Intro
Amber Tan left Singapore Airlines and put 170,000 dollars of her own savings into a fish business she set up for her then-partner. She lost most of it. When the relationship ended and he left her holding the company’s debts, she took the business over herself, taught herself the trade on the Jurong Fishery Port floor in the middle of the night, and turned it around as a single mother.
In this episode we get into how she learned the business by making expensive mistakes with her own money, what it took to win over a port full of uncles who told her to go home, and the two selves she carries: the polish Singapore Airlines trained into her, and the woman swearing in Hokkien on the wet market floor. She would have fought to save the business either way. Leaving him, she says, is the part she could not have done without her daughter.
Story Highlights
- Setting up the company for her partner, funding all of it, and watching 170,000 dollars of her savings go before she knew the first thing about fish or business.
- Getting stuck with the bill, as she tells it, when he shipped in fish from Indonesian suppliers under her company name and then went quiet, leaving her to settle it because you cannot owe the government money.
- Taking over with her last 10,000 dollars, letting the worker go, and going down to the port herself in the middle of the night.
- Breaking even by February, the Chinese New Year after she took over.
- The uncles at the port, shirtless and skeptical, telling her to go home, asking if her hands had ever done housework, handing her a calculator because they assumed she could not count.
- The aunties and uncles who call her Xiao Mei, little sister, and now say goodbye to her as their wet market stalls close one by one.
- Apologizing to every Grab driver for the smell, and learning that the slime gets into your nails no matter how hard you scrub.
- The correction to the headlines: the 300 dollars everyone read about was the company account, not her personal savings.
- Working a wet market stall for cash and realizing on the fly that she could own all three levels of the chain, port to stall to your door.
- The grandfather who flew the family somewhere new every birthday and wanted to see his tomboy granddaughter become Singapore Airlines crew.
Quote
“Both the SQ thing and this fishery port thing, both are part of me, and I’m just learning to weave them together to form this person that’s my authentic self.”
About Amber Tan
Amber Tan is a Singapore fishmonger who runs a wholesale seafood business out of Jurong Fishery Port, supplying live marble goby to restaurants and running door-to-door deliveries, with a small warehouse across the border in Johor Bahru. She spent years as Singapore Airlines cabin crew before setting up the business, and took it over on her own after her relationship ended, teaching herself the trade from the port floor up. She is opening a wet market stall this year to close the loop between port and customer. Find her business at Pao Ker Seafood on Instagram.
Why This Conversation Matters
The version of Amber that went viral was a headline: the cabin crew who lost everything and ended up at the fish port. The conversation is the part the headline skips. She can tell you why the auntie buying five fish gets fresher seafood than the supermarket, what a farmed marble goby looks like next to one from the sea, and how she is stitching port, stall, and delivery into one chain. She is not a survival story. She is someone learning a hard trade in real time and thinking several moves ahead, doing it with a two-year-old and no partner.
Turning Points
- Realizing about five months in that he had lied about everything, and pulling the handbrake on putting more of her money into the business.
- Her friend’s line: if you stay, your daughter grows up thinking this is how men are allowed to treat her. That is when something snapped.
- Being left with the suppliers’ debt and deciding she had no choice but to take the company over herself.
- The night she let the worker go and went down to the port floor alone, in what she calls survival mode, just trying to make it to the next day.
Key Lessons
- Keep the business and the relationship separate. The advice she got from every business-owner friend, and the one she wishes she had taken. Tangling the two meant losing both at once.
- Expensive mistakes teach fastest. With her own money riding on every shipment, a bad supplier or a wrong call gets etched in. She learned the trade by feeling the losses.
- The wet market is dying, and most people do not see why that should bother them. Her point is that the auntie taking a few pieces straight off the boat sells you fresher fish at lower overhead than the supermarket, and convenience is quietly killing that.
- Own the whole chain. She took a market stall job because she needed cash, and realized she could hold all three levels: port, stall, and delivery. Desperation turned into strategy.
- Do not let one person rewrite how you see everyone. Even after being lied to about everything, she refuses to go guarded into new relationships, because that would let him take more than he already did.
If You Enjoyed This Episode
You might also like:
- More Than a Headline with Naomi Black, on getting flattened into a viral headline over a rejected first date, and the whole story that didn’t make the news.
- Singapore F&B: Evolution, Adaptation, and Survival with Anthony Yeoh, on keeping a restaurant alive as the industry shifts under it, and why he thinks home cooks are the new hawkers.
