Wong Kim Hoh meets...... (Sunday Times Interview Series)

[a74henry]

In this Sunday Times article, Diana Phee did not come from a rich family. When she was growing up in a family of 3 siblings. She had to be independent and survive. Her perservance and going the extra mile is important...in the right direction pays off.

An inspiration to entrepreneurs. Morale of the story - entrepreneurs start from sales and marketing. Know your customers and products.

Glad to hear that her costly and painfulk IVF paid off with twins too.

[pianist]

i feel like an ant compared to this great lady..my hat off.

[Musicwhiz]

Has anyone tried out his restaurant? Is it good?

Hmm, wonder what happened to him in 1997 which he refuses to disclose? Did he over-borrow and sink money into a dud investment, which subsequently collapsed due to the AFC? Anyhow, lessons learnt!

The Straits Times
www.straitstimes.com
Published on Apr 28, 2013
Wong Kim Hoh meets... Alwyn Tan
Sumptuous spread for antique-lovers
Diners at ex-hawker's restaurant get to feast their eyes on his treasures



Two mammoth stone statues stand sentry outside a new Teochew restaurant along Keong Saik Road, the former Chinatown red-light district which is now home to hip eateries and boutique hotels.

They are of ancient officials, representing the Chinese ideals of wen wu (master of pen and sword).

Standing at 2.5m tall and weighing two tonnes each, they are carved out of granite, their facial features almost obliterated by time and the elements.

"They are from the Song dynasty, about 1,000 years old," says owner Alwyn Tan, 53, who paid a tidy sum for them many years ago.

He is not afraid of thieves.

"I have closed-circuit TVs. Anyway, they are so heavy you will need a crane to cart them away," he says.

More treasures await in the four-storey Cheng Hoo Tian restaurant.

The four dining rooms on the second floor, for instance, are partitioned by 46 panels, fashioned from camphor wood with intricately carved scenes - rendered in gold paint - depicting Confucian values such as filial piety and benevolence.

At 3.3m tall and 40cm wide each, the 150-year-old panels came from an ancestral home in a village in Chao'an county, north of Swatow in China.

And in the private dining room on the fourth floor, Mr Tan has on display about 100 items which will draw gasps.

These include a Song dynasty bowl and an elephant statue carved from a single piece of jadeite. The statue weighs 40kg and is from the Qing dynasty.

"When I first saw it 20 years ago, my heart missed a beat," he says. "I bargained and negotiated, and finally paid $120,000 - the price of a five-room HDB flat in those days - for it."

Today, its estimated worth is a couple of million dollars.

If his collection of antiques is intriguing, Mr Tan himself is no less so.

The bachelor is not, he takes great pains to stress, to the manor born. A former hawker, he built his collection of antiques by scrimping and saving over the last three decades, during which he worked in an array of jobs - army medic, horticulturalist, landscape artist, fish breeder - and experienced many trials and tribulations.

His late paternal grandfather was a building contractor who lost his wealth overnight after a disastrous building project.

"When my mother first married into the family, she had four maids waiting on her. My father had a chauffeur. They lived in a big house on a big plot of land in Geylang," he says.

But by the time Mr Tan - the third of seven children - came along, the family fortune had been decimated. Home was a wooden house with a zinc roof in Paya Le-bar, shared with his grandparents and five uncles and aunts as well as their families.

"My grandfather became depressed and reclusive; my grandma had to start raising chickens to help make ends meet; my dad became a painting contractor and my mother sold kway chap and laksa from a pushcart," he says. Kway chap is a Teochew dish of flat rice sheets served with dishes including braised pig offal, beancurd and preserved vegetables.

By the time he was eight, he was already his mother's able little assistant, not only helping her with the shopping for ingredients but also with the washing and chopping of offal.

During his school holidays, the former student of Kwong Avenue Primary and Bartley Secondary School took up all sorts of jobs to help supplement the family income.

"I was a cargo hand at the airport, I sewed gunny sacks at a factory and I was a construction worker," he says, adding that he once nearly fell several floors from an uncompleted building while tipping over a wheelbarrow filled with construction debris to the ground floor.

