Politics: House of Shards

“My father was Prime Minister of Singapore and we could have stayed in a huge bungalow in the Istana grounds. But he did not want us growing up with the wrong idea of our importance and entitlement…So we lived in our old pre-war home at [38] Oxley Road.” Lee Wei Ling, the second child of Lee Kuan Yew and Kwa Geok Choo, wrote this in August 2020. That year, she’d also revealed that she had progressive supranuclear palsy, a degenerative brain disease. A month later, she made her final post about her experience getting lost in Fort Canning Park and fracturing her right femur. From that point, Singaporeans heard little about one of our hitherto most vocal public figures. And this week, Lee Hsien Yang, her younger brother, announced her passing at 69.

A karate black-belter by 15, president’s scholar, paediatric neurologist who served as the director of the National Neuroscience Institute (NNI), and prolific columnist for The Straits Times (ST), Lee Wei Ling was as accomplished as her two brothers (the elder one is Lee Hsien Loong, senior minister). Unlike them, she never married or had kids, saying in 2019 that dogs “make better friends than humans because they never put up a false front”. By that point, she and Lee Hsien Yang were engaged in a bitter feud with Lee Hsien Loong over their father’s will. Her comment about entitlement is illuminating not only because of the contrast with today’s ministers—some of whom live like the Rajahs of yore—but also because her own life had become inextricably linked to that of the physical house, human and matter connected by myth.

In 2015, Lee Hsien Loong, then prime minister, told Parliament that only after Lee Wei Ling “no longer lives in the house”, will it be up to the “Government of the day to consider” what to do with it. Lee Kuan Yew wanted it demolished, as did Lee Hsien Yang (who now owns it), Lee Wei Ling (who reiterated this in her final message), and the vast majority of Singaporeans surveyed. Yet some in the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) seemingly want it preserved. In 2012 Lee Kuan Yew said in an e-mail that “…the cabinet has opposed tearing it down and rebuilding, because 2 PMs have lived in the house, me and Loong…” This suggests that the PAP may want to turn at least parts of 38 Oxley Road—the party’s founders had many meetings in its then smoke-filled dining room—into a shrine of sorts, akin to the ostentatious S$335m Founders Memorial.

In 2016, Lawrence Wong, then minister for national development, communicated with the younger siblings as part of the controversial Ministerial Committee on 38 Oxley Road. Now, as prime minister, he may soon have to make a tough decision on the house—a choice that’ll indicate whether he will truly be a leader who listens to what Singaporeans want, or one very much aligned to party elders.

Society: Singapore executes, POFMA strikes

World Day Against the Death Penalty came and went yesterday, nearly a week since Singapore hanged citizen Mohammad Azwan bin Bohari on October 4th. Azwan was sentenced to death in 2019 for possessing not less than 26.5g of diamorphine for the purpose of trafficking. But Azwan did not “go gentle into that good night”, fighting hard until the end to save himself from the gallows. And his execution hasn’t gone unnoticed. Transformative Justice Collective (TJC) wrote about it, for which it received correction directions under the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA). TJC disagreed with the POFMA order, as did many others, including lawyer Yeoh Lian Chuan. The Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network received correction directions too for its posts about Azwan’s impending execution. 

Elsewhere, Amnesty International called it an “unlawful execution” under international law and standards: “Executing people while they have ongoing appeals before the courts is a violation of international safeguards protecting the rights of people facing the death penalty,” it said. Singapore’s government maintains, however, that executions are only scheduled when a prisoner has exhausted all rights of appeal and the clemency process in relation to their conviction and sentence, which was “so in Azwan’s case,” it said. The UN Human Rights Office called for the execution to be stopped, noting that the death penalty is incompatible with the fundamental right to life. And the European Union issued a strongly worded joint statement with various diplomatic missions in Singapore, opposing the use of capital punishment, and advocating for Singapore to adopt a moratorium on all executions as a step towards abolition. 

