From being born in Singapore, growing up in China, and now attending college in the U.S., Mark Cheong is accustomed to seeing different parts of the world. Describing himself as an expatriate, Cheong’s vision for the future is based on the lessons he has learned from failures in his life.
“I love to share anything that could allow others to learn from my mistakes,” Cheong said. “At the end of my life, I will feel accomplished if I can make one person feel less alone, and even after that, one more.”
SCHOOLING
His parents’ business took them to Shanghai when he was just one year old. Cheong’s first experience in school was in a Singapore International School in Shanghai, but his parents immediately switched him when there were grammatical errors on the report card. He and his sisters all attended Shanghai American School, where he would receive diplomas in International Baccalaureate and American High School.
Cheong’s love of the arts began when he was exposed to music at an early age, starting with eight years of piano (“typical for an Asian,” he joked), then four years of saxophone (baritone, alto, and tenor), self-taught guitar, and he’s on his way to teaching himself the violin. “My mom said I should learn these instruments to be attractive,” he laughed. “I also joined the school choir for a few years, mostly because I just wanted to travel.”
In middle school, he found another creative outlet. “I got into poetry to help me cope with some things,” he recalled. “I soon stopped because it really wasn’t a ‘cool’ thing to do so I continued pursuing instruments and sports in high school instead.” In addition to instruments and choir, Cheong competed in varsity track & field and rugby. “My best friends and I had a great time in high school, hanging out with teachers. School was fun to go to. We took the best out of the whole experience, learning from them instead of focusing on grades.”
Wanting to better understand the community around him, Cheong took part in numerous clubs in high schools. He served as the public relations officer on the student council, secretary for the prom committee, vice president of the fitness council, and a personal trainer. “We held the highest (by elevation) prom that year when we got a great deal with one of the tallest skyscrapers in Shanghai,” he recalled.
His work in athletics centered around finding ways to promote healthy body image and fitness in school, and he wanted to leave a legacy to promote being active. “I founded the youth rugby program that is still thriving to this day,” he stated. “It allows elementary school students to participate in this great sport that has taught me so much about resilience and hard work.”
Being a student at Shanghai American School, Cheong always planned to attend university abroad. “Everyone there was going to the U.S. for college. All three of my sisters went to the U.S., including two to USC (University of Southern California), where I am in my junior year,” he commented.
MILITARY SERVICE
There would be a detour before Cheong could attend USC as he needed two years of national service to earn citizenship from his birth country of Singapore. “There are three categories you can be assigned: armed forces, civil defense, and police force,” he explained. “Fortunately for me, I got sent to the army.”
He enlisted at age 18 and began basic training, where he tested in the top 10 percent of recruits and soldiers to move on to Officer Cadet School. With one year of training ahead to become an officer, Cheong and his friends chose to become infantry officers since they heard it was the toughest course.
“Honestly, I was kind of an asshole when I first went in. I thought I was better, faster, and stronger, than most of my peers,” he admitted. One glaring incident showed Cheong he needed a different approach. “We were on a three-day exercise with no sleep, fighting back and forth, and did an eight-kilometer casualty evacuation on the way back. On top of our battle gear, we would have to carry our platoon mates on our backs and run,” he recollected. “Every few minutes, the officers would blow the whistle and we had to put the person down and continue fighting with. Towards the end, my body started to shut down and I was desperate for air and help. None of which came to me. Seeing the way that my platoon mates looked at me, I knew that I was in the wrong.”
“Our training exercises would usually go on for four or five days at a time. For the afternoon marches, we would have 40-60 pounds of gear on our backs in addition to wearing full battle gear, helmet, combat boots, and a battle vest,” he recalled. “My company purposely picked the hottest times of the day to march to acclimatize us. It was pretty common to see people collapse and throw up on the side of the path.”
As part of their Jungle Confidence Course, the cadets were given two days-worth of food for nine days in the Indonesian jungles and mountains. “Not everyone liked that as much as I did,” he remarked. “We had already been there for three weeks so everyone was dying to go home.”
“One time we were halfway up this bareback mountain that had no cover at all when the worst thunderstorm rolled in. Lightning strikes were all around us and everyone started screaming. Everyone was pinned to the floor to not get hit, for some reason, I thought it would be a great time to shower,” he laughed. “I stripped buck naked and showered in the middle of the lightning storm. Later in that course, one of my friends was going through hypothermia so I spent the whole night laughing at him while laying on top of him.”
