to aging. I read it up and it was illuminating. A lot of it was difficult jargon but I just skimmed through to get the gist of it.
As you grow, you reach 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, and 25 and then, thereafter, you are on a gradual slope down physically.
Mentally, you carry on and on and on until I don’t know what age, but mathematicians will tell you that they know their best output is when they’re in their 20s and 30s when your mental energy is powerful and you haven’t lost many neurons. That’s what they tell me.
So, as you acquire more knowledge, you then craft a programme for yourself to maximise what you have. It’s just common sense.
I never planned to live till 85 or 84. I just didn’t think about it.
I said: ‘Well, my mother died when she was 74, she had a stroke.. My father died when he was 94.’
But I saw him, and he lived a long life, well, maybe it was his DNA.
But more than that, he swam every day and he kept himself busy! He was working for the Shell Company.
He was in charge; he was a superintendent of an oil depot.
When he retired, he started becoming a salesman. So people used to tell me: ‘Your father is selling watches at BP de Silva.’ My father was then living with me. But it kept him busy. He had that routine: He meets people, he sells watches, he buys and sells all kinds of semi-precious stones, he circulates coins.
And he keeps going. But at 87, 88, he fell, going down the steps from his room to the dining room, broke his arm, three months incapacitated.
Thereafter, he couldn’t go back to swimming. Then he became wheelchair-bound. Then it became a problem because my house was constructed that way.
So my brother – who’s a doctor and had a flat (one-level) house – took him in.
and he lived on till 94. But towards the end, he had gradual loss of mental powers.
So my calculations, I’m somewhere between 74 and 94. And I’ve reached the halfway point now. But have I? Well, 1996 when I was 73, I was cycling and I felt tightening on the neck. Oh, I must retire today. So I stopped. Next day, I returned to the bicycle. After five minutes it became worse. So I said, no, no, this is something serious, it’s got to do with the blood vessels. Rung up my doctor, who said, ‘Come tomorrow’. Went tomorrow, he checked me, and said: ‘Come back tomorrow for an angiogram.’
I said: ‘What’s that?’ He said: ‘We’ll pump something in and we’ll see whether the coronary arteries are cleared or blocked.’ I was going to go home.
But an MP who was a cardiologist happened to be around, so he came in and said: ‘What are you doing here?’
I said: ‘I’ve got this.’ He said: ‘Don’t go home.
You stay here tonight. I’ve sent patients home and they never came back.
Just stay here. They’ll put you on the monitor.
They’ll watch your heart. And if anything, an emergency arises, they will take you straight to the theatre.
You go home. You’ve got no such monitor. You may never come back.’
So I stayed there. Pumped in the dye, yes it was blocked, the left circumflex, not the critical, lead one. So that’s lucky for me. Two weeks later, I was walking around; I felt it’s coming back. Yes it has come back, it had occluded. So this time they said: ‘We’ll put in a stent.’
I’m one of the first few in Singapore to have the stent, so it was a brand new operation. Fortunately, the man who invented the stent was out here selling his stent. He was from San Jose, La Jolla something or the other. So my doctor got hold of him and he supervised the operation. He said put the stent in. My doctor did the operation, he just watched it all and then that’s that. That was before all this problem about lining the stent to make sure that it doesn’t occlude and create a disturbance.
So at each stage, I learnt something more about myself and I stored that. I said: ‘Oh, this is now a danger point.’ So all right, cut out fats, change diet, went to see a specialist in Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital. He said: ‘Take statins.’ I said: ‘What’s that?’ He said: ‘(They) help to reduce your cholesterol.’ My doctors were concerned. They said: ‘You don’t need it. Your cholesterol levels are okay.’ Two years later, more medical evidence came out. So the doctors said: ‘Take statins.’
Had there been no angioplasty, had I not known that something was up and I cycled on, I might have gone at 74 like my mother. So I missed that decline. So next deadline: my father’s fall at 87. I’m very careful now because sometimes when I turn around too fast, I feel as if I’m going to get off balance. So my daughter, a neurologist, she took me to the NNI, there’s this nerve conduction test, put electrodes here and there.
The transmission of the messages between the feet and the brain has slowed down. So all the exercise, everything, effort put in, I’m fit, I swim, I cycle. But I can’t prevent this losing of conductivity of the nerves and this transmission. So just go slow.
So when I climb up the steps, I have no problem. When I go down the steps, I need to be sure that I’ve got something I can hang on to, just in case. So it’s a constant process of adjustment.
But I think the most important single lesson I learnt in life was that if you isolate yourself, you’re done for. The human being is a social animal – he needs stimuli, he needs to meet people, to catch up with the world.
I don’t much like travel but I travel very frequently despite the jetlag, because I get to meet people of great interest to me, who will help me in my work as chairman of our GIC. So I know, I’m on several boards of banks, international advisory boards of banks, of oil companies and so on. And I meet them and I get to understand what’s happening in the world, what has changed since I was here one month ago, one year ago.
I go to India, I go to China. And that stimulus brings me to the world of today. I’m not living in the world, when I was active, more active 20, 30 years ago. So I tell my wife. She woke up late today. I said: ‘Never mind, you come along by 12 o’clock. I go first.’
If you sit back – because part of the ending part of the encyclopedia which I read was very depressing – as you get old, you withdraw from everything and then all you will have is your bedroom and the photographs and the furniture that you know, and that’s your world. So if you’ve got to go to hospital, the doctor advises you to bring some photographs so that you’ll know you’re not lost in a different world, that this is like your bedroom.
I’m determined that I will not, as long as I can, to be reduced, to have my horizons closed on me like that. It is the stimuli, it is the constant interaction with people across the world that keeps me aware and alive to what’s going on and what we can do to adjust to this different world.
In other words, you must have an interest in life. If you believe that at 55, you’re retiring, you’re going to read books play golf and drink wine, and then I think you’re done for. So statistically they will show you that all the people who retire and lead sedentary lives, the pensioners die off very quickly.
So we now have a social problem with medical sciences, new procedures, new drugs, many more people are going to live long lives..
If the mindset is that when I reach retirement age 62, I’m old, I can’t work anymore, I don’t have to work, I just sit back, now is the time I’ll enjoy life, I think you’re making the biggest mistake of your life. After one month, or after two months, even if you go traveling with nothing to do, with no purpose in life, you will just degrade, you’ll go to seed.
The human being needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in Singapore and elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge. If you’re not interested in the world and the world is not interested in you, the biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli, that’s real torture.
So when I read that people believe, Singaporeans say: ‘Oh, 62 I’m retiring.’ I say to them: ‘You really want to die quickly?’ If you want to see sunrise tomorrow or sunset, you must have a reason, you must have the stimuli to keep going..’
3. Interview with the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune
The following is the transcript of the interview Seth Mydans had with Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
The interview was held on 1 September 2010, just 1 month before Mr Lee's wife. Kwa Geok Choo passed away
Mr Lee: “Thank you. When you are coming to 87, you are not very happy..”
Q: “Not. Well you should be glad that you’ve gotten way past where most of us will get.”
Mr Lee: “That is my trouble. So, when is the last leaf falling?”
