For My Golden Years series this week , I got to speak to Mr Steven Pang who has been supportive of XIOHOO and attended many of our classes. He explained to me that he had attended the Chinese Input class at the Community Center (CC) and met Allan, one of the co-founders and trainers of XIOHOO, there where he got to know more about XIOHOO through him. In his own words, he has attended “almost 90% of the classes” and has reattended many classes. He is interested to learn more about e-commerce such as Shopee and Lazada or “Internet Marketing” in his own words. Although he is familiar with basic smartphone usage, he attends XIOHOO classes to know more about the features, meet new people and pass time. Currently, he is attending classes such as WeChat and Tiktok classes to pass time and would love to attend more tech classes that can assist him in business-related matters. Distance is also not an issue for him as he would be more than willing to travel to attend classes that are beneficial to his learning.
I also found out that Mr Pang is currently retired and doing some trading in his free time. He has many years of working experience as a Staff Engineer and worked in many different multinational companies (MNCs) such as Phillips and Quantum. Mr Pang is also enjoying his life post-retirement, having more personal time to focus more on himself as well as more family time. He looks at his stocks after waking up in the morning and also attends webinars or classes on stocks and statistics while also finding time to write his personal memoir. Despite experiencing some decline in his health conditions and could no longer engage in more vigorous activities such as badminton matches and long-distance jogs with his friends after work, Mr Pang does not think of ageing as a problem and instead turn to walking and hula hoop as alternatives to his weekly exercise routine.
Mr Pang also ardently showed me his enthusiasm and pride in being a badminton player since his primary school days, in which he played in multiple badminton tournaments at Community Centres (CC) and at a tournament held within the electronic company called Seira. During the Covid circuit breaker period, he would polish all his medals that he won from all the tournaments he participated in.
Out of curiosity too, I asked Mr Pang about movies and songs that he used to listen to in the past during his younger days. He initially told me that he doesn’t like to watch movies but will watch only if he’s very interested. However, he further recounted that there were limited movies in the past and the popular ones were mainly from Hong Kong in which he enjoyed the romance and martial art genres such as Fist of Fury (Jing Wu Men) and Gorgeous (Bo Li Zun) starring famous celebrities such as Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. As for singers, he narrated that there were many famous Taiwanese singers such as Teresa Teng and Fong Fei-fei, and he would collect many flashcards that he would put on radios to listen to the songs. He mentions that he would still do so and use the radio to listen to songs while working on his computer.
Lastly, when probed about the topic of active ageing, Mr Pang states that he doesn’t think too much about ageing or getting old as it is just part and parcel of life in which one would just age even “as you stand or sit”. He would continue to just enjoy life and interact with his old friends while also always doing and learning new things such as attending Skillsfuture courses. Thus, I would like to end this blog post by imploring all to live life with the same fervour that Mr Pang has. After all, the life you live is in part due to the choices you make and your attitudes towards the challenges so let’s learn to make the best out of all the choices we make in life.