HELPlNG THE HELPLESS
All I want to do is to help the poorest and the helpless. We were helpless once. I feel that nobody should go through the life that we lived before, helpless and with nowhere to turn.
 

100 years, and still going strong
As Singaporeans party to usher in the new millennium, one centenarian will be meditating quietly at home. LEONG WENG KlIM tracks down Teresa Hsu, who is devoting her life to helping the aged sick.

RETIRED nurse and social worker extraordinaire Teresa Hsu will be one of the few people around tomorrow who can say they lived through the entire 20th century.

And oh, what a life it has been. She went global before the word became fashionable. Born in China, she has worked in more continents than many Singaporeans have visited as tourists, and seen more social changes than the history books record.

Born in Shantou in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in 1900, this plucky, silver-haired woman looks decades younger, with a body as agile, and a mind as sharp, as a teenager.

This she attributes to a simple but active life, which begins daily at 4 am with meditation, yoga and a morning walk near her home in Hougang.

Throughout the day, a constant stream of visitors come to her sparsely-furnished single-storey house attached to the Home for the Aged Sick at Hougang Avenue 1, which she founded in 1965 together with her late elder sister, Ursula.

With help from a group of volunteers, her Heart-to-Heart Service, which she started nearly 37 years ago distributes food items and cash every last Sunday of the month to some 20 old people in their 30s and 90s who are living in rented rooms in Housing Board estates all over Singapore.

"They are old but I treat and love them like my younger brothers and sisters," she says.

She teaches yoga every Saturday afternoon at the Singapore Buddhist Mission in Ruby Lane.

A new class with 13 students is due to begin next Saturday.

And, at home, she has a 2,000?volume private library she calls Prema, which in Sanskrit means divine love.

Looking back on her 100 years, she notes that her life has not been easy, especially during her early years in China.

She remembers her father as an unloving, irresponsible and violent man.

"He came home only for money and to beat me up with a belt or stick, because he said I was stupid," she recalls.

Perhaps because of him, she and her siblings - elder sister Ursula, younger sister Lucy and younger brother Anthony - all never married, she says.

"After what my father did to us, I told myself to shun all men and not have any emotional relationship with them, so that no other man can hurt me anymore," she explains.

Life for her really began only at 27, when her mother brought her and her siblings to Penang where they worked as cleaners in a convent.

"I didn't want to be a cleaner all my life and so I asked the nuns there to allow me to study with the children, and they agreed," she notes.

Combining study with work, she passed her Senior Cambridge examinations four years later.

Equipped with a basic education, she ventured to Hongkong to work and, later, to Chongqing, China, where she became a secretary at a German news agency.

She quit her job to become a volunteer, helping the injured during the Sino?Japanese war.

That was when she decided she wanted to be a nurse.

It was also when she nearly broke her vow never to be married, because she fell in love with a fellow volunteer, a Dane.

When the war ended in 1945, she left for England to be trained as a nurse.

Her boyfriend was to meet her in London 15 days later, but died in an air crash on the way there.

"I think that was divine arrangement, otherwise I might have been stuck," she says with a laugh.

She spent eight years in England doing nursing and another eight in Paraguay as a member of the German charity group Bruderhof, to start hospitals and homes for the aged there.

In her mid?50s, she decided to return home to Penang to be with her mother.

"She told me there are many old and sick people in the world, but I have only one mother," she says.

And her plans for the new millennium?

Nothing lavish, just a simple wish to start a new service centre in Chin Swee Road for the old folk in the vicinity.

"You are as young and happy as you want to be," says this woman who devotes her life to serving the old.

A peaceful mind, loving heart and divine design

Q: You have lived 100 years. What are the secrets of your long and healthy life?

A: A peaceful mind and a loving heart. You love all creatures, good and or bad. If they are naughty, they need love even more. People do bad things and hurt others because they are unhappy.

No happy persons express themselves in a hurtful way. This is my understanding of human nature.

And my diet is strictly vegetarian. I was born a vegetarian. I am allergic to meat and seafood. I eat a little fish and my body goes red, with patches all over. So I was protected naturally, divine protection.

I eat raw vegetables and fruits. I put them in my blender and drink them as juice. It is delicious. Cooking spoils the nutrition. Even washing a lot under water washes away the nutrition.

Eating for me is neither a social occasion nor a pleasure. I eat to keep my body in good working order. That is all.

Q: What was the happiest moment in the past 100 years?

A: It was when I returned home to Penang after 31 years and saw my mother's smile again. She cried and I cried too. On her own 84 year?old legs, she showed me around to all her friends and told them that I was her long?lost daughter.

Q: What was the saddest moment in your life?

A: I have no sad moments. I don't know how to be sad. Even when my boyfriend died in an air crash, in 1945, I thought it was divine arrangement and he was sure to be in a happier world than here. Why not rejoice for him?

Q: Do you have any regrets about the past 100 years?