Q: “Do you feel like that, do you feel like the leaves are coming off?”
Mr Lee: “Well, yes. I mean I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality and I mean generally every year when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that is life.”
Q: “My mother used to say never get old.”
Mr Lee: “Well, there you will try never to think yourself old. I mean I keep fit, I swim, I cycle.”
Q: “And yoga, is that right? Meditation?”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “Tell me about meditation?”
Mr Lee: “Well, I started it about two, three years ago when Ng Kok Song, the Chief Investment Officer of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, I knew he was doing meditation. His wife had died but he was completely serene. So, I said, how do you achieve this? He said I meditate everyday and so did my wife and when she was dying of cancer, she was totally serene because she meditated everyday and he gave me a video of her in her last few weeks completely composed completely relaxed and she and him had been meditating for years. Well, I said to him, you teach me. He is a devout Christian. He was taught by a man called Laurence Freeman, a Catholic. His guru was John Main a devout Catholic. When I was in London, Ng Kok Song introduced me to Laurence Freeman. In fact, he is coming on Saturday to visit Singapore, and we will do a meditation session. The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts. It is most difficult to stay focused on the mantra. The discipline is to have a mantra which you keep repeating in your innermost heart, no need to voice it over and over again throughout the whole period of meditation. The mantra they recommended was a religious one. Ma Ra Na Ta, four syllables. Come To Me Oh Lord Jesus. So I said Okay, I am not a Catholic but I will try. He said you can take any other mantra, Buddhist Om Mi Tuo Fo, and keep repeating it. To me Ma Ran Na Ta is more soothing. So I used Ma Ra Na Ta. You must be disciplined. I find it helps me go to sleep after that. A certain tranquility settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping. I miss it sometimes when I am tired, or have gone out to a dinner and had wine. Then I cannot concentrate. Otherwise I stick to it.”
Q: “So…”
Mr Lee: “.. for a good meditator will do it for half-an-hour. I do it for 20 minutes.”
Q: “So, would you say like your friend who taught you, would you say you are serene?”
Mr Lee: “Well, not as serene as he is. He has done it for many years and he is a devout Catholic. That makes a difference. He believes in Jesus. He believes in the teachings of the Bible. He has lost his wife, a great calamity. But the wife was serene. He gave me this video to show how meditation helped her in her last few months. I do not think I can achieve his level of serenity. But I do achieve some composure.”
Q: “And do you find that at this time in your life you do find yourself getting closer to religion of one sort or another?”
Mr Lee: “I am an agnostic. I was brought up in a traditional Chinese family with ancestor worship. I would go to my grandfather’s grave on All Soul’s Day which is called “Qingming”. My father would bring me along, lay out food and candles and burn some paper money and kowtow three times over his tombstone. At home on specific days outside the kitchen he would put up two candles with my grandfather’s picture. But as I grew up, I questioned this because I think this is superstition. You are gone, you burn paper money, how can he collect the paper money where he is? After my father died, I dropped the practice. My youngest brother baptised my father as a Christian. He did not have the right to. He was a doctor and for the last weeks before my father’s life, he took my father to his house because he was a doctor and was able to keep my father comforted. I do not know if my father was fully aware when he was converted into Christianity.”
Q: “Converted your father?”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “Well this happens when you get close to the end.”
Mr Lee: “Well, but I do not know whether my father agreed. At that time he may have been beyond making a rational decision. My brother assumed that he agreed and converted him.”
Q: “But…”
Mr Lee: “I am not converted.”
Q: “But when you reach that stage, you may wonder more than ever what is next?”
Mr Lee: “Well, what is next, I do not know. Nobody has ever come back. The Muslims say that there are seventy houris, beautiful women up there. But nobody has come back to confirm this.”
Q: “And you haven’t converted to Islam, knowing that?”
Mr Lee: “Most unlikely. The Buddhist believes in transmigration of the soul. If you live a good life, the reward is in your next migration, you will be a good being, not an ugly animal. It is a comforting thought, but my wife and I do not believe in it. She has been for two years bed-ridden, unable to speak after a series of strokes. I am not going to convert her. I am not going to allow anybody to convert her because I know it will be against what she believed in all her life. How do I comfort myself? Well, I say life is just like that. You can’t choose how you go unless you are going to take an overdose of sleeping pills, like sodium amytal. For just over two years, she has been inert in bed, but still cognitive. She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night. She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day’s work, read her favourite poems.”
Q: ‘And what kind of books do you read to her?”
Mr Lee: “So much of my time is reading things online. The latest book which I want to read or re-read is Kim. It is a beautiful of description of India as it was in Kipling’s time. And he had an insight into the Indian mind and it is still basically that same society that I find when I visit India. “
Q: “When you spoke to Time Magazine a couple of years ago, you said Don Quixote was your favourite?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, I was just given the book, Don Quixote, a new translation.”
Q: “But people might find that ironic because he was fantasist who did not realistically choose his projects and you are sort of the opposite?”
Mr Lee: “No, no, you must have something fanciful and a flight of fancy. I had a colleague Rajaratnam who read Sci-Fi for his leisure.”’
Q: “And you?”:
Mr Lee: “No, I do not believe in Sci-Fi.”
Q: “But you must have something to fantasise.”
Mr Lee: “Well, at the moment, as I said, I would like to read Kim again. Why I thought of Kim was because I have just been through a list of audio books to choose for my wife. Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, books she has on her book shelf. So, I ticked off the ones I think she would find interesting. The one that caught my eye was Kim. She was into literature, from Alice in Wonderland, to Adventures with a Looking Glass, to Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen was her favourite writer because she wrote elegant and leisurely English prose of the 19th century. The prose flowed beautifully, described the human condition in a graceful way, and rolls off the tongue and in the mind. She enjoyed it. Also Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. She was an English Literature major.”
Q: “You are naming books on the list, not necessarily books you have already read, yes?”
Mr Lee: “I would have read some of them.”
Q: “Like a Jane Austen book, or Canterbury Tales?”
Mr Lee: “No, Canterbury Tales, I had to do it for my second year English Literature course in Raffles College. For a person in the 15th Century, he wrote very modern stuff. I didn’t find his English all that archaic. I find those Scottish poets difficult to read. Sometimes I don’t make sense of their Scottish brogue. My wife makes sense of them. Then Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
Q: “You read those?”
Mr Lee: “I read those sonnets when I did English literature in my freshman’s year. She read them.”
Q: “When you say she reads them now, you’re the one who reads them, yes?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, I read them to her.”
Q: “But you go to her.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, I read from an Anthology of Poems which she has, and several other anthologies. So I know her favourite poems. She had flagged them. I read them to her.”
Q: “She’s in the hospital? You go to the hospital?”
Mr Lee: “No, no, she’s at home. We’ve got a hospital bed and nurses attending to her. We used to share the same room. Now I’m staying in the next room. I have to get used to her groans and grunts when she’s uncomfortable from a dry throat and they pump in a spray moisture called “Biothene” which soothes her throat, and they suck out phlegm. Because she can’t get up, she can’t breathe fully. The phlegm accumulates in the chest but you can’t suck it out from the chest, you’ve got to wait until she coughs and it goes out to her throat. They suck it out, and she’s relieved. They sit her up and tap her back. It’s very distressing, but that’s life.”
