Excerpted from Living in the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir (Public Affairs, 2024). Reprinted with permission.

Chapter One: Born Poor

Blame it all on the damn British. After effortlessly colonising the Indian subcontinent for a century or more, they royally screwed up their departure in 1947. The partition of British India into Muslim- majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India triggered a mass migration, with Muslims fleeing India to go to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs fleeing Pakistan to go to India. Riots and terrible communal violence accompanied these flights, resulting in a mass wave of killings. Up to eighteen million people were displaced, and two to three million people died¹ as they tried to flee Pakistan and India. My mother could easily have been among them.

As a young Hindu woman, she grew up in Hyderabad, Sind, where she was born on August 8, 1925. She was twenty-two when partition happened. Like many Hindus, she had to flee Pakistan. She managed to get on a train to India with my elder sister, Duri, who was just one year old. She was in the last car of the train with a few dozen other Hindu women, also with children. They were protected by a single Sikh guard with a single-shot rifle. In the middle of the night, their car was decoupled from the train, stranding all these Hindu women in the middle of the desert. If a Muslim mob had come along, they would have been raped and killed. It was a terrifying night. Fortunately, the next morning, another train came along and literally pushed her stranded car across the border into India. It was a close shave.

After her narrow escape from Pakistan in August 1947, she first ended up in Mumbai (then called Bombay), as she had many relatives there. These relatives helped to arrange a passage by ship to Singapore in January 1948, as my father had already moved back there, which was why I was conceived in Singapore and born there in October 1948. All this happened only because my father had been sent to work as a peon for five cents a day in Singapore in 1933, when he was thirteen years old. Hence, my being born in Singapore was an accident. I could just as easily have been born in any corner of the British empire, where the sun never set in 1948.

As independence approached in the Indian subcontinent in the 1940s, and as troubles between Hindus and Muslims increased (partly stoked by British divide- and- rule policies), my Hindu Sindhi ancestors began to flee from Hyderabad and Karachi, where they were an imperilled minority. The killings began before partition. My father told me that a Muslim mob had brought the dead body of his brother to his family home in Hyderabad to ask if he was a member of his family. Wisely, the family had denied that the dead body belonged to them. If they had accepted it, they could all have been slaughtered. Given this violence (and it must be emphasised that both Hindus and Mus- lims carried out these killings), it’s not surprising that my relatives fled to all areas of the earth to seek safety and prosperity.

One little-known fact about Sindhis is that they are remarkably entrepreneurial. When the Hindu Sindhis began to flee from what became Pakistan in 1947, they went to all corners of the world (often to cities where Sindhi merchants had already been operating since the late 1800s) and, amazingly, succeeded in many different environments. I can say this with confidence since I have first cousins sprinkled all around the globe: in Guyana and Suriname in South America, in Nigeria and Ghana in Africa, in Hong Kong and Tokyo in East Asia, and of course in Mumbai (or Bombay, as it was called then) and Calcutta. I could just as easily have been born in any of these places.

The first stroke of good luck in my life was to be born in Singapore. I am absolutely sure that if I hadn’t been born in Singapore, I wouldn’t have had the life I have enjoyed. The accident that led to my being born in Singapore was a result of my father, Mohandas Mahbubani, having been orphaned soon after he was born in 1920. He was brought up by his sisters, who couldn’t spare time for him as they had their own children to take care of. This was why his sisters sent him from Sind at the age of thirteen to “Wild West” Singapore, where he worked as a peon in a Sindhi textile shop. One reason Singapore was chosen was that one of his elder sisters had moved there with her husband. In theory, it was her responsibility to take care of him. In practice, she had little time to do so. She was focused on her own children and adjusting to a new country herself. As a result, my father grew up as an unsupervised young teenager in Singapore. Inevitably, he acquired many bad habits. He began to smoke, drink, and gamble. With these rough foundations, he ended up having a rough life. I discovered these facts only after I had become an adult. Hence, even though my sisters and I resented (and sometimes hated) our father when we were young, I came to forgive him when I understood that life had dealt him a very bad hand.

