DR CATHERINE WU, who came under the spotlight in the saga involving City Developments Limited (CDL), chatted with Taiwanese TV host Paul Lee on an episode of his talk show Da-win Dining aired in November 2024.
In the TV interview, Dr Wu, who was born in Taiwan, revealed that she is the only daughter in her family and that she has five elder brothers and one younger brother. Her mother ran a kindergarten for over 50 years.
Dr Wu’s eldest brother Wu Ching-kuo is the most well known. The 78-year-old is a former president of the International Boxing Association and a former member of the International Olympic Committee.
In her 60s now, Dr Wu and her siblings have a total of six doctoral degrees, including her doctorate in music education.
She said on the show that her parents placed importance on the children’s education so that they could contribute to society.
As she grew up with six brothers, her parents sent her to pursue music education in the hope that she could cultivate a more demure temperament.
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“My parents were worried that I would be too boyish when I grew up, so they wanted me to learn music,” she told Singapore’s Chinese-language daily Lianhe Zaobao in a separate interview published in August 2024. “They felt that music could help cultivate a girl’s temperament.”
Her parents sent her to a Catholic elementary school, where there was a music class, and at first she could play only the simplest piano chords. She fell in love with music after attending the class for more than two years, she recalled in the Zaobao interview.
Her parents subsequently enrolled her in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the US when she was 15.
She told TV host Lee that she almost wanted to give up on music when she was studying in the US.
Her then piano teacher, a graduate of The Juilliard School in New York, spent a year helping her to prepare for auditions for the prestigious institution, which she was eventually admitted into.
Dr Wu returned to Taiwan after she obtained her doctorate from New York University and joined a record label through a friend’s introduction.
She released her first piano album in 1990, and went on several TV variety shows and gave media interviews to promote her album.
Dr Wu also hosted a half-hourly music show, whose Chinese title translates to Music From The Heart. It ran for more than 700 episodes in the early 1990s.
She told Lee that the show featured Taiwanese musical acts such as bands Power Station and Ukulele and singer Julia Peng.
Dr Wu’s efforts to popularise classical music on the show even helped her get selected as one of the “Ten Outstanding Young Women in Taiwan” in 1994. She lived in Taiwan before she uprooted and moved to Singapore after meeting CDL executive chairman Kwek Leng Beng, 84, at a gathering of family friends in 1992.
At the meeting, which Dr Wu said felt like a job interview, Kwek posed several wide-ranging questions before he asked her whether she was interested in a move to Singapore.
He initially asked her to do research on properties he was interested in, and she gradually learnt the ropes of hotel management from him.
Dr Wu recalled that the CDL chairman once asked her to evaluate the data of three potential hotels for acquisition and to choose one from among them.
She ventured into cybersecurity after the Covid-19 pandemic.
She told TV host Lee that she had the opportunity to go into the field in 2020, but the pandemic thwarted it. An opportunity came up again in 2023, and she seized it.
Dr Wu brought GeekCon – an international cyber-security contest and conference – to Singapore for the first time in May 2024. She serves as secretary-general of GeekCon International while Kwek is honorary adviser.
Dr Wu came under the spotlight when Kwek’s son Sherman, who is group chief executive of CDL, said in a statement on Feb 27 that she was the underlying reason behind the family’s public rift.
Her official position is adviser to the board of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels, a wholly owned and principal subsidiary of CDL Group.
The younger Kwek alleged that she has been interfering in matters well beyond her scope, and that she wields and exercises enormous influence.
The 49-year-old said in the statement: “These matters have troubled us as directors. Due to her long relationship with the chairman, efforts that were made to manage the situation were done sensitively, but to no avail.” THE STRAITS TIMES