Q: “Yes, your daughter on Sunday wrote a moving column, movingly about the situation referring to you.”
Mr Lee: “How did you come to read it?”
Q: “Somebody said you’ve got to read that column, so I read it.”
Mr Lee: “You don’t get the Straits Times.”
Q: “I get it online actually. I certainly do, I follow Singapore online and she wrote that the whole family suffers of course from this and she wrote the one who’s been hurting the most and is yet carrying on stoically is my father.”
Mr Lee: “What to do? What else can I do? I can’t break down. Life has got to go on. I try to busy myself, but from time to time in idle moments, my mind goes back to the happy days we were up and about together.”
Q: “When you go to visit her, is that the time when your mind goes back?”
Mr Lee: “No, not then. My daughter’s fished out many old photographs for this piece she wrote and picked out a dozen or two dozen photographs from the digital copies which somebody had kept at the Singapore Press Holdings. When I look at them, I thought how lucky I was. I had 61 years of happiness. We’ve got to go sometime, so I’m not sure who’s going first, whether she or me. So I told her, I’ve been looking at the marriage vows of the Christians. The best I read was,” To love, to hold and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, till death do us part.” I told her I would try and keep you company for as long as I can. She understood.”
Q: “Yes, it’s been really.”
Mr Lee: “What to do? What can you do in this situation? I can say get rid of the nurses. Then the maids won’t know how to turn her over and then she gets pneumonia. That ends the suffering. But human beings being what we are, I do the best for her and the best is to give her a competent nurse who moves her, massages her, turns her over, so no bed sores. I’ve got a hospital bed with air cushions so no bed sores. Well, that’s life. Make her comfortable.”
Q: “And for yourself, you feel the weight of age more than you have in the past?”
Mr Lee: “I’m not sure. I marginally must have. It’s stress. However, I look at it, I mean, it’s stress. That’s life. But it’s a different kind of stress from the kind of stress I faced, political stresses. Dire situations for Singapore, dire situations for myself when we broke off from Malaysia, the Malays in Singapore could have rioted and gone for me and they suddenly found themselves back as a minority because the Tunku kicked us out. That’s different, that’s intense stress and it’s over but this is stress which goes on. One doctor told me, you may think that when she’s gone you’re relieved but you’ll be sad when she’s gone because there’s still the human being here, there’s still somebody you talk to and she knows what you’re saying and you’ll miss that. Well, I don’t know, I haven’t come to that but I think I’ll probably will because it’s now two years, May, June, July, August, September, two years and four months. It’s become a part of my life.”
Q: “She’s how old now?”
Mr Lee: “She’s two-and-a-half years older than me, so she’s coming on to 90.”
Q: “But you did make a reference in an interview with Time magazine to something that goes beyond reason as you put it. You referred to the real enemy by Pierre D’Harcourt who talked about people surviving the Nazi, it’s better that they have something to believe in.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.”
Q: “And you said that the Communists and the deeply religious fought on and survived. There are some things in the human spirit that are beyond reason.”
Mr Lee: “I believe that to be true. Look, I saw my friend and cabinet colleague who’s a deeply religious Catholic. He was Finance Minister, a fine man. In 1983, he had a heart attack. He was in hospital, in ICU, he improved and was taken out of ICU. Then he had a second heart attack and I knew it was bad. I went to see him and the priest was giving him the last rites as a Catholic. Absolutely fearless, he showed no distress, no fear, the family was around him, his wife and daughters, he had four daughters. With priest delivering the last rites, he knew he was reaching the end. But his mind was clear but absolutely calm.”
Q: “Well, I am more like you. We don’t have something to cling to.”
Mr Lee: “That’s our problem.”
Q: “But also the way people see you is supremely reasonable person, reason is the ultimate.”
Mr Lee: “Well, that’s the way I’ve been working.”
Q: “Well, you did mention to Tom Plate, they think they know me but they only know the public me?”
Mr Lee: “Yeah, the private view is you have emotions for your close members of your family. We are a close family, not just my sons and my wife and my parents but my brothers and my sister. So my youngest brother, a doctor as I told you, he just sent me an email that my second brother was dying of a bleeding colon, diverticulitis. And later the third brother now has got prostate cancer and has spread into his lymph nodes. So I asked what’re the chances of survival. It’s not gotten to the bones yet, so they’re doing chemotherapy and if you can prevent it from going into the bones, he’ll be okay for a few more years. If it does get to the bones, then that’s the end. I don’t think my brother knows. But I’ll probably go and see him.”
Q: “But you yourself have been fit. You have a stent, you had heart problem late last year but besides that do you have ailments?”
Mr Lee: “Well, aches and pains of a geriatric person, joints, muscles but all non-terminal. I go in for a physiotherapy, maintenance once a week, they give me a rub over because when I cycle, my thighs get sore, knees get a little painful, and so the hips.”
Q: “These are the signs of age.”
Mr Lee: “Yeah, of course.”
Q: “I’m 64. I’m beginning to feel that and I don’t like it and I don’t want to admit to myself.”
Mr Lee: “But if you stop exercising, you make it worse. That’s what my doctors tell me, just carry on. When you have these aches and pains, we’ll give you physiotherapy. I’ve learnt to use heat pads at home. So after the physiotherapy, once a week, if I feel my thighs are sore, I just have a heat pad there. You put in the microwave oven and you tie it around your thighs or your ankles or your calves. It relieves the pain.”
Q: “So you continue to cycle.”
Mr Lee: “Oh yeah.”
Q: “Treadmill?
Mr Lee: “No, I don’t do the treadmill. I walk but not always. When I’ve cycled enough I don’t walk.”
Q: “That’s your primary exercise, swimming?”
Mr Lee: “Yeah, I swim everyday, it’s relaxing.”
Q: “What other secrets, I see you drink hot water?”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “Tell me about it.”
Mr Lee: “Well, I used to drink tea but tea is a diuretic, but I didn’t know that. I used to drink litres of it. In the 1980s, I was having a conference with Zhou Ziyang who was then Secretary-General of the Communist Party in the Great Hall of the People. The Chinese came in and poured more tea and hot water. I was scoffing it down because it kept my throat moistened, my BP was up because more liquid was in me. Halfway through, I said please stop. I’m dashing off. I had to relief myself. Then my doctors said don’t you know that tea is a diuretic? I don’t like coffee, it gives me a sour stomach, so okay, let’s switch to water.”
Q: “You know you had the hot water when I met you a couple of years ago and after I told my wife about that, she switched to hot water. She’s not sure why except that you drink hot water, so she’s decided to.”
Mr Lee: “Well, cold water, this was from my ENT man. If you drink cold water, you reduce the temperature of your nasal passages and throat and reduce your resistance to coughs and colds. So I take warm water, body temperature. I don’t scald myself with boiling hot water. I avoid that. But my daughter puts blocks of ice into her coffee and drinks it up. She’s all right, she’s only 50-plus.
