Hannah Yeoh grew up renting.

Not in one place, but several. Moving from section to section across Subang Jaya as her father, a printer, found what the family could afford. SS14, SS18 and finally SS19. Primary school in one neighbourhood, secondary school in another. No fixed address, no asset to speak of, just a father who worked for people and a mother who kept the home together. And yet Hannah remembers her childhood not with loss, but with something close to gratitude. The freedom of walking to school along monsoon drains. Catching tiger fish in the streams of what would become USJ. Growing up in a Subang Jaya so easy between its communities that the question of whether a friend was Malay, Chinese or Indian, she says, simply never arose.

“I am a Subang girl through and through,” she told me. And sitting with her in her ministerial office at Dewan Bandaraya on a bright April afternoon, that is exactly what she feels like. Not a minister performing accessibility, but someone who genuinely remembers what it is to be ordinary, to move around on your own, to know a place by its back lanes and monsoon drains rather than its landmarks.

She is, of course, anything but ordinary now. Hannah Yeoh is Malaysia’s Federal Territories Minister, the custodian of Kuala Lumpur, overseeing a city budget of three billion ringgit. But the story of how she got here, and what she has carried with her, begins not in any parliament or courtroom, but in a small house in Subang Jaya, when she was seven years old.

Her father made them kneel.

She and her sister, born the same year, raised like twins, in the same school and the same class, had fallen into a careless habit. A classmate named Helen always had more pocket money than she could spend, and had taken to giving her coins away. The coins bought curry puffs. It felt like generosity received, not something taken. Until Helen’s mother came to school, and the trail led back to the two sisters, and the teacher who lived next door went home and told their parents.

That evening, her father hit her palm once with a ruler. It was the only time in her life he ever raised a hand to her. Then he said: “I’m poor, but we don’t steal. You do not take money that does not belong to you.”

She has never forgotten it. She does not expect to.

“I will not steal money that does not belong to me,” she said. And the line runs in a straight thread from that evening in Subang Jaya, through decades of public life, all the way to the three billion ringgit budget she now holds. Conviction and integrity, she believes, are not developed overnight. They are built in moments like that one, in the quiet severity of a parent who has very little and refuses, precisely because of that, to let it become an excuse.

This is what her father gave her. Not wealth. Not connections. A ruler across a palm, and words that became a life.

There was another shaping, quieter but just as deep. When Hannah was ten, she lost a favourite uncle, her mother’s younger brother, one month before his wedding. He was young, an electrician at the Proton factory, driven enough to buy himself a Sony Walkman to learn English on his own time. He fell at work, just ten feet, and did not survive. His wedding portrait became his funeral portrait. Watching her grandparents grieve without answers sent her searching. At eighteen, she became a Christian, and her faith has been with her since. It is not something she keeps private or separate from her public life. She believes her entry into politics was not ambition but a high calling, lived out through a daily display of conscience, integrity and good works.

She describes herself, with a certain wryness, as an accidental politician.

When she stood for Subang Jaya in 2008, she did not expect to win. She was twenty-nine, a lawyer, an unknown name. The decision to stand had come from a conversation with a friend who had grown tired of her complaints. “Why don’t you make a difference?” the friend said. She met Tony Pua. It was decided. She stood.

Before all of that, she had imagined a different life entirely. She had studied law in Australia, and when she graduated, she had tried to stay. Applied for permanent residency. The application was rejected, and she came home. Not quite by choice, not quite by accident. Looking back, she reads it as something more deliberate than either. “What I miss most about joining politics,” she admitted, with the candour that tends to surface when she is not speaking for the record, “is that I gave up my youth. I often imagine what I would have done or explored in my 30s had I not been in politics.”

But she stayed. She has always stayed. And what holds her here, she says without hesitation, is love for this country. Complicated, frustrating, full of possibility, warmth, humour, and resilience. “What holds me here is the belief that this country is worth the effort. And perhaps more importantly, that people here deserve leaders who stay, who listen, and who keep working even when the conversation becomes difficult.”

Malaysia held on to Hannah Yeoh before she ever chose to hold on to it. The rejected PR application, the friend’s challenge, the unexpected election result. She did not plan any of it. And yet here she is.

She suggested Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad for our portrait session, and the reasons, when she explained them, turned out to be layered in ways I had not anticipated.

She was called to the bar here, as a young lawyer. She later served as Speaker of the Selangor State Assembly, and this building, she reminded me, once housed that very assembly. When she became Federal Territories Minister, the building was at the tail end of a long refurbishment. The King was present for the official launch. The Sultan of Selangor also visited subsequently. She stood in a place that had held multiple chapters of her life simultaneously, a building whose history had somehow kept pace with her own.

“It is more than a building,” she wrote, when I asked her about it. “It carries memory, identity, and a sense of continuity in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.”

What moved her most about the refurbishment was not what had been added, but what had been preserved. They did not replace the bricks. They cleaned them. A building that had looked worn and forgotten, given careful attention and a second chance, had come back to something beautiful. She did not need to spell out the parallel. Same like life, she said simply.

“Being its custodian means making sure the public can feel that this city belongs to them. A historic building should not be frozen away from people. It should remain alive, relevant, and open to the public who gave meaning to it in the first place.”

Standing on the balcony of Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad, looking out over Dataran Merdeka in the evening light, it is easy to understand why she chose it. It is a place that holds things. Memory, history, the long argument about what this city is and who it belongs to. And Hannah Yeoh, a Subang Jaya girl who grew up renting, is now the person responsible for the answer.

Public life, she has learned, tests you in ways you do not expect.

Not just the difficulty of it, the long hours, the scrutiny, the weight of decisions, but something quieter and more corrosive. It can tempt you, she says, to become louder than necessary. Harder than you should be. To let the noise of public opinion slowly reshape who you are until you no longer quite recognise yourself.

“I have learned that it is important to stay grounded, to keep your values consistent, and not to let the noise define who you are.” She has held on to three things through all of it: integrity, humility, and a clear sense of purpose. The same things, more or less, that a printer from Subang Jaya once tried to press into his daughter’s palm.

For the generation growing up in Malaysia now, she hopes for courage, kindness, and a sense of belonging. She hopes they do not become cynical too quickly. And she hopes they understand something she has had to learn the long way: that the future of this country “will not be shaped by perfection. It will be shaped by people who still care enough to build, to improve, and to keep going even when it is not easy.”

A father on one income. A ruler. A lesson that became a life.

Hannah Yeoh has been holding on to it ever since.

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Hannah Yeoh is the Federal Territories Minister of Malaysia.

This portrait is part of Born in Malaysia – How We Hold On, a photography and storytelling project by Kenny Loh.