A mighty man's modest home
Not many people have been inside Mr
Lee Kuan Yew's bedroom.
But five years ago, I stood within
its austere walls and learnt a little more about the great man.
It was April 11, 2010, and I was
among a group of friends who were visiting Mr Lee's daughter, Dr Lee Wei Ling,
at their Oxley Road home.
When she showed us her father's
bedroom, we could hear him in the adjoining room reading to his wife, Madam Kwa
Geok Choo.
She had become bed-ridden after a
series of strokes.
Mr Lee, known for his fiery
speeches, spoke in a gentle voice as he read to her from The Sunday Times.
She was not able to answer him but,
without fail, he read to the love of his life every single day - alternating
between news, her favourite poems and novels - for 18 months until her death in
October 2010.
His room was spartan.
A single bed was the main piece of
furniture.
On it was a thin towel blanket and a
small bolster. I did not see a pillow.
The screen of his computer, on a
desk beside the bed, flickered as e-mails arrived.
Sitting on the floor was a solid red
briefcase, the subject of our visit to his bedroom.
It was a "parliamentary red
box" used by ministers in the British government, and the Queen herself,
to hold and transport official documents.
Mr Lee was probably the only person
in Singapore to still use it.
Amused that we had not seen one
before, Dr Lee had asked "Pa" for permission for us to see the box.
He did not object. But he did not
interrupt his reading to come out from the room.
SPARTAN
The rest of the old two-storey house
was equally spartan.
The downstairs bathroom, for
instance, still held a hamdankong (Cantonese for barrel or tub used for making
salted eggs), a large clay urn filled with water for bathing, old-school style,
complete with a plastic scoop.
Its mosaic tiles, some a little
chipped, had been popular in the 1970s.
The chairs in the house were
mismatched, giving off an eclectic feel.
An ancient exercise bike stood in
one corner, gathering dust.
It was nothing to look at - a
bicycle mounted on a stand, but I learnt that Mr Lee had exercised on it for
decades, well into his 70s, until he fell off one day.
Although the model had been replaced
by a more modern one, the trusty old bike still retained its place in the
100-year-old home.
Between 1960 and 2011, Singapore's
per capita gross domestic product surged more than 100-fold.
But the Lees' modest home remained
largely unchanged in that time and had become dwarfed by the multi-million
dollar, multi-storey bungalows that sprang up around it.
Its floor was made up of
longitudinal strips of wood with the varnish already peeling off. Its garden
was lush with trees and plants that had flourished over the years.
The family cat, Manis (Malay for
sweet), sat quietly licking itself.
The home was filled with memories.
Its basement dining room had
witnessed the beginnings of a political party that would go on to shape modern
Singapore.
One could imagine the thoughts and
conversations that went on within its walls that would translate to actions to
take Singapore from Third World to First.
In another room in the house,
another son of Singapore has grown up, like his father, to become Prime
Minister.
Like its occupants, its foundations
have stayed true and strong.
The visit brought home to me what
really matters in life.
THE
MAN AND HIS RED BOX
Education Minister Heng Swee Keat,
who was Mr Lee Kuan Yew's principal private secretary from 1997 to 2000, wrote
about Mr Lee's red box in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
The red box was used to contain his
papers, speech drafts, letters and "a whole range of questions,
reflections and observations".
Mr Lee used the box until Feb 4, the
day before he was hospitalised.
Here are snippets from the post.
His breakfast
Mr Lee's daily breakfast was a bowl
of dou hua (soft bean curd), with no syrup. The accompanying drink was always
room-temperature water.
His workout
Mr Lee exercised - which included
treadmill, rowing, swimming and walking - in the evening. Instead of music, he
listened to the evening news or his Mandarin practice tapes.
His bicycle
During his time as Prime Minister,
Mr Lee would ride his bicycle in the evenings. He kept the same bike for many years,
described by Mr Heng as "one of those old man bicycles".
-
PHOTO: MCI
His study
Mr Lee's study was converted from
his son's old bedroom. His wooden work table had a glass top under which he
kept his family memorabilia, including a picture of PM Lee Hsien Loong during
his national service days.
His evenings
Mr Lee often sat with his wife in
the study and read, classical music playing in the background.
His bedtime
When he was PM, Mr Lee would work
through the night, going to bed only at around 3.30am.
