SINGAPORE: Months before she suffered sustained torture by her abusers, Megan Khung suddenly piped up during a meal with her grandmother.
The four-year-old had said in her usual clear Mandarin: “I don’t want to go back to that pretty house.”
She did not elaborate, but when her grandmother, Chua, 68, asked if the “pretty house” was where Megan’s mother, Foo Li Ping, and the woman’s boyfriend, Wong Shi Xiang, lived, the girl said yes.
The couple had rented a condo at Suites @ Guillemard in Paya Lebar.
Chua promised her: “Don’t be scared. Ah Ma is here. I’ll protect you.”
Seated at the same dining table where they had that conversation, now with an empty chair beside her, the elderly woman’s eyes welled with tears during a three-hour interview with The Straits Times on Oct 24.
“I really regret it. I couldn’t save my granddaughter,” she said, a day after a review panel released a report detailing lapses by various agencies handling Megan’s case between March 2019 and February 2020.
After the girl died on Feb 22, 2020, Chua could not bear to put Megan’s pictures around her one-room rental flat and has given away most of the girl’s belongings.
The ones she still keeps, including a Winnie the Pooh bear and the girl’s pre-school progress reports, are covered in dust.
Tucked away in Chua’s cupboard is a stack of Megan’s baby photos, which still made her smile as she showed them to ST.
When Megan was born in October 2015, Chua took care of her for a while during Foo’s confinement.
Megan and Foo were living with Foo’s then husband, Khung Wei Nan, better known as content creator “Simonboy”, before the marriage broke down in 2017.
Foo then returned to Chua’s flat.
Those years were filled with simple joys. Foo took Megan to pre-school before she went to work at a remittance company, and Chua, who worked as a cleaner, picked the girl up from school in the evening.