Although he qualified for pre-university studies, he left after just two weeks.

"While the teachers were teaching, my mind was on the stall," says Mr Tan, whose mother was then operating a stall selling prawn noodles and fishball noodles in Sin Ming Road.

"I asked myself, what good would studying do if I couldn't help to put food on the table. I guess I had no ambition then, I just wanted to make money."

For two years, he worked at the stall until he got called up for national service, where he signed a four-year contract to be trained as a combat medic.

He was lured by the monthly pay of $460, instead of the $89 allowance regular national servicemen received.

"It seemed like a pretty good deal," he says with a laugh.

His training included a stint in forensics working under famous pathologist Chao Tzee Cheng, who died in 2000.

Professor Chao, he recalls, was quite impressed with his dexterity in dissecting and stitching up bodies during post-mortems.

"He laughed when I told him I was good at slicing and stitching because I used to sell kway chap and stitch gunny sacks in a factory," he recalls.

He did well in the army and was drawing $1,800 when his contract was up.

But Mr Tan surprised both his chief medical officer and his mother when he decided to leave the army, and became an apprentice in a landscaping company for just $430 a month instead.

His interest in horticulture was sparked during a visit to Taiwan where he saw many beautiful landscaped parks and gardens.

"My mother thought I was deranged but I told her I would not be stuck at $430 for too long," says Mr Tan, who used the army gratuity he was paid to enrol in a part-time horticulture course conducted by the School of Ornamental Horticulture at the Botanic Gardens.

Barely 11/2 years into his job, he left to join another landscaping firm which offered him a salary of $1,300.

He stayed with the company for five years, during which he worked on the landscaping for condominiums such as Clementi Park.

"By the time I left, I was already drawing about $5,000 a month," he says.

He struck out on his own, investing $3,000 to rent a small yard by the sea in Punggol 17th Avenue.

He took on several projects, including one from the Shangri-La Group to manage a plot of land in Jalan Kayu.

"I literally slept in a container in the wilderness. With just two or three workers, I cleared the land, grew plants, started a nursery. When you're young, you're just full of vigour and energy."

He did such a good job that he soon bagged contracts to landscape the grounds of several Shangri-La properties in Singapore, Sabah and Myanmar.

All went well for several years. He made enough to buy himself a terraced house in Hougang and indulge in his love for antiques.

But the 1997 Asian financial crisis took the wind out of his sails.

A business deal - which he declined to elaborate on - went terribly wrong and left him with huge debts.

He sold his house to pay off what he owed and downgraded to a four-room Housing Board flat in Hougang. His antiques, however, were untouched.

"I can eat and live simply. But I scrimped and saved to buy each piece of antique. They mean a lot to me. I've never sold any of the pieces I've bought."

To get out of the funk he had fallen into, he took on jobs abroad, including a six-month stint with the Singapore Tourism Board at the World Horticulture Expo in Kunming.

He returned to Singapore in 2000 and had planned to go into semi-retirement and "not go chasing after money".

Fate, however, nipped that plan in the bud. A fellow worshipper at the Goddess of Mercy temple he goes to in Telok Blangah sought his help to renovate a Keong Saik shophouse owned by her two adoptive mothers.

"The place had not been renovated for 75 years. The staircase was rickety and the roof - which was termite-infested - was in danger of collapsing," he says.

He undertook the project, and after it was completed, he was seized by an urge to rent the place and start a restaurant.

Grateful for his help, the owners agreed and gave him a long lease.

"I wanted a career switch, and because I love to eat and was a former hawker, I thought I would open a Teochew restaurant," he says. "I also needed a place to house all my antiques so I thought this would be killing two birds with one stone."

The hunt for a restaurant concept led him to food consultant Koh Teck Chuan, whose grandparents started Cheng Hoo Tian, a Teochew restaurant near Ellenborough Market, in 1936. The restaurant ceased operations about 30 years ago after Mr Koh's father died, and when rent and other overheads kept going up.

