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The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and Its Pasts PDF

314 Pages·2008·14.847 MB·English
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The Scripting Of A National History Singapore and Its Pasts Hong Kong University Press thanks Xu Bing for writing the Press's name in his Square Word Calligraphy for the covers of its books. For further information, see p. iv. This book is dedicated to Hui Chi and Denick S.T.Goh Magdalene Chai, Nicholas Huang and Anthony Huang The Scripting O f A National History Singapore and Its Pasts Hong Lysa and Huang JianH * * * * ± K *fc Hong Kong University Press Hong Kong University Pitn 14/F Hing Wai Centre 7 Tin Wan Fraya Road Aberdeen Hong Kong C Hong Kong University Press 2008 ISBN 978-962*209*883-1 All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Secure On-line Ordering http://wwwiikupcess.org British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this hook is available Dorn the British Library. Printed and hound by Liang Yu Priming Factory Ltd., in Hong Kong. China nr Hong Kong University Press is honoured that Xu Bing, whose art explores the complex themes of language across cultures, has written the Press's name in his Square Word Calligraphy. This signals our commitment to cross-cultural thinking and the distinctive nature of our English-language hooks published in China. w “At Erst glance. Square Word Calligraphy appears to he nothing more unusual than Chinese characters, hut in fact it is a new way of rendering English words in the format of a square so they resemble Chinese characters. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read Square word Calligraphy but cannot Western viewers, however are surprised to find they can lead it Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed.'* — Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing Contents Foreword ix List of Photographs xiii Abbreviations xv Acknowledgements xvii Introduction: Beginning of History 1 The road to ’in-dcpcndcncc’ 3 Light at the end of the tunnel 4 Singapore's postcolonial history 7 Scripting Singapore's past 9 PARTI SCRIPTURE 11 1. New Testament: Singapore and Its Tensed Puts 13 A Martian’s view of Singapore history 14 Pre-tense: Revolutionary sons of Raffles IS A tensed past: Plots uncovered 18 The tensed present: The plot thickens 21 Racing towards the inevitable 22 Quintessential^ Singapore: Essentially Chinese 27 Presenting the past 29 2. Apotheosis: The Lee Kuan Yew Story as Singapore's History 31 Bare code on Lee Kuan Yew: ‘Simultaneously brilliant and 33 hopelessly erroneous’ In life and death: Reading maketh a man 36 Setting the record: Right from the start 38 The family first: The First Family 40 ii Contents 3. Sermon: Rj^jaratnara and Devan Nair as High Priests 45 The template of Singapore history 48 ‘From someone who knows. . (Joe Yeoh) SI Genesis and the Revelation 52 The final verdict: Lee Kuan Yew and Rajaralnam 56 The final verdict: Lee Kuan Yew and C. V. Devan Nair 59 4. Liturgy: Telling Singapore’s Past through Oral History 65 Singapore's Oral History Centre 65 What is an oral historian? 67 The common voice 69 The singer and the song 72 PART II SINGAPORE’S CHINESE DILEMMA 75 5. Political Vanguard: PAP Leaders of the Chinese-Speaking 79 Community Profiling the PAP Leaders 79 Marching to the battle front 82 Fighting for a Malayan vision 8S Battles over merger and beyond 88 Campaigning for a ‘Malaysian Malaysia' 94 Holding the fort: Discourse on ‘East versus West’ 96 Extending the discourse to ‘generational differences' 99 Changing of the guards: Language of displacement 101 Bridging the gap 107 6. Language Fault lines: The Wang Gungwu Report 109 on Nanyang University Setting the stage for another university review 110 Essence of the report and its immediate aftermath 114 ‘Being Malayan': A bridge too far 119 Position of the Chinese language: Trilingualism or bilingualism? 126 Accusations of Anglicisation 128 Lamentations 132 7. Student Politkal Activism: Articulation, Contestation 137 and Omission Highlights of student politics. 1950s-1980s 137 Problcmatising the articulation of a binary world: Chinese vs. 139 English-educated activists Contesting for a place in history books: Memories and archives 143 Contents vii Interrogating through allegory: Novels and theatres 152 Winning over the post-1965 generation: Political apathy and the 157 omission ol history pAirrm con/scripting Singapore's national 163 HEROES 8. Toying with Pandora’s Box: The Scripting of Singapore’s 165 National Heroes The heroic enterprise: From negating history to spotting heroes 167 Interim heroes, mutating pasts 169 Simply a war heroine 174 A national treasure: Revealing or reiterating the silences? 175 Swan song of a heroic ghost? 178 9. Imagining a Big Singapore: Positioning the Sun Yal Sen 181 Nanyang Memorial Hall Sun eclipsed: The Villa in the orbit of China’s politics 182 Land of the rising Sun: Reorienting history 185 Singapore’s essential Sun: Reaching high noon with China as 188 the mega-market Sun’s imaginative sons: Opening Windows 2000 191 Singapore’s Sun shrine: Creative replicas on display 195 Sun screened: Alternative discourse from the theatre 199 ’Dike in all the sunlight and love the wind and rain’ 203 10. Conscripting Chinese Diasporic Culture into National Identity: 205 Tuning of the Tiger Balm Gardens From colony to nation-state: The importance of being ’Chinese’ 205 The Villa that Aw built: The tiger and his habitat 208 The Villa post-Aw Boon Haw: The loss of aura 213 Cultures plebeian and ’imperial’: In search of Chinese nativity 215 Enter (and exit) the dragon: Death of a schizophrenic Disney 219 theme park Defenders and detractors: A debate on culture and politics 222 Haw Par Villa reloaded: Redefining Singapore’s national identity 227 Conclusion: No End to History 231 Notes 235 Selected Bibliography 283 Index 293 Foreword The day Singapore« a small island at the tip of peninsula Malaya, became an independent state can be marked precisely. 