In 2017, Muhammad Shawal Bin Jumari left his parents' house as a newlywed, and moved into a HDB flat with his wife.
But this is not your stereotypical Singaporean coming-of-age story — Shawal, at 27, was returning to the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) to pursue a Higher National ITE Certificate (Higher Nitec), having previously dropped out after his first ITE enrolment in 2006.
He was also starting out in an IT support role at a company dealing in computers, his first permanent job after having worked variously at a cafe, the Singapore Discovery Centre, and the zoo, among other stints.
His life was picking up, things were looking good for him.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of his family.
Shawal's father, a delivery driver, was an undischarged bankrupt, while his mother, who worked as a coffeeshop manager, struggled with alcoholism.
At that point, Shawal's parents, his two younger sisters, and his nephew were still relying heavily on him to make ends meet.
His family — living in a one-room rental flat at that time — was mired in a 22-year funk that required Shawal, their only son, to bail them out time and time again.
Coming home from work one evening, Shawal says, he found his nephew hiding under a bed.
"I had to pull him out from under the bed, and he had peanut butter all over his face."
When Shawal questioned him, the little boy revealed that his mother had not given him food for the entire day, and that he had resorted to eating peanut butter as there was no more bread in the house.
"I see a lot of me in him", Shawal says, blinking away tears.
"Feels bad, you know? Like, I look at him right, I think of myself. Because when I was younger, it was like that also."
Heartbreaking moments like this made Shawal wonder whether he should simply give up on trying to fix things, since it seemed that his family was "really a lost cause".
At the same time, it made him resolve to follow through with his decision to leave the family home, and in so doing, to break a cycle of bankruptcy, alcoholism, and poverty.
Shawal explains how the family got into their situation, and how his departure shook things up in the one-room rental flat, setting the stage for a dramatic turn of fortunes.
Growing up
Photo courtesy of Shawal.
The family did not always live in that one-room rental flat, Shawal says.
In fact, he remembers, as a young boy, cycling in the living room at home, which was, at that point, a five-room flat.
Growing up, he was raised by an aunt, his mother's sister, who lived with them after her husband's passing. Today, he considers Hokkien as his first language, as that was the language he heard the most at home, as a child.
"Like you know, when you stub your toe or what, then you'll be like '$%!#@*', and that phrase typically is in Hokkien for me, so I guess like Hokkien is my first language."
Shawal's mother is Chinese, and his father is Malay, but he chose to study his literal mother tongue in school, recalling with some glee the confusion on people's faces at someone with his name being sent to Chinese-language competitions.
Leukaemia and bankruptcy hit
Shawal's younger sister's first brush with leukaemia at the age of four in 1997 would mark the beginning of the family's struggles.
Photo courtesy of Shawal.
Costly treatments saw the cancer going into remission, only to return soon after, in 2000.
A suitable bone marrow donor could not be found, prompting sombre prognoses and estimates of how much longer she might have to live.
Happily, the doctor were eventually proven wrong when Shawal's sister made a miracle recovery.
The toll that this had taken on the family's finances, however, was not as easily reversed.
Shawal later learned that it was during this time that his father was declared a bankrupt. His recollection of how this came to be is hazy, but recalls that his father was convinced to sign up as a partner in a failed business venture, leaving him saddled with significant debt.
He then went from being a warehouse manager — which was an "okay job", says Shawal — to a taxi driver, and then a delivery driver.
From five rooms to one
Even as the family's home had to be downgraded, at first to a four-room flat, where rooms would be leased out for additional income, Shawal recounts that "I didn't know that I was poor", explaining that he was still too young for the full reality to set in.
"One day," Shawal says, "people came to stick stickers in my house. They looked like they were government officials or something", he recalls, saying that visits to court soon followed.
Eventually, the family moved into a one-room rental flat.
Photo courtesy of Shawal.
"Everything went downhill"
"When we moved to the rental flat, it was like everything went downhill," Shawal says, almost as if the misfortune that followed from that point eclipsed the events that led up to it.
The most significant development was Shawal's nephew coming into the picture.
