Fong Sun Yeng and son, Victor Chew, stay in touch via the phone.
As families got together to usher in the Year Of The Snake, Victor Chew was absent from his Penang hometown, leaving his 80-year-old mother to have her reunion dinner without him. The Amsterdam-based 40-year-old bachelor who has spent most of his adult life overseas does not feel it is an issue in his relationship with his mother.
“The idea of a reunion is to reconnect. In our case, there is no need to reconnect, because the connection was never broken,” says Chew.
It is a sentiment echoed by his mother, Fong Sun Yeng, who has lived alone since her husband passed away in his sleep in 2007.
“My sister comes over and both of us spend Chinese New Year enjoying Penang food. I get lots of invitations from friends, but most of the time I prefer to stay home as the traffic jam on the island is just terrible during this period,” says Fong.
She and her late husband had long accepted that their son would be apart from them as he pursued his dreams.
“From the onset, my late husband and I wanted our son to be educated overseas. We wanted him to be exposed to the world of opportunities,” says Fong.
Chew first left home to do his A-levels on a scholarship in Singapore. He was then offered a Boston University scholarship to study law, which he turned down because his parents didn’t want their only child to be so far away from them.
But Fong and her late husband relented when Chew was offered a scholarship by a retired judge to do his Masters in San Diego, the United States.
“By keeping him from pursuing the Boston University Scholarship, we nearly destroyed his future. Luckily, he had high ambitions and plenty of luck,” says Fong who is proud of her son’s success. Chew’s legal career eventually took him to the Netherlands where he has been based since 1994.
Fong admits loneliness does creep in at times, but the former English teacher has learned to keep busy and think positively. The sprightly woman, who has no qualms about donning leopard print leggings and sashaying about on three-inch heels, has learned not to dwell on life’s unsolvable problems. Doing so, she believes, will affect good health, a sure-fire way to dampen the fun.
Keeping Fong on her toes is her dancing group, The Golden Girls. They are usually booked to perform at charitable events. She has long come to terms with being apart from her son, and holds to her parting words to Chew when he left for the United States: “I told him not to worry about going away because we’d be coming to look for him.”
Missing them
Ali Gulen has not hugged his wife Neslihan Ertekin, 33, or kissed his two children, aged five and seven, for eight months. It is the longest that the 39-year-old director general of the Turkish Tourism and Inform ation (South-East Asia) bureau has been away from his family.
They moved to Malaysia with him when he was first posted here. But Gulen’s family moved home when his eldest son started school because they wanted the children to be educated in Turkey.
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