Prologue

Summary

I should start by telling readers that they will not be enjoying reading this book as much as I have enjoyed producing it. The chance to talk undisturbed for hours with Professor Wang Gungwu in the quiet of his various offices at the National University of Singapore is not a gratification given many mortals.

Over the last decade living in Singapore and working at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) of which Professor Wang is the chairman, I have had opportunities — though never enough, I must quickly add — to listen to him talk on a wide variety of subjects and in many different contexts. Along with everyone else in the audiences, I have always been impressed by how someone like him who gives so many lectures always manages to stay entertaining and interesting, be it in strength of delivery or profundity of content. Often he seems to speak without prepared paper, and always he provides a big picture of the subject at hand, giving new angles his listeners had not thought of.

And so the idea came to me to write a book based on interviews with Professor Wang. Apart from the obvious goal of recording some of his thoughts that his busy schedule does not allow him to put in print, I hoped that listening to him as he formulates his ideas would offer me some crucial insight into how he thinks, thereby delving into the mechanics and the organics of how he connects his thoughts.

Using this approach of having the doyen of Asian and East Asian history talk at length to an amateur historian has certain advantages, the chief of which is that the listener, meaning me, can take on the role of conveying the expert's big picture to the common reader in a non-academic fashion. The major disadvantage also stems from that aspiration, though. An amateur lacks the deep understanding of world history that would allow him to probe certain issues more thoroughly, or to be more critical of what he hears. As it was, I was often overwhelmed by the tightness of Professor Wang's thoughts, and by his ability to present streams of thought in an impressively interwoven form.