Nice girl from Penang, schooled at the Convent, ends up in where else, sister state Singapore. And then becomes a cili padi making things hot for the grey old men who run The Little Red Dot.
“Arguably the most vivid personality in strait-laced Singapore and, when she is not writing witty romantic novels or telling ghost stories, one of the government’s most acute critics.” That’s the New York Times description of her in a profile on Saturday.
She’s Catherine Lim, 67, “romance writer” who wields “the strategic power” of the cheongsam, “bright and playful to the eye but not as benign as it seems” as the NYT describes it.
NYT photo
The NYT describes how she’s taken on Lee Kuan Yew as well as Goh Chok Tong — and flirted with the old men who come for her lectures on board the QE2 cruise ship. An excerpt from the full NYT profile:
Sometimes called a nanny state for its heavy-handed top-down control, Singapore might also be called a macho state, in which government warriors of social engineering and economic development command the citizenry. In Ms. Lim’s political analysis, these efficient, no-nonsense leaders are respected but not loved by their people, whose allegiance is to the good life the leaders provide, rather than to the leaders themselves.
This “great affective divide,” as she calls it, could deepen as a younger generation demands what some might term the more feminine qualities of the heart, soul and spirit. That view, which she first put forward 15 years ago in a pair of newspaper columns, still rankles among Singapore’s leaders, and its concept and vocabulary remain a framework for political discourse here today.
Ms. Lim has established herself as a leading voice for liberalism, and when newspapers shy away from printing her more pointed views in this heavily censored and self-censoring society, she posts them on her Web site, Catherinelim.sg.
She continues to say things few others dare to.
On her Web site a year ago, she belittled new, looser regulations over Internet speech as “a shrewd balancing act, both to reassure the people and to warn off the critics.”
“For the first time in its experience,” she wrote of the governing People’s Action Party, “it would seem that the powerful P.A.P. government stands nonplused by an adversary.”
A great read. The full article is:
A Romance Writer Jabs at Singapore’s Patriarchs
NYTimes.com (19 September 2009)
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