My father’s life must also have been affected by the turbulence in Southeast Asia. Fortunately, he left Singapore just before World War II broke out and thus did not live there under the harsh Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945. He returned to Sind to live with his relatives. While he was there, his relatives arranged a marriage with my mother, following traditional Hindu Sindhi customs. My mother had no clue that she was being married to a young man who had accumulated many self-destructive habits. Her Kirpalani family, a respectable clan, was happy that she was marrying into the supposedly prestigious Mahbubani clan. Almost all Asian societies are hierarchical. The Sindhis were no exception, and in the hierarchy of surnames, the Mahbubanis ranked high.

Having been brought up in a stable and conservative home, my mother had no idea of the turbulent life that awaited her after her marriage to my father. All her siblings, three brothers and three sisters, ended up in stable and successful marriages; she was the exception. Since she ended up in Singapore, she was far from sibling support. There were no close relatives she could turn to (except that preoccupied sister-in-law), even though she experienced a great deal of turbulence as we were growing up.

We were poor. I first became aware of this at the age of six when I was put on a special feeding program when I first enrolled in school.² All the Primary 1 boys were weighed when they joined Seraya School, and about a dozen of us were deemed to be underweight. At recess, we assembled in the principal’s office, where a big pail of milk with a single ladle awaited us. Each of us drank from the ladle, happily sharing our germs and inadvertently boosting our immune systems. Being underweight was obviously not a positive state, yet I was lucky to be alive at six. My mom told me that when I was six months old, the doctor told her that I would not survive a bad case of diarrhea. I could have become an infant mortality statistic in Singapore. Our poverty was a direct result of my father’s inability to hang on to a job for very long. At one point or another, his bad habits, especially drinking and gambling, would get in the way. He would also become violent, getting into fights after heavy drinking. My memory has erased some of my more dramatic encounters with my dad. Yet my oldest childhood friend, Jeffery Sng, whom I have known since the age of six since he lived less than a hundred meters from my home, remembers one of them vividly:

During the hot afternoon, we gathered inside the high-ceilinged living room to enjoy the cool air under the hanging fan. In the evening, the family would move out to sit on rattan chairs in the veranda of our Peranakan-style³ bungalow to enjoy the natural breeze coming from outside. One day when we were on the veranda, shouts suddenly rang out from the street, accompanied by the sound of footsteps of people running. When I looked down, I saw the neighbours and our kampong⁴ boys running past our big gate towards the Crane Road junction at the head of Onan Road. I could not help being infected by the sudden burst of excitement from the street below and rose from my chair to rush out from my house and follow the neighborhood boys running ahead towards Crane Road. As I approached the junction, a crowd was building up in front of the corner kopitiam.⁵ There was a large crowd, which spilled into the street, blocking off motor traffic. I pushed my way through the crowd, asking the onlookers in Malay and Hokkien dialect, “What’s happening?” “It’s a fight!” someone replied. As I nudged my way, body against body, to the front row, a police car arrived. A policeman was already walking past the tables on the shop floor towards the large counter where the shirtless Hylam Chinese owner was standing. People’s attention was directed to a particular spot next to the large counter. They were looking at an Indian man standing by a table with a broken Tiger Beer bottle and a broken beer mug. His white shirt, wet with beer, was torn and spattered with blood. He had an unshaven square face and neatly pomaded shining black hair parted in the middle. It suddenly struck me that he was Kishore’s father. The shirtless coffeeshop owner was standing nearby but hesitated to approach. Kishore’s father, the object of attention, looked drunk and fiercely defiant. Meanwhile, the policeman who came from the patrol car made his presence felt and started asking questions and waving his notebook. I couldn’t hear what was said. Then I suddenly noticed that Kishore had shown up next to the policeman and was calling out loudly, “Dad, Dad!” He went up to his father and took his arm lightly, with an anguished expression. “Please come home, Dad,” said Kishore. The Indian man with his torn shirt let himself be led by his son out of the kopitiam. The crowd parted to let the father and son pass through. I watched them cross the street together. Kishore’s house was almost right across from the kopitiam. Kishore walked his father up the front steps leading to the door of the house. The door opened, and they disappeared inside.

