Supporting the Small Businesses

I passed by an adik (Malay for "younger brother") selling his home-made curry puffs today. I actually passed by Old Chang Kee (a chain of curry puffs retail stores in Singapore) and gave it a pass, but this one was different. He stood near the underpass with his box of curry puffs, looking at me expectantly. At just $1 for 3, they were a steal and I bought some to relive memories of those days when we would buy curry puffs for breakfast on the way to work.

They still taste as lovely as before. Old Chang Kee’s curry puffs are good, but these curry puffs are different. Within these curry puffs go the aspirations of a man who wants to earn more to feed his family. Each of these curry puffs are cooked the way his ibu (mother) would cook them, the way his isteri (wife) would cook them, the way I know any macik (auntie) would cook them. I may be ethnic Chinese, but I grew up playing soccer with Malays, and I love the way we all take to each other’s foods and customs.

The fact that my family of 5 are cramped into one small bedroom in Ghim Moh gave me a chance to relive childhood memories of interacting with the grocer, the shopkeeper of the sundry store and the various hawkers from whom I ate their cooked food. These were small businesses, and they all conduct business to feed their family, and know their customers intimately.

How different can that be from my former residence of Bukit Batok, where I see corporations and chain stores muscling into the neighbourhood? It is a very different feeling when you are served by an employee who can be replaced any time, who is working to enrich his boss (whom, I must admit, has the entreprenuerial mindset to make others work to make him rich).

I really long for the days when the small family businesses are the ones you buy things from. I suspect I can never return to these days in Singapore, the land of the big corporations