The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew

by Lee Kuan Yew

To learn a new language in my late 30s, while snowed under by papers stamped Immediate, Urgent, Secret, Top Secret, and by files with huge red crosses printed on their covers and marked Cicero (for addressee’s eyes only), required almost superhuman concentration and effort. I could not have done it without some compelling motivation. When I started, it was, as the Chinese proverb goes, as difficult as lifting the tripod brass urn in front of a temple. Even while I was being driven to meetings, I mumbled to myself in the car, rehearsing new phrases. Sometimes, my teacher would be at my side to correct my mistakes immediately after my first speech and before I made my next. Every spare moment, I spent revising to get the sounds right, memorising new words to get them embedded in my mind so that I could roll them off my tongue without looking at the script. I had to learn quickly. By sheer practice and repetition over the next few months, speaking without notes, making mistakes and correcting them again and again, I finally mastered the dialect and could make a half-hour speech without groping for words and phrases or anxiously searching for them in my underlined script. The crowd watched all this and I won their respect. When I started, I was fumbling, awkward, almost comic. But here I was in front of them, suddenly able to express myself fluently in their dialect. I may have been unidiomatic, even ungrammatical, but there was no mistaking my meaning, delivered with vigour, ...