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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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### A: “I don’t think you’d be dazzled but this is what they give when they interview a big shot.”### B: “Okay. Barbara Poulson, she’s the CEO, owner?”
### A: “She’s the editor. The writers don’t deal with the CEO. The writers go economy class.”### B: “Thank you.”
### A: “It was interesting. The thing about National Geographic is the joke but it’s not really a joke, I guess, the photographers go business class and the writers go economy class. I never cared for that very much myself.”### B: “The writers go by economy class.”
### A: “The photographers go business class.”### B: “They’d get tired. They don’t have, what do you call it, DVD?”
### A: “No, you can watch it. In the airplane, the DVD is about this close to your face, so you can’t really move very much. It’s sort of like sitting in the first row of the movie theatre. So actually I’ve interviewed Presidents and I was born in 1948, there’ve been 10-12 American Presidents. They come and they go. But I’ve never interviewed anybody who has stayed the length that you have. It’s like interviewing George Washington and Thomas Jefferson rolled up into one, so it’s kind of nice.”### B: “It was one of these cataclysmic moments in history when empires dissolved and invading armies came in and lorded it over us for three-and-a-half years, in this case the Japanese Imperial army who were quite brutal and then the Communists who were armed to fight the Japanese, made a bid for power. So after all that, we came through as the Communists would call it the crucible of fire.”
### A: “The crucible of fire. In your book, you said that the three years of Japanese Occupation were the most, probably the most important years of your life. Do you feel that way, do you still feel that way?”### B: “Yes, of course. First, I was in my late teens, they captured Singapore in February 1942. I was 18-plus and they didn’t leave until 1945 when I was 21-plus.”
### A: “Those are significant years in anybody’s life.”### B: “So I was Chinese male, tall and they were going for people like me because this was the centre for the collection of ethnic Chinese donations to Chungking to fight the Japanese. So when they came in, they were out to punish us. So they slaughtered 50,000, well the numbers estimate go up to about 90,000 but I think verifiable numbers would be about 50,000. And just randomly but for a stroke of fortune, I would have been one of them.”
### A: “Well, 1945 seems to be a, if you look back over history, 1945 was a cataclysmic year for humanity in general. You see difference between the combination of the detonation of the atom bomb and the discovery of the Nazi camps. So at that point, tell me what you think? It seems that humanity began to stop thinking of itself as made in the image of the creator so maybe it weren’t so wonderful.”### B: “I don’t think I ever started off with that hypothesis or that basis. I always thought that humanity was animal-like and that Confucian theory was Man can be improved. I’m not sure it can be but it can trained, it can be disciplined. I’m not sure you can actually change the character of a man but you can discipline him and make him, you make a left-hander write with his right hand but you can’t really change his natural born instincts to use his left hand. But a Confucianist belief Man is perfectible which is an optimistic belief.”
### A: “I would say so.”### B: “And there are many American sociologists who also would like to prove that to be correct, the latest one being the professor who has done some research insists why ethnic Jews and Asians and West Indian Blacks do so well in America and they came to the conclusion that’s because they emphasised upbringing and education.”
“Actually, I went to the University of California at Berkley back in the 1960s and early 70s, I never graduated, then I went back and finished my degree in 2004 to show my children their father wasn’t a bum and it was interesting to see how the demographic composition of US, that’s the number one public college in the United States. It was like half of the graduating class was Asians and it was interesting and it made me feel like I would never have gotten there.”“Most of the Asians settled in California because of the climate.”
### A: “It was sort of striking because you feel like, what you’re saying is interesting because it’s like some people seem to thrive in certain environments and some people don’t, I don’t know why.”### B: “Well, we’ve got ethnic Chinese and ethnic Indians here. The settled ones have become less hard-driving and hard-striving and we’ve got recent migrants, they are hungry, they’re determined to succeed having uprooted themselves and they’re doing better.”
