Chattanooga: Singapore’s ambassador visits GPS

When Chan Heng Chee was a girl, her mother took her to a fortune teller in Hong Kong, who said her daughter would have a life like a man’s and that she would be someone well known.

“So I grew up thinking my life was like a man’s,” said Ms. Chan, Singapore’s ambassador to the United States and the first female ambassador from an East Asian country to be assigned to the United States.

Speaking Thursday to students at Chattanooga’s Girls Preparatory School, Ms. Chan said making your own decisions and being comfortable with them are key.

“When I took the job (as an ambassador to the United Nations) I consulted my husband,” she told a small audience outside the school’s Frierson Theater. “If he had said ‘no,’ I don’t think I would have taken the job.”

But that marriage didn’t survive her job as Singapore’s permanent representative to the United Nations, which she held from 1989 to 1991, she said.

“You make the choice, you make your own choice, (and) you have to be comfortable with your choice,” she said.

Iona Florea, a senior at GPS, said Ms. Chan’s visit was “incredibly hopeful.”

“I was kind of concerned when she talked of reconciling the two roles of wife and ambassador and how that was a bit difficult, but just the fact that she had this opportunity and was able to get this far is incredible,” she said.

Inside the theater, Ms. Chan talked to a full house about wanting to visit Chattanooga since she was a child in Singapore.

“It may surprise you that, even as a child in Singapore, I had heard of Chattanooga, the Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” she said as the audience laughed. “The word sort of stuck in my mind, and there was this sort of romance to Chattanooga.”

During a question-and-answer session, Frances Zwenig, a GPS alumna and senior director of the U.S. Asian Business Council, asked Ms. Chan about her upbringing in Singapore and her life as a woman in a country where women are taught to be shy and submissive. Students had questions about her role in the U.N. and politics.

Despite having received many awards, Ms. Chan said being the first comes second to doing the best she can.

“I don’t think of what it’s like to be the first woman to be going to the U.N., the first woman to be the Inaugural Woman of the Year,” she said, “because once you have achieved a first, you are going to be first in a lot of other things. But it’s really to do the best that I can and, if that makes me the first in something, that is a job rather than a first.”

“Once I was told, ‘You are going to be the first woman ambassador,’ the first thing I thought (was), ‘I better make a success of it because if I don’t, it’s going to have an impact on others.”