The person most traumatised by this event must have been me, not Jeffery. Logically, I should be the one who remembers it and Jeffery the one who has forgotten it. Instead, the opposite happened. This episode made me aware of how faulty our memories are. We remember some traumatic events. We also forget a lot. Nonetheless, I recall similar events. One night, our neighbors knocked on our door to say that my father had fallen into a nearby drain while walking home drunk. I vividly remember pulling him out to bring him home. I have even more frightening memories of going to the door of our house to tell some Chinese gangsters (and debt collectors) that my father was not home while he quickly rolled under the bed to escape detection. I don’t recall how the gangsters looked, but I’ll never forget the look of absolute fear in my father’s eyes. He knew that he would be beaten very badly if the Chinese gangsters got hold of him. In some ways, we lived on the edge in many phases of my childhood.

While my father was often involved in violent incidents, he was not violent at home. If he became angry, he would take it out on objects, not people. My three sisters and I remember one incident well. For Hindu families, the main celebratory event of the year (similar to Christmas) is Diwali, the festival of lights. That’s when we clean the house, buy new clothes, and indulge in eating a lot of sweets. One year, as Diwali approached, my father was prospering, and so he showered us with new clothes. He even bought a massive TV set that must have been five feet wide. A real luxury.

Unfortunately, he got into one of his usual drunken spats on the eve of Diwali and returned home angry. In his drunken anger, he took away all the new clothes he had bought us. He also carried the TV set out of the house. He piled up all the new luxuries in front of our home and set them alight, creating a huge bonfire that attracted the attention of the whole neighborhood. Everyone came to witness it. Our then neighbours still speak about this memorable event today: the festival of lights, done rather differently.

Incidents like this were traumatic for us children. They must have been even more traumatic for my mother. Her reaction to these domestic troubles was to pray—a lot. She would wash little silver idols of Hindu gods such as Krishna and Ganesh first in milk, then in water. I would sit by her as she prayed in front of our little family altar. Given the many hours I spent praying with my mother in my childhood, I should have emerged as a devout Hindu. Instead, the opposite happened. I felt restless and bored as she prayed, yet, as I sensed that the prayers helped her, I suppressed my boredom.

My father got into debt mostly because of his gambling, especially on horse races. Foolishly, he would take money (collected on behalf of his employer) and use it to gamble in the hope of striking it rich. He never did. He would lose the company funds, and as a result, he would lose his job as one Sindhi employer after another dismissed him for losing their money. Nevertheless, those Sindhi employers were kind and generous: they only fired him. The big mistake my father made was to accept a job from a respectable British firm, China Engineers. Initially, things went well. He earned more money from this more prosperous British outfit. Then the inevitable happened. He gambled away some funds he had collected on behalf of the firm.

The British, being British, played by the rules and reported this theft to the police, who arrested my dad. On October 30, 1962—six days after my fourteenth birthday—he was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment for criminal breach of trust. He was jailed in Outram Prison, which had been built by the British in 1847. As the only other male in the family, I was designated to visit him. These were not happy occasions. I had to take several buses to travel to the prison, which was far from our home. We often had to wait outside the prison until the visiting hours arrived. During our visits, I could not touch or hold him. We could speak to each other only through a window. He said little. I said little too. But the ritual of visiting seemed to help him. All I remember is feeling sad whenever I visited him.

While my father was in jail, my mother took the brave step of going to the government’s Legal Aid Bureau— which had been set up just a few years earlier, in 1958—to initiate proceedings for a legal separation from my father. It must have taken a great deal of courage, as she had no legal experience or knowledgeable friends to help her out. Fortunately, her brothers in Suriname and Guyana were doing well in business and sent money to keep us going when my father had none. However, my mother had no relatives in Singapore to help her with practical matters or provide psychological support. Hence, at the age of fourteen, I became the second senior adult in the house. I accompanied my mother to the Legal Aid Bureau to obtain the separation papers.

