My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore's Bilingual Journey
Lee Kuan Yew
Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2011
ISBN: 9789814342032

My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore's Bilingual Journey is the story of Mr Lee Kuan Yew's 50-year struggle to transform Singapore from a polyglot former British colony to a united nation where everyone, while knowing English, knows also at least one other language, his own mother tongue.

The founding prime minister of Singapore tells of why he did away with vernacular schools in spite of violent political resistance, why he closed Nanyang University, why he later started Special Assistance Plan schools, and why he continues to urge all ethnic Chinese Singaporeans today to learn the Chinese language.

Along the way, we learn not only of the many policy adjustments but also the challenges he encountered - from Chinese language chauvinists who wanted Chinese to be the pre-eminent language in Singapore, from Malay and Tamil community groups fearing that Chinese was being given too much emphasis, from parents of all races wanting an easier time for their school-going children, even from his own Cabinet colleagues questioning his assumptions about language.

We learn that there were four changes at the helm of the education ministry in four months in 1975. We learn that there were Chinese-medium schools in Singapore right up to the mid-1980s. We learn of the pain of "teachers who had to switch from teaching in Chinese to teaching in English almost overnight", and likewise that of students who were "caught mid-stream" in the transition from a Chinese medium of instruction to an English one. We learn why the National Day Rally of 1986 was a milestone and why he "was a proud man that day": For the first time since Singapore's independence 21 years earlier, the emcee for the event did not have to use three languages - Chinese, Malay and Tamil - to lead the audience, as finally, English had become a language understood by all Singaporeans.

My Lifelong Challenge is also the story of Mr Lee's own personal struggle to learn the Chinese language, which began when he was six years old and his Hakka maternal grandmother enrolled him in a Chinese class with fishermen's children. In evocative detail, the man born to English-speaking parents recounts his own feelings of rebellion and humiliation at different points in his life, when faced with the Chinese language and his own inadequacy in it.

This book describes in matter-of-fact yet vivid fashion his steely determination to improve his Chinese and reclaim his Chinese heritage, right up to the present when he is well into his eighties. In this book, we learn of Mr Lee's belief in a fundamental difference between the Chinese-educated and the English-educated and how it came about. He describes a scene of English-speaking students at the University of SIngapore hostel revelling in party games even as Chinese-speaking students in the Chinese High School nearby were locked in a deadly face-off with the police in 1956, and gives the dire warning that "if Singapore students all turned out like those in the university hostel, Singapore would fail." Finally, Mr Lee distils his experiences of 50 years into eight precepts which he spells out at the end of his narrative.

The second half of this book is a compilation of essays by 22 Singaporeans. They include Mr Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister and son of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, and Ms Stephanie Sun, the well-known pop star. In these essays, the 22 recount their own language journeys, imbuing flesh and blood meaning to cold policy measures wrought over more than four decades.

This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to find more about Singapore's bilingualism policy and its chief architect. It breaks new ground by putting into the public domain information about education matters that has never been publicised. It is also an invaluable resource for all who are interested in the primeval interplay between language and politics.