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Christina’s Life Story Part 1: Growing up in Malaysia
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To help our readers know us better, we will be writing some posts about our backgrounds. This is Part 1 of 6 of Christina’s life story. For a complete story, please go to the “Our Story” tab on the homepage of our blog.
I was born in Singapore on July 8, 1960. Our family moved to Kuching, a small town in the state of Sarawak in Malaysia when I was about four years old. I am the third child in a family of five kids with two older sisters and two younger brothers. As the middle child, you typically do not get much attention so I learned to be very independent from a young age. I remember walking to kindergarten on my own when I was five and my route included having to cross a main road.
When I was eight, my father decided to quit his job in Kuching and start a business in Brunei. As the three oldest children were already in school, we did not move to Brunei with my parents because there were no good schools there. Instead we went to live in a Convent where I was looked after by some very kind nuns, so we could continue our education in Kuching. I remember being very close to one nun, Mother Bernadette, who died of cancer when I was living there. I took her name, Bernadette, as my confirmation name when I underwent confirmation in the Catholic church.
When I was 11, my father decided to sell his businesses in Brunei and take up a new job as a manager for a timber company that did logging in Indonesia. For this job, he spent most of his time in Indonesia with only about one week in a month at the company HQ in Singapore. He decided to move the whole family to Johor Baru, which is right next to Singapore so it would be easier for him to see us when he was back from Indonesia.
I completed my high school in the Holy Infant Jesus Convent in Johor Baru. I coasted through high school as I was always quite good academically and excelled in all subjects without too much effort. I first developed an interest in Finance and Accounting in lower secondary school when I studied Commerce as one of my subjects. After completing Form 3, we had to decide what we wanted to specialise in and our choices were Science, Commerce, Arts or Home Science. I chose Commerce but I was forced by the teachers to go to the Science class because that was where all the smart kids were supposed to go. I continued to do well in the Science subjects so I continued in the Science stream until I graduated from High School.
In 1978, I moved to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia to do my Victorian Higher School Certificate at Taylors College to prepare for entry into an Australian University. With my science background I naturally took subjects like Pure and Applied Maths, Physics and Chemistry as Science had become my comfort zone. I managed to score As in all these subjects and even managed to get a coveted offer to do a Bachelor of Science degree at Melbourne University, one of the best Universities in Australia.
That pretty much summarizes my happy childhood. Looking back, I think I got my interest in finance and entrepreneurship in my DNA from my father, even though I was being steered into the opposite direction by the education system that I was in.
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