May 7, 2015
I've been selling and hustling for much of my young life. I've learned loads from each part of it, no matter how small or insignificant it may have been at the time. I sold cable car tickets. iPod cases. DVDs. Button badges. Most things, really. In hindsight, they've come together to define what I do today. It's amusing to think of it, really.
Bookmarks
In my teenage years, I spent most of my vacation months hanging out in the Central Business District. Each day, I would sell (under the 34 deg C sun and extreme Singapore humidity) various items, ostensibly for a charitable organization that worked with destitute elderly people in Singapore.
I was 15. It seemed like a great way to spend my days{, and I made them between $10 000 and $15 000 a day, selling bookmarks to disgruntled bankers and lawyers (I was very good at it). Years later, we found out that the founder bought fast cars with the cash, which is why I now have a bullet point in my own charitable organization (we send girls to school in India)-"we travel by bus, train and economy class, and the only people who get paid are the people who work on the field".
Lessons learned: it was the first time I learned to sell the hell out of anything, and if you stand in the heat and sweat long enough (12 hours), eventually people will buy stuff from you.
Button Badges
With my brother Adrian Tan's help, I designed and made button badges. We ordered a button badge machine from eBay. We had different themes (his was punk music), I specialized in ironic and weird businessy/political/tech buttons.
People in Kansas seemed to like my buttons. A lot.
Lessons learned: there is great value in making. I wish I did more of that, and I will be trying to do more of it. Making something with your hands was the best experience ever for a kid of 15, and eBay at the time was revolutionary. It opened up a world of global commerce to me.
Etsy before Etsy
Whenever we went on family vacations, I would convince my parents to loan me a small sum ($100?) so that I could buy a bunch of 'craft' items from Bali, Bangkok etc.
I sold them on eBay for ungodly amounts of money because I would write beautiful copy about "handmade" and "artisan". In 2000. I truly believed it at the time.
I still have some of those photo frames, notebooks and paintings in my parents' house. When I discovered at the tender age of 16 that all of this stuff was mass produced, I felt I could not see them anymore.
Lessons Learned: having a product that people want is basic, but having a product people want and can easily access, is essential. eBay and PayPal opened that window, but good old copywriting was the secret sauce, and it continues to be for me in most of my businesses.
DVDs
At 17, I came to terms with the fact that I am indisputably queer. I did not panic. I did not freak out too much. I was not bullied. But I also had no idea what it meant to be a queer adult: I did not know any such people, and I did not see them on TV or in movies. It was 2002. I ran a "DVD ring" which distributed queer video content (not pornography!) to other teens who wanted to see people like us on screen. There was no Tumblr. The idea that queer people existed on screen was something that saved my life.
The movies were horrible, and I don't believe that queer movies have improved since. It was something I needed to do at the time.
Lessons learned: I cannot do the things that I don't love. I don't love queer movies, and I don't love incremental tech that aims to solve first world or Silicon Valley problems.
iPod skins and cases
In the first year of college (2004), I imported iPod skins and cases. I was loads cheaper than anything available on the market-I seemed to know what people wanted, and built the connections to make that happen.
Emboldened by my marginal success as a 19 year old, I wrote to Waterfield Bags telling them I would like to be their sole Singapore distributor. I had no capital, of course. They wrote back with a very encouraging note and walked me through the process of what I should have if I wanted to do that. I of course, could not garner the resources. But it was the first time that someone had ever spoken to me like an adult. As a young Singaporean kid at the time, most of my life experiences (outside of the home, which was a very progressive environment for me in every way) had been about the things I could never ever do because I am a kid and I am a girl and not rich. 10 years on, just a year ago, I would get on a motorbike and travel a distance to a tiny office in a Jakarta suburb, to bug somebody to give me the rights to sell rather hard to get. He would say yes, and it would become the basis of all of the work I am doing today.
Lessons learned: Don't pre-judge yourself. You are not weak, inferior, poor, or incapable because someone of where you come from or what you are. Action, like the act of reaching out and saying I will do this, does.
Macs
In 2004, I started selling Macs at one of the Apple retailers, and did so well I was featured in Cult of Mac and Scoble's blog, which brought me a certain degree of international / tech 'fame'. There are many people I know, still talk to, or have met, especially in the US and in Europe, because of these early international tech links. In many ways, every aspect of my adult life has changed because of the years I put in selling computers and iPods. That I run around doing crazy businesses, Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford commencement speech. Learning to sell the shit out of anything, standing on my feet for 8 hours a day. And I mean anything.
