Poh Ling Yeow

So also breaking away from him, even though you broke away from the religion before you split up with your husband, did that feel also like you were really separating from a part of your life that you'd kind of ended, but also now you were really ending another part of your life because it was that shared history, that sort of shared understanding of where you'd both come from?

This is why Matt will always be my closest confidant, is he's the one that helped me leave the church.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, so he's the one that sort of got me painting.

He...

He's been my greatest enabler.

He's always been the one that's believed in me when I didn't believe in myself.

And it sounds so cheesy to say that, but he really has been that for me.

I remember when he first suggested that I be a painter, I actually lost it at him because I lacked such imagination in terms of what I was capable of.

um that it made me angry for him to suggest that I could do that and um and he was just like of course you can and I'll always I always feel indebted to him for that because he's the one that helped me he saw my potential to think outside of the church as well because I think before that I was so um I was just always kind of wanting to be a good kid you know like the sort of

Like, disobeying my parents was just such a horrifying thing for me as a, you know, Chinese migrant kid.

And he's the one that said to me, you know, it's hard, but all things that are worth fighting for are hard.

And when you get out the other side, like, you get to be more yourself.

You get to tell more of your truth.

You get to be...

you're refining, you know, who you want to be.

And he's like, believe me, even though it's going to be really hard at the beginning, they will have more respect for you and you'll be able to live a life that's just so much more free of that, those cultural constraints.

Because I think like,

The thing that's so like hard with tradition, it's beautiful in many ways, but also there's just all this conservatism that like transcends no matter how old you are, you're still expected to toe the line.

And like he really, he kind of taught me to be a rebel and to like, you know, to trust my judgment and to question everything.