Having grown up in an American culture in Shanghai, being in his own native country was a culture shock for Cheong. “The moment they heard my accent, they started to discriminate against me. I was seen as the foreigner, the outsider,” he commented. “They would call me ‘Ang Mo,’ which is a racial slur against white people that translated to red-haired monkey. I was also referred to as a banana, yellow on the outside and white on the inside, even if my Chinese was better than theirs. It was hard making friends at first.”
It would not be the last time Cheong faced discrimination, but it was all part of a process that would leave an indomitable mark on him. “Having my will and determination constantly tested from spending weeks in the jungles and mountains of several countries, with food and sleep deprivation, and countless nights of ‘resilience training,’ I came out of that experience with perseverance forged into my being,” he recounted.
After completing his training, Cheong took a staff job in starting the National Gallery project, a new army gallery in Singapore, a breakdown of the army’s past. He then went into the combat unit for four months. “It was fun training them,” he admitted. “I had to keep my age hidden from them as they were 18-to-25 years old. You got people coming fresh out of a preppy school and also from jail. I couldn’t appear as some random 19-year-old international kid. I was strict at first and started to have more fun with them when they knew the standards. We didn’t laugh or yawn in front of them either.”
After initially earning the callsign “Monster” for his character, we became a close-knit unit. “By the end of my tour, I can proudly say that I created a bond with them that we will never forget,” he described. “During their joint training with the U.S. troops in Seattle, they were recognized and rewarded as the best combat platoon in the battalion. I received that news during class at USC and I could not stop smiling for the whole week.”
USC
Just as he had done in high school, Cheong decided to get involved with many different organizations and groups in college. “When I entered USC, I was two years older than everyone and had different experiences as an international student,” relayed Cheong, who is pursuing a degree in business administration. “I was slightly intimidated at the thought of attending school here.”
He joined the school’s chapter of the Expat Society, which focuses on global citizenship, in his first semester. Cheong served as vice president of his Sigma Nu pledge class in his second semester and later joined the Trojan Marketing Group as a project manager.
In the spring semester of his sophomore year in college, Cheong worked with students at Alliance Susan & Eric Smidt Technology High School (Smidt Tech), a free public charter school in Los Angeles in making a documentary:
“Working with the students made me look at service in a different way,” he articulated. “More inclusiveness, more opportunity, and more communication in the community would help everyone.”
He was in a class that visited with life sentence prisoners, and kids and mothers visiting relatives in prison. He was also part of a team that worked with the marijuana epidemic in middle school and high school. “Those experiences and working with the Smidt Tech students were about people coming together in at-risk communities,” he stated. “Fear stems from something we don’t know. It’s important to let people be less ignorant. Once the communication is out and people start understanding their own pain and problems, they won’t take it out on others and themselves.”
Being at USC also brought back his previous interest in poetry. “When I got to college, other situations came up in my life and I found spoken word poetry and art to be a healthy outlet so I started it up again,” he commemorated. “I put some of my biggest life struggles into a poem and performed it an Asian Pacific American Student Assembly (APASA) dubbed ‘Strength in Struggle.’ Once I wrote it on paper, it makes the internal strife that I experienced external, allowing me to move on. The way that I write my poems or perform spoken word is to try to let the audience feel exactly what I am feeling with as few words as possible, while keeping the integrity of emotions.”
BEYOND SCHOOL
Cheong has enjoyed a myriad of diverse positions in the summer. The summer before his sophomore year, he worked at a Korean streetwear start-up founded by his best friend from high school, Kevin Yang and Daniel Rice. “They taught me a lot about the fashion industry as well as tips and tricks for integrating into a foreign culture,” he stated. “We managed to catch the attention of Netflix actor Noah Centineo and rapper Wiz Khalifa.”
This past summer, Cheong learned essential skills while living in Huntsville, Alabama as a door-to-door salesman for a home security company. “I went in with no friends. In fact, every single of my friends and family screaming at me not to go,” he recollected. “I decided to go through with it anyway. It was the most enlightening experience of my life, dealing with hundreds of rejections, threats, and racism. Hard not to have confidence in yourself when it seems like no one else does.”
He is in the process of starting a couple of businesses in his Junior year at USC. Typical of Cheong’s do-it-all mentality, he is also planning to drop an album and fashion line by the end of the year.
“I believe in creating a kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven,” Cheong said in summing up his life goals. “I will make music and art with that sole purpose in mind, while using business to help me attain it.”