STANDING TALL
MINISTER
FOR NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT MAH BOW TAN,
MP FOR TAMPINES GRC
- Li Xiuqi
"Alittle
nerdy" is how Mr Mah, 54, describes himself. "Maybe not nerdy.
Reflective. I do stop to wonder about things," he corrects himself.
Mr Mah is the sort who stores up a drawer of all the books he plans
to read during retirement, and his favourite movies are the heart-warming
Shawshank Redemption and Forrest Gump.
Though a confident public figure, he's actually a shy person by nature,
tidy and friendly. He takes time to think about your question and answers
it adequately. When he was in school, he had to force himself to join
the debating team, he says, to train himself to face an audience. "School
was tough," he adds.
But this quiet soul has shouldered tougher things. After losing a hard-fought
battle to Chiam See Tong in the 1984 elections, he was so crushed that
his wife says that he didn't talk for two weeks. And when the SilkAir
crash happened in 1997, he worked round the clock for weeks as the minister
in charge. You can still hear the sadness in his voice when he talks
about not being able to recover any of the bodies for their families.
On a lighter note, I asked if he gets stares from the public when he's
out with his wife of 27 years, Sheryn. She is an Australian-born Caucasian
doctor, now a Singaporean, who is much taller than him. "Oh yes,
people look, they're probably thinking, strange couple," he muses
candidly. "Anyway, I'm probably below average... I mean, I'm short,
right? Maybe that's why in school, I always tried to get up on stage..."
His four children, aged 13 to 25, have all grown up with her tall genes,
and the eldest son, Adrian, even does part-time modelling. "I remember
one day seeing this huge M1 banner up on Takashimaya and thinking, 'That
guy looks familiar,'" he grins.
One of the best times he's had was a family trip where the whole family
stayed in a little cottage in Australia which had no TV or computer.
"At home, one is on the Internet, one's on the phone, one's watching
TV..." complains the former minister of communications. So what
did they do there then? "Nothing!" he says cheerfully. "And
it was great, just being together."
