Politics & Identity & Language - the Lee Family Story

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

I wonder how many Singaporeans know that our first Prime Minister had from birth spoke as his first language Malay (Peranakan Malay). His mother used Malay as his the language of choice until the very end when she spoke to her kids, her daughter-in-law and the grandchildren. Even when conversation tuned to English, she preferred Malay as it was the language that she could best express the emotive cues well.

How many are also aware that our first Prime Minister did a deed poll to remove his Christian name and it does not appear in his NRIC.

When he convinced his parents not to give his youngest brother a christian name in 1933, you know that this was a man that thought about identity when he was young. Ironically the sibling that did not have a christian name ended up being Christian.

The only other Prime Minister that I know that changed his identity for political reason is Solomon Bandaranaike, the 4th PM of Sri Lanka who was born into a rich Anglican family and went to Oxford and took to Law. To pander to the majority Buddhists, he switched religion and made sweeping changes to language that plunged the country into civil war that lasted for decades.


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