Vince's victory.

Vince Yip's mother thought his son was bad luck, so she gave him away to a couple in Ipoh. He was less than 10 years old then. Earlier, she had even given her daughter away to the same couple.

Before all that, his father left the family of four young children to lead his own life.

So, to make ends meet, Vince's mother had to work as a seamstress in Penang.

But Vince, 60, said he was naughty then. He would "light fires and burn curtains" so the couple in Ipoh had no choice but to return him to his mother. 

However, at a young age of 10, and living in sheer destitute, his mother passed away. "The night before she died, she told me to study hard and buy myself a bowl of fishball kway teow soup. She knew I loved fishballs," Vince recalled.

Left behind like orphans, Vince's maternal uncle took him and his siblings in and cared for them. His uncle was a clerk then and had six children of his own. 

But the story did not end there. Out of the blue, his father returned, took his children away and made them work for him in his new hairdressing salon. At that time, his father was a master hairdresser from Hong Kong. By then, his father had already married his third wife.

Vince recounted: "Each day after school, we had to wash and dry the perming sheets and sweep hair off the floor. It was slavery."

Later, his own sister rescued them and he remembered that she had to pay his father a sum in compensation to take them away to England with her. His sister was a registered nurse and had to raise her siblings on her sole income. Life was therefore still difficult for them.

In his twenties, Vincent studied hard and qualified for the prestigious London School of Economics. But he opted for University of Bath instead as he did not have the funds.

After his studies, he returned to Penang and worked his way up from an executive asst to a management trainee in an international bank in KL, and thereafter to senior positions. 

From thereon, he left the bank at the height of his career to run his own business. He then "inked a deal with Australia's famous Gelatissimo chain to start a franchise in Singapore."

His first outlet was opened outside Shaw House in Scotts Road in 2005 and it "chalked up $1 million in sales in 11 months."

In the course of all that, he met the love of his life, Tan Siew Chin ("Chin"), and they married in 1990. After marriage, they worked for a while in Sydney before settling in Singapore in 1991.

But tragedy struck in 2004 when Chin was diagnosed with lung cancer. She was a non-smoker. 

She initially responded well to treatment but succumbed to the illness in 2010, a long six years of battling against cancer.

In her last six months, Vince became his wife's sole caregiver, "tending to her every need, lugging along packets of traditional Chinese medicine herbs and Chinese clay brewing pots when they travelled, and holding her when she screamed in agony at night." 

Vince said: "When you love someone, you don't question. You just do what you have to do. It's not that hard." 

Notwithstanding the anger and disillusionment, his wife's death changed him. 

He said: "Even though I was earning a lot of money before, I was very insecure and had this fear that I didn't have enough. But I realised that money doesn't matter when you're sick."

Vince never forgot his wife's parting words to him. She told him to travel and do charity, especially involving children (since they do not have children of their own).

Now, after selling his franchise business, Vince is working on various projects, one of which is called Sight To Sky, a Singapore NGO, "which does annual mobile clinics in India, Pakistan and Nepal."

There is a story behind that decision to work with Sight To Sky. Vince said that on the day his wife died, healthcare professional approached him to ask if he would donate his wife's corneas. 

But he shot back: "God made her whole and she would go home whole."

Vince said he regretted that decision. "I had a lot of time to reflect on what Chin would have done. She would have given away her corneas. That was who she was."

Currently, Vince is raising funds for a solar school that Sight To Sky is building in Ladakh.

Lesson? Just one.

Vince's story literally tells itself. It was a life of much struggles, disappointments and hardship. 

At one point, he even confronted God:-

"What sort of life plan do you have for me? You took away my father, and my mother when I was a child...And in my adult life, you took away my wife. What's my next big tragedy?"

Sometimes, it's hard to tell a tragedy and an opportunity apart. When we are going through it, the valley of shadows is always dark. 

But shadow always points to a light source nearby since they cannot exist apart from the light. Yet, most time, it is understandably not obvious to us.

And even when there is light at the end of the tunnel, it is always the darkness that keeps us in cold company in the beginning of our journey. 

What compounds it is that the opportunity for growth is never the first thing we realise when adversity first strike. 

Without fail, the pain, the hopelessness and the anger inevitably overwhelm and even threaten to overtake our life. 

Surrendering to it is all so easy, so natural, like giving in to Odyssey's sirens' call to embrace the defeat and pain. 

But as I read about Vince's life, the last 60 years, from rags to abandonment to deaths, I learn that God's plan is lifelong because our growth doesn't happen overnight.

If we judge a tragic event or two when it happen, we will never see his divine hand in them. Our myopia would cloud out his omnipotence working behind the trials, or His assuring light behind the shadow. 

At such times, it is easy, even human nature, to be consumed by the pain, and miss the opportunity for growth, be overwhelmed by the hurt, and dismiss the overcoming hope, and be oppressed by the sorrow, and resist the quiet joy.

Alas, after all that had happened, Vince has this to say: "I now look at my life as though it's a stage. I've been given a role and I have to play it out. It's time now for the next act. I choose to anticipate it with optimism."

Indeed, the power of a trial is that it can only release us to maturity after it has sufficiently broken us to humility just as the winemaking process would have to press the grapes completely in order to extract the juices with enduring fragrance. 

In the end, Solomon was right about the seasons of life. Just as weeping and mourning end with dancing, and sowing and laboring end with harvesting, and the seasonal cycle goes in that assuring order, Vince experienced the same empowering cycle from trial to growth, sorrow to joy, despair to hope. 

So, it is tempting to ask when bitter trials first happen, as Vince did: "What's my next big tragedy?"

But, if life is a season of transformation and maturity, and trials are but a journey into the shadowland that leads inexorably to the rising horizon of His guiding light, then I earnestly pray that I will always be reminded to treat such challenging journey as a farmer treats the joy of reaping after the toil of sowing, or the vineyard owner treats the winemaking process as the grapes are diligently pressed into fresh wine. 

So, taking Vince's cue, when tragedy happens, the right question to ask then is this:-

"What is my role in this adversity to my enduring hope and eventual growth?" Amen. Cheerz.