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Her comeback to him: 'What can a man do that I can't?'
Indeed, this was the woman who picked physiotherapy for a career only because she could graduate sooner and support her nine siblings.
This was also the woman who - when she decided to become a lawyer later - blazed through the three-year degree programme in half the time and became one of the first women lawyers here in 1954.
After a lifetime of bucking conventions, Madam Tan Hong Siang, better known as Mrs Cyril Wong, died of complications from pneumonia last week. The 94-year-old was buried last Saturday.
Born in 1914 as the second of 11 children, she attended Singapore Chinese Girls' School, and then the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, where she topped the school certificate examinations. She was also an avid tennis player and swimmer, at a time when girls were expected to cook and sew demurely.
The young Miss Tan had responsibility thrust upon her early. When her father's business crashed in the Great Depression and her eldest brother was away in China, she become the family's breadwinner.
Then still a teenager, she took on a few jobs, ranging from giving tuition to performing as a magician's assistant.
But she knew she had to - and could - do better. In 1933, she began studies in physiotherapy, which was when she met Dr Wong Kin Yip, her future husband, in anatomy class.
Her son Allan Wong, 65, said: 'She liked to say they met over a dead body.'
Her sharp mind and aptitude for medicine won her a scholarship to study the subject, but she turned it down because it would be six years before she could start supporting her siblings. She graduated as a physiotherapist in two.
Dr Wong proposed marriage against his father's wishes. The older Wong's reasons were that she was Teochew, and the Wongs were Cantonese, and that she danced and played sports, which was deemed unbecoming. There was also the matter of her having that large family who depended on her. He threatened to disown his son if the wedding went ahead, but the couple tied the knot anyway.
It was only after the birth of the couple's two sons that ties with the elder Mr Wong thawed.
Their daughter-in-law, Mrs Wong Mei Chan, 61, said her parents-in-law were intellectual equals and very much in love: 'He treated her like a grand duchess.'
He drove her anywhere she pleased, always held open her umbrella for her and served her breakfast in bed.
When Dr Wong - the first local head of the Singapore General Hospital's Eye Clinic before he opened his own practice - went to England after the war to pursue the Queen's Fellowship after medical school, she tagged along. But she was not the sort to be the idle wife of a doctor, so she enrolled in Lincoln's Inn, qualified as a lawyer in short order and was called to the Bar in 1954.
Over the next 40 years, Mrs Cyril Wong managed loans to civil servants with the then-Malayan Borneo Building Society, and then moved on to conveyancing law at Donaldson & Burkinshaw till 1975, after which she was a property law consultant at Aileen Chong & Co till 1994.
Mr Lee Eng Leun, 76, a retired former colleague, said Mrs Wong was always well turned-out, with jewellery and different wigs, so 'it was like seeing a different girl every day'.
Her granddaughter Charmaine Wong, 37, said her Ah Mah made weekly trips to the bank vault to get fresh lots of jewellery to wear; she was often seen in the birthstone for the prevailing month. Even her hat, shoes and umbrella matched.
She especially loved winter holidays and would time her visits to her sisters, who are living overseas, just so she could wear her mink coat.
Professor Arthur Lim, 74, whose father was a close friend of Mrs Wong's, called her 'a good lawyer who talked too much'.
But she used her affinity for languages to great effect in stories she made up for her grandchildren.
Ms Wong affectionately remembers her Ah Mah as 'a great storyteller'.
