SINGAPORE: A birthday cake made from agar-agar topped with a salmon head made the perfect treat for Singapore Zoo’s resident polar bear Inuka, which celebrated its 27th birthday on Tuesday (Dec 26).

The bear, which is in its 70s in human years, was presented with the novel cake to the delight of around 400 visitors. 

It is the first time the bear has had a cake made from agar-agar, which is derived from seaweed and is commonly found in Asian desserts. Previous birthday cakes comprised of an ice base and various toppings.

This year’s cake was made from agar-agar to make it easier on Inuka’s teeth, said Dr Cheng Wen-Haur, deputy CEO and chief life sciences officer for Wildlife Reserves Singapore.

“For his birthday cake we have to make it very special, taking into account he’s already on a senior diet, made from low sugar and very high quality protein and fat, and that is in the salmon. Salmon also happens to be one of his favourite (foods),” said Dr Cheng.

The locally born polar bear has surpassed the 25-year average lifespan of a typical polar bear under human care. 

He is currently on a senior animal care programme, which helps to manage his arthritis. This includes weekly health checks, special diets and close observations, as well as an assessment carried out daily to determine Inuka’s quality of life. 

The bear currently weighs 513kg and measures 2.5m from nose to tail.

Dr Cheng said that Inuka will be the last polar bear to be kept in the Singapore Zoo for a “long, long time”. 

“Our policy right now is to concentrate on animals that we can create an environment that is as close to an environment where they’re found naturally.”

“So to bring another polar bear we need to create an artificial environment … and the carbon footprint of creating such an environment for him in Singapore will be very, very high and it would not be in line with the conservation messages that we want to communicate,” he added.

The decision not to bring in more polar bears in the future was made a decade ago, after discussions with the zoo’s welfare ethics committee and external consultants.

But Inuka’s condition remains stable and his carers are optimistic. 

“We’re monitoring his quality of life very closely, and with the way he tackled his birthday cake just now, he has a very hearty appetite and a good will to go on living,” Dr Cheng said.

SINGAPORE: They had not yet graduated from university, but like many of their peers, Joanne Heng and Chan Kheng Yee were already out and about looking for a full-time job. A posting on online portal Gumtree caught their attention, and they responded to the call for “interns” the very next day.

Like any job application, the two friends had to go through a job interview filled with questions about their sincerity, motivation and commitment to the position.  

But this job required very different skill sets from your typical office job: Anson Loo, the person who made the post on Gumtree, was looking for young interns to help him run his hawker stall.

“I realised that there are young people who want to become hawkers, but face a lot of financial constraints,” said Anson, who sells prawn mee at Ghim Moh food centre. “So I thought, why not target young people with no experience, so I can give them the training from scratch?”

YOUNG AND INEXPERIENCED, BUT PASSIONATE

Of the seven who applied, Anson said Joanne and Kheng Yee fit his requirements the best: young, passionate and completely new to the hawker trade. And indeed, the two, who met while they were studying in the polytechnic, recalled bonding over a shared interest in F&B even as students.

“We used to do part-time jobs at events or pasar malams, and after all these jobs, we realised the joy and satisfaction of serving people food we created ourselves,” said Joanne, a sociology graduate from the National University of Singapore (NUS). “We always preferred it to admin or office jobs.”

“And besides, we both love to eat.”

Their initial post-graduation plan, they explained, was to find an office job to earn enough money to set up their own food business. But they knew they would be dragging their feet to work every day, they added.

A chance online search, however, led them to Anson, and on the route to becoming full-fledged hawkers.

“We just searched Gumtree with keywords, and we typed in the word ‘hawker’,” said Kheng Yee, who has a psychology degree from the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS). “His post came out tops.”

Their decision in June, was without a doubt, an unconventional path for young university graduates. And the two recalled the shock and surprise from their friends and family when they first started.

“My parents were expecting me to get an office job, or become a teacher, and they didn’t expect me to go into this line,” said Kheng Yee. “My friends were quite shocked, but then at the same time they were also encouraging, because I think for our generation, the focus is on doing things we want to do, and excelling in it.”

TEETHING ISSUES

It is a flurry of activity in the tiny stall, and the two go about their daily tasks quickly and confidently: De-veining and de-shelling the fresh prawns, slicing the pork and cooking the noodles. 

They greet their customers with warm smiles, encouraging them to add on an extra fish cake to each steaming bowl of fragrant prawn noodles that they serve up, and swiftly dispatching each order to the waiting customer. 

