Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"He's respected, he's somewhat admired, but not loved," my friend Wang said. "He knows that. He's rather sad that he's not loved."

Lee is of course a cold and single-minded control freak, a puritanical, domineering know-it-all, oddly resentful in the things he says; and Singapore society reflects everything in Lee's personality. Not surprisingly, Lee's domineering father was a severe disciplinarian, who insisted his son speak English at home. Lee is a highly emotional man who has publicly sobbed, to his own shame and to the horror of his stoical electorate. People said, I thought that was the whole point of him, that he didn't cry,

and yet there he was, on national television, blubbing his heart out.

Beware the blubbing autocrat, for he will make you cry. As a leader, Lee allowed his personal agonies to eat into people's lives, making Singapore a reflection of one man's anxieties. He famously hates gum-chewing, smoking, littering, and nudity. Chewing gum is banned in Singapore, hardly anyone smokes, no one litters—the fines for them are severe, and Playboy has been banned for decades. Lee suspects he is being plotted against, so it is a society without any privacy and virtually without an opposition. Lee is xenophobic; Singaporeans likewise tend to be dismissive or sarcastic about foreigners, regarding them as decadent and disorderly. Lee is puritanical. So are they. Movies are routinely censored, TV shows too. The Sopranos

was sharply edited and bleeped. Deadwood was so bleeped it became incomprehensible, and broadcasts were stopped. Six Feet Under

was chopped to pieces for its sexual innuendo. Lee refuses to be challenged or questioned, much less criticized. Apart from anything else, this condescension and censorship is odd in a highly educated country, with one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

Virtually the only Singaporean who has dared to speak openly to the government is a fiction writer and former linguistics professor, Catherine Lim, a courageous woman in her mid-sixties. Unlike her imaginative and witty novels, her op-ed pieces read like stern memos. She asks for more transparency, more idealism, more heart, more sentiment. In a 2007 essay published in the Straits Times, she wrote: "Even in a society often described as aggressively materialistic and coldly efficient, there are, fortunately, Singaporeans who believe idealism has a place, and that the fire, passion and commitment of the Old Guard, who saw Singapore through the difficult early years with little hope of financial reward, are still alive in some young Singaporeans."

No sooner does one of Lim's pieces appear than it is jeered at by a government functionary, and Lim is put in her place. In any other country, she would be regarded as a caring, auntie figure. She is not so much a critic of the government as someone who is trying to define a national mood and suggesting modest proposals, but even so, such temerity in Singapore makes her sound like Thomas Paine.

Despising and belittling the electorate, intolerant of the political opposition, which he regards as riffraff, Lee is as prominent now as he was forty years ago when I first arrived to teach at the University of Singapore—and was told by the vice chancellor to get a haircut. That was in 1968, not a notable year for barbershop visits by twenty-somethings.

On my return trip, I tried to talk to my interviewers and friends about Lee and his party and Singapore's political direction, but no one except my old friend Wang would discuss politics—and he did so in a whisper. For fear of being misunderstood or overheard, no one mentioned Lee Kwan Yew by name. He was like the Mafia capo who is never named. In the Genovese crime family, a soldier would refer to the boss, Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, only by touching his chin, never speaking the name. It was rare to hear anyone say "Lee." They said "He" or "LKY," sometimes "the Old Man" or "Uncle Harry," or they winked.

Because Lee shaped Singapore, the place bears all his characteristics and is stamped with his personality, his quirks, his crotchets. He has caused Singaporeans to take up golf. He has no sense of humor—laughs are rare in the city-state. Singaporeans' personalities reflect that of the only leader most of them have ever known, and as a result are notably abrasive, abrupt, thin-skinned, unsmiling, rude, puritanical, bossy, selfish, and unspiritual. Because they can't criticize the government, they criticize each other or pick on foreigners. And in this hanging and flogging society they openly spank their children.