Born blind, she was told she had no future. But Lim Lee Lee is an actor, film producer and social entrepreneur who blazes a trail for the disabled

Lim Lee Lee was just seven months old when her neighbours in the kampung noticed that she was not reaching out for the toys that were placed in front of her.

In the Taman Tampines Tiga kampung where she used to live, spaces were vast and Lee Lee was given free rein to explore the world with all her senses.

“I smelled the leaves and flowers, heard the chickens and ducks clucking around and knew where water was drawn from the well. But I was always bumping into things wherever I walked,” she described to Salt&Light.

She was found to have cataracts as an infant that led to total blindness. Today, such a condition can be corrected with timely medical intervention, especially in the first few months of life.

Back then, her panicked parents went around frantically searching for a cure from doctors, temples and churches.

“Though they were devout followers of another religion, my mother even took me to the Billy Graham crusade where she was told to fast for 10 days so that I would receive sight,” said Lee Lee, now 58.

She was traumatised by her parents’ desperate attempts to find a cure.

When she was around three years old, she became aware of the difference between herself and other children. As she had no sight perception, she was not allowed to play outdoor games with her siblings.

Yet upon the encouragement of a doctor, her parents enrolled her in Ascension Kindergarten which planted the first seeds of faith in her.

“We sang hymns before class and said grace before eating. I felt there was something peaceful and different about the Christian faith,” said Lee Lee.

“I think I was already searching for the answers to questions of life then as I often asked my Ah Ma why she prayed to idols that could be made by human hands.”

She was told she would not walk after a traumatic brain injury 

After kindergarten, Lee Lee’s parents enrolled her in the Singapore School for the Blind.

Unfortunately, a year later, she had a major accident at home.

Her younger sister had inadvertently left an empty plate on the floor, and Lee Lee tripped over it. She hit the right side of her head on a metallic chair and the chair fell on her. 

“I cried myself to sleep because of the pain. I could not express how I felt,” Lee Lee remembered. Her family members did not take her to the doctor immediately as there were no visible injuries.

The next morning, however, they could not wake Lee Lee up. They rushed her to a neighbourhood clinic where the staff took one look at her and urged them to get their daughter to a hospital or “she may die”.

At the hospital, doctors found that Lee Lee was suffering internal bleeding from severe head trauma. The skull bone on the right side of her head had to be removed.

Her family members wept during the surgery, fearing they would lose her.

When Lee Lee regained consciousness, the doctors told her parents that they could not predict the consequences of the head injury, but it was likely that she would end up being paralysed or intellectual disabled.

Her parents believed the doctor’s prognosis. So when Lee Lee was discharged, she was confined to bed because her family were convinced she was not able to walk.

Lee Lee, however, was not content with doing nothing and lying down in bed. She continually attempted to get up and walk.

Pushing boundaries, challenging norms 

“The doctor said I cannot walk, but who is to tell me that I cannot walk?” she complained defiantly to her grandfather who was tasked to watch her.

After a month or two, Lee Lee enlisted the help of her cousins to help support her as she got out of bed. She attempted to walk, enduring the pain. 

After practising for a few weeks, she finally took her first few unassisted steps. A rush of joy overwhelmed her. 

When she walked in to her doctor’s room for a medical review, the surprised doctor asked her mother: “Why is she able to walk now?”

Even as a young girl, Lee Lee displayed unusual inner strength and resilience, and was especially keen to prove her naysayers wrong.

Lee Lee, with her guide dog, doing her part for Touch Community Services Flag Day in 2016. She does not let her disability get in the way of living life to the fullest.

When her parents found it difficult to send and pick her from school daily, they decided that it would be best for her to live on her own at her school’s hostel. Lee Lee rose to the challenge.

“I learnt how to cook, how to clean, how to garden and how to iron, and picked up all the independent skills,” she told Salt&Light.

Her disability did not stop her from taking leadership roles in school, such as forming a band to perform for school events, and taking up swimming even when she was exempted from Physical Education (PE).

However, she had trouble catching up with her peers academically. Her brain injury caused her to  miss half a year of school in Primary 2, and she had to be retained for a year.

“I often stayed up to midnight to try to finish my homework or understand what was going on in class. I had a hard time grasping Math concepts,” said Lee Lee, who was often labelled as “hopeless”, “useless” and “good for nothing” by her then teachers.