Shawal's sister, having had a miracle recovery from leukaemia, "kind of gave up on life", he says, going out till late in the evening, dropping out of school, spending time with "bad company", and going through several boyfriends.
"Shouldn't you cherish your life a bit more?" Shawal remarks, adding that instead, "she kind of went the other way".
By the age of 17, she was pregnant.
While the pregnancy thankfully turned out uneventful, the cost of the additional checkups (because of her previous experiences with leukaemia), and of caring for a new baby, eventually added up.
The family then had their first taste of having their utilities cut off when the family's prepaid credit ran out, causing a blackout, with water flow reduced to a trickle.
Shawal recalls that "at first it was like, quite shocking", but soon became commonplace.
The family eventually learned to live with it and would even laugh it off, with candles prepared for the next inevitable blackout.
Gradually realising family finances were out of control
Shawal's parents never allowed him to manage the household's finances, even though he started contributing to the family's finances — first with his NS allowance, then later on with his income from various jobs.
Perhaps it was a decision that was consciously made to shield him from the ugly truth: That their finances were out of control.
It was the little behavioural clues — his mother's spending on alcohol, and allowing his sister to stay out late at clubs instead of coming home — that made Shawal realise that things were not what they seemed.
"I don't know whether I was the enabler," Shawal says thoughtfully, perhaps wondering if he could have done more to help his family back then.
But then again, he says: "I don't know whether I know enough to go in and confront them and ask questions," recalling that his parents were conflict-avoidant, and reticent about the family's finances.
"Like strangers living together"
Shawal, who had told his story thus far with some degree of airy nonchalance, paused and sighed audibly at the next question posed to him: did the family stay united through it all?
"I think the key problem with my house is that we didn't have open communication," he diagnoses. It was not in his family's nature to sit down for a discussion, when things went wrong.
Each of his family members took it upon themselves to deal with their own problems in their own way, in private.
"So we kind of quietly let things go bad," Shawal says before pausing. "Like strangers living together."
Photo courtesy of Shawal.
The move
The plan, as you would already know, was for Shawal to move out of the rental flat. In his mind, things could only improve for his family if he left; it would be "a net positive for everybody".
He walks me through the thought process that led him to this conclusion.
Shawal shares that he was, on many occasions, asked to bail his family out of mounting loanshark debts, and to fork out large sums of unpaid rent after eviction notices were issued.
These requests put him in an impossible position — refusing to pay could result in eviction, or loanshark harassment, which would impact Shawal directly.
Paying off the debts, however, meant that his parents' financial mismanagement could continue.
"I don't want my money to be enabling a person to do bad things, right?" he explains, referring to his mother's alcohol purchases and his sister's nights out at the clubs.
The repeated instances of him bailing the family out, however, created a precedent of Shawal's parents falling back on him and his savings.
"What was clear to me was that I had to break out, and then I fix it from the outside."
Now, before you think that this moving-out plan was hastily conceived in the heat of the moment, Shawal lets on that he had been planning this for nearly 10 years, since 2008.
Back then, serving full-time national service, the 18-year-old Shawal saved up around S$500 to purchase his "first real laptop", and began to get "very savvy" in Googling for ways to improve his family's situation.
He also began putting a part of his NS allowance into an insurance savings plan which would mature when he was 35, which is when he initially planned to purchase a flat of his own.
His timeline moved up in 2017, however, when his then-girlfriend agreed to be his wife. He moved into her father's HDB flat.
For a decision as big and impactful as leaving one's family home, Shawal's departure was pretty anticlimactic. His parents, who were unexpectedly home on the day he moved the last of his things, did not have a strong reaction.
They even nonchalantly offered to help him move.
He found out the impact of his departure later, from his younger sister, who called him soon after he left.
"Why you just leave the house like that?" he recalls her asking. His departure, she said, had saddened their mother, driving her to yet another drinking episode.
For a moment he doubted his decision. However, he pressed on, believing it was the only way to bring his family out of their dire situation.
"I chose the road right? I have to walk the whole road... to continue doing it, because if I believe that this is the way out of this, I have to do it lah. If I do it halfway then the situation can only get worse."
