Most young girls don’t grow up dreaming of becoming a bus captain. That was certainly the case for 45-year-old Chow Pei Guan.
Although Chow’s mother herself pilots a bus, that career path never once crossed her mind. “I always thought it’s a man’s job,” Chow, who is Malaysian, told me in Mandarin.
When she was in her twenties, Chow had other ambitions. Starting out as a phone shop sales assistant in Ipoh, Malaysia, in 2001, she worked hard to set up her own shop two years later, offering mobile phones, accessories and repair services. One shop grew into four.
However, in 2014, her business began to decline and got progressively worse in 2015 when Malaysia introduced its goods and services tax. “Products became more expensive and profit margins were squeezed. I had to slowly shut down my shops one by one,” she said.
In 2016, Chow lost her last shop. Then 36 years old, she was at a loss for what to do. That was when her mother, who has been working in Singapore as a bus captain for 28 years, suggested following in her footsteps – compared with running a small business, it was a stable job with decent benefits.
Something clicked, and a year later, Chow came to Singapore to join local public transport operator Go-Ahead Singapore as a bus captain.
AN EXTREME CAREER SWITCH
Usually, when people talk about careers running in the family, they tend to refer to artisan trades, hawker stalls, or even fields like law and medicine.
But you could say bus driving runs in Chow’s family.
Her father had retired when she was still growing up, so her mother Tay Kwe Huah became the sole breadwinner. Tay left Malaysia in 1997 to become a bus captain in Singapore.
