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The Stall She Spent Ten Years Trying To Get Out Of

Watercolour illustration for The Stall She Spent Ten Years Trying To Get Out Of
Watercolour · The Morning Founder

She spent ten years of her childhood trying to get out of her mother's nasi padang stall. Then she spent 33 years working for the people still standing in one. The thing she was escaping was the qualification.

Halimah Yacob has been on the news my whole adult life.

President from 2017 to 2023. Speaker of Parliament before that. In 2013, asked why she was staying in her Yishun HDB flat: "more than 80 per cent of our population live in HDB flats and if it is good enough for them, it is good enough for me."

Here's what I didn't know until recently:

She spent about ten years of her childhood washing dishes past 11pm.

Her father was a watchman. He died of a heart attack in 1962. She was eight. The youngest of five. The family lost their government quarters. They slept on mats in the living rooms of relatives.

Her mother became the only earner for five children. She sold nasi padang from a pushcart. The pushcart had no licence. They worked Shenton Way, dodging policemen, until a hawker stall licence came through.

Halimah started helping at eight.

Up at 5am. Market with her mother for the ingredients. School. Then back to the stall. Serve customers. Clear tables. Wash dishes. The day ended past 11pm. Homework got crammed into the gaps.

By Secondary 2 the double life caught up with her. She became a "ponteng queen", cutting classes with impunity. The principal warned her she'd be booted out.

What frightened her wasn't the disgrace.

Expulsion meant the stall. Every waking moment of it, for good. Her own words: "a worse punishment."

So school stopped being the thing she was failing. It became the only exit. She clawed it back by studying on buses and between customer orders.

She got into law at the University of Singapore. First in her family to reach university.

On matriculation day she had $5 in her pocket. She ran away from the society recruiters. Every table wanted a joining fee she couldn't cover.

A bursary from MUIS came through at the last minute — $1,000 a year. Her brother, newly a prison officer, sent $50 a month.

LLB with honours, 1978.

Then she made the strange choice.

She skipped private practice. She joined NTUC as a legal officer, to represent workers and "fight for a just cause". She stayed 33 years, rising to Deputy Secretary-General. She was the first Singaporean on the Governing Body of the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, and sat there 12 years.

Here's what stays with me:

She spent ten years trying to get out of that stall. Then she spent 33 years working for everyone still standing in one.

The credential you can see is the law degree. The one that did the work was the decade of 5am markets and past-11pm dishes. "When life is really a struggle," she said, "you begin to understand the struggles of other people."

Almost nobody can tell you the President of Singapore got there from a pushcart that ran from the police.

What in your own background are you trying to get past — when it's the thing you know better than anyone else in the room?

This is the LinkedIn edit — written to fit inside 3,000 characters.

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