Family FECS: Remembering Mrs. Lee Kuan Yew

Saturday 28 March 2015

Remembering Mrs. Lee Kuan Yew

Mrs. Lee Kuan Yew (Mdm. Kwa Geok Choo)

She is the late wife of the late ex-Prime Minister of Singapore, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew. I am learning a lot in terms of how to be a mother from her through the speech of our Prime Minister, the eulogies by her husband and her children. I am archiving this for learning and remembering.

Here is an extracts of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's speech from Singapore National Day 2008 that gives us a glimpse of what we can learn from her as a mom:

"I remember my own experience. I’m a beneficiary of this. My mother was a lawyer. But every day she came home to have lunch with us. So every day we come home from school, three of us, my mother is there, we have lunch. Nowadays you would call it quality time. This was before people invented such big words. All it meant was she had time for us, we had time to talk to her."

"And it was a tremendous help. She avoided going out at night for functions. She had to go for, accompany my father, but business functions, very seldom. What it meant is less takings as a lawyer, less work, less conveyancing, but she decided her children were more important to her. And she acted on that and I think she was happy with that. And we’re definitely very grateful for that."

Mr. Lee Lee Kuan Yew once said:

“If she weren’t an influence, supposing I had married somebody else, I might have become a different person, not that I would be a different person, but the things that I would have been able to do, the kind of backdrop I would have had, family, support, would have been different.”