By Phan Ming Yen

Enigmas: Tay Seow Huah, My Father, Singapore's Pioneer Spy Chief
Simon Tay
Landmark Books (2024) / 400 pages / SGD 41.20

There are moments in the life of Singapore's pioneer spy chief, Tay Seow Huah (1933–1980), that we can imagine with some surety, despite the absence of concrete evidence.

Here are the facts: late 1979, Seow Huah, alone in his apartment off Orchard Road. By that time, the once Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs and then of the Ministry of Defence, and the man who was caught in the tumultuous events of the nation, including the Laju incident and the Boat People crisis, had retired from the civil service following a medical review and was serving as Executive Director of the Singapore Manufacturers' Association. By then, he was also estranged from his wife. His daughter was in university in the UK, but he still had his only son, Simon Tay, over for dinner on some days.

As Simon recalled of those evenings in his memoir of his father, Enigmas: Tay Seow Huah, My Father, Singapore's Spy Chief, aside from conversations that ranged from books to his school life, often Seow Huah would "hum along with the classical music and drift off into the quiet… Then his eyes would open and he would say sorry that he slipped off, and call for the driver to take me home."

Simon recalled that Seow Huah had a "huge collection of classical music, LPs mainly bought from Beethoven Record House, where he would rack up bills each month." In the late 1960s and early 1970s when he was heading the Security and Intelligence Division and then later serving as the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Seow Huah would retire to his study at his home and work till late in the night, and "play his music, usually classical, sometimes jazz".

But in 1979 and in what – unknown to himself and those around him – would be the penultimate year of his life, the music that Seow Huah put on was no longer the "jaunty Night King Cole" or "the lighter classical pieces". Rather, he was listening to the "slow and deep symphonies of Sibelius and Mahler".

Simon does not state which of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius's (1865–1957) seven symphonies or which of the nine symphonies of the Austrian Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) – both great symphonists in the Western art music canon – that his father was listening to. But the choice of composers and their music is a key to unravelling the enigma of Seow Huah: a man who wore the face of Singapore's head spy; a father who could not share with his family the complexities of his work; a relative for many who till this day do not know exactly what transpired in his brief time at Port Dickson after his graduation with a general degree from University of Malaya until he returned for his Honours year.

This period in Port Dickson was one in which Simon himself states: "When he returned to Singapore, before the Special Branch appointment, he had contacts with British officers, both from the military and the High Commission. These connections were not apparent to his wife at the time nor to me and my sister. Only as information and stories have been gathered for this book, might these tangents be drawn together, tentatively as suppositions without clear proof."

Yet, while it is these very suppositions and tangents which make the heart of the book (after all, the book is about a spymaster), Enigmas is a book with something for everybody and not just for those interested in espionage or the civil service.

As family history, Enigmas is refreshingly honest, daringly opinionated and yet critically balanced in its portrayal of family members and familial relationships. Of particular note is Simon's vivid depiction of his paternal grandmother Goon Goot Meng, i.e. Seow Huah's mother, as the matriarch of the Tay family. As a mother who held the family together after her husband's death at the hands of the Japanese army at the onset of the Occupation, Madam Goon, as portrayed by Simon, alternately comes across as a hardened war survivor, who shaped by circumstances was bent on protecting her family at all costs but later expecting what was her due, as well as an individual with an innate domineering personality with high expectations of and from others, regardless of experience.

Here, Simon's skill in presenting all facets of Madam Goon's complex personality – balancing personal observations together with views from other relatives – results in the creation of a character whose presence almost upstages her son in the book.

The relationship between Simon's parents who lived apart in the latter years of their marriage is also handled with great nuance and analysis, evoking, at least for this reader, empathy for both parties and, of course, the children.

As a history book, Enigmas is the CliffsNotes for anyone who wants a concise guide to post-independence Singapore. Simon takes great pains to explain the politically volatile period – from the time of Konfrontasi to the post-Vietnam War years – in which Seow Huah worked and lived. It is a book that combines labour history (Seow Huah's work at the Port of Singapore Authority saw him engaging with the union), studies in intelligence and national security (Seow Huah's time with the Special Branch and later Security and Intelligence Division), studies in international relations (when Seow Huah was with the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Defence) and even cultural history (Seow Huah once chaired a "high profile discussion with Lee Kuan Yew on TV" which  focused on bilingualism, at that time a controversial and new policy).

As a memoir, Simon's bold closing chapter, which comprises a series of fictitious dinner conversations he has with his father, shows that fiction is as valid a way of knowing someone as historical or factual biography. In fact, this narrative strategy paves the way for readers to imagine what those "slow and deep" works which Seow Huah listened to were and thus provides another imagined private self behind the public figure.

Such a leeway of the imagination is necessary and even permissible, especially more so when Simon himself acknowledges the limits "we face in trying to understand a person from another time". As he states in the 'Introduction' chapter of his book: "The research and writing suggest to me that there are real limits to what we may think we know of a person – even when that person is your father, and of a place – even in Singapore your home, and in time – even when these are decades, in which you were alive, although a youth."

In the late 1960s and 1970s when Seow Huah probably began building his collection of classical records, Mahler and Sibelius were just entering the popular imagination, moving out from the realm of domain specialists in Western art music to a wider audience (the use of the 'Adagietto' from Mahler's Symphony No. 5 in Luchino Visconti's 1971 film Death in Venice and Ken Russell's "eccentric" 1974 eponymous biopic brought Mahler into the world of popular culture). A friend, whom I mentioned Seow Huah's liking of Mahler and Sibelius to, noted that perhaps, like Seow Huah's other interests (whether in motorcycles or cars), his exploration into Mahler and Sibelius showed a side of him wanting to always keep pace with that which was new and fashionable – was his choice of music out of intellectual curiosity or vanity?

Here then, we are surely allowed to imagine, just as Simon imagined his dinner conversations with his father, that Seow Huah could have listened to Mahler's song cycle Rückert-Lieder as well, and a favourite of his from that cycle is the lieder (art song) titled Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (variously translated as "I have lost track of the world" or "I am lost to the world").

In both tempo and mood, this work is indeed "slow and deep". The last stanza has been translated as:

I am dead to the world's commotion
and at peace in a still land!
I live alone in my own heaven,
in my love, in my song.

Mahler once told a friend that the song expressed the "feeling that fills us right up to our lips but does not pass them".

Perhaps deep down, Seow Huah knew that no one would ever get close to knowing him or understanding him: that he would always live alone in his own heaven. As Joseph Conrad once wrote in Lord Jim: "It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp."

If anything, Enigmas leaves us with the certain knowledge that we can never truly know the person we love most or the person who loves us most. We all have our secrets. And we love and want to be loved unconditionally despite and because of all those secrets.

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