### A: “Is that okay? Is that fine, I mean?”### B: “No it worries the old citizens. They say look this is fierce competition, my children won’t be getting the scholarships because they’re doing well in schools, they push their children very hard. In fact, they need no pushing. They come here from China with no English language and they know that without English, they won’t get along. So there are many cases of boys and girls aged 12, 13 who come into our secondary schools and by the time, they finish the schools, they top the class in English.”
### A: “That’s interesting, it’s like my grandparents came to New York. When they came in, they don’t speak English and they did great. They just really tried hard and made a life for themselves and I think after a number of generations, it’s very difficult to keep that kind of drive up.”### B: “Of course, of course.”
### A: “Do you think that’s inevitable or do you think that people just get lazy or what?”### B: “No, I think the spurs are not stuck on your hinds. They are part of the herd, why-go-faster? But when you’re lagging behind, you must go faster to catch up with the herd. I’m quite sure that there are children of the migrants who strive arduously. When they grow up in the same schools as the Singaporeans, the same playing fields, same environment and they begin to adopt Singaporean habits in the ways of living and thinking. So I’m quite sure they’d become like us. Well, because we’re shrinking in our population, our fertility ratio is about 1.29.
### A: “I actually wanted to ask you about that.”### B: ”So it’s a worrying factor. So we’ll need a constant inflow but we’re a small population, so we get the inflow and we get the inflow from the educated end of the population, both Indians and Chinese and they’ve got surplus populations. Well, I won’t say surplus but they’ve got huge population, huge numbers.”
### A: “They have people to spare, that’s for sure.”### B: “No and they’ve got fierce competition there, so when they come here, higher standards of living for the time being, better social environment with jobs.”
### A: “What would you say the parents of the second or third generation of Singaporeans and their children are not able to compete with the new people? How do you tell them?”### B: “We tell them look they have got to work harder or they’ll become stupid. It’s just that they don’t see the point of it. Why race when you can canter and save your energy and do other things? Art, ballet, sports whereas these new migrants, they spend all their time slogging away in the library or at home.”
### A: “You’re not saying that arts, sports and ballet are not important, are you?”### B: “No, I’m not saying they are not important but an inordinate amount of time is spent on extra-curricular activities.”
### A: “I told my son if you stop playing basketball, you do better on these tests but I like playing basketball. I said, well.”### B: “Well, I think it’s an inevitable evolution of any society and therefore, a regular inflow of migrants without too huge a deluge will keep that society on its toes.”
### A: “You have 25 per cent here of people who are expatriates. Is that too much?”### B: “Well, there’s a little discomfort in some areas because in some areas, they seem to congregate, the new ones. The Indians somehow find the East Coast congenial. They concentrate there, so they become very obvious. The Chinese are more scattered, not so obvious except in the food courts where they are doing the hard work because Chinese cooks from China are willing to work for $1,000 less a month and they’re just as good. So the employer looks for them.”
### A: “Well suppose, if you were the owner of a restaurant and you were going to hire a chef.”### B: “I’d choose the best chef.”
### A: “You’d chose the best chef. It wouldn’t make a difference how much you have to pay.”### B: “Well, because the customer will make up for any difference. I mean, good chefs are difficult to come by. That’s as simple as that.”
### A: “The talent.”### B: “It’s the taste buds, your nostrils, sense of colour, et cetera.”
### A: “We ate dinner at Iggys, somewhere at the Regency Hotel. He was telling us, we were eating the food and he’s sitting there watching us eat which is so disconcerting I have got to say and he was explaining how they put together each dish. It was like listening to a painter telling you.”### B: “Yes, they make it an art.”
### A: “It was an art form.”### B: “It’s not only just food. It’s presentation, it’s for the eyes, for the smell, for the texture and so on.”
### A: “You have a favourite food hawker?”### B: “I can’t go.”
### A: “Or is it really too good to say?”### B: “Well, I can’t go anymore because so many people want to shake my hands and I become a distraction, I can’t really get down to my food.”
### A: “So can you have take-out?”### B: “Well, that’s not quite the same. I tend to go to restaurants when I go out and I try restaurants with a quiet corner where I can sneak in and sneak out with my friends and not have a crowd wanting to shake hands with me.”
