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