ABSTRACT
The pose is languid and a touch defiant. They lean against the wall with their arms barely touching, behind them the Cambridge University landmark the Bridge of Sighs. Lee Kuan Yew and his then girlfriend Kwa Geok Choo had been law students at the University since 1947; they were young and in love. Their quiet repose exudes a delicate intimacy, and a certain social bearing nurtured by family background and the best of British tertiary education. Here in Cambridge, before Lee’s graduation and return to Singapore in 1950, there was still time to relax and enjoy what any young man about town of reasonable means might fancy. The picture dated itself to 1948. War-worn London might not be the centre of chic and fashion, but it nonetheless held the Olympic Games that summer, and the ‘American Broadway Invasion’ brought Oklahoma! and A Streetcar Named Desire to the theatres. Of these pleasures Lee makes no mention, preoccupied as he was with his final examinations. Nonetheless, this and other pictures included in his autobiography The Singapore Story1
do show something more than his usual, stern demeanour. The slick hair and the sartorial elegance of tie and woollen waistcoat under a jacket – a picture taken outdoors in the winter of 1947 showed him with a cigarette in his right hand – would have suggested, if not for the academic gown and the Cambridge backdrop, something of a dandy. There is in these postures a quiet, youthful defiance, the
romantic indolence of a James Dean or a Marlon Brando or a character from the deadly fashionable films of the Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai.
