by Koh Choon Hwee
Like many before me, I had reached a heightened state of consciousness about being a Singaporean during my university years. Some acquire this newfound curiosty about our island-state later in life, some earlier; whatever the case, one way through which we recreate and reconstruct our own narrative of Singapore history (and identity and society) is through books and texts.
So, seized with the mission of seeking out and understanding our ‘origins’, we dutifully plough through the ‘classic’ Edwin Thumboos, Arthur Yaps, LKY memoirs, Fajar Generations, Hatchet Men, Cherian Georges, Huang Jianlis, Kwa Chong Guans and many more.
Convulsed with nationalist fervour, we dutifully keep up with contemporary scholarship (freak out when Men In White gets published) and local literary production, attend election rallies (go into a primordial frenzy claiming non-partisanship, yelling “I Only Vote For Singapore”) and local plays.
Yet sometimes, despite all our efforts, some valuable piece of Singaporean history inevitably falls through the cracks, and surfaces only at the most unexpected of junctures.
Last week, I was just taking a break from being a saikang-warrior-intern (in jest, in case my boss reads this) by chatting with Gleen, the Middle East Institute’s de-facto librarian, when I spotted a book on his table.
From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Dr. Swee Chai Ang. (Ang Swee Chai, my mind automatically re-arranged her name to suit my Singaporean sensibilities.)
How strange. Thomas Friedman has a book by the same name which was also published in the same year – 1989.
I flipped open to the first page, and saw that this was a gift from President S R Nathan to the MEI library. The next page was a personal autograph from Dr. Ang herself –
How curious! I flipped to the next page.
Before long, I was swept up by this intrepid woman surgeon’s story which took me from Singapore to Beirut to Jerusalem and back. As a Singaporean who is obsessed about the Middle East, I was intrigued to read the personal account of a Singaporean woman who had discovered the region and its people before I was born.
Overview
Dr. Ang was one of the few surgeons to have flown to Beirut in 1982 in the heat of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon at the time, in humanitarian response to an international SOS call for orthopedic surgeons. Weeks after she arrived, theSabra and Shatila camps were flattened and their inhabitants massacred.
Dr. Ang relates in great detail the emotional and mundane realities of life in a war-torn society – just when the displaced refugee-exiles are getting back up on their feet, another bout of armed violence ensues and painstakingly built-up houses get flattened to rubble once again. It is tiring to read war narratives, mentally and emotionally – I can’t imagine the weariness of actually living through such events.
Dr. Ang recalls how she and the people around her coped with the deaths, injuries and shortages – with humour, love and courage. It must sound banal to you who are reading this now – we’ve been inundated with one-too-many hyperbolic award-acceptance speeches, and/or trite speech uttered by some divine-looking celebrity imploring us to donate to/help some ‘Third World’ kid. Yet perhaps this sort of imperviousness is the greatest enemy of ‘real’ suffering – our weariness with hearing about never-ending conflicts can at least be soothed perhaps by flipping the channel to MTV, where we watch Paris Hilton make new BFFs in Dubai.
In the days following the Sabra and Shatila massacre, Dr. Ang finally arrived at her decision to testify at the Kahan Commission in Israel – to testify as a witness to the massacres. In doing so, she lost her visa and had to return to London, where she and her husband lived (curiously) in exile. (more on this in the next section)
She went back to London, where she was based at the time, and founded the charity organization, Medical Aid for Palestinians in 1984. MAP kept in close touch with Palestinians in refugee camps, and as it was very small at the time, the organisation and its people saw themselves as friends of the Palestinian people rather than as a charity. (Ang, 144) I was amazed to see that 25 years on, MAP was still functional and running, and spent much time exploring their beautifully-designed internet webpage.
Years later, Dr. Ang returned to Beirut when the MAP office in London received a telefax informing them that Palestinians, Lebanese as well as foreign health workers had been under siege at Bourj el-Brajneh camp for more than 14 weeks and were running low on supplies. Conditions were inhumane and residents were being deprived of basic necessities, like drinking-water.
This time round, the Syrian peacekeeping force had moved into Beirut and seemed content to allow the siege to continue. (Ang, 223) MAP mobilized a team headed for Beirut; our intrepid surgeon, Dr. Ang, wrote a letter to President Hafez al-Assad (the authoritarian leader behind the Hama massacre, and whose son is behind the same massacres committed at this very moment in time, most recently in Jisr al-Shughour) in her capacity as leader of the International Medical Team. (Ang, 224) This was in March 1987.
(photo from Dr. Ang’s book, From Beirut to Jerusalem)
The Political Transformation and Awakening; Seeing Beirut and Palestine in the 1980s through a Singaporean lens
My love for literature begins with the discovery of a voice; many a literature thesis (I imagine) has wasted words defining and expounding upon the ‘authentic’ voice, and many an aspiring Singaporean writer whiles away time cultivating his/her ‘authentic’ voice.
The voice of this feisty, pint-sized female surgeon, speaking to me from almost 20 years ago, strikes me as the most authentic voice I’ve read in local literature in a long while. She parses this foreign region, culture and politics in Singaporean terms, affording me at once a view of both Beirut and Singapore in the 1980s.