When she failed the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) and had to sit for it a second time, Lee Lee asked her form teacher if she had a future.

“You have no future. You will end up making cane baskets,” he replied bluntly.

Though his comments did not deter Lee Lee from taking her PSLE exams again, she began having depressive thoughts.

Once, she asked her teacher how she could die without pain. Alarmed, her teachers started keeping a close watch on her.

Lee Lee remarked:“It was so ironic because I once fought so hard to make sure that I could walk. But later on, I had thoughts of dying.”

She would ask Jesus for help with her studies

During her primary school years, some of her blind seniors would return as volunteers with non-profit organisation Gospel Mission to the Blind. They would conduct camps and Sunday school programmes for the students in her hostel.

It was during those days that Lee Lee accepted Christ and often talked to Jesus to ask for help with her studies.

Frustrated at her poor academic ability, there was one time when Lee Lee asked a volunteer Mary Lim why she was so stupid.

“Auntie Mary”, as Lee Lee called her, was the volunteer who often composed songs to help blind students memorise Scripture verses.

“Just pray Luke 2:52, Jesus will answer you,” she gently urged Lee Lee.

From then on, Lee Lee prayed the verses over herself every day, declaring: “Lee Lee grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man”, just as Jesus did.

“It helped me immensely and I still pray that till today,” said Lee Lee, who eventually passed her PSLE and made it to the Normal Academic stream at Ahmad Ibrahim Secondary School.

Having benefited from volunteers who shared the Christian faith, Lee Lee gives back to society at community events. Here, she serenaded the elderly with Chinese songs at a Christmas celebration at Jia Ying Active Ageing Centre in 2017.

Unlike her primary school where her classmates were all blind, her secondary school was made up largely of mainstream students. There were only eight other blind students in her cohort.

Blind students were not allowed to take notes using their Braille machines in class because the machines emitted too much noise and tended to drown out the teachers’ voices.

Thus, the teachers had to give the slides to them after class and their classmates needed to read the notes out to them to convert it into Braille. In the weekends, Lee Lee’s cousin and other friends would come over to her home to read the notes to her.

“We also had a resource teacher to help with transcription, and she helped transcribe our homework so that the teachers could mark them. It was a very tedious process to study so I learnt how to type instead by memorising the keyboard,” said Lee Lee.

“I don’t blame God for my blindness. The Bible verses I memorised were my go-to for strength,” she added.  

Lee Lee celebrating her birthday with church members from Faith Community Baptist Church (FCBC) in her later years.

Her resource teacher also conducted Bible study sessions with a small group of students after school in her house.

“My knowledge of the Bible initially came mostly from what my teachers told me because there is no way I can store a Braille Bible, which would be taller than me, in my house,” Lee Lee explained.

She had to get approval to sit for “A” Levels 

Despite tremendous odds, Lee Lee managed to complete her “O” Levels.   

In order to proceed further and take her “A” Levels, Lee Lee had to seek official approval from the Ministry of Education. It was extremely rare at the time for a person with disabilities to pursue higher education.

A director asked her why she wanted to study for the “A” Levels. He told her: “At the end of the year, I don’t want to have to go to your class to tell your classmates that you did not make it.”

Lee Lee told Salt&Light: “I don’t know where I got the guts from but I told him that he would never get a chance to do so because I would make sure I complete the ‘A’ Levels and go to university.”

Every day, she prayed and asked God to help her understand what the teacher was teaching and to be able to finish her assignments.

She worked hard and eventually emerged second in her cohort.

However, her grades were still not good enough to get her into her desired course at the National University of Singapore – Law.

Her principal advised her to wait for Open University, which offers flexible distance learning, to be offered in Singapore.

While she waited, Lee Lee took up a telephone operator job at multinational corporation Canon Marketing Services. Switchboard operators were in demand as Singapore was in its phase of industrialisation from the 1960s through the 1990s, and blind people had limited options then.

She was only paid S$3 an hour during her probationary month, but she had to memorise over 500 extension numbers due to her disability.

Determined to keep her job which provided her with a source of income, Lee Lee pressed on.

The rare blind person with a university degree

While working, she also studied part-time with Open University’s English language and Literature degree programme and began cycling competitively with a disability group.

