100-year-old voter recalls Singapore's growing pains
Lim Kim Tee is one of very few people in Singapore who has experienced British colonial rule, the Japanese Occupation, the turmoil of the 1960s and the Golden Jubilee. But as a centennial, Madam Lim is not just part of the Pioneer Generation - you might say she's a pioneer's pioneer.
Now, just as she has done whenever there was a contest in her ward, the mother of eight and grandmother of 17 is preparing to vote in the upcoming General Election. “We will bring her [to the polling station], and we will explain to her this and that, and she will vote," says her youngest son Steven Tay, 56.
It has been a long, eventful and blessed life for Madam Lim. Back in April, she celebrated her 100th birthday with the entire family, which extends over five generations. According to the Department of Statistics, there were some 1,053 Singaporeans aged 100 or older in 2014.
Madam Lim is wheelchair-bound and in the early stages of Parkinson’s Disease. She is not always lucid - there are days when she is on "low battery", as Tay puts it. When Yahoo Singapore visited her home in Toa Payoh, Tay, a pastor with Trinity Christian Centre, does most of the talking and translates as she only speaks Hokkien.
Lim was born out of wedlock in 1915. Given up for adoption to a working class family, her biological mother actually served as her nanny for the first three years or so of her life. Then her biological mother went home to China, and never contacted her again.
“Mum has vague memories of her. She even remembers sending her nanny-mother onto the ship,” says her son.
Lim's adoptive father, a plainclothes policeman, gave her a lot of personal freedom to make her own decisions from a very young age. Once, when she was not yet 10, he even brought her to witness an execution by firing squad. Tay adds, “One of my mum’s toys was her father’s pistol – with bullets removed, of course."
By the time the Second World War came around in 1939, Lim was 24 and married with children of her own. Married to a tailor who had two wives, she saw first-hand the effects of the Japanese Occupation. “The Japanese were very bad. They killed a lot of people,” she said. She adds that she often witnessed Japanese troops knocking on doors and bashing into houses.
She even had a family friend who narrowly escaped being executed, and came home with a chilling tale to tell:
But she was fortunate enough to be sent to Mersing, in Johor Bahru, with two of her children, where she became a farmer. Her enterprising husband, who ran a coffeeshop, also helped. Tay recalls, “My dad knew a bit of Japanese. He managed to strike a deal with the Japanese officers. They would supply lots of sugar. My dad made all the coffee for them, and the rest of the sugar was kept to do business. The Japanese left instructions that Dad and his family were not to be harassed in any way."
Come the 1960s, the entire family was living in a shophouse in Geylang opposite Gay World, where the family business was also based. Lim was a housewife and helped out in the shop. But it was a time of unrest - her son recalls a racial riot that took place when he was a child, just a few hundred metres from the shophouse.
But while Lim was not politically aware enough to have views on events such as the Merger with Malaysia or gaining independence in 1965, she does have "definite sentiments" about the late Lee Kuan Yew and the pioneer generation of leaders, says her son.
"People of her generation were acutely aware of the disadvantageous conditions of Singapore in those days. She remembers that we went to school almost for free. When I went to school, school fees were $2 – everything else was free.
"She remembers the first HDB flat we moved into in the 70s, and how little we paid for it. We were still using the bucket system (for the toilet) until 1964, 1965, before we switched over to the flush system. She remembers the racial riots.
And she says: Without Lee Kuan Yew, there would be no Singapore.”
