Early Years and Personal Life
Yip was born with muscular dystrophy, a genetic disorder that slowly breaks down the muscles, and a nerve condition that affects eyesight. When she was five, she started swimming to improve her health and strengthen her muscles; nevertheless, by the age of eleven, she had lost her ability to walk and had to use a wheelchair. The youngest of three children in her family, she studied in Ai Tong Primary School and Bendemeer Secondary School, then graduated from Republic Polytechnic as back-up valedictorian and, as of 2012, is studying social science at Singapore Management University.
Read more about this topic: Yip Pin Xiu
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early, years, personal and/or life:
“Even today . . . experts, usually male, tell women how to be mothers and warn them that they should not have children if they have any intention of leaving their side in their early years. . . . Children don’t need parents’ full-time attendance or attention at any stage of their development. Many people will help take care of their needs, depending on who their parents are and how they chose to fulfill their roles.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The value of life lies not in the length of days but in the use you make of them; he has lived for a long time who has little lived.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)