A: If I have to shut my eyes now, I will not feel I have left life with certain things still undone. As far as my conscience goes, I have done my best and I can't do better than this. If  I have 100 cents, I can only give 100. I can't give 101.

My only regret, perhaps, is that I didn't give enough love to my sister's adopted daughter, when I was starting the Home for the Aged Sick.

Q: Why did you want to start homes for the elderly sick?

A: When I was a child, in my hometown in Shantou in China, I saw a lot of beggars, through a window in our house.

Some couldn't walk, others shifted on the road and cried out loud for help. My heart would cry for them.

I said nobody should go on like that. I told: myself that when I grew up and had money, I would give them to these poor people.

When I came to Singapore, I looked out for the poor and the neglected and visited them. But I can't stay with them and look after them unless I have a home for them.

So, with my sister Ursula's help, we bought a piece of land with a bungalow in Payoh Lai in Hougang for $150,000 and started the home.

All I want is to help the poorest and the helpless. We were helpless once. I said nobody should go through the life that we lived before, helpless and with nowhere to turn. No one should go without their basic needs, meaning food, shelter and medical care.

Q: Are the old and sick well looked afterin Singapore

A: No, no, no, not at all. They are grossly neglected.

Both Prime Minister Gob Chok Tong and Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew have said that we must avoid welfarism and let the people look after themselves.

"We don't want to be like England and some other European countries where welfare spoiled the people," they say.

But these are not independent people. How can they be independent when they are 89 or 90 years old? They want to be independent, but they can't even walk.

Q: What should the Government do to help them?

A: The Government must be grateful to these old people, for they are the ones who slogged to build Singapore. There should be more consideration for them.

At the moment, they get $200 a month in public?assistance money. But after you pay your rent, the utilities bill, the doctor and taxi fares how much is left? They don't even have $2 for food a day. I would say give them at least $500 a month.

Otherwise, arrange for the social?welfare people to pick them up to see a doctor on a regular basis. One social worker can be assigned to cover an area where the old and sick are, arrange their medical appointments, pick them up and send them back.

It can be done. But do they love the old people enough to do that?

Q: What is your religion?

A: I don't have what people call a religion. My religion is my own philosophy, my own conscience.

I will stay and care for a sick sister or brother rather than go to church and hear a priest talk and save my soul. God is not in the church alone, He is within my four walls and in my heart. He is everywhere.

I know there is no greater teacher than Jesus Christ. He was tortured, hanged on a cross and all he had to say was, forgive them, for they know not what they do. What greater love can there be? For that I will worship him, I will talk to him and I will cry when I talk to him.

But I will not say I am a Christian so that other people would not confine me to Christian beliefs. But in my heart I believe and practice Christ's teachings.

Q: What is the single most important philosophy in your life?

A: Love your neighbour as yourself

Q: Do you ever worry about health and money?

A: People often ask, if I don't save any money, who is going to buy the coffin when I die? I say I will go for a walk by a hill and just drop dead into a hole and die. They laugh.

I stay healthy not because I want to live a long life. But if I fall sick, I may bring problems to others.

Q: Do you think you are a late starter, since you startedforrnal education only at 27, at the convent, trained to be a nurse at 45, and started a home for the aged sick at 65?

A: No. I always feel whatever happens is by divine arrangement. What I feel is that Mother Nature arranged everything and knew what to do.

We have a small mind and the universe is so big and the universal mother knows what is best for us. I accept what comes to me.

Q: What are your thoughts and wishes for the new millennium?

A: Nothing very special. It is not my doing that I am still alive. I live from day to day. Each day brings with it my duties and their richness. I enjoy every day, even simply sitting down and talking to people.

TERESA HSU: Volunteer

1900: Born in Shantou, Guangdong province, China.

1927: Moved to Penang with mother, two sisters and a younger brother. Received her English education in a convent there.

1933: Left Penang for Hongkong to work as cleaner and clerk.

1937: Went to Chongqing in China to work as secretary at a German news agency before joining voluntary service to help the injured in the war.

1945: Studied nursing in London and worked in hospitals there.

1953: Sent to Paraguay to help start a hospital and homes for the aged sick.

1961: Returned home to Penang. Sister?in?charge of the Assunta Foundation, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.

1963: Came to Singapore and took up post as matron of Kwong Wai Shin Hospital. Started the Heart?to?Heart Service.

1965: Set up Home for the Aged Sick in Jalan Payoh Lai. Picked up yoga from an Indian master.

1973: Sisters Ursula and Lucy, both school principals, and brother Anthony, a Roman Catholic priest, died.

1981: Mother, Madam Tan Sok Chan, died, aged 104

1985: Retired as matron of the Home for the Aged Sick.

1988: Awarded the Guinness Stout Effort Award.

1994: Received the Life Insurance Association Award for her charity work.

1999: Moved to new home at Hougang Avenue 1 with the Home for the Aged Sick from Jalan Payoh Lai.

2000: Plans to start a service centre in a rented flat in Chin Swee Road to help the old and destitute.