Preface

Summary

Dr Goh Keng Swee passed away on 14 May 2010, just as I was finishing Chapter Seven. It was very sad news, of course. I had hoped to present him with a copy of this book, more for the symbolism than anything else, you understand. He had after all been bedridden for many years, following a series of strokes.

I decided then that the next best thing for me to do was to shift to top gear and finish the book within a month of his death. I have a weakness for symbolisms.

And so, I hand in my manuscript to ISEAS Publishing now, on the morning of 14 June 2010. With that, a project that took three years to do is brought to completion.

It has been a great and undeserved honour for me to study and to write about this unique man. Being of foreign origins, I had to discover this Singaporean for the first time. I knew nothing about the great deeds he performed in his life, and so was able to be properly awed by them.

I went to his wake at his home in Dunbar Walk. His son, Goh Kian Chee, was there to receive me, as was his widow, Dr Phua Swee Liang. Seeing Dr Goh in his casket that day, I wished that my children were there with me so that I could point to him and talk to them about who he was. I had after all been filling my mind with his thoughts for months on end.

Dr Goh's body was laid in state at Singapore's Parliament House for three days, beginning on 19 May. So that morning, my wife and I took the opportunity to bring along a group of home-educating families, including our own children, to pay our final respects. We sat on the granite steps outside Victoria Theatre for a couple of hours while I talked to the group about this man, whose passing was prompting young and old Singaporeans to revisit their national history.

Most of the children present, aged between 4 and 15, had not heard about Dr Goh, and if they had, knew of him only as a name they were supposed to recognize for some unclear reason. The people who were most interested in what I had to say were not the kids; it was their mothers.