by Tng Ying Hui
References
Asad-Ul Iqbal Latif, Wang Gungwu: Junzi Scholar-Gentleman (Singapore: ISEAS, 2010).
Edgar Liao, Cheng Tju Lim, Guo Quan Seng and Loh Kah Seng, The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity (Amsterdam: International Institute for Asian Studies, 2012).
George Brenton and Hong Liu, Diasporic Chinese Ventures: The Life and Work of Wang Gungwu (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2004).
“Homecoming for an Asian Scholar—Professor Wang Returned to his Roots, After 40 years.” The Straits Times, July 15, 1996.
Imagination, Openness and Courage: the National University of Singapore at 100
(Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2006).
“SIIA Ranks Top in Asia in global survey of think-tanks,” January 27, 2014, TODAY,
http://www.todayonline.com/singapore/siia-ranks-top-asia-global-survey-think-tanks
S.R. Nathan, “Official Opening of the Wang Gungwu Permanent Collection And the Inauguration of The Archaeological Unit” (Speech at Opening of the Wang Gungwu Permanent Collection at The Istana, Singapore, August 23, 2011).
Zheng Yongnian and Phua Kok Khoo, Wang Gungwu: Educator & Scholar (Singapore: World Scientific, 2013).
Interviews with Prof Wang Gungwu in March and June 2015.
Professor Wang Gungwu
Indonesia, b.1930
Ann Wee
Pioneer of Social Work
Ann Wee’s genteel bearing hides her iron resolve. She has trudged through squatter areas to help the needy and fought to introduce a university Honours degree course for social work. For her pioneering and continuing contributions to the local social work scene, UK-born Wee has been fondly described as “a walking encyclopedia on Singapore's social welfare landscape”.
The need to give back to society was instilled in Ann Wee from a very young age by her father. Born in 1926 in England to a middle-class family, she remembered that whenever she came home from school, her father would ask, “Was the world a better place today because you were there?”
Her first attempt at “giving back to society” was as a volunteer with the Red Cross. After she completed her ‘A’-level examinations in 1944, Wee volunteered to be a live-in floor scrubber at a military hospital. She recalled, “It was a fabulous growing up experience!” Little did she know that in a few short years, her whole world would change and she would be changing the world of others, as her father had expected of her. Wee came to Singapore in 1949 when she was 23, following her fiancé Harry L. Wee, a Singaporean.
They had met in 1945 at Cambridge University. Harry was reading law while Wee was reading Economics and Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) which had been moved to Cambridge temporarily because of the war. Back in Singapore, the couple were married at St Andrew’s Cathedral in 1950 and Wee became a Singapore citizen in 1958.
Wee’s first job in Singapore was as a teacher at the Methodist Girls’ School (MGS). Her introduction to Singapore culture and values came from her interactions with her colleagues and students, who were mostly from middle-class families.
In 1955, Wee became a training officer in the Social Work Department (SWD). A month before she joined, the canal on Braddell Road rose so high that a pipe was concealed and a villager’s boat hit it and sank. “About five people drowned and the children lost their parents,” Wee said, her eyes widening, as she recalled the tragedy. Her first task was to ensure that survivors from the tragedy got the help they were entitled to and that the kids could continue going to school.
As a training officer in the SWD, Wee, who had learnt Malay and Cantonese to better communicate with the families who did not speak English, remembers trudging through squatter areas in Singapore to reach out to the needy. Several scenes stuck with her. There was a family living under an umbrella at Henry Park because they were too poor to mend their roof. Living conditions were extremely rough for others and 10 families would be living together in the same cramped flat. Their children did their homework along the pavement.
In 1957, Wee joined the University of Malaya and taught the first-year social work classes for “many, many years” because she was anxious that her students understand the demands of the discipline. “Social work uses psychology and anthropology to produce social change,” she said. Wee taught generations of social work graduates, including S. R. Nathan, the sixth president of Singapore.
She became the Head of the Social Studies Department in 1967 partly by chance. The professor who had initially accepted the position turned it down for a job in Africa. When Wee looked at the list of those contending for the top position, she said that there was no one whom she would have felt happy to serve under. That compelled her to apply for the post.
“At that point I applied, but not at Professorial level—I stated that if an appointment was to be made at Senior Lecturer level, I would seek to be considered. They interviewed me anyhow and I got it,” Wee said. In a 2011 interview with The Straits Times, she added cheekily, “The advantage of being head is that you can’t have someone more stupid than you are on top of you.”
As head of the department, Wee lobbied for the social work degree programme to have an Honours year. She wanted social work graduates to have the option to become policymakers and the civil service considered Honours graduates more favourably. But Dr Toh Chin Chye, then vice-chancellor of the university, thought that Honours graduates would be too expensive for voluntary welfare organisations to hire. Despite the gridlock in views, Wee pursued the matter doggedly. She recalled Dr Toh, who “fought issues not people”, writing on the margins of a note to the deputy vice-chancellor of the university, “Can’t you say no to that bloody woman?” But eventually Wee’s resolute stance caused the higher-ups to relent. After almost two decades of lobbying, students entering NUS in 1985 to read social work could look forward to doing an Honours year, provided they qualified. Wee saw them in, but could only celebrate their graduation from the sidelines, as she had retired from the university in 1986, at age 60. On top of her academic job, Wee also chaired the Adoption Committee of the Singapore Children’s Society, which decided if families were allowed to adopt a child, and served on the panel of advisers to the Juvenile Court, where she reviewed cases of delinquents and those in need of protection, and advised magistrates.