His love
In 2010, Mrs Lee died while Mr Lee
was in hospital. After attending the wake, he asked his security team to take
him to the Singapore River, where he walked along the bank - an activity he and
Mrs Lee used to do together.
Tags: Singapore
news, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, oxley road
and home
- See more at:
http://www.tnp.sg/news/mighty-mans-modest-home#sthash.7eZHV3yT.dpuf
The Ladies News Journal added 7 new photos.
|| လင္းလင္း ဘာသာျပန္သည္ ||
စင္ကာပူေခါင္းေဆာင္ၾကီး လီကြမ္ယု၏ အိမ္ခန္းထဲကို ေရာက္ဖူးသူ မ်ားမ်ားစားစား မရွိလွ။ သို ့ေသာ္ လြန္ခဲ့ေသာငါးနွစ္ခန္ ့က ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ထိုအခန္းထဲကို ေရာက္ခဲ့ျပီး စင္ကာပူလူထုေခါင္းေဆာင္ၾကီးအေၾကာင္းကို အနည္းအက်ဥ္းမွ် ေလ့လာခြင့္ရခဲ့ဖူးသည္။
ထိုအခ်ိန္က၂၀၁၀၊ ဧျပီလ ၁၀ရက္ေန႔ ျဖစ္သည္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္သည္ ေအာက္စေလလမ္းက
လီကြမ္ယု ၏ သမီးျဖစ္သူ ေဒါက္တာလီေ၀လင္းအိမ္သုိ႔ သြားလည္ပတ္ခဲ့သူ
သူငယ္ခ်င္းမ်ားထဲမွ တစ္ဦးျဖစ္သည္။
သူမ၏ ဖခင္လီကြမ္ယု၏ အိမ္ခန္းကို
ျပေသာအခါ မ်က္နွာခ်င္းဆိုင္အခန္းမွ ဇနီးျဖစ္သူ မဒမ္ျခဴးအား စာဖတ္ျပေနေသာ
မစၥတာလီကြမ္ယု၏အသံကို ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ၾကားလိုက္ရသည္။ မဒမ္ျခဴးသည္ မၾကာခဏ
ေလျဖတ္ျပီးေနာက္တြင္ အိပ္ရာထဲ၌ပင္ လဲွေနရသူုျဖစ္သည္။ မိန္ ့ခြန္းေျပာရာတြင္
အသံမာမာႏွင့္ေျပာတတ္သူ လီကြမ္ယုသည္ ဇနီးျဖစ္သူကို ဆမ္ေဒး တိုင္းမ္သတင္းစာ
ဖတ္ျပရာတြင္မူ ႏူးႏူးညံညံ ညင္သာစြာရွိလွသည္္။
မဒမ္ျခဴးက
မည္သည့္စကားမွ် ျပန္မေျပာႏိုင္ေသာ္လည္း ခ်စ္ေမတၱာျဖင့္ သတင္း၊ ၀ထၳဳ၊
သူၾကိဳက္သည့္ ကဗ်ာ စသည္ျဖင့္ အလွည့္က် ေန႔တိုင္းဖတ္ျပခဲဲ့သည္။ ထိုသို
့လုပ္ခဲ့သည္မွာ မဒမ္ျခဴဳး ကြယ္လြန္သည့္ ၂၀၁၀ ခုနွစ္၊ ေအာက္တိုဘာလအထိ ၁၈ လ
တိုင္တိုင္ျဖစ္သည္။
လီကြမ္ယု၏ အခန္းသည္ ဇိမ္က်က်
အိမ္ခန္းမ်ိဴးမဟုတ္။ တစ္ေယာက္သုံးခုတင္တစ္ခုသာ အိပ္ခန္းထဲတြင္ အဓိက
ပရိေဘာဂပစၥည္းအျဖစ္ ရွိသည္။ အိပ္ရာေဘးတြင္ရွိသည့္ စားပြဲ တစ္လုံးေပၚတြင္
တင္ထားသည့္ ကြန္ပ်ဴတာမွ အီးေမးလ္တေစာင္၀င္လာတိုင္း မီးပြင့္ကာ အခ်က္ျပ၏။
