Little Red Dot SG is a media startup that aims to cover Singapore’s culture, history and cuisine through everyday stories in both visual and written formats. Their growing team digs into the latest trends, review local food haunts, and offer light comedic relief in the form of memes.
For anyone who is acquainted with the idea of Humans of New York, the brief was pretty straightforward. Brayden, the founder of LittleRed.sg was looking for a photojournalist to document the everyday lives and back stories of people in Singapore. From foreign workers to white collar bankers, the idea was to give readers an look into the hopes, dreams, challenges and everyday life of ordinary people in Singapore.
Excellent writer and photographer!
– Brayden Tan, Founder
I drove taxis for a long time. I’m now retired with nothing much to do, just eating and walking around. I’m over seventy and the government doesn’t let you work over seventy. The government asked me to retire, so now I look after myself.
I’m born in Singapore but I stayed in Pahang, Malaysia for a long time. Actually, I’ve been to everywhere in Malaysia, including Perlis, Sabah and Sarawak. My wife is from Perak. I travelled and worked all sorts of jobs. As a single person then, and with a thick skin, I would ask around, “Are you looking for workers?” The boss then says, “Do you want to work?” We didn’t even have work visas, we just worked wherever we were at and passed the days one at a time. There was no grand goal, and there was no such thing as vacation days. I just moved freely whenever I wanted. That’s how I met my wife and married, and we moved back to Singapore to live. This youth was my happiest time.
I’ve stayed in Bishan for over 20 years. Before Bishan, I stayed in many places, including Serangoon. I now live here with my wife and children. I studied Mandarin in school – I was from a Chinese school. Driving be like, “Yes hello, where do you want to go?”, “Understand?”, “Turn left”, “Turn right” – that’s how I learned English. Just a few phrases. I won’t go into longer conversations, asking more difficult questions. I didn’t need the map while driving my taxi. It’s only if you don’t recognize the road, when you say, “It looks like here” or “I think it’s there” – that’s when I need to look at the map.
As a retiree, I just sit, admire the scenery and people watch. Looking at people walking is free. Bishan park is not bad, it’s pretty big and the people here are nice, with no gangsters around. I live here so I exercise here. I don’t know where’s good to go, really. Shopping? Town? Nah, I prefer the quiet here.
The best thing is to have a job. I’m not working so the time doesn’t pass as fast. You see me sitting here alone, you can tell I’m retired. Apart from television at home, there’s nothing to do except to stare at the wall. I have no interest in shopping malls. I don’t need to shop much as I’m a man. If I need something, I just go to the mama shop downstairs.
I’ve been doing Tai Chi for a few years now, over there near the river. Many people will recommend you to do this or that activity, but all that matters is to do something and be healthy. If your health is good, your heart and mind will be happy also.
I used to be in accounting and I don’t really like the corporate world. It was just nice that below my company, there was this bakery that was quite nice. I chatted with them and I thought, “Maybe I can learn from them.” Their style is that they make everything from scratch in the shop, so it’s quite different from other bakeries outside. They accepted me as their apprentice. I learned how to make the sweet bun from scratch from them.
We play with new flavours when requested by new customers. We try to look around at other people’s ideas and try to modify and do our own bread. We do a bit of events, like meetings – just small events as we are quite small. We tried to do online before, but cannot make it. We tried selling some snacks online and it was still okay. We tried on Shopee, but not on Grab. Nobody will really order bread online for deliveries. We don’t sell cakes – maybe that’s the down side. We only sell coffee, tea and bread. That’s why it’s more difficult to do it online.
CBD area is badly affected (by COVID) compared to those heartland malls. We’ve been here for quite some time and for the style we do, it’s hard to move to the heartland malls. Everything we use is fresh, including our dough, so it’s easier to look after the quantity. If we move to the heartland, they (the other bakeries) tend to do a lot and sell at a lower price, at a later time. You cannot really gauge the wastage. It’s easier to gauge here compared to the heartland malls. Ours is fresh, so if I need more, I can’t do it out immediately or within hours.
My bakers will arrive at 630 AM to prepare for the morning crowd. We will prepare the dough the day before, around 4 PM. Around the morning, when we arrive, we will start the oven and wait for it to heat up. Then, we will prepare our ingredients. Around 7 plus, there will be freshly baked bread. We open at 7 AM but the choice will be lesser when it’s just started.
Japanese, Western, Indian, Malay, Italian, all. I worked many years already, so I run about (in terms of cuisines). My show hand is Japanese. I still keep my blue steel knives, but all rusty already. I never take care of them already, I just chuck them somewhere, and sometimes my wife…I place here, and she moves them to some other place. Then when I want to find, eh, then I don’t know where she’s put it. I bought them for a few hundred dollars when I was young. I called my company to order for me. Last time and now very different. Now, they are very expensive. Last time, as my sister in law was in Japan, and she would declare and bring them back for me. Sharpening stone must buy from Japan as well. Their sharpening stone got grade, so see what grade you want. Now, if I were to take back my knife and polish them, they will be shiny.
Here, she (my wife) cooks. At home, she cooks and here, she also cooks. I don’t cook. I tell you – everything’s ready. When she wants to go off, she makes everything ready. People come and I just ask them, “How much you want?” and I serve them. Before I retired, she’s been here many years. I never touch all these (preparations). I’m really tired – cooking is very tiring.
Last time young, I like cooking. But now, old already, tired. Actually, I don’t like cooking. I like to do electronics kind of things. I wanted to go study but my father said, “Don’t go study, must make money”. He asked me to work. After my national service, I went into banking. My brother was a director of a Canadian bank. He called his friend to teach me about banking, so I went in. The first week he taught me about brokering. Got pay wan, you don’t know also got pay. So I followed him.
