“The meeting with Chin Siong which in many ways, I think, was one of the better associations I have had……it was a meeting which I thought was valuable to me. It made me a fuller man I think.”
“My first meeting with him [Lim Chin Siong] was when I was the propaganda chief. I took the cyclostyled thing, and went to meet the candidate for Bukit Timah who was working in Factory and Shop Workers Union. There I met this 21-year old boy. And he was very respectful in his quiet way. And I gave him the cyclostyled sheet with all this, what talking points to address. So he said yes, he would do that. He was very quiet, didn’t say very much.”
James went with Chin Siong that night for a meeting in a little village in Bukit Panjang. The first speaker was Toh Chin Chye who spoke in English and was “Perfunctory.” “Then Chin Siong came and spoke. He fell into this style of speaking, with the ease of a duck to water. And he had the crowd in his hand”
“He [Chin Siong] had a great sense of human contact. For instance, I remember seeing him come to the office one day.. [It was] late at night and we were still working. We were all there and one Chinese woman, a very old woman whom I had an occassion to meet in my work in an American factory near Kallang; Firestone Rubber. She was a worker in Firestone. And she came there and wanted to talk to Chin Siong. She sat on a bench next to him and spoke in Cantonese. And he went to sleep. As she kept droning on, telling [him] her complaints of the Union, whenever she stopped, instinctively he will ask her something and fall back to sleep again and the conversation kept going. I was at the table watching this. At the end she went away very happy. She had talked to the Secretary-General. I called him a ‘nodding Buddha’. He had an excellent relationship with the workers. In a sense, he was not trying to convince people but people were trying to convince him and he was a very patient man.”
Lim Chin Siong was another who was detained under Operation Cold Store. He was detained in Singapore where he was incarcerated for 6 years and released only in 1969.
