Have you ever felt lonely in the dark? Are you fearful of darkness? I, for one, have been a little fearful of the dark, especially when I was a small boy. I would try not to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night as I perceived it was a long distance for…
(Click to read Part 1 and Part 2 of my blog on Leadership Camp – the week of mourning in Singapore and tribute to the late Lee Kuan Yew) Little do people in Singapore know that the death of Mr. Lee Kuan Yew was widely reported in Hong Kong (HK) media too. Nowadays, with the help…
(Click here to read Part 1 of my blog post on Leadership Camp) When my wife and I decided to move to Singapore in 2003, we simply filled out a form and paid an application fee. We were required to provide a lot of information for that form and I remembered there was a big emphasis…
I was privileged to be born in Hong Kong (HK) in the mid-60s and grew up there. I had witnessed a few decades of prosperity as a young man. My family enjoyed that time too, just like many other families in Hong Kong. We enjoyed free schooling there until 15 years of age. Medical treatment…
As Singapore is mourning for the passing of Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, I decided to run over to Parliament House this morning where Singaporeans are paying their respects to the late Mr. Lee. Numerous people queued up yesterday and it took close to 8 hours to get to the end of the line at one point. As a result, the organizers extended the time to 24 hours to enable more people to have an opportunity to bid farewell to Mr. Lee.
Compared with many Asians a generation ahead of me, my generation was the lucky one. We had a minimum of 9 years of compulsory school education in Hong Kong. It was ‘compulsory’ because parents could go behind bars if they failed to send their kids to school. I was born in the 1960s. The generation…
There has been a saying in Hong Kong relatively recently, which goes like this – “How many decades does one have?” The answers would be: (1) Not too many, (2) No one knows for sure. It was a few weeks ago over a casual conversation, that my wife, Moon, asked me whether I wanted to…
I grew up with three elder sisters. They went to a girls school and I went to boys school. During our early years, we all went to schools that were close to our home. The two schools were only about two kilometers away and it took a very short time to reach our destination on…
One of the things that I wanted to do when I visited Kuantan, on Malaysia’s east coast back in 1989 was to see sea turtles. A few of my friends from dental school went together for that trip. Being a boy growing up on a small island, I had my fair chances of seeing the…
Death and taxes are said to be the two things that no one can escape. I do not fully agree. A person can stay away from many ‘direct’ taxes (e.g. income tax) if he or she tries hard enough. On the other hand, nobody can argue that we are all subject to indirect taxes anyway…
Bits and Bites from Dr Ansgar Cheng 