Gratitude for teachers at Ipoh wedding party

At the formal invitation of Uncle Cheah, I gave a 20-minute speech in Mandarin to the wedding dinner in which I recalled my deep and time-tested friendship with his son Jen Ping and also thanked Uncle Cheah for allowing his son to share the many morally uplifting Chinese books with me when we were classmates in the very turbulent period of our nation from 1969 to 1974 and for imparting to both of us the life-long spirit as well as passion for intellectual self-improvement. In his own speech, Uncle Cheah also paid tribute to his teachers as well as fellow Chinese educationists in the very long struggle, with many trials and tribulations since the colonial era, for the right, honour and dignity of mother-tongue education, and also social progress of the community.

Bridging Chinese & American worlds in Perak