SM Lee looked so happy in old photo with first wife Wong Ming Yang shared on Reddit

SINGAPORE: A photograph of Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his first wife, Wong Ming Yang, was shared in a Reddit thread last week. In the photo, the lovely and elegant Dr Wong is holding a baby, presumably their eldest child, a daughter named Li Xiuqi, who was born in 1981.

Sadly, the following year, three weeks after giving birth to their son Li Yipeng, Dr Wong passed away. She died of a heart attack on Oct 28, 1982. She was just thirty-one.

Dr Wong was a physician born in Malaysia. At the time of her passing, Lee Hsien Loong was just beginning his political career.

Fortunately, in 1985, three years after Dr Wong passed, SM Lee married Ho Ching, a civil servant who later became the executive director and chief executive officer of Temasek Holdings. After stepping down from these positions on Oct 1, 2021, she was appointed as a director of Temasek Trust. She has since been appointed as chairperson of the Trust. They have two sons, Li Hongyi, who is the deputy director of the Government Technology Agency, and Li Haoyi, a software engineer.

While one commenter wrote that the union between SM Lee and Dr Wong had been “an ‘arranged’ marriage at its finest,” another responded with: “but his first wife (Dr Wong) was very intelligent AND beautiful. And was his college sweetheart / first love, which is very hard to beat.”

Another commenter wrote that SM Lee looked so happy in the first photo, perhaps before the weight of the world came to rest on his shoulders.

“He looked genuinely happy then,” the commenter wrote.

“Yeah, you really can feel that genuine happiness coming from deep down and not smiling just for the cameras,” another replied.

Others pointed out how hard it must have been for SM Lee to lose his wife so soon and suddenly find himself a single parent of two very small children.

Another added that in a biography of Singapore’s founding father and SM Lee’s father, Lee Kuan Yew, while SM Lee had been devastated by Dr Wong’s passing, the older Mr Lee had praised Mdm Ho “for being a gracious and caring wife/mother.”

When a Reddit user asked if anyone had pictures of the Mdm Ho in her youth, another commenter shared this link, which shows Madam Ho on her wedding day to SM Lee on December 17, 1985.

In the photo, a radiant-looking Mdm Ho and her smiling husband are about to cut their wedding cake.

/TISG

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