Q: “Let me ask a question about the outside world a little bit. Singapore is a great success story even though people criticize this and that. When you look back, you can be proud of what you’ve done and I assume you are. Are there things that you regret, things that you wished you could achieve that you couldn’t?”
Mr Lee: “Well, first I regret having been turfed out of Malaysia. I think if the Tunku had kept us together, what we did in Singapore, had Malaysia accepted a multiracial base for their society, much of what we’ve achieved in Singapore would be achieved in Malaysia. But not as much because it’s a much broader base. We would have improved inter-racial relations and an improved holistic situation. Now we have a very polarized Malaysia, Malays, Chinese and Indians in separate schools, living separate lives and not really getting on with one another. You read them. That’s bad for us as close neighbours.”
Q: “So at that time, you found yourself with Singapore and you have transformed it. And my question would be how do you assess your own satisfaction with what you’ve achieved? What didn’t work?”
Mr Lee: “Well, the greatest satisfaction I had was my colleagues and I, were of that generation who were turfed out of Malaysia suffered two years under a racial policy decided that we will go the other way. We will not as a majority squeeze the minority because once we’re by ourselves, the Chinese become the majority. We made quite sure whatever your race, language or religion, you are an equal citizen and we’ll drum that into the people and I think our Chinese understand and today we have an integrated society. Our Malays are English-educated, they’re no longer like the Malays in Malaysia and you can see there are some still wearing headscarves but very modern looking.”
Q: “That doesn’t sound like a regret to me.”
Mr Lee: “No, no, but the regret is there’s such a narrow base to build this enormous edifice, so I’ve got to tell the next generation, please do not take for granted what’s been built. If you forget that this is a small island which we are built upon and reach a 100 storeys high tower block and may go up to 150 if you are wise. But if you believe that it’s permanent, it will come tumbling down and you will never get a second chance.”
Q: “I wonder if that is a concern of yours about the next generation. I saw your discussion with a group of young people before the last election and they were saying what they want is a lot of these values from the West, an open political marketplace and even playing field in all of these things and you said well, if that’s the way you feel, I’m very sad.”
Mr Lee: “Because you play it that way, if you have dissension, if you chose the easy way to Muslim votes and switch to racial politics, this society is finished. The easiest way to get majority vote is vote for me, we’re Chinese, they’re Indians, they’re Malays. Our society will be ripped apart. If you do not have a cohesive society, you cannot make progress.”
Q: “But is that a concern that the younger generation doesn’t realize as much as it should?”
Mr Lee: “I believe they have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it. They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so. We have crafted a set of very intricate rules, no housing blocks shall have more than a percentage of so many Chinese, so many percent Malays, Indians. All are thoroughly mixed. Willy-nilly, your neighbours are Indians, Malays, you go to the same shopping malls, you go to the same schools, the same playing fields, you go up and down the same lifts. We cannot allow segregation.”
Q: “There are people who think that Singapore may lighten up a little bit when you go, that the rules will become a little looser and if that happens, that might be something that’s a concern to you.”
Mr Lee: “No, you can go looser where it’s not race, language and religion because those are deeply gut issues and it will surface the moment you start playing on them. It’s inevitable, but on other areas, policies, right or wrong, disparity of opportunities, rich and poor, well go ahead. But don’t play race, language, religion. We’ve got here, we’ve become cohesive, keep it that way. We’ve not used Chinese as a majority language because it will split the population. We have English as our working language, it’s equal for everybody, and it’s given us the progress because we’re connected to the world. If you want to keep your Malay, or your Chinese, or your Tamil, Urdu or whatever, do that as a second language, not equal to your first language. It’s up to you, how high a standard you want to achieve.”
Q: “The public view of you is as a very strict, cerebral, unsentimental. Catherine Lim, “an authoritarian, no-nonsense manner that has little use for sentiment”.”
Mr Lee: “She’s a novelist, therefore, she simplifies a person’s character, make graphic caricature of me. But is anybody that simple or simplistic?”
Q: “Sentiment though, you don’t show that very much in public.”
Mr Lee: “Well, that’s a Chinese ideal. A gentleman in Chinese ideal, the junzi (君子) is someone who is always composed and possessed of himself and doesn’t lose his temper and doesn’t lose his tongue. That’s what I try to do, except when I got turfed out from Malaysia. Then, I just couldn’t help it.”
Q: “One aspect of the way you’ve constructed Singapore is a certain level of fear perhaps in the population. You described yourself as a street fighter, knuckle duster and so forth.”
Mr Lee: “Yes.”
Q: “And that produces among some people a level of fear and I want to tell you what a taxi driver said when I said I was going to interview you. He said, safer not to ask him anything. If you ask him, somebody will follow you. We’re not in politics so just let him do the politics.”
Mr Lee: “How old is he?’
Q: “I’m sorry, middle aged, I don’t know.”
Mr Lee: “I go out. I’m no longer the Prime Minister. I don’t have to do the difficult things. Everybody wants to shake my hands, everybody wants me to autograph something. Everybody wants to get around me to take a photo. So it’s a problem.
Q: “Yes but…”
Mr Lee: “Because I’m no longer in charge, I don’t have to do the hard things. I’ve laid the foundation and they know that because of that foundation, they’re enjoying this life.’
Q: “So when you were the one directly in-charge, you had to be tough, you had to be a fighter.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course. I had to fight left-wingers, Communists, pro-Communist groups who had killer squads. If I didn’t have the guts and the gumption to take them on, there wouldn’t be the Singapore. They would have taken over and it would have collapsed. I also had to fight the Malay Ultras when we were in Malaysia for two years.”
Q: “Well, you don’t have a lot of dissidents in prison but you’re known for your libel suits which keeps a lot of people at bay.”
Mr Lee: “We are non-corrupt. We lead modest lives, so it’s difficult to malign us. What’s the easy way to get a leader down? He’s a hypocrite, he is corrupt, he pretends to be this when in fact he’s that. That’s what they’re trying to do to me. Well, prove it, if what you say is right, then I don’t deserve this reputation. Why must you say these things without foundation? I’m taking you to court, you’ve made these allegations, I’m open to your cross-examination.”
Q: “But that may produce what I was talking about, about a level of fear.”
Mr Lee: “No, you’re fearful of a libel suit? Then don’t issue these defamatory statements or make them where you have no basis. The Western correspondent, especially those who hop in and hop out got to find something to show that they are impartial, that they’re not just taken in by the Singapore growth story. They say we keep down the opposition, how? Libel suits. Absolute rubbish. We have opponents in Parliament who have attacked us on policy, no libel suits against them and even in Parliament they are privileged to make defamatory allegation and cannot be sued. But they don’t. They know it is not true.”
Q: “Let me ask a last question. Again back to Tom Plate, “I’m not serious all the time. Everyone needs to have a good laugh now and then to see the funny side of things and to laugh at himself”.”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.”
Q: “How about that?”
Mr Lee: “You have to be that.”
Q: “So what makes you laugh?”
Mr Lee: “Many things, the absurdity of it, many things in life. Sometimes, I meet witty people, have conversations, they make sharp remarks, I laugh.