Wee was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal in 2010, presented to those who have made significant and long-standing contributions to Singapore. Although Harry died in 2005 after a stroke and her two daughters and four grandchildren live in Canada and the United States, Wee continues to live in Singapore. Asked if her experience of helping those who are down and out has made her jaded, or even cynical, she replied, “A cynic? Rather a realist I hope—and a bit of an optimist also. But if you say you’re going to do social work, what you’re saying is, I believe my society can encourage change.”
References
Melissa Sim, “Founding Mother of Social Work,” The Straits Times, September 19, 2011.
Sudha Nair, Ebb and Flow: 60 Years of Social Work Education in Singapore
(Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2012).
Tan Chorh Chuan, “A Century of Contribution and Achievement”
(Speech at National University of Singapore Commencement, Singapore, July 5, 2012),
http://president.nus.edu.sg/pdf/commencement-2012.pdf
Interview with Ann Wee in March 2015.
Ann Wee
United Kingdom, b.1926
Prof Wu Teh Yao
Confucian, Scholar, Gentleman
China-born Professor Wu Teh Yao was a well-known scholar who helped promote the idea of Confucianism as a national ethic and put Singapore on the world map of Confucian thinking.
Professor Wu Teh Yao was a renowned scholar, schooled in the Chinese classics and in Confucian thinking. But his mastery of the Chinese language began only in his teenage years. Born on Hainan island in 1916, he moved to Penang in Malaya w
hen he was about nine. He attended English-medium schools so that, even after completing his Senior Cambridge examinations, the equivalent of the GCE ‘O’ Levels, he could not speak a word of Mandarin, only Hainanese and English.
One day, he got into an altercation with a coffee shop owner after trumping the man in arm-wrestling and Chinese chess. As Prof Wu was gloating over his win, the man thrust the day’s Chinese newspapers into his hands. The man said that although Prof Wu “may be strong and clever”, he could not read a newspaper in his own language. Recalling this incident in a 1992 The Straits Times interview, Prof Wu said, “I felt very ashamed. I left the coffee shop and realised that I needed to learn my own language.” He implored the head of Penang’s best Chinese school, Chung Ling High School, to take him in as a special student. In two years, he was reading the Chinese classics.
Prof Wu pursued higher education at Nanking University before travelling to the United States, where he obtained a PhD in Political Science in 1946. Subsequently, he joined the secretariat of the Chinese diplomatic corps at the United Nations, where he worked on various initiatives, including the Commission of Human Rights. Together with the chairperson of the Human Rights Commission, Eleanor Roosevelt, he helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in 1948. He never saw Confucianism as incompatible with human rights.
Prof Wu was the president of Tunghai University in Taiwan from 1957 to 1971, and by the time he retired, was a well-known political scientist and Confucian scholar. Upon hearing of his retirement, the University of Singapore invited him to head the Department of Political Science. The department then was in a state of disarray as many of the expatriate teaching staff had left. Only two lecturers had stayed. Prof Wu’s task was to build up the department or it would be merged with the History department, recalled Dr Lau Teik Soon, whom Prof Wu recruited to join the department. “He saved the department,” said Dr Lau, a PAP Member of Parliament from 1976 to 1996.
The changes that Prof Wu made strengthened the department and ensured that the study of political science was robust. He witnessed the phenomenon of rising nationalism of different varieties across the region and knew that it was essential for students to learn about Singapore-Malaysia politics first, and then Southeast Asia and East Asia, before studying global politics. All these courses, he believed, should prepare graduates for work, especially in the civil service.
Dr Lau, who took over from Prof Wu as head of the department, remembered his superior as a “fatherly figure who never raised his voice”. By 1976, when Prof Wu stepped down as head, he had become a Singapore citizen and decided to plant roots here with his family. He became dean of the College of Graduate Studies at Nanyang University, known as Nantah, and drew closer to the Chinese ground. Nantah was the only Chinese university outside China at that time. In 1980, it merged with the University of Singapore to become NUS.
Prof Wu opposed the merger vehemently. He wrote in Nanyang Siang Pau—a leading Chinese-language newspaper circulated in Malaysia and Singapore—that the report which recommended the closure of Nantah was “not sound”. He added that the committee which had written the report had neither understood Nantah’s history nor “the enthusiasm of the supporters instrumental in setting up the university”. Prof Wu believed that the “University of Singapore should continue meeting Western-style development needs while Nantah imparted oriental requirements in education”. He was deeply committed to Confucianism. In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, there were efforts to promote Asian values—of society above self, the family as the building block of society and consensus-making—to students as the government thought that these values were common to all ethnic groups in Singapore and would encourage social cohesion at a time when Western culture, which was more individualistic, was growing in popularity.
