SIMPLE HOLIDAYS, RICH MEMORIES, by Lee Wei Ling, Straits Times, Dec 13, 2009

Dec 13, 2009 , Starits Times

Simple holidays, rich memories

 Sun, sand and sea in Changi made for great school breaks during childhood

 By Lee Wei Ling

It is December now, and the rain is pouring like water gushing from a fire hydrant as I write this. For some strange reason, I like this kind of weather - perhaps because the time of the north-east monsoon coincided with the long holiday when I was in school.
Today, I tried to fix an appointment for a patient to see another specialist. Two out of the three specialists I tried to contact were holidaying overseas. This brought back memories of my own school holidays more than 40 years ago.

My childhood holidays were much humbler than what the children of my colleagues enjoy today. Most of my holidays were spent with my paternal grandmother. Before August 1965, my family would also spend a portion of the holidays on Fraser's Hill or Cameron Highlands in Peninsula Malaysia.

Indeed, we were on Cameron Highlands in the days before Separation. I remember my mother, my brothers and I driving back to Singapore in a hurry on Aug 8, 1965. My siblings and I discovered the reason only the next day.

After 1965, we would spend part of our school holidays at Changi Cottage or the chalets next door, bungalows by the sea that government officials - civil servants as well as elected officials - could use.

We did the usual things that children did on seaside holidays. I would rise early to watch the sun rise and meander along the beach. After breakfast, my brothers and I would build sandcastles, dig for clams and search for starfish and hermit crabs. When the tide was in, we tried our luck at fishing with hook and bait or swam in the sea. If it was raining, as it often did in December, we would read or play games indoors.

I remember playing a memory game using cards with the young Lee Chuen Neng, who was staying then with his father K.C. Lee and his family in a neighbouring chalet. More than 40 years later, we are still good friends; he is a cardiothoracic surgeon and head of the department of surgery at the National University Hospital, and I'm a neurologist and director of the National Neuroscience Institute.

These holidays were the rare occasions when my brothers and I had our father's company for the entire day. He would sometimes join us on the beach and swim with us. My mother would watch over us children whenever we went swimming. Without saying so, she was our lifeguard.

Every evening, my father would play golf at the nearby Changi golf course. We would walk with him, sometimes pulling his golf trolley. Sometimes, I would walk ahead to the next hole and roam in the thick vegetation nearby. Those trees and undergrowth were probably left there to increase the chances of a golfer losing his golf ball.

Among the bushes and trees, I would pretend that I was a soldier on a topographic march. I had a good sense of direction and never got lost, although I was often scratched or poked by sharp twigs and thorns. But that merely made the game more realistic, so I didn't mind.

Often, at least once a year while we were in Changi, my father would take us to Pulau Ubin. We would visit the Outward Bound School there. It was then rather under-developed by today's standards, but knowing no better, we enjoyed it, as we tried out the obstacle course.

I still have black-and-white photographs of my elder brother Hsien Loong climbing a net-like structure with parallel rows of horizontal ropes attached to parallel rows of vertical ropes. In the photograph, Loong had made it to the top, while I was trying very hard to catch up with him, as indicated by the determined expression on my face. My younger brother Hsien Yang was then too young to try the obstacle.

All three of us enjoyed our holidays in Changi and the quality time we had with our parents. I doubt we would have enjoyed ourselves more if our parents had flown us off to more exotic and expensive destinations overseas.

In the late 1970s, I remember one doctor friend deflating the ego of another doctor when the latter was boasting about his skiing holiday. My friend feigned ignorance and asked: 'Where did you go skiing? Off Coney Island (also known now as Pulau Serangoon)?' I chortled, for I shared my friend's attitude towards downhill skiing.

It is a chance for the rich to show off their ski costumes and stylish sunglasses. Equipment and ski lift passes are expensive, and skiing accidents are common. In the late 1970s, if you could afford to travel overseas to ski, you had to be very wealthy.

Now my younger doctors, with children in primary school, routinely fly their entire families to Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Europe, the United States or China during the year-end school holidays. A few with larger families may opt to drive up to Malaysia. But on the whole, the children of the upper- middle-class are growing up with expectations that expensive holidays overseas are the norm.

My readers can probably guess what I think of this trend. It is a waste of money to travel vast distances for a holiday when there are many interesting places near Singapore one could visit for both fun and education. It doesn't make sense for well-off Singaporean children to be more familiar with Vail or Aspen than with Borobudur or Angkor Wat.

But the festive season will be soon upon us and I don't want to sound like Scrooge. So I will end this trip down memory lane by wishing all my readers a happy year ahead - and by reminding them that misfortune can occur at any time and it is best not to get used to luxuries.

The writer is director of the National Neuroscience Institute.

