Nan Seng Chan’s founder Ng Cheng Hun shares the poignant story of his journey from Chinese refugee to a businessman in Singapore.
The hungry ghost festival is marked in red on Nan Seng Chan’s calendar. Every year, the 55-year-old shop stocks up on joss sticks, incense papers and candles at least 30 days before the seventh lunar month starts.
“Being left behind in the raging Cultural Revolution was gruelling,” he recalled. “Life was brutal. For three years, my grandmother and I had nothing to eat.” His grandmother’s single mindedness came on the back of China’s political turmoil. People were dying of hunger, and she feared they would suffer a similar fate if they remained sitting ducks. It took everything in her to make him flee communist China, and even more for the 17-year-old to oblige. The eye-watering price he made for freedom pains him to this day. She was 98 when he left her.
That he had survived the unthinkable and come this far only to be rejected by his family was crushing. For a time, the homeless 20-year-old slept in the back of lorries at the former Thong Chai Medical Institution along Eu Tong Sen Street. “At 4 to 5am, when people left for work and started their engines, I would wake up with a start and hop off.”
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