အခန္းၾကမ္းျပင္ေပၚတြင္ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို ့သူ၏ အခန္းအတြင္း လာလည္ပတ္ ရသည့္
အေၾကာင္းရင္းျဖစ္ေသာ အနီေရာင္ လက္ဆြဲေသတၱာတစ္လုံးရွိသည္။
ထိုေသတၱာသည္ ျဗိတိိသွ် အစိုးရလက္ထက္က ၀န္ၾကီးမ်ား အသုံးျပဳသည့္
လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုင္ လက္ဆြဲေသတၱာအနီျဖစ္ခဲ့ျပီး ျဗိတိိသွ်
ဘုရင္မကိုယ္တိုင္ပင္လွ်င္ ရုံးသုံး စာရြက္စာတမ္းမ်ား သယ္ယူရန္
ကိုင္တြယ္ခဲ့သည္ိ။
စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံ၌ ထုိေသတၱာကို ယခုအခ်ိန္ထိ
အသုံးျပဳေနသည္မွာ လီကြမ္ယု တစ္ဦးတည္း သာ ရွိပါလိမ့္မည္။ ေသတၱာကို ယခင္က
တစ္ခါမွ် မျမင္ဖူးၾကသည့္အေလွ်ာက္ သေဘာက် မွန္း သိသည့္အတြက္ ေဒါက္တာလီက သူ၏
ဖခင္ဆီမွ ခြင့္ေတာင္းျပီး ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို ့ကို ထိုေသတၱာျပသည္။ လီကြမ္ယုက
မျငင္းဆန္ေပ။ သုိ႔ေသာ္ မဒမ္ျခဴ း၏ အခန္းအတြင္းမွ စာဖတ္သည္ကို ရပ္၍လည္း
ထြက္မလာပါခဲ့ေပ။
သူ၏နွစ္ထပ္အိမ္တစ္အိမ္လုံးသည္
မည္သည့္ဇိ္မ္ခံပစၥည္းမွ်မရွိေသာ သာမန္ရိုးရိုး အိမ္တစ္လုံးသာျဖစ္သည္။
အိမ္တိုင္တခ်ိဳသည္ အနည္းငယ္မွ် ကြဲအက္ေနၾကျပီး ၁၉၇၀ ခုနွစ္ေလာက္က
ေခတ္စားခဲ့ေသာ အိမ္တိုင္ ပုံစံမ်ား ျဖစ္သည္။ အိမ္တြင္ရွိေသာ ကုလားထိုင္မ်ား
ကလည္း တစ္ခုႏွင့္တစ္ခု တြဲဖက္လိုက္ဖက္ျခင္းမရွိလွဘဲ သက္ေတာင့္သက္သာလည္း
မရွိေပ။
ေလ့က်င္ခန္းလုပ္ရာ ေရွးစက္ဘီးေဟာင္းၾကီးသည္ပင္
အိမ္ေထာင့္တစ္ေနရာ၍ ဖုန္မ်ား တက္ေနသည္။ တန္းေပၚတြင္တင္ထားသည့္
စက္ဘီးတစ္စီးနွင့္သာ တူသည္။ သို ့ေသာ္ မစၥတာလီကြမ္ယုသည္ အသက္ ၇၀ အထိ
နွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ အဆုိပါ စက္ဘီးေပၚမွ လိမ္႔က်ခဲ့သည္အထိ အားကစား
ေလ့က်င့္ခန္းလုပ္ခဲ့သည္။ စက္ဘီး အသစ္တစ္ခုႏွင့္ အစားထိုးထားေသာ္လည္း
စက္ဘီးအိုၾကီးကေတာ့ သက္တမ္း ၁၀၀ ေက်ာ္ရွိသည့္တုိင္ အိမ္ေထာင့္တစ္ေနရာ၌
ရွိဆဲပင္။
၁၉၆၀ ခုနွစ္- ၂၀၁၁ခုႏွစ္အတြင္း စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံသားတို ့၏ တစ္ဦးခ်င္း၀င္ေငြသည္ အဆ တစ္ရာခန့္အထိ ျမင့္တက္လာခဲ့သည္။
သို ့ေသာ္လည္း လီကြမ္ယု၏ အိမ္ကေတာ့ မည္သည့္အရာမွ် ၾကီးၾကီးမားမား
