Ernest Koh's book is the latest addition to a growing body of work on Singapore history by younger local scholars. Singapore stories, based on his doctoral dissertation, is useful in challenging key motifs of the official narrative, but also raises questions about the writing of the subject.
As a social history, Koh's research successfully critiques the unity of what he calls the ‘English Singapore Story’ (p. 3). Using a combination of official publications, statistics and oral history interviews, Koh identifies literacy in English as a central factor from the late 1970s in determining one's place along the social spectrum of the city-state's development. This was as the People's Action Party (PAP) government steered Singapore into the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’, characterised by the pursuit of value-added industries, and for industrial workers, higher wages and growing importance of English. This policy, Koh concludes, resulted in the fracturing of experiences between the English- and Chinese-educated segments of the Chinese population.
The book works best in unravelling the plurality of experiences. It begins slowly with a short conceptual chapter followed by an overview of Singapore's history, which is rather awkwardly integrated with a discussion on historiography. Chapters 3 and 4, however, do bring the book to life, in interrogating the myth of the divide between the English- and Chinese-educated groups in the two decades after the Second World War. Koh contends that the divide was insignificant in those years and has been framed retrospectively from hindsight, both as an official discourse and as a product of the dominance of English in the present day.
The next two chapters on the late 1970s and 1980s, tracing the actual emergence of the English and Chinese divide, form the core of the book. Koh capably demonstrates how the Second Industrial Revolution increasingly privileged the ‘English monoliterates’ against the Chinese-educated group. Social experiences also diverged, as language created inter-generational divides and the English-educated group itself became resentful towards the ‘rhetoric of shame’ employed in the state's Speak Mandarin campaign (p. 132). The social consequences of rapid development are further explored in Chapter 7, which examines issues such as the fracturing of family bonds and increased anxiety and stress, culminating in suicide in extreme cases.
Singapore stories engages a number of important questions for writing recent Singapore history. Perhaps not surprisingly under PAP governance, the factory workers of Koh's book have as limited agency as the rickshaw pullers and Asian prostitutes of the colonial era. Koh observes that agency was more often expressed by individuals in the private sphere, rather than collectively or politically, such as in older Singaporeans attempting to learn their grandchildren's languages or emigrating in search of a less stressful life.
A more crucial question arises over the book's modernist approach. It formulates a new response to an established statement but does not always scrutinise the basis of the response or statement. Social history is arguably about mapping unique social and mental worlds of ordinary people, but Singapore stories does not seem to indicate much cultural difference between the successful and marginalised Singaporeans. The latter's ‘retaliatory anger’ (p. 182) could have been taken as a point of entry into their cultural world, but this was not attempted. To some extent, the book is still a ‘Singapore story’ and a narrative of modernity encompassing its rejects. Koh does not adequately interrogate the modernist discourses embedded in his sources, although both the official publications and interviews are problematic in this regard. He still approaches housing and health in post-war Singapore from a modernist standpoint, using colonial and PAP published sources and adopting their vantage points. The Chinese community's outlook towards education is also rather briefly summarised as ‘pragmatic’ or ‘practical’ (Chapter 6), although their relationship with modernity was plausibly more ambivalent. This is where the book could have utilised more archival sources or concepts from comparative social and cultural history.
There is much good material in Singapore stories which offers the possibility of a more richly textured social history seen from the inside out. The section in Chapter 6 on gender relations and sexual conflict in both the home and workplace is a breath of fresh air. It is a fine example of how fresh Singapore perspectives are possible if new research questions are asked and the interview material is used imaginatively. Sprinkled throughout the text, too, though not sufficiently discussed, are powerful inscriptions of feeling as Koh's interviewees speak about personal experiences and official policies; these affective fragments are invaluable for opening the window into the mental worlds of those standing on the fringes of the accepted narrative. For its strengths and weaknesses, Singapore stories should encourage readers and researchers alike to mediate between two basic tasks in Singapore history: speaking to old questions while asking new ones.
