EP 1: My Story

LIVE TO SPARK WITH ERICA TEO EE TIEN

Hello and welcome to this episode. Before we begin, I’ll like to share a little about myself so you can get to know me a little better. Let’s start from my humble beginnings: I was the eldest born in a low income family where both my parents are not highly educated. My mum was born in China but was brought to Singapore when she was a toddler. She came from a Chinese-educated family who spoke predominately Teochew and Mandarin. My mum is intelligent but received the short end of the stick in the 70s. That was when education system in Singapore switched frequently between Chinese as mainstream language in classes one year to English as the mainstream language in another year. In the years when Chinese was the mainstream, she would score acceptably well but would barely pass or even fail in the years when English became the key language for class delivery. Losing my grandpa during her Secondary school days impacted her chances of furthering education after Secondary school and she had to do what most young people did in those early days, which was to find work and income to help support the family. My dad did not have any interest towards studying, preferring to roam around in his kampung in Malaysia for games and fun with his siblings and neighbours. As he kept failing his exams in Secondary school and was retained for so many years that he was nicknamed “Ah-Lao”, which means an old guy, because he was so many years more senior than his classmates until eventually he dropped out from school. One day he decided to leave home with his uncle and came to Singapore where he found work as a driver and it was in Singapore that he met my mum.

Childhood was hard as far as I could remember because we never have enough money at home. Before I started school, we lived in a rented flat that was a little one and a half-room unit in what is now a bustling night entertainment and F&B district in Clarke Quay. As far as my hazy memory can recall from my childhood days, the tiny rental flats in those days for the poor and low income families was a narrow and dimly lit corridor with units on both sides of the corridor and an opening at the end of the corridor where you see some light at the end of the tunnel.

My mum worked as a seamstress from home. Garments would be sent to our home while she hunched over her sewing machine, right foot on the peddle tapping non-stop to make ends meet. She would always grumble how the pants had 2 pockets with details like concealed zipper, etc and needed more workmanship but she was only paid $1.50 or $2 per piece to sew. She will use a notebook to record the design and how many pieces she sewn to check back how much she was paid. Sometimes her boss takes advantage and underpays her. She had to point it out and her boss will pay her the short changed amount the next round she gets paid, but it’s a vicious cycle. On occasions her heated conversation with her boss would end with her slamming down the telephone because of her fierce belief that she should be paid fairly for her amount of work done.

Her eyesight was very poor which was reduced to almost blind after suffering from cataract at young age during primary school. Surgery technology was very limited in the 70s, and I suspect it didn’t do a very good job of cleaning up her cataract problem. It was only recently when I took time off to accompany my mum for her eye check then I realised her eyesight is so bad because when they removed the cataract when she was young, the surgeon had to remove the original lenses in her eyes. What baffled me was there was no replacement of her lenses by inserting artificially made ones into her eyes and the reason suggested by her recent eye specialist now was that back in those early 70s days, artificially made lenses were not made to compensate for such a high degree. The implication meant she had to wear spectacles with lenses that were super thick like those at the bottom of drinking glasses. The distortion created is so much that when you look into her face, her eyes appear very distorted. She felt inferior and always said she was called a freak while growing up.

Myopia is so common nowadays nobody gives it a second thought, and we think of spectacles now like any other accessories, such as earrings, scarves but back in the early 70s people rarely wear glasses. She thought of herself as an alien. With such poor eyesight, she hated black or dark coloured clothes sent to her for sewing because she had a harder time focusing, especially during gloomy rainy days when natural daylight was reduced.

Growing up, we as children were roped in to help out with her work, doing small tasks like flipping corners of sewn clothes and we had to ensure the corner must be pointed and square. I also helped with folding and packing the clothes into big red plastic bags when she was done with the sewing and ready to be sent back to the factory for final packaging before being sold at retail stores. Because my parents barely made enough money to feed all of us, and with my mum’s skills in sewing, it was natural that our clothes were hand sewn clothes from my mum’s design. She would pick up her pen and just drew in her notebook and then made them for us. But I hated her design because to my younger self, it was boring, or plain ugly or simply not dressy and fabulous enough. I always prefered those that were sold outside, complete with frills, ribbons and beautiful fabrics which were so much nicer but my mum simply cannot afford those. I remember shopping at non-airconditioned People’s Park in the 80s, wandering from shop to shop. My mum would pick the cheaper cloths in reams and asked for a few yard of this fabric and that, while bargaining with the shop owner for bit of discount. I didn’t like the cheaper cloths because they are quite coarse, looked cheap and felt rough on my skin. But actually they are quite durable. I saw how she toiled over the sewing machine and when she worked, she had money. When she fell sick she also had to work. She just cannot afford to stop working because there were too many mouths at home to feed. I learned from my mum that one needs to work hard to make money and one should rightfully fight for the fair amount of money to be paid to you if work is completed properly. I saw from my mum’s example that if you don’t stand up for yourself and fight for what is rightfully due to you, bosses will almost certainly take advantage.

Life was so hard during my childhood that it spurred me to study hard when I was young. My mum always drilled into our minds the concept of success is doing well in our studies, getting into the university and then finding a stable nine-to-five job that could give us a comfortable income. My mum has always hoped my younger sister and I could find a good man with a stable income to marry so we will have better lives in future as compared to herself. This mindset of education is the key out of poverty was so deeply ingrained in me that even after I graduated, I continued to go for post-graduate studies and while working, I continued my learning journey, seeking out recognised courses from respectable institutes that could help improve my knowledge in my work. I didn’t stop learning and even today as COVID-19 pandemic happened, it is even more important that I continued to learn and adapt to the new way of working. I picked up soft skills like leadership and becoming a trainer while also acquiring know-hows to handle new softwares like Teams and Zoom to facilitate working from home. I learned that if one does not pick up the knowledge and skills to advance with the times, we will inevitably be left behind and helpless, which I have seen in many elderly people including my own parents who struggled with using a smartphone and getting banking done onli...