1 - Born a Businessman

Summary

MY CHILDHOOD

My father Baey Kim Swee had three wives. That was not strange in those days. Many men had many more. My grandfather also had three, incidentally.

Now, my father separated from my mother, who had two sons and four daughters by him. I wanted to be different on that score, and when I married many years later, I wrote a letter to myself when my wife was pregnant with our first child, to be opened twenty years later. And in that, I promised myself that I would not have more than one spouse (see Appendix I).

When I opened it before the family twenty years later, I had of course forgotten its contents. My daughter took strong objection to a paragraph: “If you have to womanise, pay for it”.

On reading the letter, I saw that I had accomplished much more than I had set out to do. To be sure, Singapore as a whole had developed during that time beyond what anyone could have dreamt of. Such were the times. I then typed another letter — eight-pages long — to myself, to be opened ten years hence. That, I am afraid, I should not publish. There are people who would take offence at the things mentioned therein.

My grandfather — a Hokkien — was the one who came from China. He was a rice merchant, and I remember him being served opium, which was a drug for the upper classes. He died when I was three or four years old, and I remember him only vaguely.

My father was born in Singapore, and unlike his siblings, studied English. According to him, kids in those days could only study for six years locally. After that, they had to go off to England if they wished to do more studying. Before the war, he had a shop in Kallang Road. That was where I was born, on 13 July 1931.

He also started a petrol kiosk in Crawford Street that year. He knew Lee Kuan Yew's father, who also worked for the Shell Company.