One hot afternoon in July, Ooi Kee Beng sat down at a Muslim cafe on Kandahar Street in Singapore for a cold Arabic coffee and a chat with one of Penang’s many big names in the academic world. Professor Ho Eng Seng, a Penang Free School alumnus, shared with him some of the most important lessons he had learned on his long academic journeys.
Ho Eng Seng returned to Penang in 1986 from Stanford University with degrees in Anthropology and Economics. The timing was bad, however. The country was in the middle of a bad depression and there was no job to be had.
