My English was of no value under the new rulers. Learning Chinese would be better than learning Japanese; at least it was my own language, not that of a hated conqueror. I bought Chiang Ker Chiu’s Mandarin Made Easy, a thin booklet of some 30 pages that taught a basic 700 Chinese characters, how they were written, and how they were used in combination with each other.
— The Singapore Story (Lee Kuan Yew), Loc. 899–901