Right when Ms Elysa Chen was about to sit for her preliminary examinations in Secondary 4, she received the news that her cancer-stricken father had died.
“At that moment, you can’t grieve,” she said, recalling that incident several decades ago.
The 41-year-old’s thoughts then returned to the present. We are in her apartment on a weekday evening.
Now a candidate running for the General Election with the People’s Action Party (PAP), she figured that bad news and tough times can still come in different ways.
“You have to hold the difficult moments and press on so that you can show up for your team. You get the work done. You make sure that life goes on.
“As a leader, you have to do that, right?”
Adversity shaped her in her teenage years.
The candidate for Bishan-Toa Payoh Group Representation Constituency (GRC) said that dealing with her father’s death made her “grow up” and “experience society very quickly”.
Losing the sole breadwinner of her family forced her to take up multiple jobs at the time – being a tuition teacher, hotel phone operator, sales operator and banquet server.
Today, Ms Chen is the director of social service agency CampusImpact, a charity that aims to build character in young people as they transit from childhood to adulthood.
When we spoke, the hustings haven’t started because it was the day before Nomination Day.
Despite having worked at her charity job for half the day, recording a podcast, needing to wake up early the next morning to submit her nomination papers and being interviewed by me, Ms Chen bore no signs of fatigue.
She was vivacious and her face lit up whenever she spoke about the children at her charity, who come from challenging backgrounds.
During our interview, she would make self-deprecating remarks and laugh loudly while showing us her son’s toys and drawings. Her voice rose in pitch as she excitedly welcomed her mother and a party volunteer when they arrived through her front door.
One might think her energetic personality is just par for the course for a candidate trying to canvass voters.
However, in the few days that I have gotten to know her, Ms Chen just seemed to be someone who is deeply interested in other people.
I followed her on one of her walkabouts and was impressed by how she recognised the faces of several residents while distributing flyers at coffee shops, even though she is a new candidate and must have had limited opportunities to walk the ground compared to her more experienced colleagues.
I have to admit being surprised by her extroversion. In preparing for my interview with Ms Chen, who was a former journalist at The New Paper, I asked around and heard from her ex-colleagues that she was a shy worker who mostly kept to herself and diligently carried out her work.
No one had thought that she would want to step forward to serve Singapore through politics.
Clearly, much must have happened in between the time she stepped out of a Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) newsroom and into a PAP branch office. In the interim years, she became a teacher, church pastor and, finally, a charity director.