မေျပာင္းလဲဘဲ ယခင္အတိုင္း ရွိေနဆဲပင္။ ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ရွိ သန္းရာခ်ီတန္ေသာ
အေဆာက္အအုံမ်ား၊ လုံးခ်င္းအိမ္ရာမ်ားၾကားတြင္ အက်ည္းတန္စြာ
သီးျခားပုံစံျဖစ္ေနေလသည္။ လွ်ာထိုးသားမ်ား ခင္းထားခဲ့သည့္
အိမ္၏ၾကမ္းျပင္အခင္းသည္ပင္ ပါေကးအေရာင္မ်ားက လႊင့္ပ်ယ္ေနေပၿပီ။
ဥယ်ာဥ္အတြင္းတြင္ သစ္ပင္မ်ားက နွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ၾကာျမင့္ေန၍
ေတာထေနခဲ့ေလသည္။
မန္နိစ္ဟုေခၚေသာ မိသားစုေၾကာင္ကေလးက ျငိမ္ျငိမ္ေလး သူ႕ကိုယ္ကိုယ္ လွ်ာႏွင့္ လွ်က္ေနေလသည္။
တစ္အိမ္လုံးတြင္ အမွတ္ရစရာမ်ားက အျပည့္ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ သည္အိမ္ၾကီး၏
ထမင္းစားခန္း အတြင္းရွိ လက္ေဆးကန္ေနရာသည္ ယေန ့စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံကို
ပုံေဖာ္ေပးခဲ့သည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီတစ္ခု၏ အစျပဳခဲ့ရာေနရာျဖစ္သည္။
သည္အိမ္နံရံမ်ာအၾကားတြင္ ခိုင္မာေသာ အေတြးမ်ား၊ ေဟာေျပာေဆြးေနြးမွဳ
မ်ားျဖင့္ ျပည့္ေနမည္ဟု ပုံေဖာ္၍ ့ရႏိုင္သည္။ ပိုင္ဆိုင္သူ
အိမ္ရွင္မ်ားကဲ့သုိ႔ပင္ အိမ္၏ ေအာက္ေျခအုတ္ျမစ္က မွန္ကန္
ခိုင္မာၾကံခိုင္လွသည္။ ယခုကဲ့သုိ႔ အိမ္မ်ဳိးကုိ သြားေရာက္
လည္ပတ္ခြင့္ရခဲ့ျခင္းသည္ ကြ်န္ေတာ့္ဘ၀၏ ေျပာစမွတ္ တြင္စရာတစ္ခု သာ
ျဖစ္ပါေတာ့သည္။
လင္းလင္း
(Singapore ႏုိင္ငံထုတ္ The New Paper ပါ A Mighty Man's Simple Home ကုိ ဆီေလ်ာ္ေအာင္ ဘာသာျပန္ဆုိသည္။)
The Ladies News Journal
လီကြမ္ယု ၏ သမီးျဖစ္သူ ေဒါက္တာလီေ၀လင္းအိမ္သုိ႔ သြားလည္ပတ္ခဲ့သူ
သူငယ္ခ်င္းမ်ားထဲမွ တစ္ဦးျဖစ္သည္။
သူမ၏ ဖခင္လီကြမ္ယု၏ အိမ္ခန္းကို
ျပေသာအခါ မ်က္နွာခ်င္းဆိုင္အခန္းမွ ဇနီးျဖစ္သူ မဒမ္ျခဴးအား စာဖတ္ျပေနေသာ
မစၥတာလီကြမ္ယု၏အသံကို ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ၾကားလိုက္ရသည္။ မဒမ္ျခဴးသည္ မၾကာခဏ
ေလျဖတ္ျပီးေနာက္တြင္ အိပ္ရာထဲ၌ပင္ လဲွေနရသူုျဖစ္သည္။ မိန္ ့ခြန္းေျပာရာတြင္
အသံမာမာႏွင့္ေျပာတတ္သူ လီကြမ္ယုသည္ ဇနီးျဖစ္သူကို ဆမ္ေဒး တိုင္းမ္သတင္းစာ
ဖတ္ျပရာတြင္မူ ႏူးႏူးညံညံ ညင္သာစြာရွိလွသည္္။
မဒမ္ျခဴးက
မည္သည့္စကားမွ် ျပန္မေျပာႏိုင္ေသာ္လည္း ခ်စ္ေမတၱာျဖင့္ သတင္း၊ ၀ထၳဳ၊
သူၾကိဳက္သည့္ ကဗ်ာ စသည္ျဖင့္ အလွည့္က် ေန႔တိုင္းဖတ္ျပခဲဲ့သည္။ ထိုသို