Through my time walking the fertile grounds of Mac stores selling thousands of dollars of hardware a day, often to the extent of forgetting to eat, I developed a loyal clientele of high net worth individuals to whom I became their personal technician. That put me through 4 years of relentless backpacking throughout and after college. I encrypted emails for mining tycoons. I backed up data (there was no 'cloud' back then!), retrieved data from corrupted hard disks, ran around with bootable flash disks with installable OSes and data retrieval utilities in my wallet. I had a FireWire cable in my pocket most of the time. I took apart hardware, put it together, and somehow never had enough screwdrivers. They paid me well for it, and they taught me about charging for what clients should think I am worth, rather than what I thought I was worth, which at the time was, not very much. I got to see every single Southeast Asian market extensively, traveling on $200 for a month (how did I do that?), learning to stretch my dollar. Being a part of the Jobesian / Apple meteoric rise and return in that period changed everything about my professional and personal trajectories.
Lessons Learned: hustle hard, and do it well; people in general will not take advantage of you. "How much will it cost for the 7 hours you just spent taking stuff apart for me and saving my data?" "Maybe $100?" (Remember, I was 19…) They would laugh and say, here you go. And hand me $1000. It taught me that when I am in a position to reward a young hustler, either financially or in terms of opportunities given, I most definitely will to pay it forward.
When I was in the middle of all of that, people constantly asked: why? What good does it do? Why are you travelling around India or Indonesia for weeks and months and living like a hobo, instead of taking multiple prestigious bank internships?
Somehow, I had the weird feeling that it would all make sense. It has only just started to (and it's not like I did shabbily in the time before). I quite simply chose a different path, not because I had so much conviction and talent, but because to me those paths were the only ones open to me.
I'm so excited to see what the next 10 years will bring. I've spent the last 6 months living in Jakarta, building Wobe and getting to learn every single day about the wonderful place that is Indonesia. What I have now, which I did not have before in my formative entrepreneurial years making buttons and selling DVDs, is a team of hugely amazing, talented, and most importantly, good people, who I have the privilege to lead. Teams are everything.
I've come to see that these insane plans of mine did not come out from a vacuum. I did not just sit in an office one day and decide, "I should get into (insert generic type of) business". They came from sitting in a 36 hour bus rides talking to people in languages I don't understand (Turkish and Arabic, for example), building and making all kinds of crazy products with all types of crazy people (I once built a website for a West African airline, but they never flew because their leader was deposed to Burkina Faso).
They came from being told several times a day that I could not have something because I am a girl, a foreigner, or just plain unlucky. A train, a bus, a business opportunity, but having to figure it out anyway because sometimes… you just have to.
One morning in 2010 I got out of a train from Aleppo, and found myself in Gaziantep, a border town between Syria and Turkey. The problem, as I soon found, was that I had no euros or Turkish lira. I did not have any money except worthless Syrian money. There was no ATM at the train station. I was, in short, screwed. Experiences like that have been far more difficult than anything hard about the hard in "it's so hard to do business in Asia".
(I managed to barter a ride to the next city.. I think I traded a Turkish kid some notes and coins 'from the Far East' so that he would buy me a $1 bus ticket!)
Experiences shape you. My formative entrepreneurship taught me about payments, exchange rates, marketing, making, selling and most importantly, customer service.
The time I had to sleep on the dust outside Trichy airport (long story), when the auto-rickshaw I was driving around South India broke down on an unlit hill. The many times on the road in which I've had to deftly worm my way out of extreme sexual harassment. All of those experiences are starting to make sense to me now.
I probably spent less on all of that over the past decade than I did on getting a degree. As a child, the stuffy classrooms in Singapore that I sat in and the theoretical problems I worked on, may have formed the foundation for many other things. I learned about hard work, and I also learned about dogged persistence there. But if you told me that all of my childhood dreams, inside those classrooms, looking out into the world and dreaming of a life on the road, doing things in the world, outside of a four-walled environment, that all of it would come true and that reality would be even better, I would not have believed you.
Thank you to all the crazy ones who believed in me enough, some of you even enough to come along on the ride with me. I pack snacks and biscuits, and two pairs of pants.
January 18, 2014
When I think of the 1980s, I think of the news. In English and Mandarin, both brought to you by Raymond Weil.
When I think of the 1990s, I think of Michael Stipe's sonic-drenched wailing about his religion, or his lack thereof. And about the one sorry period of global history when everyone wondered too much about yellow lemon trees. Dookie.
