When Amanda Chong was in school, her friends and teachers would call her “motormouth Mandy”, because “I used to talk so much and I had an opinion about everything,” she says with a laugh.
Amanda went to an all-girls’ school, where she was nurtured by teachers who saw her potential early on and encouraged her to dream big. She recounts that being dubbed a “motormouth” meant that she would often get into trouble because of her strong opinions, picking fights with those who would disagree with her.
“Another teacher would have just told me off,” Amanda says. “But my teacher told me, ‘You actually have leadership skills, but you need to learn how to listen to others’. You know, there’s a whole narrative about when girls demonstrate leadership, they are termed as bossy. She never called me bossy, and instead told me that I needed to learn how to care for people and communicate with them.”
Today, the 34-year-old is a lawyer, poet, playwright, and the co-founder of a non-profit organisation called ReadAble, which empowers underserved children aged two to 15 with literacy skills through a phonics-based curriculum.
One thing that stands out about the Deputy Senior State Counsel? She’s determined to use
