You left Myanmar a few years ago. What made you decide to go?
It was not one thing. It was a lot of small things adding up. The work I could find at home did not pay enough to save anything, and then it stopped paying much at all. I watched my parents get older and I watched the money get tighter, and I realised the most loving thing I could do was to go somewhere that would pay me for my time properly. I did not want to go. I was afraid to go. But I was more afraid of staying and being useless to the people I love. That is what decided it, in the end. Not ambition. Just the math of love.
You went through an agency. What was the process like?
It was the loan that scared me most. You pay the agency, you pay for the medical, the flight, the documents, and the loan sits on your back for the first year. I was told so many things and I signed so many papers and I did not understand half of them. I was lucky. I knew a cousin here who read them with me over the phone. The person who helped me get the job is the reason I am still working and not in trouble. I tell everyone the same thing now: whatever you are promised, get somebody you trust to read the papers. Not somebody from the agency. Somebody on your side. A passport you can't read is not freedom. It is a door you never got the key to.
The first months in Singapore. What do you remember?
I remember being tired in a way I had never been tired. The heat, the hours, the noise. I remember the first payday, counting the money and not believing it was mine. And I remember the loneliness, which nobody warns you about. In Myanmar I was somebody's son, somebody's friend, somebody's neighbor. Here, for a while, I was just a worker in a uniform. It took me a long time to find my way back to being a person. The other Burmese workers helped. We found each other, we shared food, we talked about home, and slowly I started again. You do not arrive as a whole person. You arrive in pieces and you build yourself out here, one meal shared, one Sunday at a time.
What is a normal week for you now?
Wake early, go to work, work properly all day. The work itself is straightforward if you do it carefully and show up. I have learned that the people I work with respect you more for being reliable than for being fast. So I am reliable. On my day off, I go to Peninsula Plaza with the others, I get real food, I hear the news from home, I call my mother. I send money home every month, no matter what. That is not flexible. That is the point of all of this. Everything else bends around that.
The money that goes home — it obviously matters. What does it feel like to send it?
The first month I sent money home, my mother called me crying. Not because it was a lot. Because I had done it. She did not want my money. She wanted to know I was alive and that I was coming back. The money is how I stay connected to them. Every month it is a small proof that I am still here, still working, still theirs. People think remittances are just numbers in an app. They are not. They are the only way some of us can say I love you from here and have it actually arrive. I do not feel proud sending it. I feel like I am finally doing my part. It is a heavy kind of relief.
What is the hardest thing about being seen here as just a worker?
That some days you believe it yourself. When people look past you on the train, you start to look past yourself. It took me a long time to remember that I am not the job. I am a son, I am a father of my own someday, I am a person who reads and thinks and has opinions. The work is what I do. It is not who I am. That sounds simple, but you have to defend it over and over, mostly against yourself, in a city that mostly sees the uniform.
If a friend told you they were thinking of leaving Myanmar the way you did, what would you say?
I would say: go if you must, but go with your eyes wide open. Have a real job and a real employer and a contract you have read with someone you trust. Do not borrow money you cannot repay from people you do not know. Keep your documents in your own hands as much as you can. Stay in touch with home every single week — that is not weakness, that is what keeps you human. And send money home, even a little. Not because they need it. Because it keeps you tethered to the reason you left. The moment you stop being connected to why you came, you are just tired and far away. You came for them. Never let yourself forget that.
Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the contributor, in line with our safety and consent policy.