Mr Tan says: "I asked my mother if she had heard of Cheng Hoo Tian. She told me that my grandfather used to eat there."

The food consultant broached the idea of reviving Cheng Hoo Tian, and hanging his father's old signboard at the new restaurant.

"As a food consultant, he also had all the recipes. I was thrilled," says Mr Tan.

The deal was struck after Mr Koh consulted his seven siblings, all of whom were happy that the Cheng Hoo Tian name was being resurrected.

Two elder brothers, Teck Guang, 79, and Teck Kwee, 62, even came on board to helm the back kitchen and run the front desk. With the concept finalised, Mr Tan spent a six-figure sum on building the kitchen and other renovations.

"Hopefully, I can recoup my investments in five years," he says.

Cheng Hoo Tian opened its doors in January this year. Mr Koh, unfortunately, died at age 72 one month before it began operations.

Business has been brisk, with the restaurant attracting foodies, professionals in the area as well as doctors from the Singapore General Hospital nearby.

The new venture has given Mr Tan a new vigour. His role model, he says, is his mother, now 79.

"She raised seven children and cared for two aged parents while working as a roadside hawker. She is a real plucky woman."

kimhoh@sph.com.sg

[KopiKat]

.....Two elder brothers, Teck Guang, 79, and Teck Kwee, 62, .....

..... His role model, he says, is his mother, now 79.

The numbers do not make sense.
The quality of journalism at sph needs to improve.

Those are not his brothers but that of food consultant, Koh Teck Chuan

[wsreader]

Thanks KopiKat.
I take back my comment and stand corrected.


Reading the last few paragraphs again, I gathered the consultant, Mr Koh, was age 72 in Dec 2012.
Therefore Teck Kwee, 62, is most likely a younger brother.

[Musicwhiz]

I admit she tried hard and I admire that, but not exactly a story of rags to riches. I prefer the previous interviews.

The Straits Times
www.straitstimes.com
Published on May 05, 2013
Wong Kim Hoh meets... Christine Ng
Free spirit soars after tanking O levels
She shone in US varsity and has made a name for herself in e-commerce

After Ms Christine Ng collected her Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) results about 20 years ago, she and her mother hightailed it to Malaysia for a few days.

It was not a holiday to reward her for doing well. On the contrary, the trip was an attempt to evade being asked why she had managed an aggregate score of only 222. Top PSLE pupils typically get well over 255.

"Everyone wanted to compare grades so my mother took me to Malaysia to hide out," she says.

There was, after all, no reason why she should not do well.

She attended Raffles Girls' Primary School. Her parents were successful professionals: her mother, a lawyer with her own firm, and her father a stockbroker-turned-businessman.

Home was a semi-detached house in Bukit Timah, and she had tutors to help her with schoolwork.

But the PSLE was not her only academic disaster. Her O-level results four years later were even less impressive, qualifying her for the Institute of Technical Education.

Fast forward 15 years.

Now 30, she is not quite living the life of mediocrity many expected back then.

She has a degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, one of the top universities in the United States. For the last 10 years, she has worked in Silicon Valley where she found her niche in e-commerce.

Two months ago, Ms Ng - who has worked for the likes of Internet multinational eBay and beauty giant Sephora in the US - returned to Singapore as an expatriate.

She is now the chief marketing officer for beauty e-tailer Luxola, spearheading marketing and business development in Singapore and the South-east Asian region.

Luxola's founder Alexis Horowitz-Burdick describes Ms Ng's appointment as a coup. "The sort of experience she has doesn't exist in South-east Asia yet," she told TechCrunch, a Web publication offering technology news and profiles of start-ups.

It is sweet validation for the online strategist who describes her journey to professional success and respectability as unconventional.

"I just did it my own way," she says.

A free spirit, she always felt out of place in Singapore's competitive academic environment.

"I was good in English literature, I liked drama and the arts stuff," says the precocious reader who devoured the full versions of literary classics at 12 while her peers were starting on the abridged ones.

"But that has never been a priority in Singapore where you should be doing triple science," she adds with a laugh.

