I had known that a frustrated Ong Eng Guan was plotting with some of the assemblymen, but paid little heed because I was confident he could never get a majority to support him. But he had become reckless. If he could not be in power, he would ruin us even if the MCP benefited. At a party conference in June 1960, his Hong Lim branch introduced 16 resolutions, four of them designed to win him communist support.
In order to dispel my suspicions, Lim Chin Siong and his comrades had earlier protested that they would have no truck with Ong. The Trade Union Congress had issued a statement that although the PAP had made mistakes, they would not support him. But I believed it was not beyond them to have got hold of his close friends to put him up to this. The resolutions called for a more anti-colonial policy, the immediate release of all detainees, and immediate constitutional revision. In other words, internal self-government was not good enough. So Ong, too, wanted independence. We were set for a showdown. He was isolated in the party, and after two days of argument, the conference suspended him and two assemblymen who backed him – S.V. Lingam and Ng Teng Kian, a Chinese-speaking Hokkien like Ong. All three men then crossed the floor of the Assembly to sit with the opposition.
Ong was restive. He had lost his star status and was not making the headlines. He therefore set out to attract attention by doing the unexpected and the eye-catching. In September, he tabled a motion calling on the prime minister to fight in the Internal Security Council for the unconditional release of all political detainees. This could not help him. Once again, it would only help the communists although they distrusted and despised him. But it would embarrass the government. I was away in Sarawak, so Chin Chye moved an amendment to point out that it was unlikely that the Federation government, which had the deciding vote in the Internal Security Council, would agree to release persons who it was convinced were promoting the cause of the MCP. And since it was the government’s business to advance the welfare of the people of Singapore through merger with the Federation, it had no intention of going against the Federation’s stand.
Ong’s strategy had been to show us up as lackeys of the imperialists, and he now took this a step further. In October, he said George Thomson, director of Information Services, was now my guide and philosopher; I was “a ventriloquist’s dummy and George Thomson the ventriloquist”. He wanted to diminish my standing with the Chinese-speaking by portraying me as the mouthpiece of a colonial speechwriter and mentor. He alleged that Val Meadows, whose office he had demolished, and Alan Blades, the commissioner of police, were similarly manipulating me. When I challenged him to repeat these statements outside the Assembly, he kept silent.
Instead, at the next Assembly meeting in December, he accused me of nepotism, claiming that I had appointed Kwa Soon Chuan as deputy commissioner of the Inland Revenue Department because he was my brother-in-law. Again, I asked him to repeat what he had said outside Parliament. When he did not do so, Chin Chye, as leader of the House, introduced a motion to condemn him for his dishonourable conduct and to suspend him until such time as he apologised to the Assembly. Ong tabled a motion to claim that the Assembly had no power to condemn a Member. He challenged me to resign with him and stand in by-elections in our respective constituencies, renewed his charges against the PAP, and said that the Public Service Commission was packed with PAP supporters. He agreed to an investigation of these charges by a committee of the whole House, but before the Assembly met on the day fixed for it, he resigned his seat. We announced that a commission of inquiry would be formed with a high court judge as chairman to investigate his allegations, and that after the report had been placed before the House and debated, a by-election would be held in Hong Lim.
On 3 January 1961, Mr Justice F.A. Chua was appointed to head the commission, which held ten sittings between 17 January and 1 February. My main objective in the inquiry was to press him to substantiate all the charges he had made against me. Chua’s report, submitted in February, found that there was no truth at all in any of the allegations, that they were groundless and reckless, and that Ong was “not a person to be believed”. We debated it for two days in the Assembly and condemned Ong for his dishonourable conduct. I had exposed him as a liar and a petty, vicious person. I hoped that this would shake his hold on the Chinese-speaking in Hong Lim. I could not have been more wrong.
We had a long election campaign of nine weeks from 11 March to 29 April. We fielded Jek Yeun Thong, the newspaper reporter who had written my first speech in Mandarin.
After the first two street meetings in Hong Lim, however, we knew that the ground was cold. Ong’s personal popularity had not been dented. He had done the people too many favours by giving whole streets away to hawkers. He had put up standpipes and street lamps and talked about distributing taxi licences freely. The people were willing to overlook his lies and many other failings. They were resentful because we had not given immigration permits to their relatives in China, which he now raised as an issue, although he had never done this when he was a minister. He knew that if we had agreed to do so, it would have caused enormous trouble with the other races, even with the English-educated Chinese, and would certainly have antagonised the leaders in Malaya. The voters were not interested in his four pro-communist resolutions. We discovered all this as we slogged it out. I went around Hong Lim, an overcrowded constituency in the heart of Chinatown, up and down the rickety wooden stairs of dilapidated shophouses to canvass in almost all of them, sometimes visiting the same premises twice or even three times. The people were polite but not responsive. We tried hard, but we knew that they were too committed to Ong. And we had to reckon with Lim Chin Siong, who had been unhappy because we had been changing the law to give the government better control over the pro-communist unions and cultural associations.
