Soon Keong

Soon Keong: Three Functions, One Life

Soon Keong has a way of telling stories that makes you laugh first, and only later realise you’ve been shown something serious. He begins with understatement—almost always. When asked about his years in Raffles, he shrugs it off as “not very exciting”, and then, as if accidentally revealing the real centre of gravity, adds: except that he played rugby all the way through school and university. In that single “except”, you hear the whole blueprint.

Because with Soon Keong, rugby is never merely sport. It is pedagogy. It is fraternity. It is the early training of leadership in a world where bodies collide and excuses do not hold. It is the place where boys learn what a classroom sometimes forgets to teach: responsibility has weight; commitments cost; and belonging is not a mood, it is a duty.

He remembers the arc of institutions the way an old map-maker remembers coastlines. There is a trivial fact, he says—yet it isn’t trivial at all. His cohort was the first batch of RJC in 1982. Decades later, he served as alumni president from 2003 to 2008, and in that role he oversaw the completion of the RJC era and the move “back to R”. Twenty-five years, first and last. A loop closes. A generation watches the school’s geography shift, and still tries to keep its spirit intact.

He says it plainly: he was more active after being a student than while being one. That line is vintage Soon Keong—lightly self-mocking, yet morally precise. Some people treat school as a ladder: they climb and then forget the rungs. He treats school as a lineage. You don’t “graduate” from it in the deeper sense. You carry it. You return. You build things so others can stand.

Later, his life becomes the familiar story of Singaporean stability—work, marriage, children—but the details matter, and he tells them with a blend of humour and reverence that feels very honest. He has two sons who continued the family tradition of being in Raffles, and they are grown now, both lawyers. “God’s will,” he says, and there is prayer in that phrase, but also a calm acceptance: life unfolds with effort, yes, but not entirely by effort.

What moves me is how quickly he credits his wife. He does not build a myth of the heroic father. He speaks of nurture—quiet, daily, persistent nurture—as if it is the invisible architecture of achievement. She took care of their learning, their growing, their rhythm of life, so the boys could focus. The line is not sentimental; it is simply accurate.

His parenting style, as he describes it, is neither harsh nor indulgent. It is restrained in a way that now looks almost radical. While other children had phones and games and tablets early, his boys had very basic phones only later—secondary three onwards. Before that: nothing. No games at home. No digital playground installed into the walls.

The boys, he admits, later told him they felt “quite deprived”. Their friends played games fluently; they didn’t even know how to play. They’d go to a friend’s house, pick up the controller, and feel like foreigners in a country all their peers belonged to. Soon Keong tells this with a laugh, and then quietly reveals the point: that deprivation became a kind of freedom. They grew up without the compulsive habit of touching the phone. They learned not to treat a screen as a reflex.

At the table, there is a rule: no phones. Not as moralistic discipline—he doesn’t sound like that—but because he values engagement. He says the word directly: engagement. He finds it strange, almost uncanny, when a family sits together and everyone is texting someone else. Not evil. Just strange. The meal becomes a room full of bodies, each mind elsewhere.

Now the boys are in their late twenties, and the old pattern returns with a new costume: you can hardly find them. You must book them. If you don’t, they disappear into work and life the way he once disappeared from his parents. Yet he makes gathering easy and pleasant. Weekends bring the family together. They share wine, craft beer, sometimes sake—never heavy drinking, never a performance, just a small ritual of enjoyment that turns “coming home” into something felt rather than demanded.

Soon Keong’s thoughts on learning are quietly sharp. He loves education, yet he does not worship schooling. He remembers teachers who did not teach: one who made them do ten-year-series questions and responded to a student’s protest with a line so blunt it becomes comedy—“You all Raffles boys, I got to teach you what?” Another teacher digressed into athletics stories until the lesson evaporated, then told the class to read the rest themselves. These stories are funny, but his underlying message is not: the real danger of schooling is that it can become theatre.

So he prizes “exposure”—that word again, but now applied to life. He tells of selling chocolates in the CBD as a young boy to raise funds for rugby tours. Knock on office doors. Learn to sell. Learn to be refused. Learn to speak to adults. Learn that incentives work: raise money, earn the tour, travel to Malaysia and Thailand, meet teams that are faster, bigger, stronger, and discover that your confidence at home was a local illusion. This is learning that bites. It stays.

In that sense, rugby tours were not leisure; they were laboratories. They showed Singapore boys the outer world at a time when travel was not casual. They trained the mind to accept comparison without resentment: you go out, you test yourself, you return altered.