### A: “One of the things that I did when I came, I’ve been here about two weeks, and I know I have this interview with you. So they say what are you doing in Singapore? I say well, I’m going to interview the MM and they said, oh yeah. I said well, what would you ask him if you have a chance and people have a lot of question. So I have integrated my questions with their questions.”### B: “That’s all right.”
### A: “I thought probably you would appreciate that.”### B: “I’m 85 coming on to 86 this September. I’ve had many eggs thrown at me.
### A: One thing that really struck me, coming from an American perspective is how much people, as much as they may seem to complain, they obviously feel a sense of home here and they love this place and this is their home and whatever problems they may have with whatever, that love of it comes through which I don’t think the people really in a place like America can really appreciate that. In America, what do they know about Singapore? They know it has an exotic name, the chewing gum and the guy that got caned. That’s it. And one of my missions here is to kind of like explode certain mythologies that people might have about this place.”### B: “Well, the Americans who’ve been here and done business, stayed here especially, if you ask them, they produced, the Americans get together and help each other, so they produced a book for new commerce, new entrants. So every three, four years they change and they give out all the eccentricities of the Singapore society, where do you get good food, what you have to watch out for, where they give you a bum rap and so on. And I think high on the list is the clean environment, no graffiti, safe personally, health et cetera, clean air, clean water and clean food except for some isolated cases and a safe environment for their children. I mean, where can you go out and jog at three o’clock in the morning and nothing happens? I think you can see them. You’re staying at the marina around there?”
### A: “I’m staying at Merchant Court.”### B: “Merchant Court? Opposite?”
### A: “In fact, just next to Clarke Quay.”### B: “Yes, yes. You can. Nobody has been mugged, nobody has been raped. The crime rate is the lowest in Southeast Asia because we have a fairly disciplined population. Everybody is educated, nobody, there are a few dropouts who go in for glue sniffing and drugs and so on but we keep the numbers down and we rescue as much of them as we can. But the social delinquency rate amongst young people is at a minimum.”
### A: “One thing that struck me is how you never see a policeman. I live in New York and I see police, cops all the time.”### B: “You have got to show your presence to scare people, I mean, that I’m around. But in Singapore, we’ve got what you call neighbourhood police, that they are stationed in the neighbourhood. There’s a little neighbourhood post for each precinct and they stay there for two, three, even four years, so they get to know everybody there. So any stranger comes in they know and they become friends with the neighbourhood. So apart from the occasional round in a car, they make sure that houses are properly locked up and not left open inviting thieves.”
### A: “It’s not necessary to be driving around with the search light and all of the stuff like that. That’s the way it is in most places, really. This is a law abiding society in general.”### B: “Well, it’s the education in the schools and at home partly because we’re such a densely populated kind of buildings, all high rises, so you have got to develop habits which are considerate to your neighbours. If you have loud blaring noise going through the walls, partition walls to the neighbours, they’ll soon complain to the the neighbourhood police or somebody will come up to say will you tone your volume down because you’re waking up the neighbourhood. And they learn to accommodate each other because we don’t allow our ethnic groups to choose to live together. When they are resettled, they have got to ballot for their neighbours, so you get Malays, Indians, Chinese all shuffled around together when in the first generation, they used to sell and relocate themselves, so we have quotas and no precinct should have more than this quota of the population. So in other words, we bring about an integration by spreading them which means we spread them in the schools too.”
### A: “And it’s worked.”### B: “It’s worked. And so we have a more homogenous and more homogenous in the sense that they haven’t changed their religions, the Malays are still Muslims and they go to the mosques every Friday and they’ve slightly different habits. The influence from the Middle East has made them have head-dresses for no rhyme or reason.”
### A: “Actually, it’s an interesting question that just came up recently that I was going to ask you about. I know that you put a premium on racial harmony and religious harmony and it’s actually more or less legislated here, right?”### B: “Yes, because you can have enormous trouble once religions clash.”
### A: “Well, the two things I’ve been interested to ask you about that because I agree with you is number one, the recent rise of Evangelical Christians in Singapore.”### B: “As a result of American efforts.”
