‘You shouldn’t be with a Chinese girl…that should be my girl,’ a man in Singapore allegedly said this to a Chinese-Indian couple as he spat towards them. In a world brimming with such prejudice and cultural tensions, a remarkable phenomenon emerges: nearly one in five marriages in the USA and Singapore are now interracial. “Rebels, Traitors, Peacemakers,” explores this phenomenon through real stories of Indian-Chinese relationships, delving into the love and turmoil in such lives, where cultural boundaries are shattered and hearts are forged against all odds.
Spanning across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, these heartfelt accounts transcend borders, age, and sexual orientation to illuminate the unfiltered reality of cross-cultural unions. Families disown their own flesh and blood, individuals get locked and beaten up, and online trolls attack relentlessly. Married life offers no respite – cultural expectations breed misunderstandings, life seems hopeless in front of the unfamiliar letters on the washing machine, and differing parenting styles fuel frequent arguments over raising kids. The couples often ask themselves – why did I make my life so complicated?
And yet, the featured stories reveal the couple’s deep admiration for each other and a steely commitment to sustain their syncretic relationship. The Chinese father-in-law now dances Indian style. Strict vegetarians start cooking meat. While their love first appeared as treacherous rebellion, its endurance transforms lives and communities, forging a path towards unity in our fragmented world.
Journey alongside these bold protagonists, who through their triumphs and struggles, illuminate the intricacies of human nature and our universal yearning for connection.
Silver Medal Winner (Company Culture) in the 2024 Axiom Business Book Awards
Post-pandemic, the whole world is being reset. With this unifying experience that challenges our identity, rules are broken; beliefs are corrected. Happiness and meaning in work and life are no longer optional. With success being redefined as we speak, what this means for leaders is they too, now need to reset their compasses urgently—for the real threat is obsolescence and irrelevance.
The time to act is now.
But with many management practices fading into irrelevance, how then, can leaders chart their paths in these complex and disruptive times?
While there is no one right way to lead and make an impact, for ‘right’ is subjective and contextual, the good news is that proven methods have been discovered—some of which will be shared in this book’s pages.
Leaders People Love features a host of accessible leadership lessons. Undergirded by a contemporary and relevant mindset, these strategies consistently yield excellent results and prove a point: becoming an effective and well-loved leader is possible if you know how.
Explore an authentic yet agile approach to discovering the best leader in you. Becoming a leader that people love to work with and for can, in turn, create meaningful workplaces where people love to come to collaborate, strive and succeed.
Little Drops: Cherished Children of Singapore’s Past is a compilation of biographies based on historical fact about the pain of separation and the lure of love, and how these themes constantly collide. These never-before-told stories chronicle how fourteen adoptees from the 1930s to the early 1970s in Singapore found a forever home when their own biological parents could not raise them. These stories recount the plight of families of that era; the strength of friendships and informal social networks; Singapore’s migrant heritage; how lives were thrown into turmoil during the Japanese Occupation; and the struggles individuals had borne during that period leading up to Singapore’s independence. Unfolding in these stories are the recurrent subthemes of poverty, superstition, how girl children were valued amongst the Chinese, how a family illness or death was culturally construed, and the magnanimous spirit of families taking in these abandoned children. What is most striking about many of these children is that they were sometimes not legally given away, seeming odd since children could be passed around so easily. And yet these children would almost always end up in safe, loving and caring homes of another culture. Grappling with who they are in terms of their ethnic identity is very much a common experience amongst all these adoptees. But rather than struggling between two cultural worlds, these adoptees almost always have a firm sense of longing and belonging to their families of adoption instead of their families of origin.
Chris Lee had a cushy role. For a decade, he led the Asia Pacific division of Medtronic, a multibillion dollar business and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of medical devices, and consistently produced excellent business outcomes. Then, at fifty-six, he threw all of that away to start VentureBlick, an international fundraising platform matching healthcare startups and medical investors. Why did Lee do that?
Lee takes us through his journey as one of the youngest Asian leaders in an MNC (youngest director in Merck at age twenty-seven, youngest country manager at thirty, first Asia-Pacific leader reporting to Bayer HQ at thirty-nine), how he brought Asian leadership sensibilities into multiple global companies, and reveals why he believes it’s important for corporate leaders to adopt an Asian lens and think like a maverick.
Let’s face it. Achieving what we set out to do can be one of life’s greatest challenges. From botched New Year’s resolutions to dreams and aspirations that never came to be, setbacks are a common albeit discouraging or disheartening occurrence in our lives. However, as many often say, the road to success is paved with failures. With the right knowledge and some inspiration, anyone can turn things around and savour success in a quicker and easier manner.
You Don’t Suck explores the realities of what it takes to achieve one’s goals and lead a more purposeful life. It introduces readers to three general phases in their journey to success—setting up, sustaining, and reflecting—and guides them through:
- timeless truths
- unconventional perspectives
- well-known studies
- light-hearted and serious examples
- personal and second-hand anecdotes
- practical approaches and advice
- simple wisdom for thought
In doing so, the book motivates readers to relearn the As to Zs of life, thereby renewing their mindset, recognizing their strength, and realizing their power of choice so they can see their ambitions through in their personal and professional pursuits.
The good news is that everyone is talking about ESG.
The bad news is that everyone is talking about ESG.
