wtf come all the way from china to do NS here

WHAT theatre director Kuo Jian Hong, 42, inherited from her immigrant father, who died in 2002, is the legacy of social consciousness.

Her late father was Singapore's most famous playwright, Mr Kuo Pao Kun, and her mother is ballerina Goh Lay Kuan.

When Ms Kuo was growing up here, she did not play with the things other little girls did.

Instead, she sang and played with younger sister Jing Hong and the students at The Practice Performing Arts School, founded by her parents in 1965.

For her, those were the simple pleasures of life, and family included everyone in the school.

'My parents loved life and loved people. I think they had a real big heart for people, and that has influenced how my sister and I view life and family,' says Ms Kuo, who is artistic co-director at The Theatre Practice (TPP), a bilingual theatre her father founded in 1986.

Her parents' deep concern for others, she says, created a strong sense of goodwill within their theatre 'family', which she enjoys to this day.

Mr Kuo came from Hebei, China to Singapore when he was 10, at his father's request. The elder Kuo was a successful businessman who owned Singapore's first multi-level department store, Peking, in the City Hall area.

Madam Goh moved here in her teens from Sumatra, Indonesia after World War II. Her parents were educators who sought teaching opportunities here.

The two met at Rediffusion's Mandarin radio play section, married, and lived in a bungalow off Orchard Road.

For immigrants like her parents, the theatre community offered them a place away from their home provinces in which to sink their roots, Ms Kuo says.

The innumerable acts of goodwill that people extended to one another forged a strong sense of community at a time when life was hard.

It seemed almost natural then that Mr Kuo would express his discontent with the socio-political turmoil in China and Singapore through his plays.

'There was discrimination, racial tension - there were all these things that were prime material for artistic creation,' says Ms Kuo.

His works were so critical that some were banned from the stage, such as The Struggle (1969), about the social turmoil that results from rapid urbanisation and capitalism. Eventually, he was arrested during the leftist purge in 1976.

He was detained for over four years and stripped of his Singapore citizenship. His citizenship was reinstated in 1992.

To Ms Kuo, her parents' social activism was less about being political than it was about being socially conscious of how people were being affected by regimes and policies.

'One of their concerns was the underdogs: the old, the youth, those who were ripped off by the opportunistic acts that were going on...materialistic quest was the last thing on our minds.'

This is the legacy of social consciousness that her father left Ms Kuo. She became TPP's artistic co-director in 2005 after spending 20 years studying theatre design and working in film and theatre in the United States.

She is married to freelance producer-director Christopher Hatton, 41, an American. They have a daughter, Olivia, who is five years old.

What brought her home was her sense of mission to grow the audience for Chinese theatre. This is why she chose to produce the Chinese modern rock musical Liao Zhai Rocks, which opens on Thursday.

Musicals, she says, can bring in audiences who would not ordinarily choose to watch a Chinese play. They also draw in artists from the music and English theatre scene who would otherwise stay away from Chinese theatre.

'For a lot of people who don't speak Mandarin any more, the only time they speak (Mandarin) is when they are singing karaoke. So songs are this thin thread that connects a lot of people to Chinese culture.