့လုပ္ခဲ့သည္မွာ မဒမ္ျခဴဳး ကြယ္လြန္သည့္ ၂၀၁၀ ခုနွစ္၊ ေအာက္တိုဘာလအထိ ၁၈ လ
တိုင္တိုင္ျဖစ္သည္။
လီကြမ္ယု၏ အခန္းသည္ ဇိမ္က်က်
အိမ္ခန္းမ်ိဴးမဟုတ္။ တစ္ေယာက္သုံးခုတင္တစ္ခုသာ အိပ္ခန္းထဲတြင္ အဓိက
ပရိေဘာဂပစၥည္းအျဖစ္ ရွိသည္။ အိပ္ရာေဘးတြင္ရွိသည့္ စားပြဲ တစ္လုံးေပၚတြင္
တင္ထားသည့္ ကြန္ပ်ဴတာမွ အီးေမးလ္တေစာင္၀င္လာတိုင္း မီးပြင့္ကာ အခ်က္ျပ၏။
အခန္းၾကမ္းျပင္ေပၚတြင္ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို ့သူ၏ အခန္းအတြင္း လာလည္ပတ္ ရသည့္
အေၾကာင္းရင္းျဖစ္ေသာ အနီေရာင္ လက္ဆြဲေသတၱာတစ္လုံးရွိသည္။
ထိုေသတၱာသည္ ျဗိတိိသွ် အစိုးရလက္ထက္က ၀န္ၾကီးမ်ား အသုံးျပဳသည့္
လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုင္ လက္ဆြဲေသတၱာအနီျဖစ္ခဲ့ျပီး ျဗိတိိသွ်
ဘုရင္မကိုယ္တိုင္ပင္လွ်င္ ရုံးသုံး စာရြက္စာတမ္းမ်ား သယ္ယူရန္
ကိုင္တြယ္ခဲ့သည္ိ။
စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံ၌ ထုိေသတၱာကို ယခုအခ်ိန္ထိ
အသုံးျပဳေနသည္မွာ လီကြမ္ယု တစ္ဦးတည္း သာ ရွိပါလိမ့္မည္။ ေသတၱာကို ယခင္က
တစ္ခါမွ် မျမင္ဖူးၾကသည့္အေလွ်ာက္ သေဘာက် မွန္း သိသည့္အတြက္ ေဒါက္တာလီက သူ၏
ဖခင္ဆီမွ ခြင့္ေတာင္းျပီး ကြ်န္ေတာ္တို ့ကို ထိုေသတၱာျပသည္။ လီကြမ္ယုက
မျငင္းဆန္ေပ။ သုိ႔ေသာ္ မဒမ္ျခဴ း၏ အခန္းအတြင္းမွ စာဖတ္သည္ကို ရပ္၍လည္း
ထြက္မလာပါခဲ့ေပ။
သူ၏နွစ္ထပ္အိမ္တစ္အိမ္လုံးသည္
မည္သည့္ဇိ္မ္ခံပစၥည္းမွ်မရွိေသာ သာမန္ရိုးရိုး အိမ္တစ္လုံးသာျဖစ္သည္။
အိမ္တိုင္တခ်ိဳသည္ အနည္းငယ္မွ် ကြဲအက္ေနၾကျပီး ၁၉၇၀ ခုနွစ္ေလာက္က
ေခတ္စားခဲ့ေသာ အိမ္တိုင္ ပုံစံမ်ား ျဖစ္သည္။ အိမ္တြင္ရွိေသာ ကုလားထိုင္မ်ား
ကလည္း တစ္ခုႏွင့္တစ္ခု တြဲဖက္လိုက္ဖက္ျခင္းမရွိလွဘဲ သက္ေတာင့္သက္သာလည္း
မရွိေပ။
ေလ့က်င္ခန္းလုပ္ရာ ေရွးစက္ဘီးေဟာင္းၾကီးသည္ပင္
အိမ္ေထာင့္တစ္ေနရာ၍ ဖုန္မ်ား တက္ေနသည္။ တန္းေပၚတြင္တင္ထားသည့္
စက္ဘီးတစ္စီးနွင့္သာ တူသည္။ သို ့ေသာ္ မစၥတာလီကြမ္ယုသည္ အသက္ ၇၀ အထိ
နွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ အဆုိပါ စက္ဘီးေပၚမွ လိမ္႔က်ခဲ့သည္အထိ အားကစား
ေလ့က်င့္ခန္းလုပ္ခဲ့သည္။ စက္ဘီး အသစ္တစ္ခုႏွင့္ အစားထိုးထားေသာ္လည္း
စက္ဘီးအိုၾကီးကေတာ့ သက္တမ္း ၁၀၀ ေက်ာ္ရွိသည့္တုိင္ အိမ္ေထာင့္တစ္ေနရာ၌
