Extracted from: The Asian Insider: Unconventional Wisdom for Asian
Business by Michael Backman
It was the babas who were the framers of Singapore’s rules and
institutions.
Many of Singapore’s most prominent Chinese have baba
backgrounds.
Lee Kuan Yew, who incidentally became prime minister of Singapore
when
aged just 35, is the most obvious example. He claims a
Hakka heritage, although his upbringing was that of a baba. At
home, he
spoke English with his parents and Baba Malay to his
grandparents.
‘Mandarin was totally alien to me, and unconnected with my life,’
Lee has
said of his childhood.
But then that was true of other Chinese dialects too.
Lee’s paternal great grandfather was a Hakka born in China. He
married
a local Hakka girl. His paternal grandfather was locally born.
Lee
describes him as an ‘Anglophile’. He married a Semarang-born
Chinese.
His maternal grandfather was a Hokkien from Malacca. His
maternal
grandmother was a Pontianak-born Chinese who spoke Hakka and
Malay.
They were a wealthy Straits family. Their daughter – Lee’s mother –
was
married in 1922 at the age of 15. Lee says in his autobiography
that part of
her dowry included a little slave girl whose duty it was to help
bathe and
dress her.
And when Lee himself married, he chose a local nonya woman,
Kwa Geok Choo, whose father was a Java-born Chinese and mother was
a
Straits-born Chinese, ‘like my own mother’, says Lee.
Lee’s mother, Lee Chin Koon, was a highly respected authority
on
nonya/baba cuisine. She wrote a book on the subject, Mrs Lee’s
Cookbook
first published in 1974.
It was edited by her Hawaiian-born
daughter-in-law Pamelia Lee, who married Lee Kuan Yew’s brother
Lee
Suan Yew. The preface was written by Wee Kim Wee, another baba,
and
in fact, her cousin. Wee served as the high commissioner to
Malaysia
(1973–80) and in 1985 was appointed president of Singapore.
Wee’s
wife is a nonya and the two have shown significant interest in
baba
history and culture.
Those who doubt Lee Kuan Yew’s baba origins (and some do)
should
consider the opening lines of his mother’s cookbook:
"We Straits-born Chinese are known as the Peranakan – the ladies
are called
nonyas while the men are called babas. We are the descendants of
the early
Chinese in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Malacca and Singapore
… Malay
influence, because of mingling and intermarriage, has produced a
unique
Peranakan culture and set of customs distinct from those of the
Chinese
community who came from China."
Learning to be Chinese
For Lee, Chineseness was something of an acquired skill and later a
political
necessity. He was not brought up as a Chinese with a focus on
China,
but as a baba who looked to England. His language, food and culture
were
not that of a Chinese. And he followed the conventional career path
of a
baba. Not for him shopkeeping or trading. He went to London to
study
law. And so Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore became Harry Lee of
Fitzwilliam
College, Cambridge. His father had given him and two of his
brothers
English as well as Chinese names.
Did Lee run Singapore as a piece of Asia mired in Chinese ways?
No.
He ran it in a manner to which a British colonial administrator
would have
aspired. He ran it as a baba.
Goh Keng Swee, that other great framer of Singapore’s
institutions,
who rose to become finance minister and deputy prime minister, was
the
epitome of the baba elite. Goh was born in 1918 in Malacca, the
epicentre
of baba culture, into a local baba family. His parents were
Englishoriented
Chinese Methodists. His cousin, also a Malacca baba, was Tan
Siew Sin, who became Malaysia’s first finance minister.
Goh attended the Anglo-Chinese School and Raffles College in
Singapore
– standard schooling for a baba son. He then joined the colonial
Civil
Service in Singapore. After the war he decided to study in London
and so
it was to the London School of Economics that he went. Goh returned
to
Singapore, then returned to the LSE to complete a PhD and then went
back
to Singapore to resume a life in public service. He was
instrumental in
setting up many of Singapore’s most well-known government bodies:
the
Economic Development Board, the Development Bank of Singapore,
the
Housing and Development Board (HDB) and the Jurong Industrial
Estate.
It was all about development – but development that proceeded
along
structured and paternalistic lines.
It was also Goh’s Victorian attitudes on savings and frugal
government
spending that has given Singapore the huge external reserves that
it has
today. And it was at Goh’s instigation that the Singapore
Symphony
Orchestra was established. No noisy, clanging Chinese opera for
the
babas. Their musical tastes were far more restrained.
I had the opportunity to meet with Goh at his office at the
Singapore
Totaliser Board in 1994. As he entered the room with an
outstretched hand,
my immediate impression was that he looked more Malay than
Chinese.
He was charming and welcoming, his voice was deep and his
accent
English upper class. He wore a pinstripe suit. As a fifth and sixth
generation
Australian with little interest in and knowledge of England at the
time,
could it be that I was more of the region than him?
We talked about Singapore’s then plans to invest heavily in China.
Goh
was not a fan. ‘A lot of Singaporeans will lose their shirts in
China’, he’d
said. China was messy, its legal system too poor and the going
would be
tough. Singaporeans were not used to operating in such an
environment,
Goh had said. Singaporeans might have been descended from China
but
the ways and means of China were no longer theirs. The babas had
seen
to that.
Another influential baba was Lim Kim San. He was born to a
wealthy
local family and as a fourth generation Straits-born Chinese did
not speak
Chinese at home but Malay. In 1960, he became chairman of the
HDB
where he made a remarkable contribution in a short time. He was
appointed
minister for national development in 1963. Later, he headed many
other
ministries in successive Peoples Action Party (PAP) governments. He
was
appointed executive chairman of Singapore Press Holdings in 1988
and
then became chairman of Singapore’s Presidential Board of
Advisors.
Long-term PAP chairman Toh Chin Chye is another of the old
guard
with a baba background. His first language was not Hokkien, Teochiu
or
Hakka, but English. With Goh, Lee and Sinnathamby Rajaratnam,
Toh
formed the inner core that ran Singapore from 1959 until about the
mid1970s
when his influence waned.
And so this is the coterie that designed
and ran Singapore – three babas and a Jaffna Tamil.
Current Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Tony Tan is
a
prominent second generation politician with a baba background. The
other
deputy prime minister is of course Lee Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew’s
son.
So both deputy prime ministers have baba backgrounds. Indeed,
Hsien
Loong’s baba pedigree is actually stronger than his father’s.
From the post, isn't LKY a Hakka, by virtue of his paternal
lineage?
I got confused mid way through... so how many percent is he a
baba?