After Tintin's recent void deck sweeping escapade Jo Teo now goes around picking up trash.....

Wayang much?

Tin Tin was super adorable as a little girl! 😍😍😍

Personally I feel Tin Tin is one of the more sensible MPs who actually walks the talk to help the common folk rather than connive away in mudslinging campaigns to get ahead in the political game.

Tin Pei Ling: A Glimpse of What the 4G Leadership Should Look Like

Kate Spade ends her life exactly a week before I meet Tin Pei Ling for the first time.

The 34-year-old Member of Parliament (MP) and I are having coffee at 6oz Espresso Bar in OUE Downtown, where she pays for my flat white and a pastry that we share. The eerie timeliness of the American designer’s suicide enables me to launch into the incident that Pei Ling does not want this piece to focus on.

“Let’s move on,” she appeals to my sense of newsworthiness. It’s been almost eight years.

In any other situation, I’d readily agree that harping on her social media baptism of fire during the 2011 General Elections is a media anecdote that should be retired.

Yet Kate Spade’s suicide isn’t merely relevant to our conversation because of the infamous viral photo of Pei Ling posing with a turquoise Kate Spade box when she was first fielded as a potential MP.

It’s also important because Kate Spade suffered from depression—one of the causes that Pei Ling feels deeply for happens to be mental health. (The other, more often covered by the media, is elderly issues.)

So we talk about the elephant in the room.

Opening up about how she cooped herself up at home, except for Meet-the-People sessions (MPS) and house visits, all while dealing with scrutiny and being publicly taunted, Pei Ling’s recount is clear and detailed even though it’s been, yes, almost eight years.

I feel exhausted on her behalf, but before I move on, I ask if there is a silver lining to unwanted fame.

“Yes, at least my residents can’t say that they don’t know who their MP is,” she quips, without missing a beat.

“As a politician, you’re fighting for a few causes. Because of what happened to me back then, now whenever I make a speech in Parliament, everyone pays attention. As a result, they pay attention to the causes I stand for too.”

Let’s face it, the flak surrounding Pei Ling’s initial nomination arose mainly because she’s part of the PAP. Even today, many detractors continue to focus only on the party’s ‘bad’ decisions and Parliamentary faux pas.

They don’t care that there are individuals within who are doing good work and making a difference.

Only 27 when she took on the role of full-time MP, Pei Ling was the youngest PAP candidate to ever be fielded. Almost eight years later, she recently took on a full-time role as CEO of Business China in May. She’s also a mother to one son, with another child on the way. Basically, she holds three jobs now.

The only thing that hasn’t changed is her insistence on championing the causes she cares about.

“It’s very hard to last if you don’t have a sense of mission and passion. Just imagine doing house visits every week for 52 weeks per year [for at least four years],” she says, describing just one aspect of being an MP.

She’s always believed that young people need to have a cause they’re passionate about before joining politics.

Since her junior college days, Pei Ling has wanted to break the stigma surrounding mental health, eventually pursuing psychology at the National University of Singapore. Through seven years of grassroots volunteering experience, she realised the necessity of normalising talk about mental health, not least so people are aware of their own mental health struggles.

“Once at an MPS, a resident claimed her father was Lee Kuan Yew. She refused all financial help. I thought something was unusual so I asked questions to test the logic of her reasoning. It took me a long time to convince her to accept welfare assistance,” she shares.

“At that time, I knew the reason I could detect her behaviour was because I’d studied abnormal psychology in school.”

So Pei Ling reached out to the Institute of Mental Health, and organised a session for fellow volunteers to understand the basics of mental health, and to educate themselves on what they could do to help other residents who exhibited symptoms.

I don’t realise it then but this seemingly ordinary anecdote reveals essentially who Pei Ling has always been. The woman gets shit done.

More at https://www.ricemedia.co/culture-people-tin-pei-ling-glimpse-4g-leadership-look-like/

She has aged badly.....

Woah Miss Kate Spade last time so smart sia, study at HC!