### A: “I don’t know if it’s American efforts but I went to the New Creation Church and you might as well have been in Tennessee , it was exactly the same. As soon as you walked through the door, it was exactly the same but it seemed very popular. Is that a new monkey (?) ranch in there?”### B: “No, I don’t think so. You see most Chinese here are Buddhists or Taoist ancestor worshippers, I’m one of them, so it is a tolerant society, it says whatever you want to believe in, you go ahead. And these youngsters, the educated ones, Western-educated especially, now they are all English-educated, their mother tongue is the second language. Therefore, they begin to read Western books and Western culture and so on and then the Internet. So they begin to question like in Korea that what is this mumbo-jumbo, the ancestors and so on? The dead have gone, they’re praying before this altar and asking for their blessings and then they have got groups, Christian groups who go out and evangelize. They catch them in their teens, in their late teens when they’re malleable and open to suggestions and then they become very fervent evangelists themselves. My granddaughter is one of them. She’s now 28. My wife used to tell her look, don’t go for any more of these titles, just look for MRS. It’s just around the corner, God will arrange it.”
### A: “Well, in the US, as you say, it’s import from the US or an export. These people have been very politically active.”### B: “Well, they know here that if you get politically active, you will incite the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Muslims, the Hindus and others to do similar response. We used to teach in the schools in the 1980s to get back some moral values as a result of Westernisation, Confucian culture as a subject in itself for the Chinese whereupon the Malays, the Indians and so on, they reacted. They wanted not Confucian culture, they wanted their religion, so we decided we’ll stop this. So we took the concepts of Confucianism and put it into civic subject, that society is more important than the individual, that the individual must care for the society and the interests of the society must take precedence over the individual, which is contrary to the American or Western system which says the individual trumps everything, freedom trumps everything, freedom of speech, freedom of whatever you tolerate even at the expense of making others feel inconvenient. If I don’t like abortion, you’re a doctor who aborts people, I shoot you.”
### A: “That may happen, that’s valid I think there is a rather large emphasis on individual autonomy in Western cultures that is sometimes detrimental to the larger society. But that’s the way you’re brought up, that’s what we’re used to, so it becomes….”### B: “No, it’s the philosophy of society you start with. You get all the Kantian theories and the Rousseau and so on, so gradually it evolved and then along comes Maddox and Jefferson’s the right to happiness of the society and so on. So it’s an optimistic sort of approach to life. The Chinese start off with a completely different end of the stick that all men are born the same and you have got to educate them and perfect them, otherwise, they will not improve. So they put a lot of emphasis on upbringing at home and in the schools. Well, we’re losing part of it because the Chinese schools have disappeared. We’re trying to preserve it or introduce it into the English speaking schools but the teachers now are also educated in English speaking schools and have lost the old traditions. So they’re trying to get them to go to China and see how they preserve these qualities. But we find that in the cities, they’re also changing.”
### A: “So when, don’t take this the wrong way, but when you decided to close the Chinese stream education and the college, what was the rationale behind that and do you ever regret doing that?”### B: “No, I regret not doing it faster because politically, if there’d been a violent electoral protest in the next elections because they’re so wedded to the idea that language means, culture means, life means everything. But I’m a pragmatist and you can’t make a living with the Chinese language in Singapore. The first duty of the government is to be able to feed its people, to feed its people in a little island. There’s no hinterland and no farming, you have got to trade and you have got to do something to get people buy your goods or services or get people to come here and manufacture themselves, export, ready-made markets and multinationals which I stumbled on when I went to Harvard for a term in 1968 and I said oh, this could solve my unemployment problem. So we brought the semiconductors factories here and one started, the whole herd came and we became a vast centre for production of computers and computer peripherals. But they all speak English, multinationals from Japan, Europe, whatever European country they come from, they speak English. So Chinese-educated were losing out and they were disgruntled because they got the poorer jobs and lesser pay. So eventually our own Members of Parliament were Chinese-educated and graduates from the Chinese university said okay, we have got do something. We’re ruining these people’s careers. By that time, the university was also losing its good students and getting bum students. Because they took in poor students, they graduated them on lower marks and so the degree became valueless. So when you apply for a job with a Chinese university degree, you hide your degree and produce your school certificate. So I tried to change it from within, the Education Minister was Chinese-educated and English-educated to convert it from within because most of the teachers have American PhDs. So they did their thesis in English but they’ve forgotten their English as they’ve been teaching in Chinese, so it couldn’t be done. So I merged them with the English speaking university. Great unhappiness and dislocation for the first few years but when they graduated, we put it to them do you want your old university degree or you want English university degree? All opted for the English university degree. That settled it.”
