Dear Kung Kung (Grandpa)
Congrats for having your Blog for more than a year in spite of your age and your schedule. Your desire to share your values and experiences to make us useful citizens is appreciated. You have taught us it is important to have good principles and values. More important you showed us how to live by them with relevant messages and anecdotes from your experiences. We treasure the private articles you have written for us through the years. They are the most valuable and precious legacy you can give to us.
We also share your joy of being given the Singapore National Institute of Chemistry (SNIC) Distinguished Service Award recently ‘in grateful recognition of your distinguished and lifetime contribution to the Chemistry Community’. You have done us all proud.
Our mother, Dr. Grace Lee Siew Luan, has inherited your genes and practices many of the values you taught her. Like you she has won many professional and research awards. She will be receiving another gold medal award on 12th April 2008 from the Singapore Society of Nephrology in recognition for her contribution to the treatment of kidney patients in Singapore. We are of course very proud of our mother and her achievements. We are sure you must be proud of her too.
As youngsters, we have our own dreams and ask to be allowed to pursue them. We need guidance, encouragement and support to do this. We thank our parents for allowing us to think for ourselves. We are aware of the changing values and priorities in our society.
Our affluent society tends to produce more and more timid souls who feel safer to follow the crowd than their dreams and ideals. Often we are stereotyped as “crackpots” for being different. On the one hand we are screaming for more innovation and creativity and for more people to take risks.
On the other hand are we killing initiative necessary for progress in our competitive world by some of the procedures we adopted? This is not good for our society and our future. How do we create more opportunities for the younger generation to be different and be allowed to pursue their dreams? Are we doing the right thing and are we doing enough? These are questions which we will constantly have to find answers to.
People who dare to think differently and make some mistakes are not failures or ‘Cracked Pots’. ‘Perfect’ people are also not those who made no mistakes in their lives. Perhaps we should encourage more brave people to come forward to help make the difference as was done during Singapore’s pioneering days. We can do it again. Have more faith and trust in the younger generation.
We like to share the following message with you and your “cracked pot” friends. Enjoy the beautiful flowers on our side of the path.
Your grandchildren
Laura, Michelle and Jeffery KEE.
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1 comment:
JUMPALO!!!!!!!!! I think that Lee Kum Tatt is a leader we should respect, as a fellow person of singaporian descent I feel like he has reached the pinacle of our success, an ideal that we have with a crushing reality.
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