Q: “And when you laugh at yourself as you said?”
Mr Lee: “That’s very frequent. Yeah, I’m reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure and it’s an effort and is it worth the effort? I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just carry on.”
Q: “So it’s the whole broad picture of things that you find funny?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, life as a whole has many abnormalities, of course.”
Q: “Your public life together with your private life, what you’ve done over things people write about you and Singapore, that overall is something that you can find funny?”
Mr Lee: “Yes, of course.
Q: “You made one of the few people who laugh at Singapore.”
Mr Lee: “Let me give you a Chinese proverb “do not judge a man until you’ve closed his coffin. Do not judge a man.” Close the coffin, then decide. Then you assess him. I may still do something foolish before the lid is closed on me.”
Q: “So you’re waiting for the final verdict?”
Mr Lee: “No, the final verdict will not be in the obituaries. The final verdict will be when the PhD students dig out the archives, read my old papers, assess what my enemies have said, sift the evidence and seek the truth? I’m not saying that everything I did was right, but everything I did was for an honourable purpose. I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.”
Q: “For the greater good?
Mr Lee: “Well, yes, because otherwise they are running around and causing havoc playing on Chinese language and culture, and accusing me of destroying Chinese education. You’ve not been here when the Communists were running around. They do not believe in the democratic process. They don’t believe in one man, one vote. They believe in one bullet, one vote. They had killer squads. But they at the same time had a united front exploiting the democratic game. It gave them cover. But my business, my job was to make sure that they did not succeed. Sometimes you just got to lock the leaders up. They are confusing the people. The reality is that if you allow these people to work up animosity against the government because it’s keeping down the Chinese language, because we’ve promoted English, keeping down Chinese culture because you have allowed English literature, and we suppress our Chinese values and the Chinese language, the Chinese press, well, you will break up the society. They harp on these things when they know they are not true. They know that if you actually do in Chinese language and culture, the Chinese will riot and the society must break up.”
Q: “So leadership is a constant battle?”
Mr Lee: “In a multiracial situation like this, it is. Malaysia took the different line; Malaysians saw it as a Malay country, all others are lodgers, “orang tumpangan”, and they the Bumiputras, sons of the soil, run the show. So the Sultans, the Chief Justice and judges, generals, police commissioner, the whole hierarchy is Malay. All the big contracts for Malays. Malay is the language of the schools although it does not get them into modern knowledge. So the Chinese build and find their own independent schools to teach Chinese, the Tamils create their own Tamil schools, which do not get them jobs. It’s a most unhappy situation.”
Mdm Yeong: “I thought that was the last question.”
Q: “This is the last part of the last question. So your career has been a struggle to keep things going in the right way and you’ve also said that the best way to keep your health is to keep on working. Are you tired of it by this point? Do you feel like you want to rest?”
Mr Lee: “No, I don’t. I know if I rest I’ll slide downhill fast. No, my whole being has been stimulated by the daily challenge. If I suddenly drop it all, play golf, stroll around, watch the sunset, read novels, that’s downhill. It is the daily challenge, social contacts, meeting people, people like you, you press me, I answer, when I don’t…. what have I got tomorrow?”
Mdm Yeong: “You have two more events coming up. One is the Radin Mas Community.”
Mr Lee: “Oh yeah. I got it.”
Mdm Yeong: “And then you have other call, courtesy call on the 3rd.”
Mr Lee: “We are social animals. Without that interaction with people, you are isolated. The worst punishment you can give a person is the isolation ward. You get hallucinations. Four walls, no books, no nothing. By way of example, Henry Kissinger wants to speak to me. So I said okay, we’ll speak on Sunday. What about? We are meeting in Sao Paolo at a J P Morgan International Advisory Board. He wants to talk to me to check certain facts on China. My mind is kept alive, I go to China once a year at least. I meet Chinese leaders. So it’s a constant stimulus as I keep up to date. Supposing I sit back, I don’t think about China, just watch videos. I am off to Moscow, Kiev and Paris on the 15th of September. Three days Moscow, three days Kiev, four days Paris. Moscow I am involved in the Skolkovo Business School which President Medvedev, when he wasn’t President started. I promised to go if he did not fix it in the winter. So they fix it for September. I look at the fires, I said wow this is no good.”
Q: “It’s not going to be freezing if there are fires.”
Mr Lee: “No but our embassy says the skies have cleared. Kiev because the President has invited me specially and will fly me from Moscow to Kiev and then fly me on to Paris. Paris I am on the TOTAL Advisory Board together with Joe Nye and a few others. They want a presentation on what are China’s strengths and weaknesses. That keeps me alive. It’s just not my impressionistic views of China but one that has to be backed by facts and figures. So my team works out the facts and figures, and I check to see if they tally with my impressions. But it’s a constant stimulus to keep alive, and up-to-date. If I stop it, it’s downhill.”
Q: “Well, I hope you continue. Thank you very much, I really enjoyed this interview.”
4.Living till 89 years old
An interview with Mr Lee when he was 89 years old
An editorial team from The Straits Times comprising Han Fook Kwang, Elgin Toh, Zuraidah Ibrahim, Chua Mui Hoong and Shashi Jayakumar (an administrative Officer on secondment to the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy)
Q: You have said before that you consider yourself a nominal Buddhist. Would you still describe yourself as such?
A: Yes, I would. I go through the motions and the rituals. I am not a Christian. I am not a Taoist. I do not belong to any special sect.
Q: When you say "rituals”, what do you mean?
A: On set days you've got to give offerings to your ancestors --- food and so on. All that is laid out by the servants. But it will go off after my generation. It is like clearing the graves during Qing Ming. With each passing generation, fewer people go. It is a ritual.
Q : Where do you draw your comfort from, if not from religion?
A : It is the end of any aches and pains and suffering. So I hope the end will come quickly. At 89, I look at the obituary pages and see very few who have outlived me. And I wonder: How have they lived? How have they died? After long illness? Incapacity? When you are 89 you will think about these things. I would advise that if you do not want to be comatose or half-comatose in bed and fed through a tube, do an AMD. Do not intervene to save life.
Q : The number of people who do this in Singapore is still very low, for some reason.
A : Well, because they don't want to face up to it.
Q : Are you in favour of euthanasia, which some countries have legalised?
A : I think under certain conditions where it is not used to get rid of old people and it is a personal decision of a man taken rationally to relieve himself from suffering, I would say yes, like the Dutch. So in my AMD, I am in fact saying: "Let me go."
Q : If a grandchild of yours comes to you and asks you what a good life is, what do you say to him?
A : I have grandchildren in their 20s. They don't ask me what a good life is. They know what it is. There's been a change in the physical world they live in, the people they meet, a change in generations and different objectives to what people do in life.
Q : Are you saying that it is not possible to influence young people these days?
A : No, you can influence the basic attitudes from the day they are born to about 16 or 17. After that --- sometimes earlier --- they have a mind of their own and they are influenced by what they see around them and by their peers.
Q : You spoke about not believing you would meet your wife in the hereafter. Do you not hold out such a hope, even in your quieter moment? Is it not human to do so?
