From supplementing family income to being sole breadwinner
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Ms Rita Ng, whose husband died of a heart attack last month, bakes and sells kueh lapis with the help of her daughter, Ms Joey Low.
ST PHOTO: TIMOTHY DAVID
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Soon after Ms Rita Ng started her baking business around Christmas, her deliveryman husband died from a heart attack on Jan 6.
Mr Low Nyong Tiong, a former taxi driver, collapsed while delivering food on his bicycle. He was 61, the same age as his wife.
Ms Ng had been a housewife all her married life, caring for their elder daughter, Irine Low, who has Down syndrome.
Now 22, Irine works at a centre for adults with special needs. Their younger daughter, Joey, 21, is a first-year student at Nanyang Technological University.
Despite not having been in the workforce for decades, Ms Ng, who used to work as a bank teller, started baking to supplement her husband's earnings during the pandemic.
Her speciality cake, kueh lapis in original and prune flavours, makes use of ingredients such as cloves and mace from her Indonesian heritage. She grew up in the city of Jambi in Sumatra and learnt the recipe from her mother.
She started out baking for friends and orders grew after her daughter Joey set up a Mama Lapis Instagram account for her.
Ms Joey Low also helps to manage orders that come in through the Promonade.sg website, a platform for home-based businesses.
Over the Chinese New Year period, Ms Ng, now a Singapore citizen, worked 10 hours a day fulfilling orders.
She says in Mandarin: "It has been very tiring, but I must go on working."
A woman of few words, she is determined to succeed in bringing home the bacon.
"Even if I eventually have to take a part-time job, I can do anything, although I don't want to wash toilets," she says.
Ms Low adds: "We have a little dream to open a shop so that my sister can work there, as well as others with disabilities."
She receives a bursary from her university, but has been worrying about the family's finances, pondering whether she should drop out of school to work.
She says they did not have luxuries when she was a child - eating fast food or buying new clothes were a rare treat - but her father's sudden death has forced her to grow up even more quickly.
"I was shielded from all of the stress, which had always been handled by my dad and mum. Even though I'm of age, I feel that I'm adulting early," she says.
"Now I share the burden of caring for the family with my mum."