ရွိဆဲပင္။
၁၉၆၀ ခုနွစ္- ၂၀၁၁ခုႏွစ္အတြင္း စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံသားတို ့၏ တစ္ဦးခ်င္း၀င္ေငြသည္ အဆ တစ္ရာခန့္အထိ ျမင့္တက္လာခဲ့သည္။
သို ့ေသာ္လည္း လီကြမ္ယု၏ အိမ္ကေတာ့ မည္သည့္အရာမွ် ၾကီးၾကီးမားမား
မေျပာင္းလဲဘဲ ယခင္အတိုင္း ရွိေနဆဲပင္။ ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ရွိ သန္းရာခ်ီတန္ေသာ
အေဆာက္အအုံမ်ား၊ လုံးခ်င္းအိမ္ရာမ်ားၾကားတြင္ အက်ည္းတန္စြာ
သီးျခားပုံစံျဖစ္ေနေလသည္။ လွ်ာထိုးသားမ်ား ခင္းထားခဲ့သည့္
အိမ္၏ၾကမ္းျပင္အခင္းသည္ပင္ ပါေကးအေရာင္မ်ားက လႊင့္ပ်ယ္ေနေပၿပီ။
ဥယ်ာဥ္အတြင္းတြင္ သစ္ပင္မ်ားက နွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ၾကာျမင့္ေန၍
ေတာထေနခဲ့ေလသည္။
မန္နိစ္ဟုေခၚေသာ မိသားစုေၾကာင္ကေလးက ျငိမ္ျငိမ္ေလး သူ႕ကိုယ္ကိုယ္ လွ်ာႏွင့္ လွ်က္ေနေလသည္။
တစ္အိမ္လုံးတြင္ အမွတ္ရစရာမ်ားက အျပည့္ျဖစ္ေနသည္။ သည္အိမ္ၾကီး၏
ထမင္းစားခန္း အတြင္းရွိ လက္ေဆးကန္ေနရာသည္ ယေန ့စင္ကာပူႏိုင္ငံကို
ပုံေဖာ္ေပးခဲ့သည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီတစ္ခု၏ အစျပဳခဲ့ရာေနရာျဖစ္သည္။
သည္အိမ္နံရံမ်ာအၾကားတြင္ ခိုင္မာေသာ အေတြးမ်ား၊ ေဟာေျပာေဆြးေနြးမွဳ
မ်ားျဖင့္ ျပည့္ေနမည္ဟု ပုံေဖာ္၍ ့ရႏိုင္သည္။ ပိုင္ဆိုင္သူ
အိမ္ရွင္မ်ားကဲ့သုိ႔ပင္ အိမ္၏ ေအာက္ေျခအုတ္ျမစ္က မွန္ကန္
ခိုင္မာၾကံခိုင္လွသည္။ ယခုကဲ့သုိ႔ အိမ္မ်ဳိးကုိ သြားေရာက္
လည္ပတ္ခြင့္ရခဲ့ျခင္းသည္ ကြ်န္ေတာ့္ဘ၀၏ ေျပာစမွတ္ တြင္စရာတစ္ခု သာ
ျဖစ္ပါေတာ့သည္။
လင္းလင္း
(Singapore ႏုိင္ငံထုတ္ The New Paper ပါ A Mighty Man's Simple Home ကုိ ဆီေလ်ာ္ေအာင္ ဘာသာျပန္ဆုိသည္။)
The Ladies News Journal
Not many people have been inside Mr Lee Kuan Yew's bedroom.
But five years ago, I stood within its austere walls and learnt a little more about the great man.
It was April 11, 2010, and I was among a group of friends who were
visiting Mr Lee's daughter, Dr Lee Wei Ling, at their Oxley Road home.
When she showed us her father's bedroom, we could hear him in the adjoining room reading to his wife, Madam Kwa Geok Choo.
