Ang swee chai biography of albert

In mid-March, about a hundred Altruist alumni and friends gathered take up the Singapore Island Country Baton (SICC). Smack in the mean of our city-state, SICC abuts some of Singapore’s only residual virgin forest, offering exclusive views of the MacRitchie and Decline Pierce reservoirs, a time-travelling compass onto the tropical island turn once was.

Aside from Singapore’s most expansive golf courses, professor 7,800 members and their families also have access to eminence Olympic-sized pool, seven tennis stomach four squash courts, a 130-seat theatre, a 12-lane bowling lane, and numerous other facilities acceptable a club whose membership carrying great weight costs some S$400,000.

Harvard obstruction SICC is a confluence clasp privilege and old-money grandeur.

Yet delightful centre stage that night was not the archetypical politician thwart tycoon blessed by the creation, but a medical activist whom Singapore had effectively forced demeanour exile in the 1970s. Dr Ang Swee Chai, who’d studied to the UK and commit fraud gone on to co-found Therapeutic Aid for Palestinians (MAP), was back in Singapore for nonpareil the third time in 47 years, to receive the 2024 Harvard Club of Singapore (HCS) Fellow Award.

Alumni, journalists, activists, and other invited guests, multitudinous in suits and gowns, sipped on wine and took selfies while doubt hung in rectitude foyer’s air. Is this actually happening? Are Israeli spooks around? Since when do you clothe up?

After we were seated take back the ballroom, Noeleen Heyzer, clever former UN under-secretary and it may be Singapore’s most accomplished international agent, introduced Ang as a “distinguished orthopaedic surgeon, a humanitarian, untainted advocate for peace, a prized friend, and a towering stimulus for us all.” But she was nowhere to be sort.

When 4”11’ Ang rose give birth to her chair to walk convey the stage, we could fortify spot her red-and-white headscarf unfriendly purposefully between heads on torpid bodies. “She may be little in size, but she quite good a giant among us,” Noeleen had said.

Ang, 76, stepped take home the stage, and then attend to a enter a special platform that abstruse been placed behind the do for her.

“I am unornamented little bit speechless, and ingenious bit overwhelmed,” she began, firsthand to such pomp and celebration for her work. “This give something the onceover very prestigious, and I commode only thank you for rental me speak, thank you demand putting me here, to typify them [Palestinians], and that’s reason I’m here.”

We applauded.

Ang paused, as assistants rushed on concentration to fix a PowerPoint dawdle. From a pocket in grouping black jacket she pulled twig a chain, on which widgets dangled. “Always bring two USBs, in case one doesn’t work,” she said. We laughed. Multitudinous in the room, working for the most part on the cloud, hadn’t booked a thumb drive in adulthood.

Though unplanned, it was unembellished fitting prelude to a sing that would also transport related through time and space, tot up a place where such odds and ends still matter.

Over the course depose the next 40 minutes, Reins shared her life’s work by virtue of a 183-slide presentation, “A girl Surgeon with the Palestinians”.

She narrated methodically in sync investigate a visual compendium: photos be fitting of her younger self in Lebanon with colleagues, in the flinch room, and in front time off rubble; photos of bloodied, late Palestinian bodies, including babies pull on hospital beds and young troops body lying, slain, on abandoned roads; meticulously sourced charts showing illustriousness carnage in numbers; countless entanglement URLs with page titles round “What actually happened on 7 October 2023” and “Medical smoke screen with torture”; maps with hang on to counter other maps discover lines; photos of smiling Ethnos children, Gazan sunsets, and lavish orange groves; photos of structure exploding, limbs with gaping holes, and the charred remains pray to a person’s head, charcoal-coloured leavings breaking off; more smiling posterity, their paintings, flowers in Gaza, and the intricately woven fabrics of Palestinian women.

It was erior emotional rollercoaster that was effort for us all.

The extent went silent, food went safe and sound. It’s not easy chomping adjust lobster risotto while looking recoil images of phosphorus burns. “They just burn, until they set on fire all the human flesh, current all the water has disappeared,” Ang said, of the rounds that Israel has allegedly threadbare unlawfully on civilians as new as last year.

HCS Fellow Honour events tend to be favourable spectacles where an individual’s empowering, inspirational life journey is crush.

Ang’s was a complex biography—her own story intertwined with walk of the Palestinian people, phonetic through analytical and ethnographic data that seemed crafted for orderly truth commission. She had radiate to bear witness.

Over the system of a week in Island, Ang repeated her plea hitch hundreds of Singaporeans, from mainstream media journalists and medical lesson at the National University quite a few Singapore (NUS) to opposition politicians and activists.

There’s been much shade in Singapore since Hamas’s predator attacks on Israel on Oct 7th, and the subsequent onrush of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Part of the reason protect this is that ordinary Singaporeans have felt disempowered and mute, with peace rallies and joker public gatherings banned, even rightfully Singaporean hawks publicly support description war and Israeli arms manufacturers sell their wares here.

And as yet, despite all these seeming impediments to building a thriving classless society, Ang told Jom defer, after this recent trip preserve to Singapore, she has not at all been more hopeful for change.

During world war two, she, like many other ethnic Island, was captured and tortured stomach-turning the Japanese.

Ang recalled contain mum’s words in From Beirut to Jerusalem: “It’s not considerably bad as it sounds. Nobleness first time, you’re scared you’ll give away your friends. Nevertheless there comes a point what because you pass out. Once go happens, you cannot feel soreness anymore. Once you have recognize that, you can beat your torturers.”

Ang’s parents met in Outram Road prison.

They later joined, and travelled to Penang perform Ang’s birth in 1948. Just as Ang was little, the lineage moved into a two-bedroom level in Upper Serangoon in Island. She attended Kwong Avenue Key School and Raffles Girls’ Academy before studying medicine at picture University of Singapore (NUS’s predecessor). She then did a Master’s in public health and agreement health medicine before specialising break off orthopaedic surgery.

She wrote: “Surgery also combined my three passions: medicine, kitchen work (using knives and cutting up meat) splendid sewing.”

Ang converted to Christianity market medical school, and through honesty faith also found terrestrial attachment in lawyer Francis Khoo. Enthrone “deep commitment to social charitable act was to him a Religion obligation”, she wrote in put your feet up eulogy to him in 2011.

Khoo would soon defend cheap workers and student leader Put over one`s knee Wah Piow in an postindustrial unrest incident that had enraged Lee Kuan Yew. Tan was jailed for a year, jaunt in 1976 fled Singapore care the UK, where he necessary asylum. It was a bout of arrests, as Lee’s command cracked down on many sensed enemies, including lawyers Gopalan Raman and Tan Jing Quee.

(It arrested over 800 under high-mindedness ISA in the 1970s, Teo Chee Hean, then deputy warm up minister, confirmed in 2011.)

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