“I had no money to study, but I prayed and a friend helped me to secure sponsorship from the Lee Foundation,” said Lee Lee, who eventually graduated with a Bachelor’s degree.    

Juggling multiple roles was not easy, and often she found herself working on her assignments throughout the night. To cope, she job-hopped and opted for jobs with flexible working hours, such as being a financial services consultant.

During this period, she moved from Glad Tidings Church where she attended Sunday School to Faith Community Baptist Church (FCBC) where she served in the choir for a decade.

Lee Lee sharing a meal with her FCBC cell group leader Goh Hong Yi and fellow cell group member Rachel Goh.

“It strengthened my faith so that later on even when I had two surgeries to remove fibroids in my uterus, I believed that God came through for me by preserving my womb,” Lee Lee told Salt&Light.

In 2013, Lee Lee became the fourth blind person in Singapore to acquire a guide dog. With the help of a friend, she selected a dog from a guide dog association in Japan.

Lee Lee with one of her guide dogs.

“By God’s grace, I flew home by myself with her in tow. God also helped me through the process of bonding and training with the dog as the dog could not understand my accent the first two weeks,” she said.

Lee Lee worshipping at the Jubilee Day of Prayer at the National Stadium in 2015 with her guide dog.

Over the years, Lee Lee dabbled in the arts – one of her main passions – but did not view it as a viable and sustainable career.

Instead, she worked in various full-time and gig jobs, such as being an assistant at the Aljunied Town Council, a workshop facilitator at Dialogue in the Dark and a transcriber.

There were times when she struggled to make ends meet and would see her savings dwindling.

“But I would pray and God provided. People and opportunities came knocking at my door,” she said.

Lee Lee with her FCBC cell group members at a beach outing.

Becoming a film producer during COVID

The livelihoods of the disabled community took a big hit when the pandemic broke out in 2020 and Circuit Breakers came into force.

Wanting to do something to commemorate the International Day of Persons with Disabilities that year, Lee Lee roped in a friend and applied for a digital presentation grant from the National Arts Council.

The grant was meant to support artists and arts groups to go digital during the COVID pandemic.

“I prayed and we received the full S$20,000 for our project,” said Lee Lee.

She gathered friends who had expertise in various fields – theatre, scriptwriting or videography – and produced a film called Perspectives, a docudrama about life as a Person with Disability (PWD) in Singapore.

It premiered in March 2021 at Gateway Theatre and was also livestreamed to hundreds of people online.

Lee Lee performed a monologue about her life in a digital theatre project, “This Is Who I Am”, featuring disabled artists from Singapore and the UK.

Lee Lee went on to act in and produce other short films, and her first film also led to her starting the DARE Festival, an annual performing arts festival that brings together mainstream artists and performers living with disabilities.

It gained enough momentum to attract Mediacorp as a production partner in 2025 and this year.

“Not being able to see meant that I had to practise repeatedly for basic things like walking to the positions I needed to be at, and having others give me feedback on my facial expressions,” Lee Lee explained.

Lee Lee was the producer of BRIDGES Dare Festival in 2023. It was hosted at *SCAPE Singapore, featuring a diverse mix of local and international artistes and musicians who are disabled or neurodivergent.

In recognition of her work championing inclusivity in the arts, Lee Lee received the UBS Achievement Award at the Goh Chok Tong Enable Awards in 2022.

At that time, she also attended a course conducted by CRU Singapore where she heard God speaking to her about embracing the unique mission of serving the disabled community by helping her peers upskill and linking them up with job opportunities.

It led to her co-founding a social enterprise called Collective Perspectives which helps PWDs get gig jobs and set up their own businesses. Lee Lee herself also runs a perfume business on the side.

Cell group leaders Hong Yi and his wife Kia Hui (left) and their friend visiting Lee Lee’s perfume booth at a shopping mall.

“Faith is about taking risks. I have learnt that when God calls, He will provide all the resources needed for it to happen,” she said.

Lee Lee desires to serve in the mission field overseas, but knows that God’s mission field for her is here in Singapore.

Meanwhile, she continues to meet the challenges she faces with faith and creative spunk.

Lately, she prayed for and was given a pair of Meta AI glasses. It has allowed her to access printed materials and match her clothing attire by herself, without needing the help of another person. 

“Should you face any difficulty, taste and see for yourself that God will never fail you.”

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