My father was informed of the separation while he was in jail. Legally, he had no place in our home after the end of his prison term. Still, we dreaded the day of his release, fearing that he would forcibly try to enter our house. Our house in Onan Road had once had very attractive colourful glass windows facing the street. However, one year, in one of his usual fits of rage, my father had thrown stones at them and shattered them. We had no choice but to replace them with ugly metal grilles. We felt comforted by those metal grilles on the day of his release from prison.

Sure enough, straight out of jail, my father appeared in front of our Onan Road home. He didn’t try to force his way in. He sat in the coffee shop opposite for several hours and then left. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

The legal separation turned out to be a blessing. My father rented a room and earned just about enough to keep himself going. We survived with the support of welfare payments from the state and the checks we received from my mother’s brothers in Guyana and Suriname. It was always a pleasure to accompany my mother to the post office to cash a banker’s draft that had come in the post. The money would be sent in British pounds. In those days, we got 8.5 Singapore dollars for each British pound. Today, you can get barely 1.7 Singapore dollars for each British pound.

The poverty that my family, as well as our Malay neighbors, experienced created many challenges and handicapped us in many ways. It prevented the full education of my sisters. My elder sister, Duri, left school at the age of twelve; my younger sister Vimu left school at sixteen; and my youngest sister, Chandra, left at eighteen. All our Malay neighbors also dropped out before they could graduate from secondary school.

I believe Jeffery Sng and I were the only two children from our section of Onan Road who ended up in university. Why were we the exceptions in our poor neighbourhood? At that time, university was not considered a necessary or even useful preparation for many occupations. We both had strong mothers who protected and nurtured us. We both accidentally discovered the Joo Chiat Public Library in our childhood and became voracious readers from a young age. Indeed, many of our childhood peers ridiculed Jeffery and me for the time we spent reading books.

While these personal factors were important, there were also larger national forces at play. If Jeffery and I had grown up in one of the British colonies that became either a failing or failed Third World nation, we wouldn’t have completed our studies. Unbeknownst to us as children, Singapore had miraculously begun to enjoy relatively good governance (by Third World standards), which created a favourable ecosystem that enabled us to grow and develop. From the daily ladle of milk in the principal’s office at the age of six to the trained teachers who always greeted us in the clean, functional classrooms; the constant bursaries that I received as a poor student; and the President’s Scholarship I received after finishing high school in 1967, my life was improved by the benign national environment that was developing around me.

Looking back to my childhood, I can clearly see how a well-governed state affected my life. Since my parents had several siblings who had scattered to all corners of the earth after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, I could compare my growth and development with those of many first cousins in Guyana and Suriname, Nigeria and Ghana, Mumbai and Calcutta, Hong Kong and Japan. Since my father hadn’t done well, my family was clearly the poorest compared to all my first cousins, some of whose parents became millionaires. Yet, with the exception of my two first cousins in Suriname (whose father, Jhamat Kirpalani, did exceptionally well in business by any standards), none of my first cousins completed a university education.

Therefore, Singapore played a key role in my ability to escape from the clutches of poverty and enjoy a rich life of diplomacy and learning.

1. Alvin Powell, “Getting to the Why of British India’s Bloody Partition,” April 6, 2018, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/04/harvard- scholars-take-fresh-look-at-the-partition-of-british-india-which-killed-millions/.
2. In Singapore, children generally enter primary school the year they turn seven. After six years of primary education, they attend secondary school from the ages of thirteen to sixteen. Students can then choose to attend a polytechnic, usually for three years (seventeen to nineteen), or a junior college for two years (seventeen to eighteen). After that, they may choose to continue their education at university.
3. Peranakan culture melds the indigenous cultures of the Malay-Indonesian archipelago with other ancestral cultures— in Singapore, most commonly Chinese culture. “About the Peranakans,” Peranakan Museum, accessed February 13, 2024, https://www.nhb.gov.sg/peranakanmuseum/learn/about-the-peranakans.
4. Village.
5. Coffee shop.