She had become bed-ridden after a series of strokes.
Mr Lee, known for his fiery speeches, spoke in a gentle voice as he read to her from The Sunday Times.
She was not able to answer him but, without fail, he read to the love
of his life every single day - alternating between news, her favourite
poems and novels - for 18 months until her death in October 2010.
His room was spartan.
A single bed was the main piece of furniture.
On it was a thin towel blanket and a small bolster. I did not see a pillow.
The screen of his computer, on a desk beside the bed, flickered as e-mails arrived.
Sitting on the floor was a solid red briefcase, the subject of our visit to his bedroom.
It was a "parliamentary red box" used by ministers in the British
government, and the Queen herself, to hold and transport official
documents.
Mr Lee was probably the only person in Singapore to still use it.
Amused that we had not seen one before, Dr Lee had asked "Pa" for permission for us to see the box.
He did not object. But he did not interrupt his reading to come out from the room.
SPARTAN
The rest of the old two-storey house was equally spartan.
The downstairs bathroom, for instance, still held a hamdankong
(Cantonese for barrel or tub used for making salted eggs), a large clay
urn filled with water for bathing, old-school style, complete with a
plastic scoop.
Its mosaic tiles, some a little chipped, had been popular in the 1970s.
The chairs in the house were mismatched, giving off an eclectic feel.
An ancient exercise bike stood in one corner, gathering dust.
It was nothing to look at - a bicycle mounted on a stand, but I
learnt that Mr Lee had exercised on it for decades, well into his 70s,
until he fell off one day.
Although the model had been replaced by a more modern one, the trusty
old bike still retained its place in the 100-year-old home.
Between 1960 and 2011, Singapore's per capita gross domestic product surged more than 100-fold.
But the Lees' modest home remained largely unchanged in that time and
had become dwarfed by the multi-million dollar, multi-storey bungalows
that sprang up around it.
Its floor was made up of longitudinal strips of wood with the varnish
already peeling off. Its garden was lush with trees and plants that had
flourished over the years.
The family cat, Manis (Malay for sweet), sat quietly licking itself.
The home was filled with memories.
Its basement dining room had witnessed the beginnings of a political party that would go on to shape modern Singapore.
One could imagine the thoughts and conversations that went on within
its walls that would translate to actions to take Singapore from Third
World to First.
In another room in the house, another son of Singapore has grown up, like his father, to become Prime Minister.
Like its occupants, its foundations have stayed true and strong.
The visit brought home to me what really matters in life.
But five years ago, I stood within its austere walls and learnt a little more about the great man.
It was April 11, 2010, and I was among a group of friends who were
visiting Mr Lee's daughter, Dr Lee Wei Ling, at their Oxley Road home.
When she showed us her father's bedroom, we could hear him in the adjoining room reading to his wife, Madam Kwa Geok Choo.
She had become bed-ridden after a series of strokes.
Mr Lee, known for his fiery speeches, spoke in a gentle voice as he read to her from The Sunday Times.
She was not able to answer him but, without fail, he read to the love
of his life every single day - alternating between news, her favourite
poems and novels - for 18 months until her death in October 2010.
His room was spartan.
A single bed was the main piece of furniture.
On it was a thin towel blanket and a small bolster. I did not see a pillow.
The screen of his computer, on a desk beside the bed, flickered as e-mails arrived.
Sitting on the floor was a solid red briefcase, the subject of our visit to his bedroom.
It was a "parliamentary red box" used by ministers in the British
government, and the Queen herself, to hold and transport official
documents.
Mr Lee was probably the only person in Singapore to still use it.
Amused that we had not seen one before, Dr Lee had asked "Pa" for permission for us to see the box.
He did not object. But he did not interrupt his reading to come out from the room.
SPARTAN
The rest of the old two-storey house was equally spartan.
The downstairs bathroom, for instance, still held a hamdankong
(Cantonese for barrel or tub used for making salted eggs), a large clay
urn filled with water for bathing, old-school style, complete with a
plastic scoop.
Its mosaic tiles, some a little chipped, had been popular in the 1970s.
The chairs in the house were mismatched, giving off an eclectic feel.
An ancient exercise bike stood in one corner, gathering dust.
It was nothing to look at - a bicycle mounted on a stand, but I
learnt that Mr Lee had exercised on it for decades, well into his 70s,
until he fell off one day.