Turning point
Since Shawal's move in 2017, things have taken a turn for the better.
Shawal had figured that his departure would force his family to pay more attention to his youngest sister, Hasyimah.
With him gone, they were forced to confront the possibility that she, too, could one day leave home.
This meant that they could no longer take advantage of her quiet contributions, which at one point included bringing her nephew along to her secondary school when no one else could tend to him.
The dynamics in the family have changed dramatically, with his youngest sister, now aged 23, having more of a say in the family's affairs, as their parents have begun to allow her to manage the household finances, according to a plan that Shawal worked out previously.
Shawal's older sister's visits to the clubs are no longer financed with the family's budget, he says.
"She's more willing to express her displeasure," he says, but explains that she is able to do so more diplomatically than he did before, allowing tensions to be resolved productively.
His younger sister has also graduated with a polytechnic diploma, becoming the most educated member of the family.
"Like a normal kid, that every parent wanted. Go to poly, get a job, then you help support the house right? Yeah, so she took up that role."
And with that, she also managed to bring in the highest salary among her family members.
His father was also discharged from bankruptcy in 2019, which subsequently allowed the family to find enough credit to make a downpayment for a modest three-room HDB flat, where they now reside.
As for Shawal himself, he now holds a stable job in IT support at an educational institution and has even managed to buy over his father-in-law's flat.
He visits his family in their new flat every once in a while, though he says that it typically happens when his help is needed, such as helping his nephew get set up for home-based learning during the Circuit Breaker.
Shawal sees his decision in 2017 as a turning point, instead of being yet another positive blip in an overall negative trajectory.
But he is reluctant to celebrate the progress since then, and is instead relieved that things didn't worsen for his family when he left.
After all, as thought-out as his plan was, there was a chance that things would continue to go downhill.
"At least it worked out lah," he says, imagining that his relatives would likely have blamed it on him, having not been fully aware of the situation.
"If you don't know what's going on, you'd be like, 'oh no, that guy is bad man, when he was at the house he only know how to scold people, then after that he just know how to run away.'"
"Sometimes you got to do the hard thing to fix the problem," he adds quietly.
TV series played out at home
"I never watch TV for a long time already," Shawal says.
"My house [is] TV already, every day drama. Why would I still watch TV? You name it, I have it at home, like a TV series."
This conversation, often repeated jokingly between him and a musician friend of his, eventually turned into a concrete plan to write a song about his life.
"What if there's a lot of people like me?" Shawal says, explaining that as he grew older, his attention turned outwards as he started to develop a better grasp of society and the way it works.
Realising that he never had a song to relate to while growing up, he decided to write one for the sake of "people who were like me, or are currently like the me that was before."
Holding It Together
The song, "Holding It Together", and accompanying music video, was released earlier this month on YouTube.
In it, Shawal sings and raps in Chinese, with lyrics written over the span of eight years. Writing was his way of recording his thoughts and feelings, he says, but also served as "a way for me to talk to myself".
The music video features him at Seletar reservoir, but also includes footage and photos captured from the one-room rental flat where the family lived, which Shawal himself shot just before leaving home.
These are interspersed with photos of his childhood, which, as he describes in the song, was "carefree", and where "everything was provided".
Reception
Shawal shares that he was initially unsure whether his family would be receptive to the song and the music video, as it was the first time that the story was being told in such detail.
Which is why he was very glad that feedback from them and other viewers has been positive.
Beyond that, he's keen for the song to make a difference, especially in light of greater hardship brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic this year.
"Hopefully this will help everybody out lah. If he's in a bad state and if he's making a tough decision like I was. Hopefully he would hear it, and be like, 'okay, I'm going to stick to my decision, I'm going to do the tough thing, so that I can fix this.'"
Stories of Us is a series about ordinary people in Singapore and the unique ways they’re living their lives. Be it breaking away from conventions, pursuing an atypical passion, or the struggles they are facing, these stories remind us both of our individual uniqueness and our collective humanity.
Top image by Faris Samri and from Shawal
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