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On the sixteenth of September 1923, Harry Lee Kuan Yew, a third generation Straits Chinese, was born to Chua Jim Neo and Lee Chin Koon at 92 Kampong Java Road, a large and airy bungalow in Singapore. The Lee family was rich but not extravagant. However, they had no business foresight and when the Great Depression hit the rubber market of Singapore, the Lees were badly hit and had to move into Kuan Yew’s mother’s residence, much to the chagrin of the patriarch of the Lee family, Kuan Yew’s grandfather Lee Hoon Leong, who had lavished his sons with English education and unlimited credit accounts at John Little’s and Robinsons. His influence over the family was exhibited in Kuan Yew’s name itself. “Harry” was chosen even though it was subnormal at that time to have a British name if you were not a British, but Hoon Leong believed that the name “Harry” should be given to one of his grandchildren as a sign of respect and admiration for the British. It is interesting to note that “Kuan Yew” in the Mandarin dialect means “light and brightness”, indirectly communicating to us the high hopes Kuan Yew’s parents had pinned on him even at such a young and tender age. Kuan Yew had a rather normal childhood by past standards, playing with the Chinese and Malay children in the neighbourhood surrounding his childhood home 141 Neil Road, competing in games of marbles, fighting fish and kite battles. He later said in his memoir, the Singapore Story “These games nurtured a fighting spirit and the will to win.” It definitely helped prepare him for the arena of politics where the atmosphere was to win or die trying. He read almost everything that the mail boat from Britain which docked at the Tanjong Pagar Wharf every Friday but had a certain partiality for old cowboy westerns. Life was not all a bed of roses however. Lee Chin Koon was a gambler and would often insist fervently on pawning his wife’s jewellery to pay off his debts after a particularly bad round of blackjack.
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