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Special report

Life as a youth in Singapore was real tough
My earliest and most vivid recollection is of being held by my ears over a well in the compound of a house where my family was then living, at what is now Tembeling Road in Singapore. I was about 4 years old.

I had been mischievous and had messed up an expensive jar of my father's 4711 pale green scented brilliantine. My father had a violent temper, but that evening his rage went through the roof. He took me by the scruff of the neck from the house to this well and held me over it. How could my ears have been so tough that they were not ripped off, dropping me into that well? Fifty years later, in the 1970s, I read in the Scientific American an article explaining how pain and shock released neuropeptides in the brain, stamping the new experience into the brain cells and thus ensuring that the experience would be remembered for a long time afterwards.

I was born in Singapore on 16 September 1923, in a large two-storey bungalow at 92 Kampong Java Road. My mother, Chua Jim Neo, was then 16 years old. My father, Lee Chin Koon, was 20. Their parents had arranged the marriage a year previously. Both families must have thought it an excellent match, for they later married my father's younger sister to my mother's younger brother.

My father had been brought up a rich man's son. He used to boast to us that, when he was young, his father allowed him a limitless account at Robinsons and John Little, the two top department stores in Raffles Place, where he could charge to this account any suit or other items he fancied. He was educated in English at St. Joseph's Institution, a Catholic Mission School founded by the De La Salle Brothers in 1852. He said he completed his Junior School Certificate, after which he ended his formal education - to his and my mother's eternal regret. Being without a profession, he could only get a job as a storekeeper with the Shell Oil Company when the fortunes of both families were destroyed in the Great Depression.

My family history in Singapore began with my paternal great-grandfather, Lee Bok Boon, a Hakka. The Hakkas are Han Chinese from the northern and central plains of China who migrated to Fujian, Guangdong and other provinces in the south some 700 to 1,000 years ago, and as late comers were only able to squeeze themselves into the less fertile and more hilly areas unoccupied by the local inhabitants. According to the inscription on the tombstone on his grave behind the house he built in China, Lee Bok Boon was born in 1846 in the village of Tangxi in the Dabu prefecture of Guangdong. He had migrated to Singapore on a Chinese junk. Little is known of him after that until 1870,when he married a Chinese girl, Seow Huan Neo, born in Singapore to a Hakka shopkeeper.

In 1882 he decided that he had made enough money to return to his ancestral village in China, build himself a large house, and set himself up as local gentry. His wife, however, did not want to leave her family in Singapore and go to some place she had never seen. According to my grandfather, who was then about ten, the children and their mother went into hiding with her family in Ah Hood Road. Lee Bok Boon went back to China alone. There he married again, built his large house, and duly bought a minor mandarinate. He had a portrait done of himself in mandarin robes, which he sent to Singapore, together with another painting of an impressive-looking Chinese traditional-style house complete with courtyard and grey-tiled roofs. The painting of the house has been lost, but the portrait of my great-grandfather still exists.

My grandfather, Lee Hoon Leong - whom I addressed as Kung or "grandfather" in Chinese - was born in Singapore in 1871, and according to my father was educated at Raffles Institution up to standard V, which would be today's lower secondary school. He himself told me he worked as a dispenser (an unqualified pharmacist) when he left school, but after a few years became a purser on board a steamer plying between Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. The ship was part of a fleet belonging to the Heap Eng Moh Shipping Line, which was owned by the Chinese millionaire sugar king of Java, Oei Tiong Ham.

In between his travels he married my grandmother, Ko Liem Nio, in Semarang, a city in central Java. There is a document in Dutch, dated 25 March 1899, issued by the Orphan's Court in Semarang, giving consent to Ko Liem Nio, age 16, to marry Lee Hoon Leong, age 26.

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