Joy was radiated from Khoo Yi Feng’s face while visiting the headquarter of Centre for Southeast Asian Social Studies (CESASS) UGM (20/09/2017). The National University of Singapore (NUS) alumni felt like returning to “home” after he attended SEA Gate program organized by CESASS in 2015. This time of SEA-Chat, CESASS invited Yi Feng to share with students who want to know about Singapore with the theme “How Is Singapore?”. Yi Feng is the initiator of SEA-Chat program so it’s no wonder if he was very happy to know that his program still continues.
In a warm and relaxed atmosphere, the discussion was opened by introduction to each other. The participants of the discussion not only came from the social-humanities sciences, but also from exact sciences such as medical science. Yi Feng successfully invited participants to interactive dialogue. He stressed that the goal of SEA-Chat was to talk about the background of each country to get to know each other more, especially between countries in Southeast Asia. He invited participants to describe perceptions and ask questions about Singapore and he answered them one by one. Yi Feng also did not hesitate to invite discussion participants who had been in Singapore to answer questions from other discussion participants.
The one-and-a-half hour discussion successfully bridged participants and speakers to exchange ideas and offered different perspectives on things, for example, the public transportation rules in Singapore that were judged differently by the participants. As a result, this discussion did not only summarize the knowledge of language, culture, social, political but also the development and context of Singapore’s history. (Meike)