- Joined
- Jan 22, 2014
- Messages
- 9,315
- Points
- 113
.
.
Chee Soon Juan , FB,
“What’s going on on your end?” I asked.
“Still during a recount,” Tang Liang Hong replied.
The year was 1997 and the occasion was GE polling night. Liang Hong had stood with the late J B Jeyaretnam in Cheng San GRC.
Yes, it was that same GE that then-PM Goh Chok Tong waltzed into the polling station at MacPherson SMC where I was a candidate – and he wasn’t. Apparently, other ministers had done the same in other constituencies.
Long story short: we lodged a complaint of the unauthorised entries but the AG reckoned that the ministers were inside the polling stations and not loitering outside it, and therefore did not commit any offence. Whatever.
Liang Hong and I later met at the Marco Polo Hotel at Tanglin Road (now gone). It was three in the morning. We talked for a bit and left about 45 min later.
When I woke up the next morning, I learned that he had left for JB. He later recounted that after we left the Hotel, he noticed that he was tailed by a vehicle. That was his signal that Singapore was no longer safe for him, and he made a beeline for the Exit.
He never came home again until this week. In his casket.
In the aftermath of the 1997 GE, I visited him a few times in JB and brought him some legal papers. Meanwhile, the media here was raging with news about PAP ministers. A whole bunch of them – 11 all in - had collectively sued him and Jeyaretnam.
Both he and Jeyaretnam were frantically trying to raise funds to take care of legal expenses. I saw him one afternoon - he was crestfallen. He said that he had raised a grand total of $50 (no typo).
Politics back then was brutal – and that’s putting it mildly. Liang Hong’s assets of more than $10 million were frozen. There was no social media, no Whatsapp, no Youtube. It was just you and your lonely thoughts. If you got sued, it was the death knell – financially and politically.
Months later, we met again in HK and gave a talk organised by Amnesty International. We arranged to meet again in Melbourne with (the late) Francis Seow, former solicitor-general, who also stood as a GE candidate (in 1988) and who also fled the country.
In Melbourne, the three of us stayed in former-Father Edgar de Souza’s home. We talked into the wee hours of the morning with Francis and Liang Hong over their favourite pal, Mr Jack Daniels – neat – and me with my orange juice – on the rocks. There was also roast duck from a nearby Chinese restaurant.
Liang Hong regaled us with snippets of how his counsel, QC Anthony Gray, had decimated Goh Chok Tong's account of the lawsuit. But the mood turned sombre when the subject got into Singapore’s political system. Out of it came one of the country’s first political website – Singapore Window.
I left Melbourne in 1998. I had spent a year as a Fellow at Monash Univ during which I wrote To Be Free: Stories from Asia’s Struggle Against Oppression. In the chapter on Singapore, I related Liang Hong’s political travails.
We kept in touch after I returned to Singapore. Liang Hong settled back in JB years later and we talked on the phone several times, often with him advising me on my health. Then one day, he called again and sounded rather frail. I asked him for his address but, try as he might, he couldn’t remember it. That was the last I heard from him.
(I had also seen Francis Seow just a few months before he died. It was in an old-folks home near Boston. He looked a shell his old confident and bombastic self. He recognised me but couldn’t remember our time in Australia with Liang Hong.)
I bade my final farewell to Liang Hong yesterday. In our parting, I also bid farewell to an era when men of courage stood unflinching, spoke truth to power, and gave completely of themselves to the struggle for justice, for freedom, for Singapore.
May their spirit stir in the younger ones, to live with the same courage, to speak with the same honesty, to fight with the same love for our country.
May that spirit never die.
.
