Tom Pepinsky

Category: Asia

  • What’s Behind the Lee Family Troubles in Singapore?

    The Guardian has an explosive story today of a split within Singapore’s first family, the Lees. Lee Hsien Loong is Singapore’s Prime Minister, and is the son of former Prime Minister, Senior Minister, and Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. After months of simmering tensions with his siblings Lee Wei Ling and Lee Hsien Yang, the two have come out with a damning public criticism of their brother the Prime Minister. (See mothership.sg for more, including some social media posts by Lee Hsien Yang’s son Li Shengwu.)

    The story behind this is almost prosaic: a dispute over Lee Kuan Yew’s former home, which the late former Prime Minister did not want to be preserved as a memorial to himself. Hsien Loong has not followed his father’s wishes, and as a result, his siblings allege that

    we believe that Hsien Loong and Ho Ching are motivated by a desire to inherit Lee Kuan Yew’s standing and reputation for themselves and their children. Whilst our father built this nation upon meritocracy, Hsien Loong, whilst purporting to espouse these values, has spoken of a “natural aristocracy”. Hsien Loong and his wife, Ho Ching, have opposed Lee Kuan Yew’s wish to demolish his house, even when Lee Kuan Yew was alive. Indeed, Hsien Loong and Ho Ching expressed plans to move with their family into the house as soon as possible after Lee Kuan Yew’s passing. This move would have strengthened Hsien Loong’s inherited mandate for himself and his family. Moreover, even if Hsien Loong did not live at 38 Oxley Road, the preservation of the house would enhance his political capital.

    One might see this as just one more example of why one should not allow family dynasties to emerge in electoral regimes, for the phenomenon of regression to the mean means that outstanding parents are statistically unlikely to have outstanding children. Although that might be a good lesson to learn—see also my commentary on the Soeharto regime and the Trump administration—there is a still deeper problem that the Lee family troubles reveal.

    That problem is the structural dangers of personalized politics. It actually does not matter whether Hsien Loong or his siblings are correct. A system in which the charismatic authority of deceased politician may conceivably be appropriated by his ruling child is one in which it is always possible to call into question the justice or fairness of the system itself. It is a weapon of criticism which is always available, a source of doubt which can never be erased. State ideology in Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore was for better or for worse constructed around an ideology of meritocratic excellence. Lee Hsien Loong finds himself bound by his father’s outsized political legacy in ways that would never have been possible had (1) LHL not been LKY’s son, or (2) LKY not been such a gigantic personality in Singaporean politics. So when the current Prime Minister Lee acts in ways that are even plausibly attributable to an anti-meritocratic preference for family favoritism (as, for example, his comments about “natural aristocracy” suggested to many Singaporeans), it is not just a crisis not just for the Prime Minister, but potentially an indictment of the system itself.

    The consequences will almost certainly not be regime change. But scandalous rumors and family squabbles certainly undermine Singapore’s reputation as a bastion of meritocratic excellence among the very citizens whose assent is most essential for perpetuating the political status quo.

  • Lorraine Chuen on Food, Race, and Power

    This is relevant to my interests (HT Angry Asian Man).

    The amount of power that White people hold continues to both amaze and disturb me. White folks have the power to tease, torment, and mock (this food smells like poo, they’ll tell you, or perhaps: your lunch looks like worms, or maybe, simply: that’s disgusting, with a pinch of their nose). I spent an entire childhood lying about my favorite foods and being embarrassed about bringing noodles to school for lunch because of the casual racism that White folks learn apparently as early as middle school. White adults are no better: I recently had a coworker tell me, over dim sum, that chopsticks were the laziest eating utensil ever invented (whatever that even means).

    White folks have the power to torment, often without consequence; but the special thing about White people is that they also have the power to make a trip to your home country for a month or maybe twelve, get inspired, and dictate when your previously unpalatable dishes suddenly become socially acceptable, trendy, and profitable in the Western world. And inevitably, with the popularization of certain ethnic dishes, comes erasure. I can’t help but wonder, what becomes of dishes when they are prepared for the white gaze – or in this case, white palette? What remains of food, after it’s been decontextualized? What are flavours without stories? What are recipes without histories? Why are people of colour forgotten, over and over again, while their food (also: vocabulary, music, art, hair, clothing) are consumed and adopted?

    …

    When I look at the repertoire of work that White chefs and restaurateurs have built on ethnic cuisine, it feels in a way, dehumanizing. White people are able to establish outrageously successful careers for being experts and authorities on the stuff that racialized folks do every day simply by existing. But of course, people of colour will rarely, if ever, be called experts on how to simply be themselves. It’s as if racialized folks and their ways of life are objects to be observed—study material, of sorts—rather than entire countries, cultures, and individual complex lives.

    It reminds me of this, which I wrote a year ago, and which may strike some readers as rather more (or, for some, rather less) urgent right now.