If anything happened at all between those decades and now, they were these: the news was broadcast again two minutes afterwards, in a different language (the stories were the same). We flung playing cards at each other in school. We were told in many languages that New Zealand has nearly no people at all, and millions of cows, a fun fact all of us would remember for the rest of our lives. Between 10 and 11 many mornings, children stood by a very large (at the time) drain, brushing our teeth in unison. We rubbed our eyes to relaxing music to prevent the onset of myopia (too late for most of us). I carried a backpack from ages 7 to 13, which I know today to be nearly as large as the travel bag I would carry for the rest of my life, perhaps even as heavy. A battery of life-defining examinations - with as much relevance to my life as other acronyms like WITS and ACES - were survived, even surpassed, before I was deemed fit to be released into the world at large. In quick succession there were also the people I loved, the ones who left, the ones who migrated, or quite simply died. Raymond Weil faded into our collective memories like the playgrounds I never went to until they covered all the sand with foam so our children would no longer bleed when they fell. Perhaps they needed the sand to fill the new lands beyond our shorelines.
Sometimes, I moved one chess piece while my China-born grandfather brewed a pot of tea and filled out his little notebook with calligraphic scrawls I could not read.
We pretended, all the time, that I was winning.
I'd been acutely aware there were two worlds, even within this tiny country - I was born into one, and pulled into the second, kicking and screaming. Growing up I spoke no Mandarin, some English, but I spoke the sort of Teochew which made hawkers giggle as they scooped extra fishballs and minced pork into my noodles. "Girl ah," they loved to say, beaming at me. "You speak this language like an old woman from Swatow." My other grandmother brought me to the wet market and showed off my encyclopaedic knowledge of Hokkien classics, the kinds which sound like war cries and power ballads at the same time. "Sing", she said. "Sing the song about what you'd do if you had a million dollars."
I would sing. There would be more fishballs, more minced pork, more noodles for the little girl who could speak and sing the languages of her forefathers, but not say a word in Mandarin. I now speak Mandarin but I have forgotten the songs of my childhood.
The world I was pulled into was the one I entered against my free will when I turned 12. I had done well enough, they said, so I should go to the type of school which would improve my station in the world. My new classmates lived in large houses and apartments five minutes from campus, not 45 minutes away in a HDB flat as I did. They were chauffeured to school in Bentleys, Audis, and Jaguars; I took two buses to get there. Their mothers and grandmothers and even their father's grandmothers had come to this school, which was proud of its secular, elite heritage spanning more than a hundred years. It took pleasure in taking in young, scruffy girls like me, and slowly it turned us all into the same people: young women with poise, education, and class. "I've never been to a hawker centre in my life," my new classmate confessed. "I don't think I ever will."
In one English literature class, and we were the school known for producing writers and lawyers, there had been a discussion on the theme of protagonists who'd lost it all. "I imagine if my family lost everything we had, we might have to live in a HDB flat," a classmate said in horror. "In Clementi. Or Toa Payoh. Or one of those places." I lived in Clementi; I was pretty certain she had never been to any of those places.
For the most part, the school succeeded in turning me into the archetype. My Mandarin shaky, my English accented, my grades stellar, my sights turned not to Raffles Place and the local universities, but to Wall Street and Ivy League. I would be one of them. It was written.
What was also written: the writing on the wall. The boy in the boy's school next door who'd gotten a public caning for writing my name on his school walls. I was to be the heterosexual young lady with poise and education and a District 10 lifestyle ahead of her, but that was never my world. I shuffled in my feet when the boy I dated brought me home, and home to him was a grand dining room with a painter mother, several Lamborghinis, and uniformed servants - all ten of them. I balked when I realized I did not have, nor want, a walk-in wardrobe filled with the spoils of shopping trips to Paris and New York. Or at least Hong Kong. Straddling two worlds: one foot in the Clementi hawker centre, delighted by my $0.60 chwee kueh, the other learning to like $6 lattes and $60 set lunches. I must be a communist, they said, because they'd found a copy of the Communist Manifesto in my bag. My father was summoned. He said he was glad I was considering the vast spectrum of political opinions. I am not a communist.
The social mobility that afforded me, with all its trappings of 'station' and 'opportunity', propelled me to anywhere I wanted to be. London. New York. San Francisco. Sydney. Dubai. Delhi. Bangalore. Beirut. Helsinki. It was all there for the taking. I flirted with other cities, angered by my city-country's small-ness. Beware small states, the title of a book reads. I was afraid my city's smallness would close in on me like a beast of the sea, its tentacles firm around my neck. I was afraid I would never learn to breathe, much less fly.
