BT: Choo, a name that sets one heart a-flutter

Published October 4, 2010

KWA GEOK CHOO, 1920-2010

Choo, a name that sets one heart a-flutter   By ANNA TEO DURING a constituency visit years ago, then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew dropped in on a kindergarten class. He spoke to one of the kids, asking the boy question after question, until Mrs Lee, who was at his side, stepped in to the child's rescue. 'He's only five!' she gently chided her husband. Moments in a remarkable life: Mrs Lee with Mr Lee at the Foreign Correspondents Gala Dinner in Singapore in 2006 Only Kwa Geok Choo could have done that. She had been, for 63 years, more than his life partner - Mr Lee described her as his 'source of strength', his intellectual equal if not better and, yes, a 'powerful critic and helper'. Not least during the writing of his memoirs, published 12 years ago, when she would stay up with him until 4am, going over the drafts, scribbling comments and corrections, arguing with him over some parts. As she later told a reporter, it's what she had been doing for years: 'I have been proofreading and sometimes correcting his speeches from his earliest 1950 speech to the Malayan Forum in London.' Theirs was a great love story never told, until the revelations in Mr Lee's memoirs, The Singapore Story, in 1998. He had first learnt about her back in Raffles Institution, as a fellow contender for the Queen's scholarship, and then at Raffles College as the girl who, to his horror, beat him in English and Economics in the term exams. Ms Kwa didn't just ace her classes - she topped the 1936 Senior Cambridge exams for the whole of Malaya, went on to study law at Cambridge University on a Queen's scholarship, and became the first woman to bag First Class Honours at Cambridge after only two years of study. It turned out, serendipitously, that she was a sister-in-law of a friend of Mr Lee's. He pursued; she was won over. Their romance was sealed before he left for England to study law on his 23rd birthday, and after she finally joined him in Cambridge about a year later, they married in secret in Stratford-upon-Avon in December 1947. Some three years later, on Sept 30, 1950, back in Singapore after graduation, they had a second wedding ceremony, this time before family and friends. As Mr Lee would recount later, the time he spent courting her in the 1940s, even during the thick of the turbulent Japanese occupation days, was 'the happiest' of his life. For her part, Mrs Lee had been fully and utterly devoted to him ever since, supporting his work and career closely and staunchly, behind the scenes. A highly successful lawyer herself - she was widely known to be among the best conveyancing lawyers in town - she ran the Lee household, and later Lee & Lee, the law firm the couple formed in 1955 jointly with his brother, Kim Yew, as Mr Lee began to immerse himself in politics. As the Minister Mentor said in an interview to mark his 70th birthday in 1993: 'My wife is my source of strength. She puts my mind at ease. In case anything untoward should happen to me, she would be able to bring up my three children well.' He has also declared that it was Mrs Lee's income as a lawyer that had enabled him to continue in office over the years - and enabled them to buy property for their children when they were growing up, to help them set up home later. And though she had no official political role to her name, Mrs Lee was a founding member of the People's Action Party (PAP), and had a hand in drafting the party constitution. She was one of the first women to join the PAP - and even delivered a political speech on radio in the 1959 general election urging women to vote for the party. That was her first and only such broadcast. Intensely private, Mrs Lee said precious little in the press in all her years as a public figure. Not that she isolated herself. In earlier years, she had been regularly spotted buying vegetables at Pasir Panjang, where she had grown up, with just a plainclothes security officer in tow. Reporters who covered Mr Lee's overseas work trips found her to be warm, kind and friendly. And she was candid enough, if matter-of-factly, the couple of times she did open up to the media - about her part in the writing of Mr Lee's memoirs, and on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2003. She was reluctant initially, for instance, to have her husband write about their secret marriage in his memoirs. 'I was afraid the press would make a big fuss about it,' she said later. 'That would give me goose pimples.' But she thought about it - if eventually the 'secret' got out one day, it could be said that Mr Lee might also have hidden other facts when writing his memoirs. And she believed that in writing a biography, the entire truth has to be told. Mr Lee himself put it this way in his preface to his memoirs: 'She went over every word that I wrote, many times. We had endless arguments. She is a conveyancing lawyer by profession. I was not drafting a will or a conveyance to be scrutinised by a judge. Nevertheless, she demanded precise, clear and unambiguous language. Choo was a tower of strength, giving me constant emotional and intellectual support.' Even after suffering her first stroke in 2003, Mrs Lee recovered well enough to continue to accompany her husband on his numerous engagements here and overseas. But two more strokes in 2008 left her unable to move or speak. Still, until this past Saturday, she remained cognitive and continued to keep awake for him, Mr Lee told The New York Times recently. 'She understands when I talk to her,' he said. She might have been the proverbial quiet loyal wife, but there can be no doubt about her influence and role behind Mr Lee's policy decisions - and her own place in Singapore's political history.