Mathematics, tests and homework - not necessarily in that order - made her blank out.

"I loathed things which were repetitive or formulaic; I didn't like the rigidity of maths. In fact, I hated maths so much I would throw my assessment books into the rubbish chute," she recalls.

"I had a lot of tuition and my mum also spent a lot of time with me on my homework. I probably gave her a really hard time; I was a difficult kid."

She is the eldest of three girls. Her two younger sisters were good students, she says. One is now a doctor, the other a businesswoman.

Any dreams Ms Ng's mother harboured of her doing law and taking over the law firm were dashed after the PSLE.

Although her English essays were often held up as examples of good writing at St Anthony's Convent, where she completed her secondary education, she floundered in other subjects, especially maths and accounting.

"I spent half my time in remedial classes or in tuition," she says. "It was all round frustrating. In fact, my accounting teacher thought I needed therapy because I kept failing the subject. She asked me if there was anything wrong at home."

She tanked at her O levels, failing maths and accounting.

"It sank in then. If you failed maths at O levels, you couldn't go anywhere, not even the polytechnic. I could only get into the secretarial course at the ITE."

On the advice of her maternal uncle who was settled in America, her parents decided to send Ms Ng to the US.

She left for St Jose in California a year later, after her family applied successfully for a green card.

"I did nothing for the year of 1999 but think about why I was in this limbo and what I was going to do," she says.

"I knew I was very lucky; I had an opportunity. So I asked myself, 'What are you going to make out of this?'"

She decided it was time to step up, and prove that she was not a total write-off.

She ended up at Evergreen Community College in St Jose. Community colleges, which are public institutions of higher learning, do not always enjoy a good reputation in the US and are sometimes seen as a last resort for those who cannot get into normal colleges.

Her stint at Evergreen opened up her eyes. The students came from all sorts of backgrounds and included refugees, poor immigrants and ex-inmates.

"It was there that I saw how lucky I was. Some of the students came from nothing, they had parents who had no means to send them anywhere else."

She decided it was not only time to study but also to give back a little. "I started giving English classes to immigrant students who wanted to learn it as a second language."

Free to choose courses she was interested in, such as philosophy, sociology and psychology, she thrived.

She did so well that she was accepted into the third year at the University of California, Berkeley, to do English literature.

Her parents had hoped she would return after graduating in 2004, but she felt she was not yet successful enough to return.

"With this degree, I felt I could do more. I wanted to make up for a lot of years," she says.

Getting a job, however, was not easy.

"Everybody wanted a business or engineering degree, at least where I was. I'd attend job fairs and get nothing."

She ended up finding a job on the online classifieds site, Craigslist.

Her employers were two wealthy Chinese women who had more than 25 companies. "I think they set them up to hide their assets," she says.

"I was hired to write technical manuals for their employees, like 'You can't leave the office before 10pm' or 'You can only take one- hour lunches' and things like that."

She roughed it out in a US$700-a-month apartment in a not very savoury part of town.

After 10 months on the job, she moved on to a real technical writing job, preparing instructional manuals for a company dealing in equipment such as biometric machines and health-care cabinets.

"It was my first step into technology and my boss really taught me a lot. But I also realised that I sucked at it; I hate reading instruction manuals myself," she says.

She was transferred to the marketing department, a stint she enjoyed a lot more. "It was still very writing-focused, but instead of instructions, I was writing marketing manuals, white papers, website materials."

After another stint at a software company, she joined eBay.

"By then, I realised I really enjoyed the thought behind products - how they put things together, how things work."

As a product specialist, she wrote marketing and other requirements for products.

"I'd write specs for engineers so that they'd know what we wanted to do, what we wanted to sell, how we wanted the products to look like. It was a lot of strategy work and I loved it."

The company also gave her a team of 10 to lead and a multimillion-dollar budget to spend on developing products.

"I was in an environment where there were many people who were hungry and eager to perform. Everyone was fighting for the best projects. In that kind of environment, you learn so much."

Unfortunately, she also had a taste of the cut and thrust of Silicon Valley when she was laid off after three years.