The cry for a more inclusive form of capitalism is growing. But the irony is we are using the same tools that caused the excesses of shareholder capitalism—incentives and regulations—to drive responsible behaviour.
Eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith propagated profit maximization as the incentive for businesses to create goods and services that society needs. He argued that free-market competition would ensure consumers get the best quality product at the cheapest price.
200 years later, Milton Friedman agreed in his seminal 1970 New York Times op-ed that the sole responsibility of business is to maximize profits ‘so long as it stays within the rules of the game’. Incentives coupled with some regulations were to henceforth safeguard societal interests.
Instead, incentives created bad behaviour. Regulations were routinely bypassed with intelligent loopholes. Despite this—to encourage sustainability today—we are again using incentives and regulations. That’s predominantly what the ESG framework focuses on. And what do we see? Rampant greenwashing and box-ticking.
To address today’s existential challenges, we need innovation of the highest order. Innovation can neither be legislated nor driven by extrinsic incentives alone. We need a values-driven revolution. We need steward leadership—the ability to create a win-win-win future for stakeholders, society, and the environment. ESG must upgrade to ESL, where the ‘L’ stands for Steward Leadership. In ESL, ‘G’ is a subset of ‘L’.
Sustainable Sustainability lays out a practical, step-by-step playbook for any commercial entity that wants to succeed at marrying profit and purpose.
https://www.sustainable-sustainability.com
Every organisation has stories about women in the workplace that live on through constant retelling: ‘Women are too emotional’; ‘Women are not interested in a career’; and ‘We are hiring the best person for the job, regardless of gender’. We need to dispel these myths that undermine women and are keeping them on a lesser footing. Here are the tools for doing just that.
Based on thorough research and made highly relevant through dozens of anecdotes from hundreds of hours of interviews, Narratives: The Stories That Hold Women Back At Work will shatter ongoing workplace gender myths. Mette Johansson, in this book, provides context and different perspectives to dispel these myths and offer women-and men-the powerful arguments and tools they need to counteract them and ensure a fairer and more competitive workplace-and a better business overall.
Written in a highly entertaining way, Narratives challenges us to take different perspectives in the gender equity debate.
Ordinary is not as ordinary as you think. History is written by the loudest and most charismatic victors, but are silent about the true movers and shakers: the rebels, the honest servants, the quiet doers, the square pegs in a round hole, and the ordinary believers who kept showing up.
Through seven moving tales of courage, prolific Malaysian writer, James Chai, shows us in his debut book how:
– A frail 70-year-old woman became the face of Malaysia’s largest protest that helped overturn the longest-ruling regime in the world;
– A mother-of-two fought through gender and racial unfairness and became the first Asian woman to win the ‘Nobel Prize for Cancer Research’;
– A middle-aged, middle-level government servant exposed the largest white-collar crime in the world;
– A punk graphic artist persevered through multiple arrests and drew one of the most recognisable activist artworks in the region;
– An indigenous retiree battled powerful governments and corporations to usher in one of the largest environmental victories in Southeast Asia;
– A group of leaderless Sikh organisation saved the lives of thousands in the worst flood in modern Malaysian history; and
– A suburban bottom-of-class student found his way through modern history’s bloodiest wars and won the Pulitzer Prize.
Sang Kancil will force us to reassess what is truly important and remind us of what we are capable of. Filled with research-backed theories, this book is a call-to-action for the underdogs battling our own giants.
In this collection of poignant and uplifting essays, seasoned international journalist Marga Ortigas shares what she’s learned from over two decades of covering conflict, humanitarian crises, and political turmoil. Each chapter explores a different assignment location, taking you up-close as the author reflects on what endures after life’s triumphs and tragedies.
Ortigas’ engaging writing style and wealth of experience will transport you from the war-torn Iraqi desert to the snow-covered steppes of Mongolia, bustling Brazilian beaches, rugged Irish cliffs, and even a pop concert in South Korea, leaving you with a newfound understanding of the human condition.
Heartfelt and humorous, There Are No Falling Stars in China is a must-read for anyone interested in storytelling, global affairs, or simply gaining a richer appreciation of the world we live in. It’s a true gem you won’t want to put down, filled with insight and inspiration that will stay with you long after you’ve turned the final page.
If you have enjoyed and learned from the snippets of my life as a ‘Wais Na Misis’, through my Instagram and Facebook posts, you’ll most certainly get a kick out of the untold stories you’ll find in the pages of this book.
It wasn’t always easy for me, but when life threw me lemons I didn’t dodge or flinch. Instinctively, I caught every piece and turned the bunch into lemonade, lemon meringue pie, lemon-scented hand soap, and home deodorizer, and sold them all! Sometimes, I’d wonder when another lemon would come my way just so I can use it to my advantage again.
You get the picture.
As a mompreneur, I was never given any manual on how to effectively navigate through life. But it somehow knew what it needed to teach me, through experiences and the people around me, at the right moment.
So, here I am paying it forward to you, my fellow wais na misis.
Being wise takes time. It takes a lot of experience and a load of crushing and pruning in order to reach the stage of becoming fine wine that everyone can enjoy.
May this book serve as your bestie; the handy dandy survival guide you’re looking for as you journey into the intimidating yet marvelous world of motherhood and entrepreneurship. Each page is brimming with meaty tips and tricks that I have learned from the best mentor l’ve ever had–LIFE.
