September 06, 2017, 08:28 AM 
This is Anja Chong.
She's 24, and a Malaysian champion speed-skater.
She came out of the SEA Games's first winter games' speed skating events with a historic and record medal haul: Three golds in the 500m and 1,000m women's race, as well as the women's 3,000m relay.
She is a Singapore Permanent Resident
But here's why we're telling you about her: Chong also happens to be a Singapore Permanent Resident.
She was born and raised here, went to school at the United World College of South East Asia and started figure skating when she was nine.
Her mother, even more interestingly, happens to be none other than the president of the Singapore Ice Skating Association (SISA) Sonja Chong.
Here she is (in the red blazer) at this year's Singapore National Figure Skating Championship at The Rink at JCube, together with Senior Minister of State for Culture, Community and Youth Sim Ann, and our SEA Games one-two figure skating finishers Yu Shuran (on the left) and Chloe Ing (on the right):
Photo via SISA Official Facebook page
And here's a nice picture of them together recently:
Sonja Chong: essentially mother of Singapore's ice skating scene
Chong has, we understand, done a lot for Singapore's ice skating scene, despite also holding Permanent Residency status here.
She was president of the SISA back in 2008, when news of our very first Olympic-sized ice skating rink was announced. The Rink at JCube eventually opened in April 2012, and it is still Singapore's only Olympic-sized rink, which holds national and international skating competitions from time to time.
Chong also played a big role in securing SISA's membership with the International Skating Union back in 2008 — in part thanks to her lobbying for an Olympic-sized skating rink, because prior to that, the biggest one we had was 20m x 40m, smaller than the minimum 30m x 60m size by international regulations.
And thanks to her great efforts, Anja would be the first skater to represent Singapore at a world junior championship in 2009. In 2008, Anja achieved an earlier milestone, being the first figure skater to win an international medal for Singapore — a bronze at the 2008 Asian Junior Challenge.
A younger daughter of hers, Nadja (in the middle), is also a competitive speed skater — but she, too, is regrettably not Singaporean.
Applied for citizenship, but didn't get it
Now in case you're wondering, well, why didn't you guys just apply for citizenship? Getting it should be a cinch, right, for all the contributions they've made to Singapore thus far, and also the sheer amount of promise Anja and even Nadja have shown thus far?
Here's the thing: They did.
In this Straits Times report syndicated by Malaysian newspaper The Star from 2012, Anja, then 17, and Sonja both applied for citizenship after Anja was offered a spot to compete at the 2011 Asian Winter Games in Kazakhstan.
Back then, according to the report, Malaysia's ice skating association also offered her a ticket to the same event, but she turned them down, hoping to get to skate for Singapore, where she has been pretty much all her life.
Sadly, in the end, she missed out on competing there, because she and her mom were not granted citizenship.
And so in February 2012, Anja competed at the International Skating Union World Junior Short Track Speed Skating Championships in Melbourne, for the first time, for Malaysia.
And she's been skating for our neighbours ever since, leading to her most recent three-gold victory at the recently-concluded SEA Games — against her mom, who led the Singapore squad to the Games, which for the first time featured winter sports, leaving our citizen skaters, like favourite Cheyenne Goh, to settle for mostly silvers, especially in the women's speed skating events.[related_story]
So why were they rejected?
Photo via Anja Chong's Facebook page
Sonja, after all, has really contributed to building and nurturing an ice skating scene in Singapore that is to be reckoned with, at the very least at the regional level, and likely at least at the junior world championships too.
There is plenty of promise in our gold and silver medal figure skaters Yu Shuran and Chloe Ing, too, who are both working toward the Tokyo 2020 Winter Olympics.
And as we can see Anja is definitely well on her way up — and who knows, perhaps Nadja too, when she starts competing.
But as to why the Chongs have not been granted citizenship, your guess is as good as ours.
How much more rooted does this family need to be?
Top photo via Anja Chong's Facebook page
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