Francis Tan Born: 1963
Was born on National Day. Has fond memories of growing up in Kampong Amber in eastern Singapore. I was born on National Day. Actually, it wasn’t National Day yet at the time; it was just the 9th of August. But when I was in school, my birthday would always be a holiday, so I would invite my friends to come over for a party. Sometimes my friends would say, “My mother says that because it is the seventh month, night time cannot go out.” So they could not come to my party. But us kids did not really believe in these things. At the time, my father drove private cars known as ba wong cheh (Cantonese for 霸王车). I don’t think it was really legal, but he drove some teachers who lived near us to school. Most of them taught at ACS (Anglo Chinese School) and that’s how I ended up there. Most of my classmates were the sons of rich men and it was quite common to hear them say, “My family owns this or that famous establishment”. I was the only one who was a driver’s son. But it did not bother me. We were all kids anyway, and kids don’t care whether someone is more atas (high-class) or
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not. We played together, grew up together, got into trouble together, looked at girls together. Today, they are still some of my closest friends. I remember that when school reopened, some kids would not be around when attendance was being taken, and they would say, “Oh! He’s still in Disneyland (or some other place). Not back yet.” I would think, “Where is Disneyland?” I had never even been to Johor Bahru. That could have had some influence on my interest in travel later on. When I was really young, we lived in Kampong Amber in the east coast among all the Peranakans, so I used to always think of myself as a Peranakan. My grandmother had been adopted by a Malay family, so we spoke both Malay and Chinese at home. It was only much later that I realised that I wasn’t actually Peranakan. As kids, we used to always go to the Chinese Swimming Club behind our house in the kampong. We would turn up in our swimming suits, take our
floats and call out to the guy who jaga (manned) the door. “Ah Keong Chek (Uncle Keong)!” Then he would just let us in, without us having to pay the $0.20 entrance fee because he knew we were all from the same kampong. My sister and I are very, very close. When I was in primary school, it was her responsibility to take me to school before taking bus number 12 to her own school at St Hilda’s. She was only in Secondary 1 at the time, but back then, 13-year-olds were already considered to be quite grown up and they were given a lot of responsibility. In those days, the bus conductors used to scold us. They would say in Hokkien, “Go inside! There’s no ghost at the back of the bus!” People used to gather in front of the bus and not move to the back because there was only one door near the front. When my sister joined Singapore Airlines (SQ) as a stewardess in the 1970s, she used to take me with her on holidays with the free tickets allocated to family members of cabin
crew. By the time I joined SQ as a steward, she had been with the airline for almost 10 years and was about to resign as she was married and pregnant. But we managed to do one flight together. We requested it so that we could take our parents to Vancouver. In those days, the cabin crew were paid about $2,000, which was a lot of money because most of your peers were being paid a few hundred dollars. I invested this extra money in a salon to support a hairstylist friend. It was my first proper, registered business. After a while, I felt that I still needed that piece of paper (academic qualifications) after all. So I took the money that I had saved up working with Singapore Airlines and spent three years in Australia studying business. When I returned, I joined Qantas doing business development and later I moved into travel agencies. Today, I’m back working with Singapore Airlines as the distributor for their tickets. It’s still my favourite airline.
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