Lim Chin Siong wanted to eliminate the Internal Security Council because he knew that if he went beyond certain limits, it would act, and if it ordered the arrest and detention of the communist leaders, the Singapore government could not be held responsible and be stigmatised a colonial stooge. For, this time, the Malayan government representative with the casting vote, not a British governor, would be pulling the trigger. When we refused to budge on the issue, Lim addressed a meeting of a thousand trade unionists at the Victoria Memorial Hall during the campaign along these lines and quietly passed the word around in Hong Lim not to support the PAP. When the votes were counted, Ong had defeated our candidate by 7,747 to 2,820.
This was a stinging defeat, but I was determined to fight on. “The results,” I said, “make it imperative that we clearly establish our position of confidence.”
One consolation from this gruelling experience was that I gained in confidence as a Hokkien speaker. With the suspension of Ong in June 1960, we had lost our only effective Hokkien speaker to match Lim Chin Siong. Keng Swee suggested that I myself should make the effort to replace him, rather than groom another man who might again give us trouble. So I started to learn the dialect, snatching an hour either at lunchtime or in the evening, three, often five times a week. I had two good tutors, both from our radio station, who first had to teach me a whole new Romanised script to capture the Hokkien pronunciation of Chinese characters. Hokkien is not at all like Mandarin; it has seven tones instead of four, and uses different word combinations for verbs, nouns, and adjectives. But they are both forms of Chinese, and fortunately my Mandarin had reached a sufficiently advanced level for me to go into it, not from the basement but from the second or third floor of a 25-storey building. Nevertheless, the first time I made a Hokkien speech in Hong Lim, the children in the crowd laughed at my mistakes – wrong sounds, wrong tones, wrong sentence structure, wrong almost everything. But I could not afford to be shy or embarrassed. It was a matter of life and death. It was not just a question of fighting Ong. I was preparing for the inevitable showdown with Lim Chin Siong and the communists. I would lose by default if I could not speak the dialect well enough to get my views across to the uneducated and poorly educated Chinese who were then the majority but whom I could not reach with Mandarin. By the end of the campaign and after innumerable speeches, I spoke understandable Hokkien.
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, feeling and conviction as I argued, cajoled, warned, and finally moved some of them to go with me.
I had become my own dialect communicator. The PAP did not have a Lim Chin Siong or an Ong Eng Guan, both native Hokkien speakers. People knew I started from zero in 1961 and so had no doubts about my determination and stamina. I am Hakka, and Hakkas as a minority group living among speakers of other dialects are supposed to be great linguists. This added to the myth. They thought it was natural for me to learn languages easily. But Choo knew I sweated blood to master Hokkien.
Soon after the setback in Hong Lim, we were faced with another. About nine days before polling for Hong Lim, our assemblyman for Anson, Baharuddin bin Mohamed Ariff, died of a heart attack. He was a young Malay in his early 30s, a journalist in the Utusan Melayu who had been a PAP city councillor, energetic, intelligent and promising. It was a shock, and it meant another by-election. I knew the communists would now try to chase us from pillar to post. They would see Hong Lim as a sign that the Chinese-educated we had won over in the general election were in fact more Ong’s supporters than ours, and that we English-educated leaders did not have a real following among the Hokkien-speaking masses.
That May Day, as I went to the Trade Union Congress rally at the Jalan Besar Stadium, I decided to dig my toes in. I quoted Lim Chin Siong’s communist phrase, “Seek concord, maintain differences”, a neat four-character slogan Mao Zedong had often used when he called for a united front on specific issues. To make clear that the PAP was not going to demand the abolition of the Internal Security Council when the constitution was revised in 1963, I said, “Seek concord if you will, but on the PAP stand, otherwise maintain your differences and seek no concord if you find that the PAP is against your interests.” We had believed that key questions on constitutional change could be left open until 1963, but because of the developments before and during the Hong Lim by-election, I decided to tackle them early.
A few days later, a Chinese girl courier came to see Choo in the office with a letter for me. The same courier had earlier that year passed me a note from the Plen, asking me to indicate the pseudonym I would use for him when I communicated with him. I had decided on his surname “Fang” and as first names, “Ping An”, meaning “peace and tranquillity”. This time he asked if I would meet him, and if so, to ring up the number of the Rochor Road bicycle shop.
I hesitated. The last time we met I was just an assemblyman. Now I was the prime minister. If I was discovered consorting with the enemy, it would be most embarrassing. And I would be going to a meeting at some secret location alone. If I was a threat to their scheme of things, the communists could quietly dispose of me. I decided to take a calculated risk to know what he had in mind. It was also risky for him. I might go to the meeting having first tipped off the police. They might ambush him. But by choosing a pseudonym embodying his surname, I had signalled that I knew who he was, the brother of the PAP assemblywoman Fung Yin Ching. If I wanted to have him arrested, I would not have given this away, and that should reassure him that I was on the level. I had to take a chance that he, too, was on the level and would not take advantage of my vulnerable position.
