By Sandra Davie

YANGON: Step into the Chinatown apartment home of Myanmar couple U Myint Han, 52, and Khin Mi Mi, 49, and the first thing that catches your eye are rows of lovingly-burnished gold medals, neatly lined up on top of a television set.

The proud father picks them up, one by one, to show off their inscriptions.

All seven medals are academic prizes won by two of his daughters, who have aced their studies at Ngee Ann Polytechnic in Singapore.

Mr Myint Han, who completed high school in Myanmar, is especially proud of his eldest daughter, Ms Su Mon Pyone, 21, who left for Singapore in 2004 after completing her high school matriculation examinations, which are used for entry to university.

To prepare herself, she attended a three-month polytechnic preparation course run by Singapore education company RV Centre International in Yangon, which cost Mr Myint Han US$450 (S$662), nine times the average monthly income in Yangon.

She then sat and passed the entrance examination for Ngee Ann Polytechnic and was offered a place in its electronic and computer engineering course.

Despite struggling to speak English and being apart from her family for the first time, she made it to the dean's list and bagged the Motorola prize given to the best-performing female student in her course within a year.

Encouraged, she toiled even harder, spending many hours in the library each day.

It paid off. She beat all 600 course mates to swipe five medals in her final year at Ngee Ann. These include the Creative Technology Gold Medal, Institute of Engineering Singapore award and the Phoenix Contact Prize.

Then came the biggest prize of all - a place in the computer engineering course at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

Mr Myint Han picks up the framed graduation picture of his fair, long-haired daughter and says in his native tongue: 'See, not just smart but beautiful, too.'

His second daughter, Ms Zin Mon Pyone, 19, in her final year at Ngee Ann, elicits more sighs. She has already bagged two prizes and looks likely to add to the family's medal tally.

The ethnic Chinese couple, who run a family business distributing generic medicines, are racing against time, putting in 12-hour workdays and scrabbling together funds to send their two younger children to Singapore as soon as possible.

In July, third daughter Han Ni Htun, 16, scored five distinctions - out of six subjects - for her high school final examinations.

Although she stands a good chance of getting into Yangon's University of Medicine, a training ground for future doctors reserved for Myanmar's top scorers, her parents prefer that she head to Singapore and take the same path as her sisters - to Ngee Ann and then NUS.

'NUS is better than any university in Yangon and better than many universities, even in Western countries,' gushes Mr Myint Han, who has heard that NUS is consistently ranked among the top 50 universities in international rankings.

As such, Han Ni started preparing for Singapore two years ago, after completing Grade 8, the equivalent of Secondary 2.

Like her sisters, she attended one of Myanmar's top five high schools. It was near their home in Chinatown on Latha Street in Central Yangon, and her parents were spared the hefty 'entrance fee' usually levied by the headmaster.

The undertable going rate for entry to top high schools in Myanmar, such as Basic Education No. 1 (Dagon) school, which their son attended up till recently, is as high as S$1,000.

For the past two years, school for Han Ni began at 9am and ended at 3pm. The real learning, however, took place after that, in private tuition centres from 4pm to 9pm.

Like most other students, she took tuition in at least three subjects - mathematics, science and English - which cost her parents more than US$100 a month. She also attended a series of English courses at the British Council, which cost another few hundred dollars. Her bedside table is piled high with books on mastering English, borrowed from the British Council library.

She is now attending the same Singapore polytechnic preparatory course that her sisters had taken earlier - five times a week, four hours a day.

Prodded by her parents to seize the opportunity to practise her English and explain why Ngee Ann is a better choice than studying medicine in Yangon, she says, in halting English: 'Myanmar people..., they have no confidence in the universities in our country.'

Her parents nod in agreement, but they refuse to add more, wary of being quoted. Instead, they ply you with glasses of luminescent, orange-coloured drinks.

Much remains unsaid in the still, stifling air, which reads 37 deg C on a plastic thermometer hanging on the wall. A standing fan is on full blast.

They have an air-conditioner, which is rarely switched on. It is a 'good day' if they have eight hours of uninterrupted electricity supply, is all they would say. Their youngest and only son, Han Lin Aung, will soon be sent away, too.

Worried that the playful 14-year-old was not focused on his studies, they took him along to visit their daughters in Singapore in May.

The trip had its intended effect. After seeing how 'modern and advanced' Singapore is and how well his sisters are faring, he agreed to quit his high school studies altogether and threw himself into full-time preparation to enter a Singapore secondary school.

Every morning, starting at 8am, he struggles on his own with English exercises, which is taught in the Myanmar high school curriculum as a foreign language and at a very basic level, and Singapore secondary school maths.

After a short break for lunch, he is off to a tuition centre run by RV Centre International in a nearby condominium, with 25 other classmates who all have the same goal of making it to a Singapore secondary school. Their teachers - a Filipina and a Myanmar national - put them through the paces of Singapore secondary level mathematics, English and science for the next five hours, till 6pm.

A quick dinner, and he is back at his desk attempting the homework that his teacher has set him, till about 10pm.

Later this month, he will go to Singapore to sit for the Secondary 3 entrance exam. If he passes, he will start his new school year next January.

Looking pensive, Madam Khin Mi Mi says she already 'misses' him and will have to adjust to all four children being away from home. But she and her husband have no plans to move away themselves. 'It will be too hard to adapt to a new country at our age,' she says.

They just hope that their children will make it in Singapore, find good jobs and enjoy the life they never had. Mr Myint Han says: 'My wife and I will miss our children, but we will be so happy. At least in Singapore, they will have a future.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Oct 11, 2008.

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