Despite local and global criticism, and even after Malaysia’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to remove its mandatory death penalty last year—the country’s deputy law minister acknowledged that it hasn’t worked in deterring crime—the Singapore government remains unshaken in its belief of the merits of capital punishment. Results from a 2023 MHA survey released last month found that 77.4 percent of respondents—compared to 73.7 percent in 2021—agreed with the use of the death penalty for the most serious crimes, such as murder, trafficking a “significant amount of drugs” and firearm offences. While 87.9 percent think that capital punishment works to deter drug trafficking.

These views have undoubtedly been shaped by decades of propaganda—state and society clinging on to a belief that flies in the face of available evidence. Azwan is the fourth person we’ve hanged this year. Whatever his crimes, we now have his blood on our hands. Retribution is unlikely to deter future Azwans. Empathy, understanding of circumstance, and the improving of life opportunities will.

Sports: In Limbo

A Spanish couple from Valencia honeymooning in Singapore is under police investigation after protesting local billionaire Peter Lim’s ownership of the eponymous football club. Dani Cuesta held up a banner reading “Lim Go Home” in various public places before pasting a sticker that said “Lim Out” on a door near Lim’s ostensible permanent residence. Cuesta posted the images, and a video, on social media which led to him and his wife, Mireya Sáez, being detained at Changi airport. When Lim landed in the city of Valencia with his treasure chest in May 2014, 40,000 had welcomed him as the saviour who was pulling their cherished club back from the brink of bankruptcy. By 2023, 20,000 were gathering outside Valencia’s stadium chanting “Peter go home.” 

Since taking over, Lim has overseen 16 managerial changes, including the laudable hiring and outrageous sacking of Marcelino Garcia Toral who took Valencia CF to its first trophy in more than a decade, in 2019; beloved players have been sold, allegedly because they disagreed with their owner’s policies; the current stadium is dilapidated and Lim’s promise of completing a new one lies in tatters. Equally galling for the fans have been the family’s tone-deaf public utterances. Lim himself described his purchase of Valencia CF as “incredibly good for networking”, including with “sheikhs, kings, mafia”. His daughter, Kim Lim, once responded to fan criticism: “The club is ours and we can do anything we want with it and no one can say anything.” This winsome approach has made the Lims some of the most detested people in the city. 

In recent decades, football clubs have joined superyachts and private jets on the list of billionaire must-haves. Lim, in a painfully ironic turn of phrase, called Valencia CF a “trophy asset”. For fans though, their teams are custodians of local community and culture; of identity and pride, creating collective memories so vital to belonging. It is this spirit which animated the Valencia duo’s protest at Esplanade, Marina Bay, and outside Lim’s home, and which may now have landed them in trouble. “Their freedom of movement has been violated, simply for peacefully exercising their right to expression,” said Libertad VCF, a fan group dedicated to loosening the Lims’ grip on their club. If only Cuesta and Sáez had applied for a licence to exercise their right at local free speech bastion Hong Lim Park.

History weekly by Faris Joraimi

Our queer mythologies are still being written. Kirsten Tan, director of award-winning 2017 feature-film “Pop Aye”, is making a new film set in the underground lesbian club scene of 1990s Singapore. Called “Crocodile Rock”, the film takes its name from an actual lesbian bar in our city which enjoyed its heyday in the final decade of the last century. According to Tan, it was also Singapore’s longest-running lesbian bar. The film weaves together the tales of a teenage drifter, a bar owner, and a student activist: a way more interesting premise than our dozens of short films and miniseries about Chinese twinks and their coming-of-age, based on BL-inspired tropes. Yawn. In all fairness, Ken Kwek’s “#LookAtMe” (2022) and Dzul Sungit’s “Salam Gembira” (2024) are two recent Singaporean films exploring the politics of queerness in inventive ways. But finally, some sapphic representation. History nerds may be intrigued by Tan’s process: she first encountered the bar Crocodile Rock from an older lesbian friend at a dinner party, “who regaled me with tales of an entire community of women who lived their fullest and most colourful selves and identities through this bar. It hit me soon after that had I not attended this dinner party, I would not even have known of this important landmark in Singaporean queer history, and I am only one generation away.” 