I work in a construction site. The Ang Mo Kio project, on the HDB side. I’m doing excavation work for the underground pipe – the rubbish chute. I’m from Bangladesh. I’ve been working here 7 years. After 3-4 years more of working, I will return to my country to do business – open a shop to sell clothes, like a minimarket. Now, I don’t have the cash money, so I’m working.
Singapore’s good, very nice country. They give a lot of working money. I miss my family back home. Now, I cannot go home because it is very difficult to come back. If I come back, I have to quarantine for a long time. It’s $2000. My company doesn’t give that. Next year, maybe I can (go home).
I don’t take holidays – I just continue working. Christmas is off. Sometimes I come here (Bishan Park), Little India or Farrer Park. My dormitory is very near, so I come here to walk. Sunday is my off day.
On working days, I wake up at 630 AM. Work starts 8 o’clock. 8 to 5 PM is the basic duty. After 2 hours, 5-7 PM is overtime. 12-1 is lunch. After that, coffee break is 3 ‘o’clock and 10 o’clock, 15-minutes each time. Our company is very good. Food is from catering, because we cannot cook. Our dormitory does not allow cooking. Before, when I was staying in Choa Chu Kang, I was cooking. I stayed in a big dormitory, where I can cook. Now, here, they (my company) made a temporary dormitory – that’s why they don’t allow cooking. Before (moving here), I stayed in Choa Chu Kang, and worked here. That side is very big, over 20,000 people living together. The big one is better because cooking can. Catering has more unhealthy food, more oily. Cooking is very good, I can choose this one or that. For catering, the same thing is coming everyday. Catering comes in two times a day, for breakfast and dinner. Last time, I finished working at 7 PM and then cook after work. I sometimes eat rice or roti, paratha roti.
Both of us are started this but she (the co-founder) doesn’t come to the store because she has a full-time job. She’s actually with Google. We didn’t exactly started out as florists. I started out in finance. I kind of got bored – it was not something I foresee myself doing for long. One day, I was browsing through Bloomberg and thought maybe there was something I could do besides just numbers. I told her, “Let’s learn something else that has nothing to do with numbers.” So we thought, why don’t we try floristry. At that time, we had no clue what is it like. We went for a basic course, but I didn’t like what we had in Singapore as well.
After a while, a trader in the company gave me a sum of money to do his wedding. That’s how I realized oh, we can have something running from this. I was still holding on to my full time job though, as I wasn’t sure how being a full-time florist or floral designer was going to be like. I kept on doing this on a freelance basis even though I was still with the financial institution. After that, I went into private wealth. My first new proper client was the financial institution. The financial crisis came, and the financial institutions cut back on the budget they had for their clients. We then shifted our target audience to doctors, because they do give gifts to general practitioners who refer patients to them, like a thank you or appreciation for working with them. That’s how we started having doctors on our clientele list. And then, I went into family office, doing social investment. After a couple of years doing that, I decided I wanted to try this full-time. My boss at that time realized that I have a deep interest in floristry so I became his florist. I provided flowers for his home, his offices and his private functions. We didn’t have a retail store in the beginning, so we just serviced that one client. Eventually, we serviced another family in Singapore. Both of them are ultra-net worth – that kept us going, it’s sufficient. The thing is though, with having two clients on your portfolio.
I’m a father of three. I used to be a musician, I used to be a bookie, I used to perform on stage in clubs, during those, you know, single days life. I’m an active footballer until now. I’m the founder of a football team – Chill Pill FC. It’s a multi-racial football club. I always emphasize on a multi-racial team because you know when you say football, they will only mention one common race, which is that Malays love football. But our team, there’s a lot of foreigners inside, a lot of non-Malays, a lot Singaporeans, so we are multi-racial and multi-national.
2020 March was our last football match for eleven a side so we didn’t play football after that. After a few months, we started to play four a side – the government allowed this when the restrictions eased – but you know it stopped because of Phase 2 last year, right? We managed to get back on track during the last two months – it became five a side. But in Singapore it’s not easy to book ActiveSG. That kind of pitch is not easy to book, so we are stuck there again. We can play football but we need to book the futsal’s pitch and cage, and it requires time. You need to do ART and it’s very expensive, they marked up the price – I don’t understand why. It’s been a long time we’ve never played football, so the morale is very low now. I’m still handling the team and the boys, to ensure that we are still in the group chat. Besides football, we talk about everything else, like family actually, because we have English, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysians, Pakistani and Chinese in the group chat. Right now, we are still hoping that the government can ease the restrictions so that we can play eleven a side football again.
Talking about music, I love songwriting. I have one single on the radio, and it’s mostly for the Malay community. I jam with my ex-band members, for the sake of happiness, just jam, you know, just enjoy. I’m a rock-metal head, I still write songs for myself. I don’t want to get involved in music anymore, like active in music because in Singapore, music never brings you anywhere. Music doesn’t give you any benefits in Singapore.
I set out to all four corners of the little island city of Singapore to collect stories from the old and the young, the busy and the retired. In a conservative Asian society, it’s not easy to open up to strangers, much less have a long conversation with them on the street. I was rejected over a dozen times each day, and even had some people get up and literally flee from me before I could finish saying hello (that happened on Singapore’s famous Orchard Road). I am grateful for those who spared the time, including a former SIA exec who sat down with me for four hours in a tiny cafe downtown in the heart of CBD, and shared her life story, including many unexpected twists and turns.
Altogether, I collected the stories of and photographed over 10 profiles under a month. Brayden, the founder of Little Red Dot SG, was delighted the results, and we continued working together on travelogues when I had to fly to Turkey and subsequently South Africa to continue my overlanding adventure.