A : No, it goes against logic. Supposing we all have a life after death, where is that place?
Q : Metaphysical, perhaps?
A : So we are ghostly figures? No, I don't think so.
Q : How often do you think of Mrs Lee?
A : I have an urn with her ashes and I have told my children to put my ashes next to hers in a columbarium, for sentimental purposes.
Q : And hope?
A : Not really. She's gone. All that is left behind are her ashes. I will be gone and all that will be left behind will be ashes. For reasons of sentiment, well, put them together. But to meet in after life? Too good to be true. But the Hindus believe in reincarnation, don't they?
Q : It is in the Hindu creed, yes.
A : If you lead a good life, you come out in a better shape in the next world. You lead a bad life, you become a dog or something.
Q : So do the Buddhists.
A : But they are not so sharp in their conceptions of the hereafter.
Q : Is your routine these days very different compared to when you were still in Cabinet?
A : Of course. The pressure is not there.
Q : But you are somebody who has always coped very well with pressure.
A : Well, the pressure of office means a decision has to be made. And when several decisions come at the same time, you've got to look at the questions carefully and decide. Once you have decided, you cannot back track. It is a different kind of pressure.
Q : Do you miss having that sort of pressure?
A : No, no. Why should I miss it? I have done my share.
Q : And would you say you miss attending Cabinet meetings, and the opportunity to interact with younger Ministers?
A : No, I think the time has come for me to move on. I am 89. Compared to my world and the reference points that I have fixated in my mind, the map of Singapore --- the psychological map of Singapore --- has changed. I used to visit the housing estates. I used to know people from the residents' committees well. I interacted with them. I had a good feel of the ground. Now I do not have that. I have to go by reports, which is not the same thing. So I have to leave it to the people in charge who do go around.
Q : Do you regret the decision to step out of government shortly after the 2011 General Election?
A : No. How can I carry on making decisions when I am losing the energy to make contact with people on the ground? It requires a lot of physical energy. The mental effort does not bother me because I have not had a stroke nor am I going into dementia. But I lack the physical energy. Before this interview, I had a light lunch, did my treadmill routine and then rested for 15 minutes. I did not need that in the past.
Q : So you have no unfinished business that you had wanted to...
A : No, I have done what I had wanted to do. I gave up my duties as Prime Minister to Gob Chok Tong. I helped him. He passed them on to Lee Hsien Loong. It is a different generation now. So my contributions are less meaningful --- except when they want to go back on dialects.
Q : How is your health, if I may ask?
A : I was recently hospitalised after experiencing what the doctors said was a transient ischaemic attack. But I have since recovered fully and have returned to work. If you take into account the fact that I am in my 90th year... the doctors have told me there is no benchmark for people of that age.
Q : You set the benchmark. So you are reasonably happy with your physical and mental state at the moment?
A : No, you have to accept the gradual decline in your physical abilities. So far the mental capabilities have not declined, which has happened to some of my friends. I am grateful for that. I think it is largely due to inherited genes. But the physical ageing --- you cannot stop it.
Q : Your mental faculties --- could that be due to your mental habits as well? You are someone who has kept himself mentally very occupied and interested in what is happening.
A : Yes, of course. And I keep on learning new words and phrases in Chinese, so that I am forced to. It is like playing mahjong.
Q : Have your dietary habits changed over the years?
A : Well, I no longer eat to my heart's content. I stop before I am full. I also try to eat more vegetables and less protein.
Q : At an interview with The Straits Times when you turned 80, you said one worry you had was the narrowing window that people who are ageing tend to have, and that it gets smaller and smaller, that would be the end of existence. Is that something that you still think about --- keeping that window open?
A : Yes. Otherwise I would be sitting alone. Why should I meet you and talk to you?
Q : Are you afflicted by loneliness sometimes?
A : You have to distinguish between loneliness and solitude. I had a friend who was one of the brightest students in Cambridge. He is dead now. His name was Percy Cradock. He had a wife who was Danish and had diabetes. She had lost two legs. Percy used to say: "I enjoy my solitude." And I said: "Get hold of the computer and go on Google. You can get all the poems that you have read and enjoyed, purple passages from works of literature. You just type in the keywords. It will come out.” And he did.
Q : What newspapers or Internet sites --- do you read regularly?
A : I read The Straits Times and Lianhe Zaobai. I used to read Berita Harian also but now I don't. I used to be very good with my Malay but it is not necessary now that most Malays in Singapore speak English. I follow closely on the Internet news on Singapore, the region, China, Japan, Korea, America, India and Europe. The Middle East --- occasionally. Latin America --- almost zero, because it is not relevant to us. Too far away.
Q : What particular Internet sites?
A : Google. I pre-arrange for news from the various regions to be automatically passed on.
Q : What books or movies have you read or watched recently?
A : I do not watch movies.
Q : And books?
A : Usually I read biographies of interesting people. I am not attracted to novels --- make-believe, or recreations of what people think life should be.
Q : Any recent one that you enjoyed particularly?
A : One on Charles de Gaulle. France was lost. He was a nobody. He went to London and said: "I am France." And he went to Algiers and told Alphonse Juin, who had obeyed the Vichy government and was in charge there: "As a Marshal of France, you ought to be ashamed of yourself." That was a pretty bold man. And he walked back to Paris, of course, with the Allied troops having cleared the way for him.
Q : What are your foremost pre-occupations these days? What are the things that keep you awake?
A : I think our changing population. With an overall fertility rate of 1.2 --- we have no choice but to take in migrants. It is difficult to get Singaporeans to change their mindsets. The women are educated. They want a different lifestyle, not to be stuck with early marriages and children. They want to travel first, see the world, enjoy life and marry later, by which time they will have trouble having children.
Q : Any hopes for Singapore?
A : Well, the hope is that it will keep a steady course and uphold all these institutions which make it different from the rest of the region.
5. One's man view of the World
All the passages below are taken from Lee Kuan Yew’s book, “One man’s View of the World,” Published 2013
There is an end to everything and I want mine to come as quickly and painlessly as possible, not with me incapacitated, half in coma in bed and with a tube going into my nostrils and down to my stomach,
"I wouldn't call myself an atheist. I neither deny nor accept that there is a God," he said.
"So I do not laugh at people who believe in God. But I do not necessarily believe in God - nor deny that there could be one."
Asked where he drew comfort from if not from religion, he said: "It is the end of any aches and pains and suffering. So I hope the end will come quickly."
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My daily routine is set. I wake up, clear my email, read the newspapers, do my exercises and have lunch. After that, I go to my office at the Istana, clear more papers and write articles or speeches. In the afternoons and evenings, I sometimes have interviews scheduled with journalists, after which I may spend an hour or two with my Chinese teachers.