This account is familiar: much of queer history is secret history, surviving through word-of-mouth. In countries where same-sex relations and gender diversity have been decriminalised and granted various legal protections, efforts to document the history of queer people and spaces usually followed, taking form as archives, oral history projects, exhibitions and academic publications. Hopefully, with S377A’s repeal, Singapore’s trove of queer studies resources will likewise grow. For her research, Tan interviewed over 20 lesbians in their 50s and 60s, a significant effort given the few attempts to gather and archive such accounts for posterity. Loo Zihan collected accounts of gay cruising at Fort Road from 1980 to 2000. It’s fallen on artists and independent researchers to interview social groups the National Archives has not included in their oral history projects. Nor ever will? As Tan’s anecdote shows, there’s no continuity without documentation, so it’s unsurprising if our local baby queers know more about the Stonewall Riots than they do about the police raids of Club One Seven in 2001, which led to significant legal precedents here. 

Some further reading: The Queer Arab Glossary, published in June this year and containing over 300 words of LGBTQ+ slang from across the Arab world, also represents efforts at recovering forgotten queer histories that have long existed in non-Western societies.

Arts: The moon represents Singapore’s heart at the Oscars...

...or perhaps we should say it also represents Malaysia’s. “La Luna”, the Singapore-Malaysia co-production that won hearts—then also got them pumping—will be Singapore’s official submission to the best international feature film category at next year’s Academy Awards. The charming comedy follows a minor sexual revolution in the fictitious Kampung Bras Basah—a chimeric village combining sleepy Malaysian rurality with stifling Singaporean orthodoxy—when a charismatic newcomer opens a lingerie shop in the conservative community. The cross-Causeway film was written and directed by a Singaporean (M Raihan Halim) and stars a shiny slate of Malaysian actors (including the luminous Sharifah Amani as the lead). Raihan acknowledged the deliberate blurring of national borders in the film, which “feels like a Malaysian film, but slightly off kilter. Something about it doesn’t feel Malaysian”. In his review of “La Luna” for Jom, Dan Koh quips that the film heritage of Singapore, Malaysia, and ultimately Malaya, is “one nearly as possessively contested over as the origins of certain food dishes”. 

What makes a “national cinema”? It’s been a banner year for Singapore film, with our flicks picking up awards around the festival circuit worldwide. Among them: Nelicia Low’s fencing drama, “Pierce”, Chris Yeo Siew Hua’s psychological thriller, “Stranger Eyes”, and Chiang Wei Liang’s migration tragedy, “Mongrel”. What’s more striking is the regional collaborations that undergird all of these headlining acts, from Taiwan to Thailand and Vietnam. This isn’t a bad thing: films are inherently collaborative projects that require skill sets and tie ups from around the globe. Whether as catalysts, intermediaries or facilitators, Singaporean filmmakers and producers are keeping up the plurality of our port city in these co-productions. We see the specificity of Singaporean themes—digital surveillance, migrant and queer rights, cultural conservatism—narrated resonantly through adjacent contexts. The Singapore International Film Festival is leaning into this for its upcoming edition, the first under new leadership with Jeremy Chua, himself a globetrotting local producer, at the helm. The festival will premiere more than 30 Singaporean and “made-with-Singapore” features and shorts, and open with critical darling “Stranger Eyes”, the first Singaporean film to be shortlisted for the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion. The Singapore-Taiwan-France-USA co-production is also in the running for six prizes at the Golden Horse Awards. It’s a multi-hyphenated mouthful, but less gatekeeping means a wider gateway for what our national film imaginary might be, or become.

Some further reading: In Jom’s review of “La Luna”, Dan Koh takes us on a whirlwind tour of the history of Malay cinema in Malaysia and Singapore since the 1960s.

