by CJ Tan
The Tan Cheng Juan Story: From Systems Analyst to Security Guard
This all started happening to me seems to me must have been a long time ago, my first job since I was retrenched as a software engineer in a local bank two years ago. There was still a silent war between foreigners and Singaporeans.
It was hot and humid. Filth everywhere. Just like now. I didn’t have any love in my life. To speak of. No love at all, and nobody to care for. Just very little self-respect.Whatsoever.
There are certain Singapore mornings when just about everybody wakes up crazy. Even the native Singaporeans. You can see it on their faces. Such misery and unhappiness. Well so this other person was hanging around too, on his lunch hour and he seemed very extremely unhappy. Said the security guard at Public Housing Authority knew him as a troublemaker. Said his name was Kian Heng. He’s a property agent who has to go back to work or he will be out on the streets for good. He’s plainly worried about himself a lot as he needs to hit his sales quota. Said he didn’t like being recognised and started at because this was his free lunch hour to do with as he damn well pleased.
Also I’d been thinking that spending all of my all-too-free time at the Public Housing Authority was basically a step in the wrong direction. For staying up all those nights with insomnia, I suspected I should be paid.
A few mornings later on this hot humid filthy mother of a day, I went up to Public Housing Authority security guard office, job hunting.
Unreal. Divorcees, foreigners, skunk, pussy everywhere just don’t go to make up a city in my book but there you are; that’s basically your Singapore early in the morning. Well thank God I’d seen worse.
In my head I was making all these notes: real cunt of a day,
Well that day, too, I began to keep this journal. As a keepsake. Something to keep me from going completely crazy. Keep me busy.
Public Housing Authority security guard room is a small faded blue office with a few closed circuit cameras nailed and screwed to one side of the wall.
Caution signs. Check-in logs tacked to the walls. Organisation chart hanging in another.
My dairy says I saw this person at the entrance next to the chart. That personnel office was also unreal. I took my chances on the man with a white spot in his right eye. He was sort of skinny at one end and sacklike on the bottom. Not very pretty to look at.
Once he sees my Singapore Computer Engineering Association patches, he wants to know if I was retrenched.
“May 2010….”
“What’s that?”
I say “That’s my approximate date of retrenchment. From Hewlett Packard Singapore. Jobless for 2 years doing temporary jobs but really want a job.”
Emphasizing a lot so he would see I had respect for him, meant no harm. Well I really wanted work but I also mean business.
He stopped me. “From the influx of computer engineers from India?”
He seems to have all sorts of different things on his own mind except my getting work.
Well I don’t seem to seem rude. “I came here to see about getting a job as a security guard, I think.”
“Oh,” says the guy. “I bet you have seen our advertisements before. You think getting work here in Public Housing Authority is a great big cinch.”
“I’m willing to work… is all…”
“Any troubles with the law?”
“No sir.”
“Willing to work night shifts?”
“Yes.”
So just then there was a lot of commotion, couples screaming, car exhausts, Somebody has slammed some doors along the corridor.
The man squints at me hard and over all the noises I can hardly hear him when he asks, “So… why do you want to work as a security guard? You are overqualified, you have a degree to be accepted as a member of the computer engineering association….”
Well I don’t happen to think that’s any of his business anyhow. Though I am not ashamed.
I tell him very straight: I can’t seem to find a job at my age and with my qualifications.
I said, “All companies prefer to hire fresh graduates or foreigners. At my age 40, it’s hard to find a job when you are retrenched.”
Well he says the cab companies are always looking for drivers.
Me, disregarding his insult: “I know. I was not able to pass my driving license.”
He still won’t let me be, won’t let up. “So what do you do now?”
“I ride around nights mostly buses. Have been going for job interviews for the past 2 years. Figure I might as well get paid for it.”
“We don’t need any misfits around here, son.”
“Who else would want to work as a security guard in Public Housing Authority breaking up couples’ fights every day?”
I’ve been speaking to him like my mind don’t know what my mouth is saying and now I am getting angry. Riled.
“You got others to take the heat off you at the Human Relations people. It’s ok with me.”