### A: “In recent events as China begins to ascend, I mean, would you?”### B: “No, no. It makes no difference. We are not going to tie ourselves to China to the extent it makes us hostage. I mean, we have many investments there because the older generation are Chinese-educated, they feel comfortable but the younger generation, they have enough Chinese who want to go there and do business and they can ramp it up if you want because once you are able to listen and speak and read without writing, you can pick it up. And not everybody wants to go there and we’ve been offering scholarships to their top universities, Beijing, Qinghua, Hudan, very few takers. They say nah, I want to go to America or Britain because they know they’re coming back here and competing in English.”
### A: “Do you think that, I mean, one question I wanted to ask you was building a country from scratch is obviously an enormous achievement, accomplishment.”### B: “No, it’s not a nation. It’s a society in transition. You need a few hundred years to build a nation.”
### A: “Oh really?”### B: “Yes.”
### A: “You have a lot of countries running around claiming they’re nations. You don’t think they really are nations?”### B: “Well, we make them say the national pledge and sing the national anthem but suppose we have a famine, will your Malay neighbour give you the last few grains of rice or will she share it with her family or fellow Muslim or vice versa?”
### A: “Depends on the person, doesn’t it? No, it doesn’t?”### B: “No, I think there comes a time, I read a book by Edward Wilson who was Harvard.”
### A: “I know who he is.”### B: “And he wrote about human beings.”
### A: “Actual past ones.”### B: “And he described the Maoris. So when two tribes were fighting, the third tribe will come and see which tribe is more our side, more genes like us and they joined that side. So it’s an instinct. Can you overcome that instinct? Edward Wilson says culture can overcome because he’s American, he knows a mix of Europeans and others. But it takes many, many years. Yes, they all do the military service, equal treatment, equal pay, equal hardship, job opportunities but we live in concentric circles. Cross marriages, yes a few, usually the parents are most unhappy. Then where do you belong, the children of the cross marriages? Sometimes they get reabsorbed in their father ethnic group and they carry the father’s surname. Sometimes, if you become a Muslim then whether you’re male or female, you join the other side. But it has happened to the margins more and more. But I think the instinct, the human instinct is still there. I mean, it’s in America.”
### A: “I live in New York which is similar to Singapore in a way.”### B: “No, I mean, I used to talk to an Indian. He was the administrator of Agra and we were driving back to Delhi. This was in the late 1970s. So he was telling me he was writing a thesis on Shakespeare, a highly-educated man. At that time, English-educated, that generation. So I said, supposing I pretend as a caste, supposing I pretend I’m a Brahmin, high caste and I invite you to dinner, he said yeah I’ll come. You give me a good dinner, I’ll come. Now supposing I want to marry your daughter? He says that’s different. The most thorough inquiries will be made. So I said supposing I tell you I came from Calcutta and how you’re going to find me. He says no, you’ve got to live somewhere in Calcutta, you must have your family, your neighbours, your friends in Calcutta, we’ll find out. Then we’ll know what caste you belong to.”
### A: “So as long as you have enough human trail people will figure out who you are.”### B: “Yes, and in Japan, they do it a different way. They exclude the Chinese and the Koreans who have been there for generations. They’re still not Japanese citizens. Some had become since the West started criticizing them because you may have a Japanese name and you speak perfect Japanese, but for promotions, where is your home village? Never mind, I come from Tokyo, Osaka or Kobe. No where is your home domicile and they will trace you there.”