From standing in the rain with thousands of other Singaporeans just 24 hours ago, I’ve since flown back to Bangkok where I am currently based. I stayed up late last night catching up on the eulogies that I missed, reading transcripts and posts from other Singaporeans online.

Today is the new start of the week. Life for everyone goes back to normal. When I took the Bangkok Skytrain this morning, it was the same faceless crowds I see every morning when I get off at the Siam intersection. It’s routine for me as much as it is for the average MRT commuter in City Hall.

Yet I feel that something intangible in me, and many other Singaporeans, has shifted.

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My family was by many accounts, middle class and average. I’ve never had intellectual debates at the dining table growing up. In fact, I never so much as developed a critical thinking mind until my later years in NUS, when I started diving deeper into journalism and writing. Otherwise, I was very much blasé about the state of affairs in Singapore.

There are many things that I could, and would be angry about when I look back on my experiences growing up in Singapore, and how they have shaped me as a person.

When my mom had me, she was a non-graduate working as a clerk. During those times, Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s eugenics-tainted views imposed on the country called for only graduate moms to procreate. She was understandably angry at the government, for being made to feel like a lesser citizen than other women who were more academically-inclined and ranked higher in their professional fields. She eventually went on to work her way up to a managing director level after decades of hard work.

In Primary 4, I missed the cut-off for the EM1 stream because I did not fare well enough for Chinese. It was deeply frustrating, for someone who had not picked up the Chinese language until my first day in school when I was 6 years old. I have a love-hate relationship with the language. Despite studying the hardest for this subject and memorising texts from cover to cover, I continued getting Bs and Cs throughout my schooling life. I used to resent the bilingual policy for this, for diminishing my roots to Bahasa Melayu and forcing upon me a language which had no relevance to me other than to communicate with other Chinese people.

In 1998, the Asian Financial Crisis broke. Through those years, I witnessed as a very young Singaporean how devastating the effect was. Though I was still apolitical and more concerned with trying to fit in at school, I also saw firsthand families breaking up, families losing their homes and cars overnight, heard of employers shutting down businesses and committing suicide. On a personal level, I slept for years in the living room of my grandparents’ house: A small house in the East which has remained the same since the Japanese Occupation, and is now shrouded by two and three storey houses popping up all around. Saw some peers touting the latest Nokia 8250s, Discman and mp3 players which I could not afford, and did not dare to ask for. My parents did their best to provide for us, but I knew that money was tight.

This scarcity mindset would carry through. Since then, even though things have improved dramatically, I’ve always felt that it was always never enough. This was compounded by Singapore history modules that I took in university, where I started gaining access to more alternative forms of history in the university libraries. A professor once glibly remarked that Singapore’s problem is that we are made to keep believing that we are never good enough, and that we have to keep striving.

This thought that the government should impose the idea of inadequacy upon us angered me. I wanted a Singapore where its people could be confident of themselves without having to compare our material possessions. I wanted a Singapore where its people would stop feeling inferior to what the government then termed as “foreign talent”. I developed an attitude that told myself I would never settle for being a second-class citizen in this country that I grew up in, and that I refused to be likened to a creature that needed spurs stuck in my hide. The level of scrutiny, conformity and competition amongst ourselves was toxic enough, I reasoned, and I did not want to grow up in an environment like that.

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There were several factors, alongside a possible quarter-life existential crisis, then led me to enroll in an opposition political party the moment I graduated from university. Since then, I went on to make my views heard in a national election, and many other forums where I have had the chance to meet many other Singaporeans and mingle with other cultures.

The anger slowly replaced itself with a burning need to think up of actual alternatives to how Singapore could turn out. It is no easy task, and even I do not have the full, detailed answers after examining, comparing, ruminating and questioning for more than five years. It is a journey I am still on, along with several other Singaporeans who are concerned in their own right.

When I moved to Bangkok to work, I started observing the political and social condition of the Thais. I integrated into their way of life, learnt their language and understood their culture, and started to see Singapore, not just through the lens of what is happening in Singapore, but how our neighbours also view us. Our dichotomy of First World versus Third World is so troubling indeed and it reeks of misplaced arrogance and focuses on the wrong things in life. I’m not going to expound on how we should be thankful, or how much cheaper the cost of living is here. I have removed my Singapore lens and I just understand our neighbours to be different, and there are lessons here which can be learnt from them as well as vice versa. It is not zero-sum.

Before I left Singapore, a friend told me that social media would continue to allow me to stay in touch with what is happening on the ground here. I watched with dismay as certain groups of people seemed to reach levels of anger that I haven’t seen in Singapore. On my last few walkabouts in Singapore, I met angry middle-class Singaporeans who felt repressed and were struggling to get by. I facepalmed along with the rest of the Internet when politicians made certain quotable quotes.

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The day Mr Lee Kuan Yew died, I felt a sinking pit in my chest when I awoke at 6am to the news. I sat there, and for no particular reason, I just cried. And I later wondered why I felt so deeply for a man I had never met in person, and whom I disagreed with on a lot of issues. Gradually, people started coming out to pay their respects, salute the man, issue tributes and Internet memes. Stories of kind Singaporeans being orderly and handing out aid and foodstuff to fellow well-wishers started flooding the Internet. Stories adulating his life as a politician, statesman, loving father and husband filled my social newsfeed. In the same vein, there were also some who came out to make a political point on flaws in his legacy.

I was defensive about this. In my mind, it is tantamount to jumping on a person’s faults the moment he passes on. It doesn't matter whether the person in question is a statesman, celebrity or average Joe. It’s human decency.

Because he is now ashes to ashes. And as much as he has had direct or indirect effect on my life, and regardless of affiliation, we now have many years ahead to critique his misplaced policies, and to crack our minds over how to preserve the successful policies that work for generations to come.

To me, Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s biggest legacy is not the gleaming albeit sterile landscape he left behind, or the “mud-flat to metropolis” narrative that has been forced down our throats.

Rather, it is the idea that there was someone who fought so bloody hard for us because he genuinely wanted to help make the country work. It is the idea that you can have a successful career without sacrificing simple human experiences like falling in love or running after your grandchildren. It is the idea that we can look beyond ourselves to be bigger people and make more meaningful contributions than we think ourselves capable of. That we can push ourselves to do our very best and lead the fullest of lives which we can look back and be proud of.

Mind you, this is not white-washing, nor am I proclaiming the man a saint. Rather, it is the inspiration of such ideals that will stand the test of time, cultures and generations. And anything that inspires us to be better and more selfless for the ones we love can only be a good thing to work towards.

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