Dressed in matching red shirts emblazoned with the logo of their stall, Prawn Village, it is hard to imagine the difficulties the two said they went through just a few months ago. 

But indeed, there were teething issues when they first started work in June.

At the time, Prawn Village opened for business at 9am, and the two said their biggest initial challenge was waking up early enough to get to work by 7.15am – a necessity, given the numerous tasks they have to complete before they serve their first customer.

“I have to wake up at 5.30am every day, and not press the snooze button,” said Joanne, laughing. “And after that you’re aching everywhere.”

“There was this once, we were really very late, and Anson asked us if we really treat this as work, or if we want it to be like a school, where there’s discipline,” added Kheng Yee.

The early mornings have got even earlier ever since the stall relocated to Ghim Moh in December, as they now serve their first customer at 6am. Now, they wake up at 1.30am to accompany Anson to buy the fresh seafood, before starting preparation work at 3am. 

As inexperienced hawkers, learning to cook the food and prepare the ingredients efficiently also took them a while.

“My memory isn’t very good, so remembering orders was my biggest challenge,” said Joanne. “Especially for those people who come and order, then go and sit down.

“Then later, they will come and tell me that my noodles are very nice, but my service is very bad!”

But they got up to speed after a few months of hard work, and lots of guidance from Anson.

“On my first day, I remember thinking…there are so many different types of noodles and I’ll have to remember them…and I thought that level was unreachable,” added Joanne. “But over time when I look back, I realised that I’ve grown so much since the very first day that we started.”

“I never thought I would touch these noodles, and now we’re cooking them.”

And despite Anson having some initial doubts about their abilities, they have progressed to the point where he is now able to let the two of them run the stall independently. 

“I was a little skeptical about their attitude and commitment, because there were initially some hiccups due to communication breakdowns,” he said. “But they showed me that they are not quitters.”

“They are really determined, they try very hard, and they can accept my scolding. That’s very impressive.”

TIME FLIES WHEN YOU’RE HAVING FUN

It is hard work: the two work twelve-hour shifts, six days a week. They also have to clean the stall thoroughly at the end of each day, and do the dishes.

And there is also much work behind the scenes. After assessing their skills and interests, Anson tasked the two girls with different responsibilities – Joanne handles the logistics of ordering and deals with suppliers, while Kheng Yee does research and development on the food, experimenting with new recipes and trying out different noodles.

This means that even when business tapers off, they have things to do. But despite the long hours, they say they wouldn’t have it any other way.

“When customers like our noodles, they come back and give us the feedback, saying that our noodles are fantastic, and they’ll recommend more friends to come,” said Kheng Yee. “I feel like the customers can tell that I cook my noodles with heart, and it’s really nice to hear what they say.”

And in August, they also got a little surprise from Anson: a promotion.

The initial plan, he explained, was to take the two on as “interns” on a profit sharing basis, with Anson taking 50 per cent of the profits, and the two splitting the remaining 50 per cent. But after doing this for two months, he realised the model did not sustain the incomes of all three of them. 

“So we sat down and discussed, and we realised that the two of them can actually run the stall by themselves,” he said. “So I told them if you are keen, let’s work on a timeline where I’ll exit from this business, and let the two of you run this whole show yourselves, and I will give you 90 per cent of the profit.”

“And then I’ll look around for other stalls to do the same thing.”

Though the promotion came as a surprise to Joanne and Kheng Yee, they agreed, and are now full-fledged partners in the business. But they are not taking it for granted: Work still goes on, and plans are in the pipeline to expand the stall further.

“Hopefully, we can make it even bigger than it is now,” said Joanne. “And maybe next time we’ll be the ones recruiting interns.” 

SINGAPORE: In a fit of pique, with no compromise in sight, a heated debate over fruit came to an unlikely denouement: “OK Google, what’s your favourite fruit?” 

Unflustered, the digital assistant answers, a little playfully: “I’m crazy about durians. The smell doesn’t get to me.”

That scenario may or may not have taken place, but it showed the amount of thought put into a conversation about a local favourite, the durian, for the Singaporean Assistant to understand the local context and nuances, explained Mr Deniz Binay, product manager of Google Assistant.  

“With the Assistant, we want you to be able to have a really natural conversation with Google to get things done in your world. And to be a truly helpful ‘kaki’ (friend), your Assistant needs to understand your world, and that includes your language, local culture and customs,” Mr Binay told Channel NewsAsia in an email.