9 August 1963. It was an ignoble birth. The local understanding is that *we, Singaporeans* were kicked out. after three years of difficult membership in the federation of Malaysia. Its newly* minted citizens were either descendants of or poor immigrants themselves who had flocked to the British colony in search of better material life. This past was not something that could be dusted off and valorised at the point of independence. Meanwhile, there was the pressing need to survive as a city-state. Under the People’s Action Party government. Singaporeans immediately ploughed into surviving the future with frenzy. Everything that stood in the way of economic development was removed without any sentimentality, as creative destruction necessitated by capitalist development History was of little concern. The past is the past. By the end of the twentieth century 'success* has become part of the identity and boast of the island-nation and its people. But something is amiss. As early as the mid- 1970s, the PAP government realised that individuals who achieve or fail by their own effort arc often devoid of sense of responsibility to the well­ being of fellow citizens and to the 'nation* as a community. Obviously, economic development alone does not build a 'nation*. A nation needs ideological underpinnings to provide moral bearing for its citizens. Among other possible ideological gestures, an obvious starting point is to 'explain* how Singapore gets to its First World economy in a world where postcolonial societies flounder in downward spirals into failures. Such an explanation requires the recuperation of'history' as moral lessons to remind the old and instil in the young the 'spirit* of the struggles for the hard-won present. Thus, from the start, official 'national* history was to be written from the economically successful present back to the ignoble beginnings. x Foreword For tbe purpose of mass education, the official national history has to be kept simple: a linear narrative from its founding as a trading post for the East India Company by Stamford Raffles in 1819 through the process of decolonisation to the ascendancy of the PAP and its unending rule, since winning the 1959 general election as a self-governing legislature. Along the way, ‘communists’, ‘communalists’ or ‘racial chauvinists' and other enemies of the state had to be and were successfully destroyed by the stout and triumphal PAP leaders, before the present success is achieved. This narrative has been taught at every level of education, repeated by PAP politicians at every commemorative occasioo and built into mass entertainment at every opportunity. Not surprisingly, most Singaporeans find the simple narrative‘tedious’and‘boring’. This response is worrying. Apparently, repetitions have made this narrative accepted ‘everyday knowledge', as ‘common sense’, the highest achievement of an ideology. In their disdain. Singaporeans have not paid sufficient attention to what went into the writing of this anything but ‘simple’ history. This ‘simplicity* has now been ‘exploded’ by Hong Lysa and Huang Jianli, two Singaporean historians in this collection of essays in which they have unveiled the handiwork of various ideologues, both within the fturty and without: the self-proclaimed Party propagandist, Rajaratnam’s fixing of Singapore’s beginning with Raffles so as to suppress the possible lengthening of history back to those of China, India and Southeast Asia, lest racial disharmony results from this longer history of its people: Party-anointed popular historian Dennis Blood worth’s strategic flattening of the complex and changing political positions of Chinese-educated members of the PAP founding generation into something close to persistent ‘Chinese’ chauvinism; in view of tbe rise of the People’s Republic of China's economic power. George Yeo’s attempt to insert Singapore into the larger history of China through re-reading of the Chinese immigrants' participation in revolutionary Chinese politics, particularly through the figure of Sun Yat Sen, a politically relatively ‘safe’ figure for aO Chinese and at a more abstract level, the rewriting of the cultural interests of the earlier generations of Singapore’s ethnic population, so obviously present in the building of Nanyang University, into their generosity of public spiritedness, so valuable and necessary for the making of Singapore as a ‘nation* and finally, the work that Lee Kuan Yew's memoir does to pull it altogether. The essays in this volume are historiographic works of ‘how’ what we might call the ‘official’ history of Singapore has been written. However, as always, while the concern of historiography is methodological, its effect is unavoidably ideological and political. In uncovering the hands and tbe intellectual strategies of its ideologically-interested writers, these essays constitute a critique of this very official history, leaving the ‘national* history

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