Raised by strength: Two granddaughters on the women who shaped them

The argument began like many others, over seemingly trivial insecurities.

Only this time, it ended in a knifing.

That night in the 1950s, Madam Agnes Vyner, then in her 20s, had just returned home from another evening of work as a cabaret and ballroom dancer.

That night, in a fit of anger, he stabbed her in the back with a knife.

Madam Vyner survived the attack and left him. 

“My grandmother did not tolerate the abuse,” recalls her granddaughter Kimberly Desker, 37. “She chose to leave as soon as she could, because she could not go back to a man who did not trust her.”

It was her grandmother’s second marriage. She had left the first to escape violence too, each time forced to leave behind her children – three from the first marriage, and another three from the second.

These stories were shared in the kitchen of their five-room Housing Board flat about five decades later, over meals of asam pedas and sotong masak hitam cooked by her grandmother.

The details, which Kimberly later confirmed with her mother, paint a picture of a woman who refused to be limited by her circumstances.

“She wasn’t the kind of grandmother who showered you with affection or gentle words,” says Kimberly. “She was tough – the kind of tough that tells you she had lived through things most of us couldn't imagine.”

Madam Vyner died in 2024. She was 95.

Her life and her granddaughter’s – shaped by vast differences in experience, choice and freedom – reflect the story of how women across generations in Singapore have evolved over the past six decades since the country's independence.

It’s in such unrecorded personal stories that the changes are often felt most deeply. 

Today, Kimberly is a communications and engagement manager at the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations (SCWO). Her role involves giving voice to the struggles of those like her grandmother.

What struck Kimberly most was realising that her grandmother had grown up in a time when narrow views about women were the norm. “She was told what to do and how to think. She didn’t have choices.”

Yet, she pushed back against those limits.

Move the slider to see how women’s literacy in Singapore – compared to men – has changed in 61 years.

For Madam Siew, learning didn’t stop at the door of the classroom. That she speaks fluent English today is proof of her resilience. She taught herself how to speak and read when she was 29, with help from her parents-in-law and neighbours.

“My neighbour was very kind; whenever she had new books she would pass them to me,” she shares. “When my children were asleep, I would read.”

The books she read were mostly fiction. She would underline the words she didn’t know and ask others how to pronounce them.

The matriarch now lives in a four-room HDB flat with her daughter, son-in-law, and two twin granddaughters.

Her granddaughter Chloe Yu, 26, sobbed silently as she listened. It was the first time she was hearing this part of her grandmother’s life – not just the work and hardship, but the grit and resilience it took to build a different life for her family.

“She’s my primary caregiver so we’re very close,” says Chloe, who works as an executive at Star Shelter, a crisis shelter for women and children facing family violence. It is run by SCWO. 

“She brings us everywhere she goes and takes care of us very well. We receive so much love from her,” she adds, but they never knew about the hardship she went through in her younger days.

That love, she now realises, had been shaped in part by years of deprivation – of things her grandmother never had.

“During Christmas, no matter what, I would bring (the twins) to look at Christmas lights and all the cartoons in Orchard Road,” says Madam Siew. “Because I didn’t have all this growing up; I want them to enjoy themselves.”

She pauses before adding: “I don’t want my children and my grandchildren to suffer like me.”

Chloe and Kimberly live in a different Singapore today – one that ranks eighth out of 166 countries and first in Asia-Pacific for low levels of gender inequality, in the latest United Nations Gender Inequality Index released in March 2024.

Reflecting on how far women’s rights and opportunities have come in Singapore, Chloe, who holds a degree in psychology, says: “I’m most grateful for the freedom to choose what I want to do.

“For example, whether I wanted to continue studying by going to university, and even what I wanted to study.”

Journey towards equality

Kimberly sees her grandmother’s two failed marriages as part of what shaped her strength.

“No matter the hand she was dealt, she did not tolerate it if it didn't align with her needs. She was able to start over, not once but twice, and eventually had my mother and uncle with my grandfather,” she says.

That strength didn’t leave callouses. “Later in life, I saw her soften. She became kinder, more smiley, and her presence felt warmer,” says Kimberly.

Moments of connection endured even with the haze of dementia, which struck her grandmother in the last decade of her life.

Her voice quivering, she recounts a final exchange with her grandmother in November 2024, just before she left for a holiday in Japan.

“I just sat with her and I cried, and asked for forgiveness. I said everything I wanted to say to her before I left,” she says. “And I felt like she understood me, because she was looking at me right in my eyes and she was also tearing when I was talking to her.”

It’s a memory she cherishes.

“She deserved to smile, and I hope to honour that by embracing resilience with kindness.”

Now a mother herself to three children aged between 4 and 12, Kimberly hopes to carry forward what was passed down to her; strength, yes, but softness, too.

“I want my children to understand the importance of adaptability. We are not bound by the same rigid paths our parents (and grandparents) had to take,” she says. “Their stories have shaped me, but they’ve also inspired me to raise my children with both strength and softness.”

Strength, for both Madam Vyner and Madam Siew, was forged by hardship. 

For this new generation of women, however, it looks different. It looks like choice. It looks like freedom. 

It looks like promise and possibility.