Book review: Late lawyer Adrian Tan’s If I Were King Of Singapore a loose set of LinkedIn musings

If I Were King Of Singapore

By Adrian Tan
Non-fiction/Landmark Books/Paperback/256 pages/$27.43/Amazon SG (

amzn.to/4dqIKOx

)
3 stars

Adrian Tan,

the late president of the Law Society of Singapore,

had a way with popular writing genres that few other Singaporean writers can lay claim to. A new posthumous collection of his online writings confirms his flair.

His best-selling novels The Teenage Textbook (1988) and The Teenage Workbook (1989) have sold close to 90,000 copies as at June 2023. The books follow the lives and loves of junior college students, and the first novel was adapted into a film by director Phillip Lim.

On LinkedIn, the self-professed “King of Singapore” attracted more than 37,000 followers with his varied writings on topics ranging from political and legal issues around migrant worker rights to the repeal of anti-gay sex law Section 377A to social topics around cultural history and social media use.

An alternative title for the book could be The Collected LinkedIn Posts Of Adrian Tan. Readers who followed Tan closely on social media would recognise most, if not all, of these as occasional writings that he penned in response to hot-button issues of the day.

Consequently, one might be disappointed to find the book little more than a loose gathering of writings that does not quite convey the urgency his LinkedIn posts could. With no assessment of Tan’s contribution to the agora of ideas – in the form of an editorial essay, for example – the book reads mostly like a thematically arranged record.

The lesson to be learnt here is that trending and viral content does not automatically make for riveting reading on the page after the fact. What leaps off the screen might not leap off the page.

Tan’s humorous, avuncular voice of political reason is, of course, unmistakable and ever present. Legal jargon is traded for digestible question-and-answer format posts, and a critique of how Covid-19 statistics were presented is told as a story about school report cards. Lists, bullet points and snappy paragraphs were his best friends.

Tan was a master of the aphoristic, advice-dispensing genre of internet speech.

“When we fight for the rights of migrant workers, we improve the rights of all workers,” he wrote on a case where Bangladeshi migrant worker Hasan Shofiqul faced difficulties making his claim of 1,515 hours of overtime pay from his employer.

In that LinkedIn post, for example, there are more than 8,000 likes and a rousing discussion in the comments section, although the book was not able to capture that buzz. One gathers that the online ruckus was half the fun of these writings.

His titular refrain showcases his ability to get a serious point across with wry humour. “If I were King of Singapore, I’d pass a law forbidding anyone riding in cargo beds. Anyone who wants to debate this will have to do so from the back of a lorry, while it is speeding down the PIE, at night, in a rainstorm.”

Collected in a single volume, it is hard not to marvel at the sheer range of issues Tan cast his eye over, even as he was fighting cancer.

From the controversy over comedienne Jocelyn Chia’s jokes about Singapore’s relationship with Malaysia to the demolition of Pearl Bank Apartments, Tan always spoke to Singaporean concerns with wit, honesty and clarity.

As a letter to The Straits Times put it,

“we need more Adrian Tans in the workplace and in our social circles”.

If I Were King Of Singapore reads as a peculiar time capsule of the past few years, even as many issues he raised continue to be contentious today.

Readers might be grateful to be able to read the sagely yet everyday prose of Tan in this paper archive if, hypothetically, LinkedIn were to disappear or be taken over by rogue tech leaders. His voice is sorely missed.

If you like this, read: The Teenage Textbook by Adrian Tan (Landmark Books, 2023, $18.61, Amazon SG, go to

amzn.to/44BLc0j

). The new memorial edition of Tan’s humorous coming-of-age novel includes an essay by scholar and writer Gwee Li Sui that sets this best-selling book in rich literary context.