I have made it a habit to exercise daily. At the age of 89, I can sit up and I do not need a walking stick. When I was in my 30s, I was fond of smoking and drinking beer. I quit smoking because it was causing me to lose my voice at election campaigns. That was before medical research linked smoking to lung and throat cancer, among other things. Oddly enough, I later became hyper-allergic to smoke. The drinking gave me a beer belly and it was showing up in pictures appearing in the press. I began to play more golf to keep fit, but later on turned to running and swimming, which took me less time to achieve the same amount of aerobic exercise. Now, I walk on the treadmill three times a day ---12 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes after lunch and 15 minutes after dinner. Before dinner, I used to swim for 20 to 25 minutes. Without that, I would not be in my present condition physically. It is a discipline.
I continue to make appointments to meet people. You must meet people, because you must have human contact if you want to broaden your perspective. Besides people in Singapore, I meet those from Malaysia, Indonesia, and, from time to time, China, Europe and the United States. I try not to meet only old friends or political leaders, but people from a variety of fields, such as academics, businessmen, journalists and ordinary people.
I have cut down on my overseas trips significantly, because of the jetlag, especially when travelling to the US. Until 2012, I was still travelling to Japan once a year to speak at the Future of Asia Conference --- now into its 19th year, organised by the Japanese media corporation, Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei). For a time, I was going to China nearly once a year, although I am reluctant to go to Beijing now because of the pollution. But the leaders are there, so you have to go there to meet them. The JP Morgan International Council, which I am on, did me the honour of holding its 2012 annual meeting in Singapore, so did the Total Advisory Board. Going to France is all right. It is a 12-hour direct flight on an Airbus 380, there and back. But to go to New York is much more tiring --- especially because of the time change, from night into day and day into night. Travelling overseas helps me widen my horizons. I see how other countries are developing. No country or city stays static. I have seen London and Paris change, over and over again.
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Life is better than death. But death comes eventually to everyone. It is something which many in their prime may prefer not to think about. But at 89, I see no point in avoiding the question. What concerns me is: How do I go? Will the end come swiftly, with a stroke in one of the coronary arteries? Or will it be a stroke in the mind that lays me out in bed for months, semi-comatose? Of the two, I prefer the quick one.
Some time back, I had an Advanced Medical Directive (AMD)) done which says that if I have to be fed by a tube, and it is unlikely that I would ever be able to recover and walk about, my doctors are to remove the tube and allow me to make a quick exit. I had it signed by a lawyer friend and a doctor.
If you do not sign one, they do everything possible to prevent the inevitable. I have seen this in so many cases. My brother-in-law on my wife’s side, Yong Nyuk Lin, had a tube. He was at home, and his wife was lying in bed, also in a poor shape. His mind was becoming blank. He is dead now. But they kept him going for a few years. What is the point of that? Quite often, the doctors and relatives of the patient believe they should keep life going. I do not agree. There is an end to everything and I want mine to come as quickly and painlessly as possible, not with me incapacitated, half in coma in bed and with a tube going into my nostrils and down to my stomach. In such cases, one is little more than a body.
I am not given to making sense out of life --- or coming up with some grand narrative on it ---other than to measure it by what you think you want to do in life. As for me, I have done what I had wanted to, to the best of my ability. I am satisfied.
Different societies have different philosophical explanations for life and the hereafter. If you go to America, you will find fervent Christians, especially in the conservative Bible Belt covering much of the country's south. In China, despite decades of Maoist and Marxist indoctrination, ancestral worship and other traditional Buddhist or Taoist-based religious practices are commonplace. In India, belief in reincarnation is widespread.
I wouldn't call myself an atheist. I neither deny nor accept that there is a God. The universe, they say, came out of the Big Bang. But human beings on this earth have developed over the last 20,000 years into thinking beings, and are able to see beyond themselves and think about themselves. Is that a result of Darwinian evolution? Or is it God? I do not know. So I do not laugh at people who believe in God. But I do not necessarily believe in God -- nor deny that there could be one.
I had a very close friend, Hon Sui Sen, who was a devout Roman Catholic. When he was dying, the priest was there next to him. At 68, he was young, but he was also absolutely fearless. As a Roman Catholic, he believed that he would meet his wife in the hereafter. I wish I can meet my wife in the hereafter, but I don't think I will. I just cease to exist just as she has ceased to exist---otherwise the other world would be overpopulated. Is heaven such a large and limitless space that you can keep all the peoples of the world over the thousands of years past? I have a large question mark on that. But Sui Sen believed that and it gave him a certain tranquillity of mind as he went through his last moments with his priest. His wife, who died in November 2012, believed they would meet again.
Those around me who may have tried to proselytise to me no longer do so because they know it is a hopeless case. My wife had a friend she knew from school who was very religious and kept trying to convert her. In the end, she stayed away from her friend, saying: "It is absurd. Every time we meet she wants to convert me into a Christian." She did not believe in the afterlife --- although, admittedly, it is comforting if you believe there is an afterlife even if there is none.
With every passing day I am physically less energetic and less active. If you ask me to go out in the heat of the sun at two o'clock to meet people, shake hands and kiss babies, I will not be able to do it. I could do it 20, 30 years ago, but not anymore. You take life as it comes, with your physical capabilities declining over the years. Sometimes my secretary would see me resting in my office and would ask me whether they should cancel the next meeting. Sometimes, I would say: "No, let's get on with it." I need 15 minutes for a shut-eye, so that my mind can concentrate after that. But if I cannot, I would say: "Yes, put it off: Let me have a nap." You cannot predict what your physical condition will be like. However rigorous and disciplined I am, it will still be a downhill slide.
In the end, my greatest satisfaction in life comes from the fact that I have spent years gathering support, mustering the will to make this place meritocratic, corruption-free and equal for all races --- and that it will endure beyond me, as it has. It was not like that when I took office. The Lim Yew Hock government was already going corrupt. Younger Singaporeans may not be familiar with a man by the name of Mak Pak Shee, a member of that government. He was an Indian Cantonese with a moustache, and he was what you would call a fixer --- somebody who facilitated the fulfilment of favours for a fee.
Singapore, as it stands, is the one corruption-free spot in a region where corruption is endemic. The institutions have been created to keep it that way, with the anti-corruption bureau. People are promoted on the basis of merit, not of race, language or religion. If we uphold these institutions, we will continue to make progress. That is my greatest hope. [295-301]
6. Eulogy by Dr Lee Wei Ling at Cremation Service of the Late Mr Lee Kuan Yew
29 March 2015
Family and friends, thank you for being here with us today.
After Mama died in October 2010, Papa’s health deteriorated rapidly. The past five years have been challenging. But as always, Papa was determined to carry on as normal as possible, as best as he could.
He developed Parkinson's disease three years ago which severely limited his mobility. He had great difficulty standing and walking. But he refused to use a wheel chair or even a walking stick. He would walk, aided by his SOs.
Papa was also plagued by bouts of hiccups that could only be controlled by medication which had adverse side effects. Over and above the frequent hiccups, his ability to swallow both solids and liquids was impaired, a not uncommon problem in old age. Papa searched the Internet and tried a wide variety of unorthodox hiccup therapies. For example, he once used rabbit skin and then chicken feathers to induce sneezing, so as to stop the hiccups. Although the sneezing sometimes stopped his hiccups, it did not do so consistently enough. Papa also tried reducing his food intake, because he felt that eating too much could precipitate hiccups, hence he lost a lot of weight, and appeared thin and gaunt.
