Former Sec School Discipline Master On Why He Left Teaching To Become A Hawker Working 15-Hour Days - 8days Skip to main content

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Former Sec School Discipline Master On Why He Left Teaching To Become A Hawker Working 15-Hour Days

"Since young my parents told me 'you have to study… If not you’ll end up like me'," said Sim Weijie, who joined his family's traditional hawker bakery Hung Huat Cakes & Pastries after teaching for seven years.

Former Sec School Discipline Master On Why He Left Teaching To Become A Hawker Working 15-Hour Days

Some of Sim Weijie's early childhood memories involved pastries.

Standing outside his parents' bakery at Sims Vista Market and Food Centre with loose change jangling, Mr Sim would have a box of tau sar piah (filled pastry biscuits) in one hand and plastic bags in another.

This would be his introduction to the family business.

"It was a family thing," he recalled. "Everybody started from young, we came here and we helped out."

During the Lunar New Year, Mr Sim would be mobilised to help make pineapple tarts, love letters and prawn rolls with hae bee hiam (spicy shrimp condiment). If the Sim family were making goodies, the whole block would know it, he recalled.

But as his path took him into teaching, little did Mr Sim expect that he would one day be continuing in the family legacy.

FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Hung Huat Cakes and Pastries started off from a humble pushcart.

Before hawker centres were developed in Singapore, Sim's paternal grandfather was a pushcart vendor who sold traditional min jiang kueh (folded pancakes with various fillings) in the Geylang area.

After the government relocated street vendors like Mr Sim's grandfather into hawker centres, the business found a home at Sims Vista Market and Food Centre, where it remains today.

Mr Sim's parents - his mother, Mdm Liau Cheok Wan was an apprentice at a traditional bakery, while his father Mr Sim Heng Hung was a carpenter - would eventually take over the reins from his grandfather.

The bakery was right beside the carpentry factory, and that was how the couple met. After getting married, they decided to leave their jobs and run the business full-time.

"My mom has the background, and even though my dad wasn't trained as a baker, he loves eating all these things," said Mr Sim.

"So he is always thinking about new ways and things, so together then they started doing more and more pastries. A lot of recipes are actually created on their own."

And along the way things changed. Mr Sim's parents moved on from selling min jiang kueh, and expanded to selling different kinds of homemade pastries.

These days, they are particularly well known for their Teochew mooncakes, pineapple tarts and kueh bangkit (tapioca cookies).

But it was never on the cards that Mr Sim would follow in his parents' footsteps. 

"Since young, my parents told me, you have to study … if not you’ll end up like me. They are the very traditional kind of family. So the mindset is always if you don't study, you end up doing things which are very tough. It’s a tough job, you wake up very early, you sweat it out, you work very, very hard, and things like that," he recalled.

"If you study hard, you get a better job, you sit in the air con ... But the funny thing is, now I ended up here."

Mr Sim's journey to teaching had a few "detours" such as spending another year in junior college, he recalled.

"All these I believe added on to my life experiences. I had to experience a few ups and downs, failures and things like that, which I believe made me stronger," he said.

"I feel in a way indebted to very good teachers that I met, (and there were) quite a few of them. Even until today, I keep in contact with them."

Inspired by these teachers, Mr Sim knew what kind of teacher he wanted to become.

"That ... experience forms a large proportion of my teaching belief, the way I taught, the way I spoke to my students and things like that. Without that ... I don't think I'll be able to do what I did in school as a teacher," said Mr Sim, who taught in a secondary school for about seven years.

FIREFIGHTING "EVERYWHERE"

Being a teacher came with its highs and lows, said Mr Sim.

"To say that it's perfect, I'd be lying," he said. "There were things that I really, really loved about the job, but there are also things that I really didn't enjoy."

What he enjoyed the most was his interactions with students, as he was roped into the school's discipline committee. He eventually became a discipline master.

"That was the one thing that kept me going for very long," he recalled. "What really fuelled me is really in this role .. I got to interact with the students, students from really very, very diverse backgrounds."

Getting through to these students brought him satisfaction.

"I felt that I was in the right place, I'm doing what I'm good at," he said. "You've got to have a lot of different tricks up your sleeve. The way you talk to different students ... It's really about the tone, the language and everything - you just really have to be very quick, very flexible."

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