"It was a huge shock. I have an aggressive personality and my takeaway from being laid off is that you cannot always be in someone's face. You have to be able to manage yourself and play the game."

Fortunately, Sephora came a-calling not long after.

The cosmetics giant was then taking giant steps into social media and mobile technology.

The job gave her a lot of visibility and opportunities to test new e-commerce innovations such as Google Catalogs, and social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter.

She left after two years, consulted for a few start-ups before she was hired by PopSugar, an online media and commerce giant which offers news, videos and information on entertainment, fashion, beauty, fitness and shopping.

Boasting more than 20 million users, it has offices in Australia, Britain, France, Germany and Japan.

As director of affiliates and social, she was tasked with developing PopSugar's shopping portal and business relationships.

Her resume by now was much sought after.

Luxola, which was founded by Ms Horowitz-Burdick with funding from Wavemaker Labs and Singapore's National Research Foundation, started talks to get her on board last year. The company stocks more than 60 beauty brands from established names such as SKII to cult labels like Edward Bess, decleor and Tangle Teezer.

"I was actually offered another job with David Yurman to be based in New York," she says, referring to the American designer jewellery company. "It would have paid more but I thought about it and decided to go to the place where I was most needed."

What helped her make up her mind was also the conviction that e-commerce would take off in a big way in Singapore and the region.

"It's a new and exciting market. It will allow me to use all I've learnt in the US during the boom years and apply it here. At the same time, I'm also relearning because the challenges here are different."

Polytechnic lecturer Sarah Soh, 30, describes her former St Anthony's classmate as the prodigal daughter come home.

"When I first learnt that she was working for eBay, I asked her, 'What has eBay got to do with you?' We were so worried for her when she didn't do well in her O levels.

"But we're really happy for her. She's really changed. She's so driven and so focused; I guess she felt a lot less constrained by circumstances in the US."

Although glad to be home, Ms Ng says she is still trying to adjust to working here after being away for 14 years.

"I've had to temper my personality which is not a bad thing. Americans are very direct but it doesn't quite work like that here.

"It's just another skill set. I guess I just have to work things out."

kimhoh@sph.com.sg

[KopiKat]

Polytechnic lecturer Sarah Soh, 30, describes her former St Anthony's classmate as the prodigal daughter come home..

The above statement, from someone who knew her well (as her classmate) enough to see and experience her behaviour back then, tells us a lot more than the whole article, about her past...

From online dictionary,

prodigal : 1. recklessly wasteful or extravagant, as in disposing of goods or money

IMO, another of those rich kid, with too much money to spend, preferring to use her time to enjoy herself, rather than study... Of course it's a good thing she saw the light. Looks like shock therapy (going to US community college) was used to help her??

[mrEngineer]

So far the morale of story I got from these articles are to follow your passion..

[Temperament]

Polytechnic lecturer Sarah Soh, 30, describes her former St Anthony's classmate as the prodigal daughter come home..

The above statement, from someone who knew her well (as her classmate) enough to see and experience her behaviour back then, tells us a lot more than the whole article, about her past...

From online dictionary,

prodigal : 1. recklessly wasteful or extravagant, as in disposing of goods or money

IMO, another of those rich kid, with too much money to spend, preferring to use her time to enjoy herself, rather than study... Of course it's a good thing she saw the light. Looks like shock therapy (going to US community college) was used to help her??

Of course! The "failed" children from the rich, the upper-class, the Elites will always have family's backing to go for 2nd chance or even 3rd chance to make good. Even in another country, environment more suitable to do so. After all, what is the use of money?
No money? No Talk?

[yeokiwi]

I admire those who contribute to the society regardless of their background and their capacity.
I know there are lots of admiration for those who retire before 40, 35 or 30 but I am not the fan of this group of people, especially those specialists that the society has put in lots of resources to train them.

It is trued that they worked hard for their riches but it is not necessary trued that their hard work is the only reason that they are successful.

Ms Ng came from a well-off family. If she did not buck up, she probably would end up living off her family's riches. But she found her direction, worked hard and continue to contribute to the society.