GE2025: He’s a prize-winning singer and Pritam Singh’s legislative assistant. Now add ‘potential candidate for Tampines GRC’

As a young child, Mr Jimmy Tan felt inferior to other children his age because he was not as well-to-do. His childhood home in Chai Chee was a small one-room rental flat on the ground floor, which felt overcrowded when his parents and three siblings were all home.

New toys were a rare luxury and unlike other children who got to spend time playing, Mr Tan would walk around the neighbourhood with his siblings promoting his mother’s popsicles or Chinese desserts.

Mr Tan, a potential candidate for Tampines Group Representation Constituency (GRC) for the Workers' Party (WP), said that selling these desserts helped the family of six make ends meet, supplementing the income of his father's work as a school bus driver.

Although he has good memories of his childhood and his mother’s never-give-up entrepreneurial spirit shaped who he is today, Mr Tan admitted that those times were tough. 

“I felt I was one class lower than my friends growing up,” the 53-year-old sales manager said. "We lived in a flat where if you close your eyes, you can easily walk to the kitchen, toilet and bedroom. It was quite small."

Now a grandfather of two, he is co-founder of Immanuel Engineering, a family-run business that sells process and explosion safety equipment.

He hopes to give back to society and create a bright future for other Singaporeans – through politics. 

During a nearly two-hour-long interview with CNA TODAY, Mr Tan spoke at length about his family, professional life, how he got involved with a political party, as well as his love for singing that clinched him a nationwide champion title.

He revealed that he became more interested in politics while watching Mr Low Thia Khiang, then the leader of WP, make a victory speech shortly after the People's Action Party lost Aljunied GRC to the opposition in a watershed moment during the 2011 General Election.

However, his greater political awakening came later around 2017 when he felt the PAP government was able to easily pass a bill amending the constitution to adjust the eligibility criteria for presidential candidates, despite concerns raised by WP’s Members of Parliament.

These changes included raising the eligibility criteria for candidates to have experience comparable to running a company with S$500 million in shareholder equity for the most recent three year period, up from running a company with at least S$100 million in paid-up capital.

“So from then, I realised that single-party dominance should not be the way for a democratic country. I think we should have the active participation of a rational, responsible and respectable opposition party,” Mr Tan said.

“That was the year that really shook me from my political slumber to my political awakening,” he added.

Thus, in 2018, he began actively volunteering for WP.

SERVING WITH THE WORKERS' PARTY

At 6.15pm on Monday, while I was observing his work as a WP member, Mr Tan walked me through his typical routine as he opened a storage room at the void deck of 672 Jalan Damai in the Bedok Reservoir neighbourhood.

Like clockwork, he pulled out chairs and put up place cards indicating where residents may register for Aljunied GRC MP Pritam Singh’s weekly Meet-The-People Session, which starts at 7.30pm. 

As he put on a lanyard labelled “legislative assistant”, he told me with pride that he was often the first person to arrive and set up these weekly sessions.

He has rarely missed one – so much so that he celebrated his 50th birthday at this very same void deck three years ago.

His familiarity with residents was evident as he waved at residents who knew him by name and lent a listening ear to their woes.

The way volunteers would seek him out whenever they were uncertain about something made him seem like a walking encyclopedia. He had solutions and suggestions at his fingertips.

Mr Tan told me that listening to residents and helping them find closure or solutions to the problems they face bring him satisfaction and motivate him to keep going.

In 2023, he became Mr Singh’s secretarial assistant and would oversee the weekly Meet-The-People Sessions.

At the start of this year, he became Mr Singh’s legislative assistant – a paid role where MPs are given a monthly allowance to hire one – organising estate-wide events and continuing to help out at Meet-The-People Sessions, among other duties. 

Besides helping the WP chief, Mr Tan has been visiting residents' homes and meeting them around the Tampines town since 2018. A resident of Tampines himself, he now leads the team of volunteers there.

“The receptiveness of the ground so far has been encouraging and we will continue to do our best wherever we have been assigned by the party,” Mr Tan said about being potentially fielded in an estate WP has never contested.

