When the suggestion to write a book on Dr Baey Lian Peck was put to me by ISEAS Director K. Kesavapany in mid-2010, I must confess that I felt very doubtful. I had just put in three years of work on a book on Dr Goh Keng Swee, and was looking forward to getting back to studying Malaysian personalities from the Merdeka years. Not another Singaporean, I thought.

But I had no idea who this Dr Baey was. In fact I had never heard of him, and none of my peers had heard of him. This was not strange, since I began living in Singapore only in 2004. And so, to be fair to the Director, I said I would have to meet the man first before I decided. The head of ISEAS’ Public Affairs Unit, Mr Tan Keng Jin, arranged for the three of us to meet for lunch at the Singapore Cricket Club.

It turned out to be a very entertaining meal. Dr Baey was obviously a charismatic individual. Most significantly for me, he was clearly a very frank and honest person, and he had a lot of stories to tell. I was hooked. I had to find out more about him and his improbable tales.

I now think that it was exactly because I had just finished a book on a Singaporean leader that I felt drawn towards the story of Dr Baey Lian Peck. What is always not sufficiently present when authoring a biographical account of great leaders like Dr Goh are the soft voices and untold tales that lurk in the shadows, without which that main plot would not be plausible. In fact, the main plot is fatally bland unless one assumes the existence of these sub-plots.

And yet, the supporting cast in the big drama of nationhood is seldom studied seriously. This is a failing on the part of historians. These sub-plots are stories in their own right.

In that important sense then, the project I was being offered promised to still a disquiet that had settled upon me following my choice to base my book on Dr Goh largely on his writings. The adjoining and the underlying stories began to seek my attention.