He also remembers the student leadership ecology of those days—older students mentoring younger ones, captains leading their divisions, a downward flow of responsibility that taught care as well as authority. It was a system, yes, but more importantly it was a culture: the older looked out for the younger. He worries that what later returned as “togetherness” might not be the same in substance. Systems can be reinstated, but spirit is harder to restore.

Then there is his relationship with the body—another place where he speaks with blunt wisdom rather than romance. Ageing is not tragedy, he says; it is physiology. Digestion slows. Recovery slows. What once passed through you easily now lingers. So he adapts. He walks about an hour. He does squats, stretching. Fifty sit-ups every morning, thirty push-ups. “Either do it or you lose it,” he says. He ran two marathons, then stopped—he wanted to save his knees. That is Soon Keong in a sentence: committed, but not foolish; disciplined, but not addicted to proving anything.

And then, suddenly, the transcript delivers a scene that reveals the deeper nature of his leadership.

In university, he became the one sent forward to ask the minister the question everyone wanted asked but no one wanted to own. He describes it as “suicidal”—the kind of question that could make the minister uncomfortable and you, by extension, unwelcome. He was not chosen because he was the cleverest, he says; someone simply had to sacrifice and go first.

So he went.

In front of the chancellor, the minister, and a whole formation of officials, he asked. He was ignored. His question landed like a stone dropped into water that refused to ripple. But he persisted with a second question—more carefully framed, more recognisably “fair”: students had signed up expecting an NUS degree, yet the outcome seemed to be an NTU degree; if they had known, they might have chosen differently. That question did not get ignored. The minister said it was fair and promised to think about it.

A week later, they received a choice: graduate with an NUS degree or an NTU degree—up to them. That option was extended to the next two batches as well.

Soon Keong calls it one of the highlights of his life. Not because he won an award. Not because he looked good. But because he fulfilled an obligation and delivered something concrete for his people. Leadership, again, as service under pressure.

When I step back from the transcript, a portrait emerges: Soon Keong is the kind of man who moves between worlds without losing himself.

He knows the rough fraternity of sport and the polished intimidation of institutional rooms. He understands money and fundraising, yet he speaks easily of prayer and God’s will. He is serious about achievement, yet he refuses to be swallowed by screens, by status, by the anxious theatre of modern life. He knows how to ask a hard question in a room that does not want to hear it, and still keep his humour intact afterwards.

In 2025, Soon Keong formally retired. But retirement, in his case, did not mean withdrawal. It meant clarification.

What emerged were three tracks, running in parallel.

The first: he continues as consultant to the firm he founded. Not to interfere, not to dominate, but to steady. Founders know where the deep faults and quiet strengths lie. His counsel here is measured, offered only when needed.

The second: he advises long-standing clients who still seek him out for complex corporate matters—fundraising, IPOs, restructuring, governance. These are not transactional engagements. They are calls made to someone whose judgement has been tested across cycles, whose discretion is trusted, whose orientation is reliable.

The third track is the most inward, and perhaps the most consequential. He runs a Christian ministry group devoted not to spectacle or dogma, but to understanding God. Scripture is read slowly. Questions are allowed. Faith is not treated as performance, but as alignment.

This ministry is not separate from his life before it; it is its distillation. After decades navigating institutions, hierarchies, and markets, the question sharpens: what underlies all this movement? What remains when roles fall away?

Here, his Christianity is quiet, grounded, and invitational. It is concerned less with winning arguments than with living truthfully. God, in this space, is not an instrument for success, but the ground of being itself—the presence one learns to attune to rather than control.

It is in this spirit that Soon Keong often brings people together—not for networking, but for conversation. Around a table, with Lian Ann, a surgeon; Pastor Mohan; and himself, discussions unfold naturally—about life, suffering, work, faith, and the question of God. No pressure. No conversion theatre. Just human beings circling something large and ancient.

If you want a single image to hold him by, I would choose this: a family table on a weekend evening. No phones. A bottle opened, not to get drunk, but to make presence feel enjoyable. The sons—grown, busy, hard to book—arriving anyway. A father who has spent a lifetime in systems, now insisting on something simpler than success: engagement.

And beneath it all, running like a quiet undertow, the third track you already know in him: that the most interesting question is not how to win, but how to live—and how, after all the noise of work and institution, one might still inch closer to the idea of God.