Farewell, Wong Wai Lin

Some of my friends would have known Wong Wai Lin from our Internet days of the early 1990s. We had formed a group of Internet enthusiasts and he had come to join us at one of our meetings. We must have impressed him much because he kept coming back to attend more meetings where we shared ideas and information about Internet tools like the World Wide Web, FTP, Gopher, Telnet and IRC among other things. In fact, Wong’s son-in-law, Jeffrey Chew, another Internet enthusiast who would soon become a good personal friend, spoke of his father-in-law's commitment to our informal group. “He wasn't a very sociable person, preferring to be surrounded by his family, but he considered the Internet group worthy of becoming his friends. That was why he kept going back to them again and again," Jeffrey told me last Sunday.

For me, I had known Wong even earlier than the Internet days of the 1990s. It could have been at the end of December 1977 or in January 1978, I don't remember the date exactly, but on one of those days he walked into the Pulau Tikus branch of Ban Hin Lee Bank to open a bank account and I happened to be the one to attend to him. Everytime he came into the bank, he would seek me out until I was transferred elsewhere. As an Accountant, he already had a business bank account somewhere else, possibly at Malayan Banking, but with Ban Hin Lee Bank just days into opening their branch in Pulau Tikus, he wanted a personal current account here. So he was one of those pioneer customers with a single-digit account number. 

In the last few years of his life, Wong suffered from dementia and the condition gradually worsen with time. He passed away last Saturday after spending three years in a nursing home. Farewell and rest in peace, Wong Wai Lin.