Renee Chong left the classroom with one question: Who speaks for the students we miss?

Nobody worried about the high achievers. That was what troubled Renee Chong, a former teacher and now chief operating officer of MangaChat.

One student, among the brightest in his cohort, ended up leaving the system because of mental health challenges. Another, under immense pressure from his father to excel, survived on a loaf of bread a week as punishment.

His classmates later revealed he had been cutting his arm during lessons, hiding it under the desk. Students like these were falling apart because the system, however carefully designed, was not built to catch that.

It is this realisation, made slowly over 17 years inside Singapore’s education system as a teacher, curriculum leader and policy officer, that eventually led Chong to do the one thing few people this long into a respected career in public service would consider: walk away.

The gaps no policy could close

“I left without a safety net,” she says. “No startup experience, no investors, no clear roadmap.”

She describes the decision partly in spiritual terms. As a Christian, she had spent long hours in prayer before stepping out. But the professional logic was there, too. Teachers carrying full classrooms and tight syllabuses simply do not have the space to notice every cry for help. No policy document, however well-crafted, could close that gap from the inside.

She found her answer at a small gathering of educators in Taiwan. Joe Huang, a professor from National Taiwan University, had built MangaChat as a storytelling platform: a space where young people could express their emotions through manga narratives and guided reflection. 

“Something clicked immediately,” she recalls. It reflected what she had seen over a decade in classrooms, that students rarely opened up through formal channels. They opened up through stories, through invented characters who felt excluded, overwhelmed, or misunderstood. MangaChat was built around that.

Play

Huang brought the technical depth and today leads the company as chief executive officer. Together, they began building and testing the platform through credible ecosystems. They were accepted into the Technology for Sustainable Social Impact Accelerator, which focuses on startups addressing societal challenges, and then into the NUS Medicine Digital Health Accelerator, where clinical professionals helped strengthen the platform’s mental health framework.

More recently, they were selected for AI Accelerate, a joint initiative run by Microsoft, Enterprise Singapore, and NUS Enterprise.

“These programmes gave us something very important,” Chong says. “Rigorous feedback from educators, clinicians and technologists.” The DBS Foundation Grant followed. It was recognition, Chong says, that the problem they are trying to address is real and important, and that the will to solve it reaches beyond the education sector.

A different kind of feedback

But the sharpest feedback didn’t come from any programme. It came from home.

Her younger daughter developed social anxiety and low self-esteem during her formative years. In the final stretch of the International Baccalaureate programme, she stopped going to school after discovering that close friends she had trusted for years had turned against her.

Chong watched herself, a woman who had spent two decades thinking about children’s wellbeing, do exactly the wrong thing. When her daughter, now 18, shared something painful, she reached for solutions. “Like many Asian parents, my instinct was to fix problems quickly,” she says. “But what she needed first was not a solution. She needed me to sit with her emotions.”

So, she began sharing her own moments of exclusion and hurt, vulnerabilities she had not previously thought to surface. The honesty transformed their relationship. And it changed MangaChat. Many of the ideas the platform now explores grew from conversations at home.

It would be easy to file MangaChat under a familiar category: an educational app, a mental health tool or a slice of the growing digital wellbeing market. Chong resists all of it. “The problem we are trying to solve is emotional isolation.” In many Asian families, emotions are not a subject that children are taught to discuss.

MangaChat is designed as a preventive tool, not an intervention after a crisis. By the time a young person reaches the point of despair, they are already responding to failure. That argument does not always find a receptive audience. Many parents worry that focusing on emotional well-being will distract children from academic success. 

But Chong has seen the opposite play out. “Some of the most talented students I encountered had to step away from their studies because their mental health could no longer sustain the pressure,” she says. “Resilience and emotional awareness are not soft skills. They are the foundation that allows young people to perform at their best.”

When she runs workshops for teachers and asks them to list emotional vocabulary, many struggle to name more than 10 emotions. “It’s not a question of resources or intent,” she says. “It’s a question of capacity and cultural habits.” Tools like MangaChat don’t replace the teacher. They do the work that the teacher cannot find time for.

That is not a critique of the system, she is careful to say. It is, if anything, a continuation of what the system is already trying to do. What she wants for Southeast Asia is straightforward: children who grow up understanding that emotions are signals, not weaknesses; parents who feel equipped to have difficult conversations; and schools with tools that support emotional development in step with academic learning.

She is well-placed to say so. She had, after all, spent years inside a system that couldn’t quite reach the children who needed it most. “If we want to help children navigate the emotional challenges of this generation,” she says, “we have to try something different.”

Photography: Angela Guo
Art direction: Fazlie Hashim
Grooming: Benedict Choo