Singapore's First Woman Cabinet Minister Had an Answer. Nobody Asked.

She had a complete, exonerating explanation — hers from the first day, and corroborated in print within days of the count — and said nothing publicly for eighteen years. The correction never catches the story. So she stopped trying to win the argument and rebuilt in a field where the work cannot be misread.

Most people who know the name Seet Ai Mee know one story about her. I knew it too.

The story is wrong in the part that matters. And it's from the wrong election.

She was Singapore's first woman Cabinet minister. Appointed 1 July 1991.

She held the job about two months.

Here's what I didn't know until recently:

The incident is from the 1988 campaign. Three years earlier.

The version that spread: she shook a fishmonger's hand, then washed hers.

She won that election. 12,661 votes to 11,024.

Tan Bee Bee had worked both Seet's campaigns, and by 1991 chaired the PAP Women's Wing in Bukit Gombak. She wrote to the Straits Times Forum page in September 1991. Her account: the fishmonger had just rinsed his hand in a water container. He grinned, embarrassed, and said his hand was wet.

"Dr Seet smiled, told him not to worry and immediately gave him a firm handshake."

The washing came later. After a butcher, and a hand covered in pork grease.

Tan Bee Bee saw Seet hold up that hand and say she needed to wash it in case she met a Muslim.

Seet's own words, in 2009: "I washed my hands...simply because I thought that if I shake the hand of another person later who may be Muslim, it would be a religious offence."

Then 1991. The story came back. From a rally stage. From her own Prime Minister. On 29 August, two days before polling, Goh Chok Tong raised it to end it.

The Straits Times reported it this way: she was a strong woman of good character, but she had a habit of washing her hands often, and that could be a liability as a politician.

He was defending her.

The defence carried the hand-washing into the national press.

On 31 August she lost by 654 votes. Ling How Doong 12,037. Seet 11,383.

The first Cabinet member in Singapore's history to lose a seat.

She has never said the handwashing alone cost her the seat.

Here's what stays with me:

She had the whole defence. True, simple, sympathetic, and in the paper five days after the count.

She said nothing publicly for eighteen years.

Her reason, when she finally gave it: "Did the press ask me why I washed my hands? No. Did the then Prime Minister ask me? No."

The correction never catches the story. She had the argument. Making it would have changed nothing.

She changed the arena instead.

She was 48 when she lost. In 1992 she co-founded Dover Park Hospice, Singapore's first secular hospice. She was a founder of the Singapore Hospice Council.

Politics is a business where perception is the product. A hospice isn't. Either the patients are cared for, or they aren't. She never got the reputation back. Singapore got the hospice, and the national council.

What are you still trying to explain, when building the next thing is the only argument that lands?