SingFirst: Following your heart is not enough!

By David Tan

In line with the new Singaporeans First (SingFirst) logo of a head and a heart within, I thought it would be appropriate and timely to pen my thoughts on why following one’s heart is simply not enough. You need your heart and head to make rational and acceptable decisions.

I am a businessman and I meet with all sorts of people all the time. I had been disappointed several times when I allowed the heart to lead and had also offended many when my head took possession of the decisions made. As one of those few crazy quadruple major graduates during my university days, psychology being one of them, I dug up my old notes to see if I could find something useful for this topic. “Is there a balance between the heart and the head? Can I find something about the need for the heart to follow and the head to ‘decide’?

When Jee Say, Yong Guan and a few other true blue Singaporeans gathered to meet, lamenting on the numerous and repeated failings of the current Lee Hsien Loong led government and reiterating on the urgent need for Singaporeans who love the country to come forward and resurrect the nation, I immediately gave a positive YES!

That was the start of my heart following my head.

The Logo

Amazingly, the chosen logo of Singaporeans First (SingFirst) of an inner heart surrounded by the head (mind) reaffirmsmy personal view that whoever wants to lead the nation well, must believe and put in place, the heart and the head! When the logo was first released, it was hotly debated, regularly criticized and made laughable by some pro-PAP IBs who associated it with a brand of ice cream that they openly love! I do not blame them. They had been cooked long enough in the PAP’s hotpot and have been numbed. Nevertheless, the original 10 founders of Singaporeans First stood firm, believing that over time, Singaporeans will embrace what our logo stands for – Party of Choice – Fair Society, Strong Families and Esteemed People!

In expressing my views on this topic, I thought it would be prudent and relevant to go back to my early childhood that has influenced my strong belief that we need to be loved, cared and prioritized because we are Singaporeans! We must use our heart and our head to make Singapore not just a livable place but a constantly progressive nation for the betterment of all current and future generations to come. Political leaders must have that sense of political calling to serve and not to entrench and enrich themselves for selfish means!

Learning the meaning of helping the poor from my parents

My late father was a small time business man, dealing with coffee and pepper. He travelled regularly within Singapore and Malaysia. In one of his trips, he discovered PulauMinyak, an attap huts squatter colony, a place where many poor and unemployed Singaporean ‘Teochew’ people lived. PulauMinyak was then located off Boon Keng and Bendemeer Road but now no longer appears on our map.

My father was not rich although he came from a family in the shipping business. He was a man of great integrity and creative resources. He had a huge appetite for the poor and needy. I noticed on numerous occasions, he would leave home late at night to meet his ‘tong kang’ (small lighter boats) workers from India whenever they needed extra money to send home to their families. The joy on the faces of those Indian workers he had helped remain in my mind  till today!

My father knew that one way to help the poor was to create jobs and to be a fair employer. He believed in ‘teaching others how to fish’ and not just giving them fishes. He was instrumental in teaching me the ropes of business and how to do it in a fair and ethical way. In his work, he had faced many temptations to be bribed. He was also a qualified surveyor and tasked to sign off ‘Quality Survey Reports’ for coffee and pepper. He was an honest man and never once did he fall or succumb to temptations. He still makes me so proud for what he believed in and stood for. His incorruptible stand rubbishes off all the talk that PAP is trumpeting all the time.  Who says that a man can be corrupted if he is not well paid? That is the PAP falsehood and it must be demolished as soon as possible! My father was not rich nor well paid for what he was doing. Yet he did his job well and no amount of temptation caused him to fall. He has been influential in my softer leaning for the poor and needy. To my father, wealth is a means to help others and not to enrich oneself. One must be transparent, trustworthy, humble and be caring to those who are less fortunate.

PulauMinyak – a squatter colony

I remember, one day, hearing a conversation between my father and my mother. They were talking about a squatter village in PulauMinyak. My father shared his pain and concern for those poor people there. Large families were cramped into small attap huts. Most of them relied on fishing and laboring as livelihood and the women folks there were jobless and unemployable due to their economic and academic background. My father suggested buying a piece of land and starting a small coffee business there where the women folks could earn some money by sorting out the coffee seeds.  My mother, being a staunched Methodist and a kind hearted lady, agreed and supported his idea without any hesitation.

Creating employment in PulauMinyak

My father eventually bought a piece of land in PulauMinyak, built a modest attap house and developed the open area in front of the house for the coffee business. His ‘heart and head’ decision came with a huge price and sacrifice. The family had to be uprooted from a comfortable home in Kim Seng Road (opposite the current Great World City) and resettled in a new environment where very few Hokkiens lived. I had to give up my place at ACS (Anglo Chinese School) and relocate to the nearby McNair Primary School. Our family was large, six boys and six girls – a full dozen moving house was not an easy task in those days.

I can still recall that day when we shifted our home from Kim Seng Road to PulauMinyak. I waved goodbye to my friends in Kim Seng Road and as a very young boy then, sitting on a lorry was a great thrill and adventure. PulauMinyak, being a squatter colony of poor people of mostly Teochews, was a strange and odd place for a Hokkien boy. I had no friends there and I could not converse well in Teochew. However, that odd situation was transient as the many Teochew boys were so friendly. They made me feel so much at home and very soon, the Teochew dialect was a part of me. I also joined them in swimming in the murky dirty waters of Kallang River and did all the things the boys did – fishing, catching crabs and spiders, staying late at night to witness how pigs were slaughtered by the villagers and kite fighting! It was a real eye opener and a new adventure for me – something I had never done when staying in Kim Seng Road.

My mother employed two young girls from the village to look after my two younger brothers and I. I remember always running away from them during meal and bathing times. We made life so difficult for them.  That was my first taste of being a ‘boss’ hahahahaha.

Other than my father and another businessman who operated a hardware business, no one owned a car in the village and they were the only ones who offered employment to the villagers. That may explain why our family was so well respected and highly regarded by the villagers then. My mom was the so-called boss. They called her “chai hoo chim” (equivalent of an official’s wife) and many considered us as well off and educated. My three elder brothers were then students and boarders at Catholic High School, located at Queen Street and every weekend when they returned home, it was always a very happy family gathering. By sheer coincidence, my eldest brother, after his graduation from the then Nantah University, returned back to Catholic High as a teacher and both Hsien Loong and Hsien Yang were his students.

The women living in PulauMinyak were not well educated and mostly unemployed or even unemployable. My father’s small coffee business offered them an opportunity to work and anyone who came for a job was offered one, without any interviews needed. To cater for a larger than expected job seekers, my father expanded the piece of land in front of our attap house to provide more space for the daily increasing number of women seeking work. Every morning, the women and their young children would come to our house to work.  Their job was to separate and sort the coffee seeds and at the end of the day, weigh the good seeds and be paid based on the weight of the sorted seeds.