No monuments for Great Men
During my first trip to Singapore, a friend showed me around. She was in tourism, so when we rode around she had something to say about everything — the road we were on; the beautiful old buildings that lined that road; some tidbits about landmarks and what-not. Where to eat, where to shop, where to take pictures and when. I admired how she seemed to have everything in organized sets in her head, and how she knew when to leave the silences between us untouched and when to interject something of interest. One thing’s for sure: Tourism as a career is not for me, but I sure was glad to have known someone in it, for they are very informative and entertaining.
On my second day in town, my friend turned to me and asked what I thought of her country. I smiled; as expected, I loved Singapore on sight. The train was efficient, the streets were clean, and people followed street lights. She returned my smile with a confused one: “We should really count our blessings no?” she just said.
That comment was a reminder for the both of us, actually. As someone who comes from a country where senators have the gall to say we’re just like Singapore already, well — I suppose that means I should be thankful we still have the freedom to say such ridiculous things out loud? Or that we have a press that is able to report such things, despite everything. Perhaps. These days, it gets harder and harder, to find blessings to count. Not a surprise, considering how it feels like the lights are going out everywhere.
But when you’re in another country, you have to try to uphold some sort of national pride, so you say things like, “I suppose we each have unique things to be thankful about,” or some similar-sounding shit. Which was exactly what I said.
“Have you ever been to Manila?” I asked. She hasn’t; she’d spent some time working in Thailand’s tourism sector, and had been to Europe and Australia on vacation with her sons, but never the Philippines. “You should try our beaches — have you heard of Palawan?”
“Quite famous,” she just said, adding that she was more a hiking sort of person.
“Oh, we have those too — go North,” I said, telling her of friends who organized hikes and joined mountaineering groups on weekends. I told her I wasn’t too fond of mountains because I was scared of heights.
“So we won’t be taking those cable cars then?” she teased. I laughed, shuddering.
At one point, we came around to discussing their beloved leader, Lee Kuan Yew. We’d been admiring how they had managed to restore their old buildings and repurpose them — their century-old Old Supreme Court and City Hall buildings, for example, now houses National Gallery Singapore, which is a repository of Southeast Asian art (including works from the Philippines) and many hotels and restaurants are, in fact, housed in restored buildings. Or, you know, an old Church. (“My countrymen would be livid,” I said, “if anyone ever decided to turn old church grounds into a restaurant row.”)
“But not LKY’s house,” she said, much to my confusion. “Right now, his daughter the doctor is living there, but he explicitly said that after she passes, that house is to be demolished.”
“Demolished?” I asked. “Would be a nice museum, don’t you think?”
“He doesn’t want that,” she said. “He wants no monuments or statues, nothing named after him.” As a matter of fact, she said, there’s only one establishment named after Lee Kuan Yew, and it’s a governance school. “He was a great man — Singapore will remember him for many different things, for his legacy. Not monuments.”
Coming from a country where even barangay kagawads pounce on the chance to put their names on the smallest projects like waiting sheds or bulletin boards — well, I really had to take a long, hard pause.
For some reason, supporters of the current administration have always wanted to draw a parallel between the sitting president and the late great Singapore leader, although perhaps this connection is getting harder and harder to make, what with the President even going so far as saying that he is, in fact, no statesman — which is definitely among the first few words that come to mind when anyone mentions Lee Kuan Yew’s name, to begin with.
A recent opinion piece at the Singapore newspaper Straits Times has also readily disputed this claim, with Global Affairs associate editor Ravi Velloor writing that such analogy between the two leaders “would have been interesting, except that it is laughably inappropriate.”
Velloor was referencing a piece penned by economics professor Emmanuel Lopez of the University of Santo Tomas, which argued that the sitting president’s strategy “was rather like Mr Lee’s own in the initial years, when he worked strenuously to rid the island state of corruption and crime.”
“Mr. Lee, for one thing, tough as he was on crime, was not a man to have a person’s life taken away without absolute attention to due process,” writes Velloor. “Nor would he, favourable arbitral ruling in hand, ever back away from pressing his principled claim to national territory for the elusive promise of a few bags of silver in development aid.”
With deaths in the drug war mounting and already breaching the 3,000-mark, and the President favoring a “soft landing” approach to China where the South China Sea conflict is concerned, we can suppose that a rightful comparison to Mr. Lee is already out of the question.
Even then, Lee Kuan Yew who? The President prefers to be likened to the Fuhrer, anyway.