Papa was stubborn and determined. He would insist on walking down the steps at home, from the verandah to the porch where the car was parked. Ho Ching had a lift installed so Papa need not negotiate those steps. But when he was aware and alert, he refused the lift though it was a struggle for him to walk down those steps even with 3 SOs helping.
But the lift was not installed in vain. On several occasions when he was ill and needed to be admitted to SGH, he did not protest when the SO guided him onto the lift. Still, even when ill, if he was asked if he wanted to use the lift, the answer would invariably be "no".
The SOs were an integral part of Papa’s life, even more so in the last five years. They looked after him with tender loving care, way beyond the call of duty. One doctor friend who came to help dress a wound Papa sustained when he fell, noticed this and said to me: "The SOs look after your father as though he is their own father.”
Papa believed that goodwill goes both ways. He was very considerate towards his SOs. Once while in Saudi Arabia on an official trip, one SO came down with chicken pox. The doctors decided that the SO should be isolated in some hospital in Saudi Arabia for two weeks. Pa thought that very unkind to the SO and insisted that the SO return to Singapore together with the rest of the delegation. He wasn't going to leave any Singaporean behind, not least an SO.
Sensing he was special, all the SOs have been very kind to Papa. On behalf of my family, I would like to thank all of them. I know each of them well, even the number of children they have. To me, they were not only staff whose job was to look after Papa, but also friends of the family. They helped me pull out the SIM card from my blackberry when it hung; they were friends for me to share food and goodies with whenever the opportunity arose.
Soon after my father died, Yak called to inform me. After being in my room alone and unable to go back to sleep, I went downstairs to the SOs room, and sat with the two SOs on duty, watching black and white footage of Papa in his younger days. I needed the company of friends. Jun zi zhi jiao dan ru shui. There is a Chinese saying that the relationship between two honorable gentlemen is as understated as plain water. That was the relationship between the SOs and me.
One occasion, while having lunch at home, Papa choked on a piece of meat. It went down his trachea and obstructed his airflow. Fortunately the SOs knew what to do. ASP Yak and Kelvin together carried out the Heimlich manoeuvre several times, but to no avail, because Pa’s abdominal muscles were very tense. Yak then called for help over his walkytalky. Liang Chye was the only senior SO downstairs, and sensing something strange in Yak’s voice, he came running up. They formed a human chain. Liang Chye, the shortest and probably the strongest, was positioned behind Papa; the tallest, Yak, at the furthest end of the human chain; and Kelvin, the one of middle height, between the two. They coordinated their pull, and after several attempts, the piece of meat was finally ejected. By this time, Papa had already turned purple. But within seconds of the meat being dislodged, he was mentally alert.
I would like to give special thanks to Liang Chye and Kelvin, and especially ASP Yak, whose presence of mind saved Papa's life. To all the SOs who have served Papa over the years, I thank you on behalf of my family.
I would also like to thank all the nurses, doctors and specialists who have looked after Papa over the years, especially those who were involved in the last five years of his life, when his medical problems multiplied and became more complicated. At a ripe old age of 91, he had multiple medical problems and many specialists, so the list of people to thank is a very long one. I am grateful to each and every one of them for all the care they have provided to Papa.
When Pa was not well at home, I was the first line of defense. I would handle on my own what I could at home. At other times though, I had to call the relevant specialists outside of office hours when Papa had a medical emergency. Since the most common emergency was pneumonia, one particular doctor was called most frequently. He doesn’t wish to be named so I’ll call him Dr X. After several calls, I learned that Dr X would be up by 5:45am to send his children to school. One morning at 5am, I had to call him. I apologized for waking him up, and asked him to tell his registrar on duty at SGH what to do, adding: "You don't need to rush in to see Pa. You can see him after you have sent your children to school." Dr X replied, “Today is Sunday.” But even on Sundays, he made his rounds at SGH.
During his last illness, Pa had to be cared for in the medical ICU of SGH. This was a very difficult time for Papa, the medical staff, as well as for the family. The MICU staff were diligent and meticulous in their care, and no effort was spared to help Papa and tend to his every need. The doctors had meetings twice a day to discuss how to proceed, including on weekends and Chinese New Year.
Again, I thank all the doctors involved in this last fight. That includes not only the respiratory specialist who ran the ICU, who played the most important role, but also Dr X who decided on what antibiotics to use, the cardiologists, and others who advised on how to maintain nutrition whilst Pa was sedated and intubated on respirator. Thank you all doctors, nurses and physiotherapists who
have helped Papa be as comfortable as possible in his final days. My family is extremely grateful to all of you.
I also want to thank the PMO office staff who kept the office running smoothly in Papa’s absence. Thank you all for being with Papa and for helping to ease his suffering in the last five years of his life. Thank you for being here with us today, to bid farewell to Papa.
My brothers have said much about Papa. I just want to focus on one point: what have I learnt from Pa? What is the biggest lesson he taught me?
The influence parents have on children depends on many things. To a certain degree, it depends upon the temperament of the parent and the child.
Temperamentally, I am very similar to Papa. So similar that in a given situation, I can predict how he would feel and respond. For example, the SOs would look on with some amusement at the way Pa struggled to complete his 12 minutes on the treadmill, even on days that he was tired. He may rest in between bouts on the treadmill, but he was always determined to hit 12 minutes. The SOs were amused because they knew I was equally fanatical about exercise. Today, I have run up and down my 20 meter corridor 800 times, making it to 16 km.
Once, about 15 years ago, my father told me: “Mama and I should be very happy that you remain single and hence will be able to look after us in our old age. But you will be lonely. Also, you have inherited my traits but in such an exaggerated way that they are a disadvantage to you.”
Papa, I know you would have preferred if I had married and had children. But I have no regrets, no regrets I was able to look after you and Mama in your old age.
What is the most important lesson I have learnt from Papa? It is never to push around anyone simply because he or she is weaker than me or in a socially inferior position. And never to let anyone bully someone else if I am in a position to stop such bullying. If I saw someone being bullied unfairly by his superior, I should have no hesitation to come to the rescue of the victim. Since I am by nature pugnacious like my father, and I enjoy a fight so long as it is for a just and good cause, I learnt these lessons readily.
We have seen an astonishing outpouring of emotion on the passing of my father this week. There are many reasons why people feel this way about Papa. But I think one reason is that they know Papa was a fighter who would always fight for them no matter what the odds were. They know that he was ready to fight for them till his last breath.
This morning I noticed that the maid, in setting the dining table, had moved away Papa's chair and placed it against the wall. It was a poignant reminder that this farewell is for ever. I have been controlling my feelings for this past week, but looking at this unexpected scene, I nearly broke down. But I can't break down, I am a Hakka woman.
Farewell Papa. I will miss you. Rest in peace.
Article was 1st pubished on 30 March 2015
by Benjamin Cheah
by Benjamin Cheah
"The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law " Deuteronomy 29:29
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This website is the sole property of Dr Benjamin Cheah
Materials excluding links on this website are not copyrighted. They may be reproduced and distributed without fees.