MORALS AND MORALE by Lee Wei Ling, Straits Times, 29 Nov, 2009

Straits Times , Nov 29, 2009

Morals and morale

Chinese class taught me values that I still live by today; English spelling gave me grief


By Lee Wei Ling

Recently, my father acknowledged that he made a mistake in deciding how Chinese should be taught in our schools.

I remember many years ago Mr Lim Kim San telling my father that if my brothers and I had not been able to cope with both Chinese and English, he would not have insisted that all ethnic Chinese students acquire an equal facility in both languages.

My first nine years of formal schooling were spent in Nanyang Girls' - five in its primary school (I had a double promotion) and four in its secondary. I had no difficulty learning Chinese and I did not object to tingxie or moxie.

In tingxie, the teacher would pronounce the words and the student would try to write them down. As far as I know, tingxie is still practised in our schools. Moxie requires one to write down an entire essay or poem from memory.

For every wrong character, one mark would be deducted; and for every wrong punctuation mark, half a mark. As many of the classical poems and essays exceeded 100 characters, one could end up with a negative score.

Those who know about moxie might be surprised to hear that I enjoyed memorising the classics, and I never got less than 90 marks for moxie. It was English spelling that I had problems with.

Since I had no difficulty with written Chinese, I blamed my problems with English spelling on the strange spelling rules of the language. It was only many years later that I discovered I was dyslexic in English. To this day, I sometimes cannot decide whether to use a 'd' or a 't', a 'v' or a 'z'. I have even more difficulty with vowels. Fortunately, my e-mail and word-processing programs have spell checkers.

I had two favourite places where I would memorise my Chinese text. One was a particular tree on the Istana grounds with branches suitable to sit and lean back on; the other was a ledge outside the Istana building where I could sit and lean against the wall.

Both locations gave me a good view of the Istana grounds - the trees, shrubs, grass and ponds. And when twilight blurred the view, I imagined I was looking down on a vast lake or gloomy landscape, as they were described in the poems I was memorising.

Of course, there was always the danger I might fall off the tree or ledge - a danger that served to keep me alert as I studied, and was more effective in doing so than caffeine.

I rather enjoyed memorising the Chinese classics. The exercise trained my mind, and in later years, when I had to remember many medical facts, I could do so without much difficulty. And over and above the mental training, I absorbed many moral values from the Chinese classics I memorised. Some of these values are so much a part of me now that I find it difficult not to live by them.

When Chinese-medium schools were phased out, the Chinese language curriculum changed. Chinese culture and moral values were no longer always reflected in the Chinese textbooks. I remember one of my nephews, now 21, protesting: 'What Chinese culture are we being taught when we read Hans Christian Andersen in Chinese?'

I agreed with him wholeheartedly. I am told that the textbooks have been changed since then. I can only hope they have been changed for the better.

I took two major Chinese examinations: Chinese as a first language in my Secondary 4 school-leaving examination in Nanyang Girls' High School; and then later, the GCE O-level Chinese as a second language paper when I was in pre-university at Raffles Institution (RI). I took the latter because all the others in my RI cohort had taken it in their O levels. I received distinctions in both instances.

Recently, while searching for my old certificates, I found an exercise book in which copies of my essays published in Chinese newspapers were neatly pasted.

I remember being paid for those essays. In those days, $10 was big money to me. It was my mother who had cut out the newspaper articles and neatly pasted them in an exercise book.

I reread these essays. Years of disuse of the Chinese language - except to speak to some of my patients - have greatly lowered my ability to write in Chinese. The change from the old Chinese script to the modern simplified one adds to my problem. I know I cannot write Chinese essays now of the same quality as the ones I wrote as a teenager.

I do not regret that my parents sent me to a Chinese-medium school up to Sec 4, nor do I consider all the time I spent memorising those classical essays and poems as wasted.

I learnt how to behave honourably like a junzi - a cultured, honourable person. Among all the subjects I studied in school, I slogged the hardest for Chinese, but that was time well spent.

However, I recognise that not everyone can cope with learning two languages at a high level - especially English and Chinese, which are such different languages. For many pupils from English-speaking homes, Chinese is more a foreign language than a mother tongue. Such pupils form a growing proportion of our Primary 1 cohort.

The everyday use of Chinese will also be transformed by the development of IT, which will make certain skills like writing less important.

Schools have to keep up with these trends and customise the teaching of the language to meet the needs of different groups of students.

Chinese should be taught in a way that students can understand, and for a purpose that they will find useful. They should also be tested in ways that are relevant to how they would use the language in real life.

In that way, we can ensure that as many Chinese Singaporeans as possible retain their interest in the language throughout their lives.

The writer is director of the National Neuroscience Institute.