Although the model had been replaced by a more modern one, the trusty
old bike still retained its place in the 100-year-old home.
Between 1960 and 2011, Singapore's per capita gross domestic product surged more than 100-fold.
But the Lees' modest home remained largely unchanged in that time and
had become dwarfed by the multi-million dollar, multi-storey bungalows
that sprang up around it.
Its floor was made up of longitudinal strips of wood with the varnish
already peeling off. Its garden was lush with trees and plants that had
flourished over the years.
The family cat, Manis (Malay for sweet), sat quietly licking itself.
The home was filled with memories.
Its basement dining room had witnessed the beginnings of a political party that would go on to shape modern Singapore.
One could imagine the thoughts and conversations that went on within
its walls that would translate to actions to take Singapore from Third
World to First.
In another room in the house, another son of Singapore has grown up, like his father, to become Prime Minister.
Like its occupants, its foundations have stayed true and strong.
The visit brought home to me what really matters in life.
THE MAN AND HIS RED BOX
Education Minister Heng
Swee Keat, who was Mr Lee Kuan Yew's principal private secretary from
1997 to 2000, wrote about Mr Lee's red box in a Facebook post on
Tuesday.
The red box was used to contain his papers, speech drafts, letters
and "a whole range of questions, reflections and observations".
Mr Lee used the box until Feb 4, the day before he was hospitalised.
Here are snippets from the post.
His breakfast
Mr Lee's daily breakfast was a bowl of dou hua (soft bean curd), with
no syrup. The accompanying drink was always room-temperature water.
His workout
Mr Lee exercised - which included treadmill, rowing, swimming and
walking - in the evening. Instead of music, he listened to the evening
news or his Mandarin practice tapes.
His bicycle
During his time as Prime Minister, Mr Lee would ride his bicycle in
the evenings. He kept the same bike for many years, described by Mr Heng
as "one of those old man bicycles".
Mr Lee's study was converted from his son's old bedroom. His wooden
work table had a glass top under which he kept his family memorabilia,
including a picture of PM Lee Hsien Loong during his national service
days.
His evenings
Mr Lee often sat with his wife in the study and read, classical music playing in the background.
His bedtime
When he was PM, Mr Lee would work through the night, going to bed only at around 3.30am.
His love
In 2010, Mrs Lee died while Mr Lee was in hospital. After attending
the wake, he asked his security team to take him to the Singapore River,
where he walked along the bank - an activity he and Mrs Lee used to do
together.
Swee Keat, who was Mr Lee Kuan Yew's principal private secretary from
1997 to 2000, wrote about Mr Lee's red box in a Facebook post on
Tuesday.
The red box was used to contain his papers, speech drafts, letters
and "a whole range of questions, reflections and observations".
Mr Lee used the box until Feb 4, the day before he was hospitalised.
Here are snippets from the post.
His breakfast
Mr Lee's daily breakfast was a bowl of dou hua (soft bean curd), with
no syrup. The accompanying drink was always room-temperature water.
His workout
Mr Lee exercised - which included treadmill, rowing, swimming and
walking - in the evening. Instead of music, he listened to the evening
news or his Mandarin practice tapes.
His bicycle
During his time as Prime Minister, Mr Lee would ride his bicycle in
the evenings. He kept the same bike for many years, described by Mr Heng
as "one of those old man bicycles".
- PHOTO: MCI
His studyMr Lee's study was converted from his son's old bedroom. His wooden
work table had a glass top under which he kept his family memorabilia,
including a picture of PM Lee Hsien Loong during his national service
days.
His evenings
Mr Lee often sat with his wife in the study and read, classical music playing in the background.
His bedtime
When he was PM, Mr Lee would work through the night, going to bed only at around 3.30am.
His love
In 2010, Mrs Lee died while Mr Lee was in hospital. After attending
the wake, he asked his security team to take him to the Singapore River,
where he walked along the bank - an activity he and Mrs Lee used to do
together.
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- See more at: http://www.tnp.sg/news/mighty-mans-modest-home#sthash.7eZHV3yT.dpufA mighty man's modest home
FAMILY HOME: Mr Lee and his wife, Madam Kwa Geok Choo, at their home in Oxley Road with their three children. PHOTOS: COURTESY OF THE LEE FAMILY, ENG BOW KEE
