Yap Swee Keow
Age: 62. Married.
City: Gurgaon, near New Delhi
Job: Mandarin interpreter, translator and teacher
IT was only supposed to be a fleeting visit, a couple of months at most, but 23 years later and Swee Keow Yap is still in New Delhi.
A casual tourist jaunt led to a job offer, a romance, a family and eventually a new passport.
It all started when Ms Yap, who has a masters degree in Chinese Language and Literature and an advanced postgraduate diploma in interpretation and translation (French and Chinese) from Sorbonne, dropped in on Jawaharlal Nehru University’s school of languages in 1977.
She just wanted to see the campus where some of her former classmates at Paris’ Sorbonne University had studied.
'My first visit ended rather unexpectedly. I went to meet the head of the department, and had a job offer to teach Mandarin at the university. I thought I would try it out for a couple of months then go back to Singapore,' she recounts over a meal at a packed restaurant in New Delhi.
The new job soon led to love and she married S.A.Rahman, a professor of Arabic at the same university, in 1979.
They have two daughters, Syeda Safia Rahman, 30 and Syeda Sana Rahman, 26.
By 1984, she had traded her Singapore passport for an Indian one.
Ms Yap admits that at first it was tough to adjust to life in India.
In the 1970s, the economy had not opened up to the outside world and government policies made it difficult for the university to pay her. Despite being married to an Indian, she found it difficult to get a work permit.
But campus life was pleasant. New Delhi in the 1970s and 1980s was a quieter and more beautiful place than it is today, with few cars and minimal traffic.
She has retired from the university but is fully occupied with diplomatic and corporate interpretation assignments as well as giving private Mandarin lessons.
'There is a huge interest in Mandarin now. My days, even my weekends are packed.'
Read the special report in Saturday's edition of The Straits Times