The Mayor's Lecture Series 2004

28 Jul 2004

By Mr Khaw Boon Wan , Acting Minister for Health

Speech By Mr Khaw Boon Wan, Acting Minister For Health And Senior Minister Of State For Finance At The Mayor's Lecture Series 2004, 28 July 2004 At 3.20 Pm

Your Generation and Mine: Which is luckier?

Lucky People

My children are about your age.  So we belong to two different generations. The organisers have asked me to answer this question: which is the luckier generation.  Let me try. But first allow me to paint you a picture of a "lucky" person.  This is my take: a lucky person is one with a decent job, a happy family, in relatively good health, weekends spent with family and friends, have enough to go by, and even some spare money to go on holidays etc.  I do not know if you can accept this definition as adequate, but we can debate this point after my speech.

Even if we can agree on the definition, this is not an easy question to answer, for the simple reason that nobody can be certain about the future.  My generation is not finished yet, being at the half or 3/4 mark.  Yours has just begun.

Perhaps I should begin by comparing my generation with my parents' generation.  Here, I can answer with absolute certainty: that my generation is luckier than my parents'.

Escaping Poverty

Four years ago, I made a trip to my father's hometown in Fujian.  This is a village up on the hill, about 2 hours drive from Xiamen. Xiamen is now a rich modern city, like many other coastal cities in China. Not as glamorous and prosperous as Shanghai, but certainly prospering and oozing with opportunities.

But 2 hours up the hill, it is a very different world.  It is a village of about 1,000 farmers, all with same surname as mine.  As I walked in the village, I could not help noticing that several looked like my father; some like my brother. So I knew I have come to the right place. Poverty is still widespread. Infrastructure is weak and children have to walk down and up the mountain path, each day just to attend schools.  I was immediately reminded that China is still a poor third world country. 

But my relatives were proud to show me evidence of their economic achievements. While I saw poverty, they saw drastic transformation in their standard of living, compared to what they had ten or even just five years ago.   

So I could imagine what a sorrowful state it must have been like 80 years ago, when my father and his friends had to escape the village to sail into the unknown, risking their lives, not knowing what their future in Nanyang would be like. Settling down in S E Asia did not end their misery.  They had to further endure the Japanese Occupation, the struggle against communism and communal violence. During the Japanese Occupation, my maternal grandfather actually starved to death in Penang while my parents and grandmother were in hiding in Perlis. 

From Third World to First

On the other hand, my siblings and I have not known war and deprivation.  We experienced a bloody May 13, the racial riots in Malaysia. But that was minor compared to what my parents went through during the War. We were born poor, but we saw our standard of living rising with each passing year. My generation graduated from third world to near first world. Relative to my parents' generation, what can we complain about?

While my parents were born without any spoon in their mouths, mine had at least a wooden spoon.  But, yours was even better, a silver spoon, or at least silver-plated.   You have never experienced poverty and third world deprivation.  Instead, your world is one of mobile phones, PDAs, digital cameras, holidays overseas.

Less Lucky People Elsewhere

Last month, I took my family to Yunnan Province, visiting Kunming, Lijiang and Zhong-dian (based on which James Hilton wrote the "Lost Horizon" of a Shangri-la or paradise on earth). We took in the sights: beautiful mountains, spectacular Yangtze Gorge and colourful minority tribes with their rich arts and culture. At Lijiang, we stayed in a comfortable villa, with a young housekeeper, about your age, looking after our daily needs. She was a bright enthusiastic girl from the minority Naxi tribe. 

She finished her High School last year, sat for the nation-wide University Entrance Examination. Did well, but there were many others who did even better.  Because of the shortage of University places, she could not pursue her tertiary education. 

Every year, some 6 or 7 million Chinese students would compete in such annual examinations, but only one in four will be lucky enough to get a place in a local university.  So you can imagine how competitive it is and how stressful their schools must be.

Unable to enter university, this young girl then had to get a job. She was lucky to get one as a housekeeper in the Hotel. That was another competitive race: hundreds applied for a handful of vacancies. But this time round, she was lucky. So you can imagine how enthusiastic she was to keep her job, learning on the job and always trying to improve on her skills. But she has not given up her wish to enter university. She studies on her own at night, intending to re-sit the university entrance exams and hopes that she would be luckier the next time.

Her salary at the Hotel: about 500 RMB a month; that is about $100 Singapore dollars.  

Her conditions reminded me of my childhood days.  Her generation in Yunnan is now living through what my generation experienced 40/50 years ago.  As the Hokkiens would put it: we belong to the "chai-si" generation ("we know death").  For we know that if we do not work hard, we will remain trapped in poverty, in living death.

But your generation in Singapore is drastically different. You have already moved up the standard of living. $100 is more like your monthly pocket money, rather than the pay of a full time job.

Youthful Idealism

At Lijiang, we visited an orphanage, about 100 orphans there. I was most happy to meet one ex-RJC girl there. She finished her A levels last year and decided to take one year off, before joining the university. She decided to volunteer her time to help run the orphanage. The idealism in her is inspiring and her sense of charity and giving, most heart-warming.

