By Xinghui Kok
SINGAPORE – The estranged sister of Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong died on Wednesday at 69, after being diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy in 2020.
The death of Lee Wei Ling, a doctor, was announced by their younger brother Lee Hsien Yang on Facebook.
The siblings are the children of Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and have been embroiled in a public dispute around what to do with their late father’s house after the elder Lee died in 2015.
The former PM Lee, now a senior minister in the cabinet, wrote on Facebook that despite the rift between him and his siblings, “I held nothing against Ling, and continued to do whatever I could to ensure her welfare”.
He described his sister as a fighter who was “fiercely loyal to friends, sympathised instinctively with the underdog, and would mobilise actively to do something when she saw unfairness, or suspected wrongdoing”.
The late doctor earned the prestigious President’s scholarship and topped her cohort in medical school. Lee never married and stayed with her parents until their deaths.
She helped set up Singapore’s National Neuroscience Institute and served as its director for 11 years. She also regularly contributed columns to the national broadsheet The Straits Times.
Senior minister Lee said his sister had diagnosed herself before the doctors did. “She took it with her usual fortitude and stoicism, and posted about it as one of those things in life to be borne and endured. She knew what it meant, and made the most of the time she had even as her health declined,” he wrote.
When announcing her illness, Wei Ling wrote: “My immediate reaction to the news was ‘ren’, or endure in Chinese, of which the traditional character has a knife above a heart. I have been practicing ‘ren’ since I was in Chinese school, recognising that life has many unpleasant, unavoidable situations.”
(Reporting by Xinghui Kok; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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