The General Election will be held on May 3 and candidates from 11 political parties are expected to be fielded. 

One thing that Mr Tan constantly hears from residents is their worries about the cost of living and he hopes to raise these concerns in parliament should he be given the people’s mandate, he added.

Cost-of-living concerns may encompass transport and utility costs, but he observed that the top three woes are housing affordability, higher education costs and healthcare costs, especially for retirees.

“I think these are the three issues that we need to dig into because (they affect you at) different stages of your life,” he said.

“In (settling down) with your family, you deal with the housing costs. When your children grow up, you have to prepare yourself to fund their higher education. When you enter into retirement ... your medical costs will be a concern.”

When asked about how he would propose to address the rising cost of living, he acknowledged that it was complex but emphasised the importance of understanding the issue first and foremost.

“If you do not even understand or recognise that there is a problem, then there's no way you will be able to address this concern,” he said. "So acknowledge the problem, work out a plan to propose to the government of the day in parliament.

"I think that is a big part of the responsibility that (an MP has) to fulfil.”

Editor's Note: This article previously stated that Mr Tan's political awakening was due to Parliament's passing of constitutional amendments to reserve an election for a particular racial group if no one from that group has been president for five continuous terms in 2017. Following Mr Tan's clarification, the article has been amended to reflect that he felt more strongly about the raising of eligibility criteria for candidates.

A PROMISE TO HIS FATHER, A HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

Even though he looked quite serious most of the time as we were talking, Mr Tan lit up when I asked him about his family and he proceeded to gush about his two grandchildren whose baby photographs were part of the digital wallpaper on his computer.

He tries to dedicate two days a week to spending time with his family, though he started doing this only in recent years.

As a self-proclaimed workaholic, he had spent much time away from his children and stroke-stricken father to focus on his job, which involved frequent travel between Singapore and China in the early 2000s. 

However, when he was asked to move to China for work in 2009, he declined to uproot his family.

Instead, he spoke to his siblings and they decided to start a family business in the oil industry, which evolved to sell specialised safety equipment.

Outside of work, Mr Tan has a talent for singing. He was a winner at the Chinese singing competition Golden Age Talentime in 2023, apparent from the trophy and countless posters of himself made by his family that decorated his office.

Participants had to be 50 years old and above for this contest, which is televised on Mediacorp's Channel 8.

“My late father, a stroke patient, stayed home most of the time because he (was) not mobile. TV programmes were the primary and only entertainment for him,” Mr Tan said.

“I used to (jokingly) tell him I would join (the singing contest) when I turned 50 years old.

"Unfortunately, he passed away nine years before I turned 50. I joined the competition later to fulfil my promise to him,” Mr Tan added as he teared up.

With years of karaoke singing under his belt, Mr Tan came up champion in the competition and while doing walkabouts in Tampines, he is occasionally recognised by people who watch the programme. 

“I won these two huge speakers and the karaoke machine, but I have to put them in my office since my neighbours would kill me (if I used them at home),” he said when I asked about the karaoke set in his office. 

“I love to sing, jio (invite) me anytime.”

Throughout our conversation, one theme kept surfacing: regret.

Mr Tan regretted not spending more time with his father before he had a stroke. He regretted not being more present during his two daughters' early years and he regretted letting his school crush slip away in secondary school.

He was scant with details about his love life, but said that his first marriage broke down in 2019. He is now dating his first love from his secondary school days and has even written a Chinese song dedicated to her titled 21 Years Later.

With Singapore going to the polls on May 3, Mr Tan has no plans to regret anything more.

He is glad that his family members were supportive when he told them why he wanted to be involved in politics, even though he would be away from home "quite extensively" if elected.

“But I think they want to see me being happy, doing what I call 'my calling' in the next stage of my life.

"I'm doing something for the betterment of Singapore and I think there's nothing for me to fear (in stepping up as a candidate). 

“Ultimately, it is important to me that our future generations, the future of Singapore, continue to go from strength to strength, from glory to glory.”