When I phoned, I recognised the voice that answered as that of the person who had made the first contact with me in 1958. We agreed on the same rendezvous, that I look for a girl in pigtails walking along Keng Lee Road away from Newton Circus at 8 pm on 11 May 1961. I again used my father’s little green Morris Minor and picked her up. The Plen might have arranged for my car to be tailed to make sure that nobody followed us, but I did not look into the rear-view mirror in case she reported it and so aroused suspicion and distrust. After taking a roundabout route, we ended up in St Michael’s Estate, a half-built complex of Housing and Development Board flats off Serangoon Road. The capability and ingenuity of the communist organisation won my admiration. Nobody would be implicated in this meeting but the HDB. I walked up two flights of stairs of an uncompleted block in darkness. Construction materials still littered the place, and there was no electricity or water. When I entered the candlelit room the girl indicated, the Plen was already waiting. It was furnished only with two armchairs and a table standing between them. He knew I was a beer drinker, and provided warm Anchor beer. He opened a bottle, poured me a mug, and topped up his own. He drank first. I hoped I did not show any hesitation before I drank mine. We had to trust each other to talk at all.
He looked leaner, more gaunt than when we last met over two years ago. I asked him how he was. He said it was a hard life on the run, very wearing. I said he did not show it, he looked fine. No, he felt it. He thanked me for helping his sister. (She had been scalded as a child and had her legs so badly scarred that she always wore trousers. In 1960, Choo had arranged for Yeoh Ghim Seng, a professor of surgery and a friend from my London days, to give her a skin graft.) When we returned to the subject of politics, there was anxiety in his voice. He said that I should come around quickly, meaning that if I did not accept his point of view we would find ourselves under attack. As in earlier meetings, I assumed an air of calm. I was not anxious to do a deal with him; I was willing to be conciliatory but would make no commitment. But I was interested to know what he wanted to tell me.
We had a four-hour session, from 8:15 to past midnight, ranging over many subjects. But he would repeatedly come back to “giving the people their democratic rights, their cultural freedom, freer imports of books from China and freer immigration permits” – in short, more opportunities for communist activities, for communist expansion. He wanted us to work together, not for independence or the reversion of British bases – they could have them for a few years – but for the abolition of the Internal Security Council.
He was concerned about my talk of the PAP government throwing in its hand and wanted to know my intentions. I said if I concluded that the present situation would only worsen in the coming years, waiting for the five-year term to end would make no sense. The PAP would fail. And I would only go on if there was a prospect of its policies succeeding. I explained that much depended on the Federation agreeing to a common market so that there would be a better chance for us to industrialise and so create more jobs. He asked whether I was expecting to get merger from the Tunku soon. I replied that there was no imminent likelihood of it. The Tunku had his face set against Singapore. We were too Chinese and the Chinese were too pro-communist.
He pressed me again and again to agree that the immediate target for the 1963 constitutional talks should be the abolition of the Internal Security Council. After observing his body language, his tone of voice, and his keenness to have the PAP carry on, but on his terms, I would have been a fool to go along with him. Put starkly, he wanted to commit us to giving more opportunities to the communists to expand their united front from 1961 to 1963, and then to get the Internal Security Council abolished whatever else the British might not concede.
I decided there was little to be gained by prevarication. I was in government. If I agreed with him now, he would see from my subsequent actions that I had been lying. I did not give him a direct “no”, but said it was best for him to assume that the PAP would do what it had publicly stated it would do. In other words, my public statements still expressed my policies for the future. We parted with a handshake. He showed no rancour or animosity. He may have been surprised that I refused to commit myself, when I could have said what was expedient and later gone back on my word.
At the time I felt that he did not fully understand the situation, that so long as the British had not given Singapore independence, they had the power to revoke the constitution. As long as sovereignty and the bases remained in British hands, it was foolish of him to believe he could get the Internal Security Council abolished and build up communist strength in Singapore in order to undermine the Federation. He had got it the wrong way around. The communists could never control Singapore without first controlling Malaya, yet he hoped to use Singapore to overturn the government in Kuala Lumpur. How could he imagine the British would allow that? In fact, I had told Selkirk at an Internal Security Council meeting that the communists wanted by whatever means to make the island a base from which to liberate the whole of the Federation, and they were out to encourage Chinese chauvinism by playing on Chinese fears of Malay domination if there were merger.
I had told Selkirk and Moore that the communists believed there was no need to take action against the British bases for the present since they could easily be rendered useless in time of war. They also disregarded the economic arguments in favour of merger and believed that, as with Cuba and the Russians, they could count on massive Chinese aid. If Singapore did not join the Federation soon, therefore, the situation might get out of hand, but if a proposal for merger could be put to the people within nine months to a year, it would probably be carried. After that, it might be too late. I had emphasised to Moore that we were at a critical juncture, and if the British allowed the communists to believe there could be a pro-communist Singapore, they would be inviting trouble both for Singapore and Malaya. I was absolutely certain that even if the British were to accept the build-up initially, they would suspend the constitution as soon as things got out of hand. There would be riots, violence and bloodshed, and the communists would be quelled by British troops still on the island as of sovereign right.
But it was not my business to spell this out for the Plen.