During my time, we were not without such youthful idealism, but with wooden spoons, and sometimes, no spoons, in our mouths, we were not in a position to help others.  As the Chinese saying goes: "it's like a clay Bodhisattva crossing the river, she cannot even rescue herself".

So there are vast differences between us.

Wanbao interviewed me 3 months ago. Among other things, the young reporters asked how I got to know my wife. We met each other in a college in Penang, before we went to separate universities: she in Singapore and I in Australia.   So we were separated for 5 years, but we kept up the courtship through letter writing. I must have written 1000 love letters. They were shocked and puzzled, not so much by the number of letters I wrote, but by the fact that we did not use the telephone! So clearly, these were young reporters who had never experienced the pre-Internet days of expensive IDD calls.

Beyond 5Cs

I know that many of you complain about stressful school life. It is true that during our time, we were more relaxed. Fewer examinations, less homework, more time to play.

But as a result, more students failed to get into higher education. From my P1 Class of 50, probably less than 20 ended up in High School, and less than 5 made it to University.

So while your school life is more stressful; your opportunities are far greater.  If I may use a soccer analogy, we were then merely competing in the Malaysian Cup; you are now in the World Cup. Yours is more competitive but the trophy you win is much more prestigious than we could ever hope to get.

I suppose these are facts of life. Where there are upsides, there will correspondingly be downsides. There is no free lunch.

Talking about lunch. My generation went through deprivation and sometimes starvation. Yours is an era of plenty and often, waste. So obesity is now a big problem among the young, especially in the West.

I read somewhere that even wild bears in the Rockies, living near population centres have become obese. These animals feed on human leftovers in the rubbish dumps. As Americans eat junk food, so do these bears. As a result, you get obese bears in America.

So this is a problem which your generation cannot ignore. These are problems brought about by prosperity at an age of plenty.

Greater Humanity

Another example of change is in medical science. It will continue to extend life expectancy. In 1950s, all new-born in Singapore could, on average, expect to live to 60 years. Now, all new-born in Singapore could expect to live to 75 a big increase of 15 years.

With continuing advances in molecular biology, scientists are already talking about living to the ripe old age of 150. That will not happen during my time, but you will see many who live beyond 100.

But science is merely a tool. How you make use of it will determine your wisdom and humanity. You may have read that when ultrasound was introduced to China, it saved many lives. Unfortunately, it was also abused by parents who wanted to know the sex of the baby, leading to many aborted female foetuses.  China today has significantly more boys born than girls, and finding partners is becoming a problem.   

Two weeks ago, I read in the Sunday Times the essay by Amanda Chong, an RGS student who won this year's Commonwealth Essay Competition, beating 5,000 other entries from 52 countries. She did Singapore proud. She wrote about an uneducated but devoted single mother who toiled to bring up her daughter, giving her an education which brought her all the 5Cs, a great career, a large salary. But the daughter finally dumped the mother in an old folks' home, in pursuit of her self-interest and so-called freedom. The young lady got material success, but along the way, forgot her roots and lost her soul.  

Amanda's essay reminded me of an ancient Greek story. Those of you who study Literature may know about Odysseus, a handsome mortal devoted to his wife.  But he was tempted with immortality by Goddess Calypso in return for his love. He turned the Goddess down, so that he could simply grow old and die with his mortal wife, Penelope. 

The moral of these stories is that while it is natural to strive for a better future, we must not lose touch of our common roots. Fighting wars and deprivation gave my generation and my parents' generation an acute sense of shared memories and common destiny. Life was tough, but we forged a strong sense of group solidarity, loyalty to extended families and social cohesion. Amanda's essay painted a worrisome future where some people may lose their social anchor and seek primarily to advance individual interest.

Conclusion

So let me get back to the question posed to me. My generation and yours: which is luckier?  At the end of the day, I don't think it is one of luck. People like to say so-and-so is lucky or unlucky, after the event. But luck or lack of luck is not preordained. Much of our luck is for us to create. 

Even for my generation, while most are luckier than their parents, there are some who make themselves unlucky: not taking care of family and friends, drifting through life without putting in efforts, ruined their health by over eating, over drinking, not doing exercises and are now lonely and in poor health.

For you, the opportunities are plenty out there.  But so are the challenges, for you are not alone in the race to make a grab at those opportunities. There are millions out there, like the young housekeeper I met in Lijiang and many others in China, Vietnam, India - they are hungry with the desire to better their lives, and willing to slog it out to get there. 

Do you have the drive, the courage to dream dreams, and the passion to realize them?  Do you have the wisdom to make use of the advantages given to you by your parents, to sink even deeper roots, and add to humanity and make this world an even better place? 

You will face tougher competition, but with what you have, in terms of better education and greater resources, many of you can be luckier than your parents, provided you put in the efforts, take control of your own lives and make yourselves lucky. How you make use of your advantages and opportunities will determine whether you can in 30 years time conclude, like I am now able to conclude, that we are luckier than our parents.

Good luck.