Arts: Poetry gets a new press

Fresh off her tenure as director of Singapore’s flagship literary event, the Singapore Writers Festival, the poet Pooja Nansi is stepping into new shoes as chief publisher at AFTERIMAGE. The small press, prioritising poetry, is the new publishing arm of Sing Lit Station (SLS). The state-supported literary non-profit has been a significant catalyst for the development of local literature for nearly the past decade; one of its tentpole programmes is Singapore Poetry Writing Month (affectionately abbreviated to SingPoWriMo), where every April poets both established and emerging converge on Facebook and fill its feeds with verse. Nansi is joined by fellow writer Daryl Qilin Yam, co-founder of SLS, who will serve as AFTERIMAGE’s managing editor. The duo told ST that they were excited to embrace a range of writers at various stages of their development: “Whether they have an entire manuscript compiled or even just a handful of poems ready to go—we want to be able to meet them where they are.”

The new press ostensibly fills a gap left by Math Paper Press, the now-defunct publishing imprint of beleaguered bookstore BooksActually. In its heyday, the press churned out stacks of poetry chapbooks and anthologies, but ultimately shuttered last year in debt to both suppliers and customers. There are a handful of Singaporean publishers that can boast a robust poetry catalogue, including Ethos Books and Landmark Books, as well as New York-based Gaudy Boy (the publishing arm of literary organisation Singapore Unbound), which also hosts an annual poetry book prize—but poetry titles still pale in output with prose forms. Joshua Ip, SLS co-founder, said in a press release: “While more experienced poets may have the networks and the derring-do to still find ways to get published despite the shrinking local scene, new writers seeking to publish their first collections have found that their path to the page has narrowed drastically.” That path promises to widen: AFTERIMAGE will open for submissions later this year, with a raft of titles slated for next year.

Some further reading: in “The crossings of Boey Kim Cheng”, Jonathan Chan speaks with Singaporean poet Boey Kim Cheng, whose poetry spans cultures and continents.

Tech: From carbon to hydrogen 

On the back of a visit here by Yook Suk Yeol, president of South Korea, Hyundai Motor Group has announced a new clean energy collaboration with Nanyang Technological University (NTU). The three-year research agreement will explore the use of two Hyundai technologies that convert waste material to hydrogen, a clean fuel: one from non-recyclable plastic, the other organic waste. Additionally, the focus on developing an advanced energy system tailored for urban environments highlights the partnership’s practical approach to addressing Singapore’s specific needs. Some 95 percent of Singapore’s power is generated through natural gas, a fossil fuel, making such industry-academia collaborations vital if the country is to achieve its carbon neutral goal by 2050. 

Tech: Opening Singapore to AI

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has announced plans to open an office, and hire five to 10 people in Singapore by the end of 2024. The company, which recently raised US$6.6bn (S$8.6bn) at a US$157bn (S$205.3bn) valuation, counts Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings among its investors. Singapore also has one of the highest ChatGPT users per capita in the world, with weekly active users doubling since the start of the year. OpenAI’s presence in Singapore is expected to facilitate closer collaboration with government agencies. There’s a regional thrust too. The company’s partnership with AI Singapore includes a US$1m (S$1.31m) investment that focuses on developing resources for adapting AI models to South-east Asia’s diverse local languages and cultures. 

It’s worth highlighting that OpenAI’s aggressive use of journalistic content has been controversial. Intercept and The New York Times (NYT) have sued the firm. In the latter case, OpenAI tried to get NYT to reveal journalists’ confidential notes, which the paper called “harassment and retaliation”. Other groups, such as Condé Nast, the Financial Times, and Le Monde, have signed deals with OpenAI. “At this point, I’m guessing that all major publishers have decided to just get these deals done quickly as AI platforms are crawling your stuff whether you like it or not,” said Alan Soon of Splice in a recent newsletter. Notwithstanding any benefits to Singapore and the region’s AI landscape from the firm’s heightened activity here, it would be prudent for South-east Asians generally to monitor its use of copyrighted content.

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