Valerie Khoo is many things. She is a businesswoman, a curator, an entrepreneur, a writer and an artist. The thread that connects all these aspects of Khoo’s life is her innate fascination with the mechanisms of how the world works and how you can work with that apparatus to create things of meaning that matter to you. In the process she has made some daring and improbable leaps, such as from being a corporate accountant to working as a writer and into creating a social enterprise in another country. Through it all Khoo has a buoyant attitude combined with an incisive understanding that makes her story at once instructive and inspiring.
From Singapore to The Shire
Khoo emigrated to Australia with her parents from Singapore and they settled in the “The Shire” in the southern suburbs of Sydney. Although it was an era and location where racism may have been expected, Khoo’s recollection of her childhood is typically sunny. “It was great,” she enthuses. “I had a fantastic childhood. We were one of two Asian families in our area but I experienced very little racism or prejudice — in fact I probably experienced the opposite. I had wonderful neighbours and friends. Racism was not something that came across my path.”
As we shall see, Khoo is very much grounded in reality, but she balances this with a fervent embrace of the positive. It is this balanced outlook that allows her to observe genuinely, “It was one of the best childhoods you could ask
