The people I look up to most in my life:

  • My Father
    My father’s name ‘振权’ means ‘to exert authority’, and yet he is one of the least pushy person I know. Although his relationship with me and my two younger sisters was not the touchy-huggy kind, his tender side showed in all he did with/for us. He read widely and had a large collection of books, which he added to in his frequent visits to book-stalls. I took after his reading habit at a young age and because he showed me how to use the dictionary, I was able to read through most of his collection before I finished primary school.
    In the year 1952, he was stricken with Polio and was hospitalised with little prospect of regaining mobility. My mother had a failing heart-valve and she too was admitted for observation at the end of her pregnancy. After my birth, father somehow persuaded the British nurses to help him make his twice-daily visits to the maternity ward to look in on mother and me. He kept up the vigorous regime of physiotherapy and regained the use of all limbs. However, the right leg was partiality atrophied and he walked with a limp the rest of his life. Still, it was a remarkable recovery according to the medical staffs. I learned to never give in to despair but to plod on no matter what.
    In the year 1966 the Perak River overflowed and flooded the banks along the river. We had to leave the shop and moved to higher grounds. Its was an unsettling and unnerving experience, especially when I realize we had to spend the night in the open. My father, sensing my bewilderment, said to me: “However bad the situation is, it will pass. Just do our best to cope and we’ll be home soon.” Sure enough, we returned home after two days on the hill. So I learned to look beyond a bad situation knowing that it will pass, and I just do my best while looking to better time when its over.
    Father was incredibly creative and resourceful despite a very basic primary education. He devised an ingenious system for cost-price marking for the shop, and hand-built some wonderful stuff. He build me my first bed (with removable side barriers and 3 drawers underneath for my toys and comics), a flame-red wooden rocking horse and a mechanical pinball machine. I can still remember how I became the most popular boy in town at 8 because everyone want to play with my pinball table.
  • Brother Thomas Ng, a Marist brother
    Brother Thomas was my form teacher for higher secondary years (Forms 4 and 5) back in Ipoh’s Sam Tet (三德 the 3 virtues, meaning Faith, Hope and Charity) High School. Fresh out of a lower secondary school examination where I did quite well, I was taking it real easy and my school work was not progressing much. During a vacation trip to the seaside town of Lumut, Brother Thomas and my English teacher made a stopover at my hometown and paid me a surprise visit. When shown to my father at our shop, Brother Thomas told my father within earshot of all and sundry that “在我班上, 他可算是数一数二的角色” (meaning that I was one of his top pupil, which I knew is far from the truth). My father was grinning from ear to ear while I was so ashamed that I didn’t slacken one bit for the rest of my years in school. While I was never at the the top of his class, it was not due to lack of trying.
    In class, Brother Thomas sparked my interest in physical chemistry. Out of class he introduced me to the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard, Alfred Whitehead, Clive S Lewis and the Young Christian Students movement. He is the greatest influence in my life. Last I heard, he was appointed as the Principal of Catholic High School in Malacca (his hometown).
  • Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
    Richard is the one person I really want to be like. It was my dream to read QED – Quantum-Electro-Dynamics under him in CalTech. Unable to afford the cost of studying in USA, it remained unfulfilled. I admire his brilliance in pioneering the field of Quantum Physics (he is credited with developing the pictorial notation use to mathematically express QED , hence the name Feyman diagram) and his humility (he frequently referred to himself as just a Bongo drum player). I consider him the brightest mind since Einstein.

    What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school… It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see my physics students don’t understand it… That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.
    — QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

  • Issac Asimov (1920-1992)
    Issac is my favorite author, bar none. Trained as a biochemist, his writing are both prolific and eclectic, ranging from biochemistry to physics and mathematics, science (fact and fiction), mysteries and puzzles, humor and satire, limericks and (surprise!) biblical observations and commentaries. His stores of how he was smuggled out of USSR (Russia) in a suitcase reminds me that humble beginning cannot limit how far one can go. My favorite story was that as a pre-schooler, out of boredom, he memorize sets of numbers printed at the back of exercise books of older siblings, only to learn years later that he knew the multiplication table before it was thought. His life story teaches me to set no limit to the fields in the quest for knowledge, and that there’s no such thing as useless or too much information.