The guy brightens. Says, brightening, “You are willing to work permanent night shifts?”
“Permanent night shifts, day shifts doesn’t make any difference. What have I got to lose? I’ll work anywhere anytime. I can’t be choosey.”
Then he wants to know if I have an arrest record and when I tell him I’m clean, real clean, “as clean as my conscious,” he says, “listen, if you are gonna get smart, you can leave right now.”
I apologise. I don’t mean to seem so smart. So the guy asks can I pass a physical, how old am I, if I am moonlightening. Stuff like that. Words to that effect. He seems to like it that I’ll work long shifts.
“Hell,” he says, finally, “we just ain’t fussy around here. There’s always openings on one position or another.”
He asks me to fill out a bunch of pink yellow white forms, leave them with the girl at the front desk behind the window. They would call.
Good to break the ice anyway. On the way out saw myself in plate glass again. This thin dark shadow. I read my Association patch backwards.
By March I was working and it had been raining days ever since I started, well, practically. Lousy wet syrupy weather. Like the beginnings of a miserable spring.
Well at least the divorcing couples and the crowds in Public Housing Authority bicker less in that weather.
“When couples fight, the boss of the PHA is the security guard,” all the guys in the control room say.
I started out working the day shift but that got to be too much for me. Too many higher-class people can be harder on your nerves than some divorcees. The higher-class people expected you to know all sorts of very strange things.
I am walking down the aisle with a half chewed burger in my pocket. I have no time for giving reports on lift breakdowns or lighting failures, just no inclinations.
“Listen,” says this guy in a business suit one day, “Is the lift working today? The repairman changed the motor parts?”
“I suppose so,” I tell him. “There is no big crowd at the lift lobby today.”
Man says, “You know that for a certainty?”
“There is a board meeting with visitors from China. It does mean something, don’t it?” he demands, moments later. “Do you know or don’t you?”
My hamburger tastes like solid brown fog in a bun. Through a mouthful I ask if he has tried telephoning the the company.
“In other words, you don’t know?” This guy is getting me crazy.
“Well,” he snarls, “You should. Should know, dammit or who would know?” Stuff of that sort. A lotta blah blah. Says, “Do you know who I am? I am the Deputy Director of Corporate Communications.”
He’s pointing out to the lift like a schoolteacher. Says, “Why don’t you stick your head into the control room and find out who I am!”
I had a laugh. He must have been angry to know a security guard didn’t know who he is.
Mostly, when I had my break, it’s at the McDonald’s three blocks fr
om my work.
There was also a woman in full dress and she was selling tissue paper at a dollar to us. She asked if I knew her son Adrian Lu in Hewlett Packard after she spotted my old jacket with the Singapore Computer Engineering Association. She had gray hair. Doused herself a lot with lilly-of-the-valley water. She said Adrian Lu was her oldest, such a good boy but was retrenched last year, had I ever known him? She quipped, “Private companies are already infested with foreign talent and economic refugees.”
She says her name is Tara. That if she had a job, she’d be at that job, but instead she’s here talking to me. Asks if I’m up from Nanyang Technological University or wherever the hick I’m from, and if I aspired to downgrade myself to be a security guard and so again I tell her about Adrian Lu, and how we was ex-colleagues in different departments in Hewlett Packard and look at our lives divergent, and she shakes her head and says, “Fucker stole my future. And look how Tembusu Holdings and our politicians left you. Sure you don’t want some tissue?”
It’s true I have not slept in days due to my insomnia and maybe also the truth that I have not had the heart to tell her the truth about Adrian Lu, and it’s nice that this old lady cares because when no one cares, you think about dropping dead all the time.
It comes easy to chant her grief out loud.
“You have been fucked by the political system,” she told me.
I wasn't sure what I was going to say to her but then I saw her lips and brow twitching, I said, "Hey,. . what're you doing? Are you crying?"
She wept, “If he had graduated and stayed on to the basics of finding a job, this wouldn't have happened.” she said, in between sobs.
