My Country and My People is one of the best-known poems by the Singapore poet and critic Lee Tzu Pheng. It first appeared in the 1970’s and was published in the collection Prospect of a Drowning in 1980. Lee Tzu Pheng is considered Singapore’s leading woman poet writing in English. Prospect of a Drowning was her first major collection, and “My Country and My People” has remained a popular favorite.
Although often mistaken for a nationalistic poem, “My Country and My People” is a contemplative, questioning poem. Through the perspective of personal experience, it considers the complex meaning of nationhood. As a relatively young country (it gained independence in 1965), Singapore continues to face issues of national identity for its people. Lee Tzu Pheng considers the perplexing problems that challenge a new, multiethnic country and how they affect the individual.
My country and my people are neither here nor there, nor in the comfort of my preferences, if I could even choose. At any rate, to fancy is to cheat; and, worse than being alien or subversive without cause, is being a patriot of the will. I came in the boom of babies, not guns, a “daughter of a better age”; I held a pencil in a school while the “age” was quelling riots in the street, or cutting down those foreign “devils” (whose books I was being taught to read). Thus privileged I entered early the Lion City’s jaws. But they sent me back as fast to my shy, forbearing family. So I stayed in my parents’ house, and had only household cares. The city remained a distant way, but I had no land to till; only a duck that would not lay, and a runt of a papaya tree which also turned out to be male. Then I learnt to drive instead and praise the highways till I saw them chop the great trees down, and plant the little ones; impound the hungry buffalo (the big ones and the little ones) because the cars could not be curbed. Nor could the population. They built milli-mini-flats for a multi-mini-society. The chiselled profile of the sky took on a lofty attitude, but modestly, at any rate, it made the tourist feel “at home”. My country and my people I never understood. I grew up in China’s mighty shadow, with my gentle, brown-skinned neighbours; but I keep diaries in English. I sought to grow in humanity’s rich soil, and started digging on the banks, then saw life carrying my friends downstream. Yet, careful tending of the human heart may make a hundred flowers bloom; and perhaps, fence-sitting neighbour, I claim citizenship in your recognition of our kind. My people, and my country, are you, and you my home.
Lee Tzu Pheng points out that nationality is not a matter of choice—it is “neither here nor there.” Worse than not belonging or being mindlessly subversive is being patriotic through an effort of “will.” In a highly personal, confessional voice, the poet describes her own struggle for identity and a sense of meaning. Her description points to many of the conflicts of modern Singaporean life. She describes the contrast between country life and city life, between old ways and new. She shows the irony of rebellion against a colonial power whose language children are taught in school. Singapore’s successful process of modernization—which has erected new roads, new cities, and new buildings—is also shown to result from Westernization.
Ultimately, Lee Tzu Pheng aims to find consolation in the individual and in the “careful tending of the human heart.” She places “people” before “country” now. Blind nationalism may be senseless, but Lee can embrace her fellow citizens in the spirit of humanity. This spirit is the key to the poet’s discovery of her true “home.”
