Elise Liang, 17, did not enjoy studying at her top-tier secondary school.
She found the transition from South View Primary School to Methodist Girls’ School (MGS) tough.
“It didn’t feel good that I was lagging behind. Because everybody there is very good academically, even if you’re doing okay, you feel like you’re not enough,” she recalls.
“I placed a lot of importance on getting good grades and had high expectations of myself. I didn’t do much apart from studying.”
She says she held back tears when she scored 50-something in her English examination at the end of Secondary 1 in MGS. Even though she scored 85 and higher for subjects like science and geography, she had shifted from being in the top class in Primary 6 a year earlier to languishing at the bottom of her Integrated Programme class, a six-year course that leads to an International Baccalaureate diploma.
Elise did not know it then, but a few months later, her parents would make the decision to uproot their family of four from Singapore.
It started when Covid-19 struck early in 2020, the year Elise sat the Primary School Leaving Examination.
Her mother, mathematics tuition teacher Corrine Ang, 44, had a revelation during the almost two-month circuit breaker, which was meant to curb the spread of the pandemic.
Ms Ang says: “I felt the circuit breaker was a very beautiful period in our lives, contrary to others’ experience. Even though it was Elise’s PSLE year, we spent most of the time playing Subbuteo (a table-top football game).
“It sparked the thought that maybe this was the way to do life together, having a lot of family time.”
Ms Ang is married to Mr Joash Liang, a 46-year-old service engineer, and they also have a younger daughter, Eleora, 13.
Slow living
By early 2022, the couple were ready to relocate elsewhere in South-east Asia to explore a different, slower way of life.
Ms Ang says: “It was making a decision to live as a family by forgoing materialism and comfort to smell the roses. I suggested it to my husband and he agreed very quickly because I think the desire was in us.”
The couple, who are Christians, reached the decision after praying about it. Within a month, they had packed, stopped work and rented out their five-room Housing Board flat in Choa Chu Kang.
Education not a priority
For Ms Ang, education was a “low priority”. She says: “I wanted to give the children the gift of time that I think was stolen from them by the education system.”
She knows of Singapore parents who hurry their children from school and enrichment lessons to having dinner and brushing their teeth before bed. Elise had little time to pursue her interests after focusing on schoolwork and her football co-curricular activity.
“I feel a lot of parents spend a lot of time being the timekeeper of their children. I don’t want to be that kind of parent,” says Ms Ang.
In her 20 years working as a tuition teacher, Ms Ang has encountered feelings of anxiety and depression in high-achieving students struggling to do even better; children with poor grades aiming to improve; as well as parents musing about how things would be different if only their children did better academically.
“I feel there’s very little joy in student life in Singapore,” she says, adding that chalking up one academic milestone after another provides only a transient satisfaction.