I sought flight: I flew, and still fly, 250 000 kilometres a year. I sought breakup sex with Bombay and Bangalore: my lover, my city, would never be as free and uninhibited as you are, I told my Indian dalliance. I sought space: the vast expanse of the Empty Quarter, the ancient civilizations, the churches which stand on precisely where Cain slew Abel. Then when I was done I sought adventure. I raced tuk-tuks, I washed my hair in the river Skrang upstream from where the entrails of dead boars lay before they were to be cooked. I boarded the modern-day successor to Agatha Christie's Orient Express, after drinking bad Syrian beer at the Baron Hotel where she and Lawrence of Arabia had once lived. I donned burqahs and boarded the public bus to Aden, drinking tea with pirates real and imaginary, seeking refuge in hotels I associated with the James Bond movies I had come to love as a little girl in Clementi. I went to London and Kuala Lumpur in the pursuit of love. I flew too much in those years.
Then I came home.
I came home, road-weary, wanting to sleep in the bed I'd slept in as a child. The Sundays with 'mee lay', soggy yellow noodles simmered in pork and anchovy soup, boiled together for hours, helped. I came home, exhausted, wanting nothing more than to hold my grandmother's hand for as long as I can, which is, not very much longer. I lost my grandfather to sudden disease when I was gone on one of my adventures, and I don't know what I would do if that happened again. I came home to walk the streets of Jalan Sultan to talk to garbage-scavenging, tissue-selling old women who will never recall my name, but whose names and faces have been etched into my mind: Madam Chua. There are many Madam Chuas in this city. Madam Chua who walks with a limp, Madam Chua whose disabled children cannot work, Madam Chua whose family lives in two-room government rental flat, who makes a few dollars a day selling tissue to yuppies like me who most of the time turn our faces away and say, sorry auntie I already got tissue no need already thankyew. I can only speak to Madam Chua because my grandmothers made me sing Hokkien songs on demand. I can only speak to Madam Tan who swoops in on our beer cans because my grandmothers taught me to talk like the girl fresh off the boat from Swatow. That world is at once my world, and it is not. I came home to learn more about the Singapore I forgot.
At the Queen Street bus station at 6am one morning, I stood on the grass patch waiting for a bus to Johor. I imagined my grandparents making that same journey: the Johore Express, or whatever they called it back then. The decades-old ticketing office certainly still used tickets which looked just like they would have, when ah gong and ah ma boarded the bus in the opposite direction, to make a new life in Singapore after they got married. After they were match-made on a hill whose name they cannot remember. By way of Swatow, by way of Johor, here I am now, boarding the $2 bus to my grandmother's city, the one she doesn't even know anymore because she has dementia.
We build so quickly in this city, such that if I didn't have personal geography here I would have never known what stood here before: on this very spot between Queen Street and Victoria Street, the tiny man that was my ah gong carried gunny sacks many times his body weight, every single day, gambling it all away, making the little boy who would become my father the most determined person I'd ever met, hell-bent on giving his children a life better than this.
When I experience other cities even as an insider, even as someone who has lived somewhere else for a long time, there is curiosity, and there is joy, in exploring their streets, in learning their names anew. When I walk these streets I know them by their old names. The ones on which there had been the stunted walk of my gunny sack carrying grandfather, once attacked on the head by a cleaver on these streets, lined with the washer-boards his wife had used to wash the laundry of the rich women who did not have to wash their own. The old names and the new overlap: I was born in the 'bull pen', not in the gleaming women's hospital down the road. The policemen of my memories still wore shorts, and had their fearsome batons for the troublesome Chinese gangsters. The nurses were known as the white shirts, and the Hotel New World wasn't just something I saw on TV, but experienced through my mother, a white shirt who happened to be there looking for something to eat after a shift, but spent hours attending to people who had been picked out of the rubble just like in the movies.
Then there are the landmarks, some of which no longer exist: on that grass patch and its adjoining streets, near the wholesale market which no longer exists, my grandfather carried spices and dried goods for decades. Five decades later, memories of bittersweet happiness would be formed just around the corner: of being shy and 17, stumbling out of a movie theatre, holding tightly the hands of the first woman I'd ever come to love. They were the neighbourhoods we came to know, and the places we'd called home.
The other cities will always be there. The bright lights of our imagined better places will always be on. I can build a life anywhere I want, whenever I want. For now, perhaps it is nostalgia, perhaps it is misplaced political optimism, but I choose to build my life in my late twenties, right here where it all began. Even if I can never call my wife my wife, even if I have to adopt my own children before the state will let me call myself her mother, it is the home which was set into motion for me: sixty five years and a bit ago.
Even though people like us live a life on the move, we still need a place to call our own. I choose to walk these streets, to call them by their old names, and to remember the reason I love this home is because I have one foot in this Singapore, and the other in the one that will only get better.