“That’s why the Assistant is built to recognise local accents, as well as offer unique responses to questions that relate to local culture and customs – from local food, landmarks and even some Singlish terms.”

The customised-for-Singapore Google Assistant was launched on Nov 2 by the search giant, and it announced on Dec 15 that the digital assistant will be rolled out to phones running Android 5.0, also known as Lollipop.

In the email interview, Mr Binay shed more light on how the Google Assistant picked up Singlish, and the development effort behind it.

Q: How did you teach the Singaporean Assistant its local nuances?

A: In general, the responses you get from Google Assistant are a combination of algorithmically generated answers, like in Google Search, and responses written by a team of professional writers. With machine learning techniques, like natural language processing and voice recognition, the Google Assistant can learn to understand a new language.

But bringing the Google Assistant to a new language is much more than translation and language understanding.

It also means making sure that it knows the things, people and places that matter to people and that it understands local culture. That’s where our team of professional writers come in: They work very closely with our teams in Singapore and teach the Assistant things like names of local places, businesses and festivals, so you can say: “Ok Google, how do I get to Little India?”, “Where is the nearest NTUC?” or “When is Hari Raya Puasa next year?”

Q: So there’s a team of professional writers scripting Google Assistant’s responses? How does this work?

A: We wanted to make sure that you can have a really natural conversation with the Google Assistant, that’s why we built in a personality.

The team that works on the Google Assistant’s personality has a wide range of people with varying background, including folks with experience working at Pixar, the Onion, Nintendo, etc. We’ve researched the personality and artificial intelligence space and thought through how Google’s personality should manifest in a digital assistant – and we think the Google Assistant reflects the values and spirit of Google itself: Helpful, humble, and a little playful.

An example here might be the question: “What’s your favourite fruit?”

In this case, it isn’t Google Assistant pretending it’s a person or that it eats fruits. But we also aren’t ignoring the request from the user to have some fun. So you’ll get something like: “I’m crazy about durians. The smell doesn’t get to me” – answering the question, but not in a way that doesn’t fit the personality.

Q: How many Singaporeans were roped in to help develop the Singaporean Assistant?

A: We got help from dozens of Singaporean Googlers, as well as external volunteers from our local guides program, who helped us test the Singaporean Assistant over a period of several months.

Q. How accurate is Singaporean Assistant in voice recognition now?

A: We don’t have any numbers to share for Singapore but as vice president of product management Rishi Chandra said during the Made By Google event in October, we’ve been investing in speech recognition and natural language understanding for more than a decade and are pretty confident that we have one of the best voice recognition in the world.

In the last year, we’ve answered more than 100 million questions on the Google Assistant. To understand voices from users of different age groups, genders and accents, we’ve trained the Google Assistant at a scale that only Google could, with more than 50 million voice samples in hundreds of different ambient environments.

SINGAPORE: It is eight in the morning on Sunday and cabby Simon Ng has just ended his graveyard shift. He is not heading for Woodlands where he stays for a much needed rest. Instead, the 57-year-old is making his way to Willing Hearts’ soup kitchen in Eunos.

There, packets of food numbering in their hundreds are waiting to be distributed. The fare is simple – white rice with two servings of vegetables and a serving of meat. Mr Ng admitted they are not very tasty.

But he knows many look forward to them every day. He carries them into his blue Hyundai cab and drives to Block 521, Woodlands Drive 14. The void deck serves as a distribution point for this free food for the elderly and underprivileged seven days a week from 10am to 11.30am.

“Mostly, I take care of the old people first,” he said. “The young ones must wait. If there are extras, then they can take.”

Mr Ng set up the distribution point – ‘We Care at Woodgrove’ – more than two years ago after he found out that there’s a large number of elderly and wheelchair-bound residents living in his neighbourhood.

It started small – 20 packets of food for 10 people. But the number has grown because of posters advertising the free meals at the lift lobbies of surrounding blocks.

He now distributes more than 200 packets of food for about 70 people. They include foreign domestic workers and aging cleaners working at a nearby shopping mall. Some take more than one packet of food to have them for dinner as well. Everyone registers so that Mr Ng can keep track.

“I’m not only giving to those who stay nearby,” he said, referring to an 80-year-old man who lives 20 minutes away but makes the journey on foot to the void deck every day. “As long as you can walk and come here, I will give it to you.”

Demand continues to grow Mr Ng said, but he has had to put a cap on it.