"Well then, The politicians will be telling you — foreigners create jobs for Singaporeans, help to improve our salaries bottomlines. If they slow down the mass import of foreigners, Singaporeans will all become jobless. Of course, the politicians won’t tell you that slowing down mass influx of foreigners will make their businessmen, Tembusu Holdings and CEOs friends very unhappy, and reduce the GDP which will then reduce their bonus & pay and good way of life."
She fought for control and at last the tears stopped and there was only an occasional sob. "Why didn’t you stand for the President’s election and fight for us then?"
One night, in the morning in the Public Housing Authority, there was a Pinoy in short mini skirt. She was going to a bar at a few blocks away as a masseuse. I get picked up by her and says she wants to give me a massage when I go off duty as a guard. Well I said no. And when she sat on a chair, she has her feet up inside the stirrups with her legs spread and she is sticking herself with this long glass tube in the hot spot. I asked what’s going on and she explains that she was extracting her blood. Seems she did this every month so she wouldn’t have to have her period. Her boyfriend liked her better that way and she said she had more control over her body.
Well she said she was going over to the bar to see her boyfriend tonight and was staying over and she would almost forgotten. She wanted to surprise him that way again. Well she liked me, said I could come home with her sometime if I wanted. She drank a lot I think. I don’t like that sort of forward woman. Afterwards I would still be lonely.
As usual. I look up into the notice board, I see her skirt hardly and barely enough to cover her hot spot.
So forward. Just like animals. All too many of them. I suppose if I said yes maybe so if not for that boyfriend.
Also I liked to think they would come to my place and my place was a mess. Really pretty awful.
Well I had this room and a half on Toa Payoh, a ratty old mattress on the floor, a chair and a table. I almost never got calls at my place so the phone was disconnected. There were also some porn photos, I’d collected too and a kitchen full of grease and roaches, a stopped sink.
Well that was no place much to hang out for long, and I didn’t. I just fell out there to sleep, if I could, after a day’s work.
I was working very hard, six to six, sometimes six to eight in the AM, a stretch shift, it was a hustle, kept me busy. I could take in extra shift allowance by working the nights.
People never seemed satisfied. That face in the aisle as they come into work in Public Housing Authority. The buzzer in my security room means that I have to vacate my post to come settle some dispute. A lotta distrust and disapproval makes my stomach queezy.
I was exhausted all the time now, back achey, too from my scars. I almost never got a chance to write in this book much in those days, didn’t even see a movie a week at a time.
By April 10, I was doing stretch shifts.
I knew I had to do something about my loneliness aside from talking to colleagues but I didn’t want that sort. That kind of colleagues can get really heavy, depressing. You find yourself twisted. This way and that.
I guess like most people I wanted to meet someone I liked have some fun. Eventually maybe make her a commitment. Just to be with another person. To have a friend.
I felt I was capable of giving and getting. Had been so ever since I came home. Well you know I really couldn’t prove it but I felt there were these things inside me that had to come out on another person. With another. Good things and bad. A man is not a fountain pen, you know> I wanted to care and be cared for. Well it was a heavy time. Bad days those. The people I saw. The things I did.
At least, I think she was a sort of a girlfriend. I guess she liked me a lot better than I ever liked her. She really wasn’t my type, I’m afraid. No class. She said she loved me but it felt like she was taking me over. She called me Juan like a rhyme. Her big dill Juan. Said she needed a bit of my dill morning, noon and night. Said, Sure I liked her but not that much. She wasn’t any dream to me, just another woman.
I guess I hurt her feelings. I imagined she thought with a face like hers she would have to get her hooks in somebody or else, pretty soon. I imagined I was too young for that. That sort of thing. When I left her she cried. More like a mother to me than a girlfriend really.
Well, as I say, working in the day shifts, I saw things happening me being unemployed a lot better in some respects. I saw people at their worst. Whatever that means. The PHA is hardly a fit place for making friends and influencing people.
I would go back to the back of the security guard room to clean stuff off people who left their belongings, mostly umbrellas, sometimes mobile phones they left behind when they sat down. The seats were bucket shaped, meaning their phones tend to drop out of their trouser pockets due to the inclination.