“It must be possible for both [Jews and Palestinians] to live together. Many said that Israel was too small to be home to both Jews and Palestinians. I think the idea of room or space is a relative one. Having been brought up in Singapore, one of the most crowded countries in the world, Israel or Palestine felt spacious to me, and it must be possible for a few million Jews and Arabs to live there as fellow citizens…
“The population of Singapore was nearly that of Israel, and we managed to make homes for all our people in an area of only 226 square miles. Israel is many, many times the area of Singapore, so no one could use the ‘over-crowding’ argument to a Singaporean. … So it is not a question of room, but one of an ideology of intolerance.” (Ang, 131-132)
(The current population of Israel is about 7 million; here in Singapore, we are at about 5 million.)
Sometimes, her descriptions give me a clue as to what Singapore used to be likebefore I was born. She wrote, “Early in the morning I was awakened by the sound of continuous machine-gun fire in the distance. It reminded me of waking to the sound of firecrackers at the Chinese New Year in Singapore.” (Ang, 28) I was intrigued to read this reference to a Singapore which came alive with the sound of firecrackers during CNY, having only encountered firecrackers while travelling in India.
(photo from Dr. Ang’s book, From Beirut to Jerusalem)
Exile, Trouble with the ISD
Curiously though, Dr. Ang refers to herself as an exile from Singapore and as a refugee in the UK, and alludes to having been too ‘outspoken’ for her colleagues back home in Singapore.
In Chapter 2 of her book, she wrote, “When community medicine had got me into hot water for being too outspoken for Singapore, orthopaedic surgery had provided me with a bolthole. When Francis and I had been obliged to leave Singapore because of the unwelcome attentions of the Internal Security Department, I wanted to work as a surgeon in Britain, but found plenty of white male prejudice in the British medical establishment.” (Ang, 4)
A Google Search of “ang swee chai” yields this entry on Singapore Rebel regarding ISD prisons, and offers this paragraph by way of explanation : “In March 1977 Francis Khoo, a Singapore lawyer who had defended one of the accused in the Tan Wah Piow trial, left Singapore after the Special Branch had arrested four lawyers, all of whom, like Francis Khoo, had been active in human rights work. After he left the Republic, his wife, Dr Ang Swee Chai, was arrested at her hospital by ten Special Branch officers and subjected to rigorous interrogation at Whitley Road Holding Centre. She was later released and allowed to join her husband in England.”
Google Searches of “Tan Wah Piow” yield more information, and I won’t stray too far from the topic at hand here. Nevertheless, the unfortunate turn of events for Dr. Ang and her husband led her, ironically, to a heightened sensitivity towards the plight of the Palestinians, being both exiles and refugees at the same time (and depending on which tack one takes).
“We boarded the airliner, and as the plane door closed on us I had a vivid sense of déjà vu. Tel Aviv airport reminded me of the airport in Singapore. As the plane took off, I felt exiled again – not from Singapore, but from the Middle East. Through the window I could see the sunset. Beautiful and golden, the setting sun cast its warmth and radiance over Lebanon, over occupied Palestine, over Beirut and Jerusalem, over victors and vanquished, faithfully and without bias… Now that I would be exiled from Jerusalem , I understood how the Palestinians must have felt. (Ang, 134)
Dr. Ang also had a ‘cheeky’ way of describing her exiled self. She relates an incident:
“On our way out, we were met by the British High Commissioner. He was very concerned about us… [but] he was a bit confused as to whether I was Singaporean, Malaysian or British. I was not sure either, but after some thought I told him: ‘I suppose the best way to put it is that if I died here, my body would have to go back to London, and that would probably be the concern of your department.” (Ang, 129-130)
She admitted that this was a ‘cheeky’, but ‘practical way of describing herself’. This streak of pragmatism certainly attests to her Singaporean roots, in my opinion!
Apart from this mysterious matter about the Internal Security Department and being a political exile/refugee, another issue that greatly fascinated me about Dr. Ang was her gradual political transformation.
She began as a pro-Israeli supporter, who empathised with the plight of the Jewish people who had suffered under the Nazis. Indeed, she wrote that “Both my parents had suffered at the hands of the Nazis’ allies, the Japanese Imperial Army. As a refugee in a foreign country, I understood what it meant to be stateless. The creation of the State of Israel, giving all Jews a home free from persecution, seemed to me to be an act of justice – even one of divine justice.” (Ang, 1-2)
Yet, when she read that “[t]he newspapers said that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon had made 100,000 people homeless and had killed 14000 people”, she was terribly upset and could not understand why the Israelis had done so.(Ang, 2)
Subsequent physical encounters with Palestinians, Lebanese, Israeli soldiers and Israeli activists then saw the progress of her political maturity – Palestinians were not all ‘terrorists’, and neither were all Israelis supportive of the invasion of Lebanon or of what they perceived was the ‘occupation’ of Palestinian territories.
Reality was much more nuanced, but what mattered at the end of the day was not one’s political affiliation, but one’s basic human compassion. She wrote,
“I am not an Arab, nor am I a Muslim. I am not a European, and I have neither the difficulty of living with the guilt of Nazism, nor responsibility for the British Mandate in Palestine. For me, supporting the Palestinians is not a political matter: it is my human responsibility. They seek to return home. Failing that, they demand the right to a decent life in exile: the right to exist. Their demands are just. I support them.” (Ang, 246-247)
Conclusion
Dr. Ang Swee Chai’s book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, should be resurrected from the black hole of our collective amnesia — or perhaps I speak too presumptuously about this ‘collective’, perhaps there are many others out there who have already heard of and read this book.
This book is available from the Middle East Institute’s library, thanks to a generous donation from our President, President Nathan. A recent interview of Dr. Ang Swee Chai in 2006 by the Singapore Medical Association is available
.This article first appeared on the Kent Ridge Common.