A committee with Prof Wu as the chairman was set up to write textbooks on Confucian Ethics that could be used in schools. In 1984, Confucian Ethics was established as part of the Religious Knowledge curriculum; however, the classes were poorly subscribed to, with students preferring to take classes in Buddhism and Bible Knowledge. Religious knowledge classes were phased out of the education system by 1990. One result of the concerted effort to promote Asian values was the setting up of the Institute of East Asian Philosophies (IEAP) in 1983. Prof Wu was a board member right from the start and became the director in 1986. Goh Chok Tong, later to be prime minister, explained the rationale of the IEAP thus: “An academy could be established to reinterpret Confucianism in line with changing times, with Singapore even developing into a centre for the study of Confucianism.”
The institute followed that mandate and the IEAP connected research in Confucian studies in Singapore with an international network of Confucian scholars through large-scale conferences. Most of these events were branded as public lectures and hence contributed to public education in Confucian teachings. As a famed academic, Prof Wu’s presence in the IEAP attracted many overseas Confucian scholars as research fellows, rasing the profile of Singapore as a centre of Confucian studies. When he retired in 1989, the IEAP was renamed the Institute of East Asian Political Economy and its research focus was redirected accordingly. Today, it is known as the East Asian Institute.
Prof Wu spent his twilight years living simply—home was a modest HDB flat in Jurong East and he took taxis to get around. He passed away while he and his wife, Hsueh Ying, were visiting Taiwan. A memorial service held for him at the Presbyterian Church in Orchard Road in June 1994 was packed to capacity, leading former President Wee Kim Wee, who attended the service, to note that “people from all walks of life attended the service because, first and foremost, the late professor was a very humble man and they loved, admired and respected him for that.”
Wee, speaking later at a ceremony at the NUS, said of Prof Wu, “I had the good fortune to meet this humble but great man at the Istana. After the first meeting, I was convinced we had a sage among us in Singapore, who would move mountains to help his fellow men. I feel his death is a great loss not only to his family, but also to Singapore and others in the region.”
A memorial fund was set up in Prof Wu’s name to raise money for the annual Wu Teh Yao Memorial Lecture. A book prize was also established for the best Chinese studies trainee at the National Institute of Education. Although the Department of Chinese Studies at NUS stopped conducting the annual lectures in 2013, the book prize is still awarded annually.
References
“About Us,” East Asian Institute, accessed July 2015,
http://www.eai.nus.edu.sg/Profile_&_Objectives.htm
Barry Steben, “Confucianism in Southeast Asia,” in The Encyclopedia of Confucianism,
ed. Xinzhong Yao (New York: Routledge, 2005).
“Dean Rejects Proposal for Merger,” The Straits Times, March 17, 1980.
Dr Lau Teik Soon interviewed by Chua Ai Lin, April 3, 1997, accession number 001871/30, transcript, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore.
Edwin Lee, Singapore: The Unexpected Nation (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2008).
Leong Weng Kam, “Shamed into Learning Chinese,” The Straits Times, October 4, 1992.
Neo Peng Fu, “Wu Teh Yao,” in Southeast Asian Personalities of Chinese Descent:
A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Leo Suryadinata (Singapore: ISEAS, 2012).
Wee Kim Wee, “Address by Honorary Graduate” (Speech at NUS, August 30, 1994),
http://www.lib.nus.edu.sg/nusbiodata/bioweekw1994.htm
Interviews with Dr Lau Teik Soon in August 2015 and Hsueh Ying
over the phone in October 2015.
Prof Wu Teh Yao
China, 1916-1994
SOCIETY
BG Yaakov ‘Jack’ Elazari
Israel
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Prof Thomas Harold Elliott
United Kingdom
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Christine Laimer
Austria
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Krystyn Olszewski
> Poland
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G. G. Thomson
United Kingdom
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Bruno Wildermuth
Switzerland
BG Yaakov ‘Jack’ Elazari
Helping to Defend Singapore
Israeli Brigadier-General Yaakov Elazari was inspired by Singapore’s story of nationhood and came here to train military instructors for the inaugural Singapore Armed Forces Training Institute (SAFTI) officer training course.
Upon separation from Malaysia, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and Defence Minister Dr Goh Keng Swee agreed that it was imperative to build up an armed forces with a Singapore identity to secure the country’s sovereignty. Indonesia’s Konfrontasi campaign, launched to protest against the creation of Malaysia in 1963, had not yet ended. Until separation from Malaysia in 1965, Singapore had two infantry battalions with about 1,000 men in all, and many of these men had been deployed to defend parts of Malaysia from the threat of Konfrontasi. It was only in January 1966 that Singapore gained complete control of its battalions.
Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew wrote urgently to India and Egypt, requesting help to build Singapore’s army. At the same time, Dr Goh contacted Mordecai Kidron, Israel’s ambassador to Bangkok, who then flew to Singapore in mid-August 1965 for a discussion about military training with the Prime Minister. Dr Goh had first visited Israel in 1959 and was impressed by their defence system and military ethos.