Although grownup, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong says his four children are, “at the moment”, not interested to enter politics.
PM Lee shared this in a televised Mandarin interview with Chinese television host Yang Lan ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Beijing in the first week of November. When asked if he would specially encourage or lead them in that direction, he said his children “have to find their own path in life”.
“They have to choose [their lives], because a child’s personality and aptitude have to be taken into consideration,” he said, in a transcript translated by national newspaper The Straits Times. “Every child is different, parents would of course wish that their children can fly high, but they all have different natures, some may be more inclined towards the arts, some may be more interested in computers or science, this will have to be developed according to their interests.”
Not much is known about PM Lee’s children, the first two of whom — 34-year-old Li Xiuqi and 32-year-old Li Yipeng — were born to his first wife Wong Ming Yang, who passed away after a heart attack, three weeks after she gave birth to Yipeng, an albino. His two sons with his current wife Ho Ching, whom he married three years later, are 27-year-old Li Hongyi and Lee Haoyi, now 25 years old.
Lee’s third child Hongyi made the news in 2007, while he was serving his National Service, when he sidestepped the usual chain of command to file a lengthy complaint in an email sent to senior military officers and then-Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean. Li, a Public Service Commission scholarship holder, studied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then spent two years working as a product manager at internet giant Google, as part of a programme allowing scholars to spend a stint in the private sector before starting work in the Public Service. He later returned to Singapore, where he now works at the Infocomm Development Authority as a consultant. According to his LinkedIn profile, he started work there a year ago.
Lee’s father, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, revealed in a dialogue in 2008 that Hongyi had written to his younger brother, Haoyi, to advise him not to take up a scholarship — this after Haoyi had scored 43 out of a possible 45 in his International Baccalaureate exams. Lee’s sister, Lee Wei Ling, wrote in a 2011 column that Haoyi had later joined his brother at MIT. According to his Facebook page, Haoyi interned at Facebook and also spent time at Dropbox.
Source: https://sg.news.yahoo.com
