Lee Kwan Yew - The Singapore Story

I must say that I am very proud of the fact that I have just finished the thickest book I have ever read: The Singapore Story. It is the biography of the famous former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew. My parents(who had pushed me to read this book for ages) and I expected that the book would show me how to become a successful person like him; but as a toiled through the book's pages, what I found was something different. The book is a biography more of Singapore than Lee; for most of the book, he explains how Singapore had developed to its current state.

The daunting length of the book has made me forget much of what I read in it. However, it did manage to leave some impressions on me. Lee, as a politician, had met innumerable people, and for nearly everyone, he described what that person was like, with very fitting adjectives. He impressed me on this, as I consider myself very bad when it comes to judging people's characters. Unfortunately, I forgot how he acquired this skill. Also, he struck me as being less politically correct compared to western authours, which showed when he supported corporal punishment and Deng Xiaoping; the book showed me how different the world could be viewed by different people, and that a virtue supported by one culture didn't necessarily have the support of other cultures.

I've learnt a lot from Lee's description of his neighbouring countries. Although I had a vague knowledge about their history, Lee proved that I knew hardly anything. I learnt that the communist threat in Asia, which came to me as distant and unimportant to me during school history lessons, was very much real back then; Singapore could have easily ended up as being a communist country. Also, I've learnt about the tenuous China-Taiwan-US relationship. I had thought that Taiwan was an independent country; in fact, China becomes very sensitive when other countries regard Taiwan as an independent nation. All in all, I feel enlightened about the modern history of Asia.

Of course, there's plenty more to write about this monstrously thick book, but at the moment, I want my mind to be free from Singapore for some time.