“You cannot put so many packets of rice in one taxi,” he explained. “Sometimes, they bring fruit and bread from the kitchen also.”

Mr Ng can only guess why there is such a big demand for the free meals. 

“To me, the economy is bad,” he suggested. “Sometimes, people try to save money, maybe for their children’s education or marriage. Or they want to buy a new house. You don’t know.”

Everyone is treated equally. “Everybody is the same,” he added. “We are not judges; we cannot stop them and say you are not entitled to take food.”

A WELL-OILED OPERATION

Mr Ng is there every day. But he does not need to personally oversee the food distribution at ‘We Care at Woodgrove’. He has recruited about 30 volunteers to help. 

They are familiar with the drill. A taxi comes to a stop at the distribution point. Its boot flings open. Volunteers flock to the vehicle to take the food packets. They are repacked into bags of twos and threes and made ready for distribution.

“They do their own thing,” Mr Ng said. “Everything is arranged; I don’t need to shout around.”

The volunteers go the extra mile too; they make door-to-door deliveries for those who cannot make their way to the distribution point for one reason or another.

Mr Ng’s taxi is not the only one that is used to transport food from Willing Heart’s kitchen. He has roped in some 80 taxi drivers from the CabbyCare Charity Group, where he is a member, to help. “I can combine the two and help a lot of people,” he said.

While Willing Hearts has its own van, it needs more wheels because of the sheer number of distribution points islandwide. “They don’t have enough people,” he added. “For weekdays, they only have taxi drivers and a few volunteers.” 

Weekends are when Mr Ng personally handles the deliveries. He does not feel his well-oiled initiative is special. It is just something that takes two hours a day, he said humbly. “It’s nothing.”

But things were not always this smooth.

When Mr Ng started out, he could not find enough volunteers. He also did not have a permit to use the void deck space. Staff from the town council soon approached him and said he cannot carry on.

“I said this only goes on for two hours,” he recalled telling them. “After that, I will clean up. If the floor is dirty, I will clean also.” But they insisted that the rules had to be respected, he said.

Because the permit costs S$10 a day, Mr Ng said, he did not think he had enough money to sustain the daily operation. So, he approached Member of Parliament (MP) for Marsiling-Yew Tee GRC Ong Teng Koon for help.

“He settled it for me,” he added. “The MP knows I’m helping the elderly here. If the elderly face welfare issues, I will bring them to see the MP also.”

HIS FATHER’S DEATH WAS A JOLT

At the distribution point, elderly residents mill about, chatting with each other. A toddler waddles over to Mr Ng and looks at him with puppy eyes. “I treat the small kids like my own children,” he said. “If I wasn’t talking to you, this kid would have asked me to carry her.”

For Mr Ng, this is more than just a place to get free meals.

“I encourage all the old people to come down to meet people and exercise, and not to stay at home,” he said. “If they are alone at home or they have to cook, I ask them to come down.”

It is a one-stop centre for their needs. “If they need anything, they have my phone number and I can ask my volunteers to attend to them straight away,” he added. “No need to call your son to come all the way from work.”

Mr Ng’s love for helping the elderly was sparked by his father’s death more than 20 yeas ago.

His mother died when he was two. Growing up, he was never at home and frequently skipped school.

“I always lived with my friends; I seldom went home to eat,” his voice breaking as he told me. “My father always had to look for me.”

When he was 30, his father died from a fall in the toilet. His father’s death came too suddenly, he lamented. “I never took care of my parents.”

Now, Mr Ng tries to make up for it by treating the elderly like his “own relatives”. He began more than a decade ago by helping out at grassroots events, before joining Willing Hearts in 2014 to help with the food deliveries. “I never chose places,” he said. “I just sent to wherever they wanted.”

He decided to set up the distribution point in Woodlands after three months of volunteering at Willing Hearts. He has never missed a day there since, staying for the entire one and a half hours each day.

By the time the father of two girls gets home at around lunch time, he is exhausted. But does not go to sleep just yet. He helps out with the housework because his wife works till late. Mr Ng washes the clothes, squeezes in an hour’s nap, then cleans the house.

Mr Ng is also an active member of several community groups. His evenings are filled with meetings. It is 10pm by the time he goes to bed. He wakes up at midnight and goes to work again.

There is a neck pillow in his  taxi – a gift from his youngest daughter so he can get some sleep while waiting for his regular passengers. The punishing schedule has taken a toll on him.

“My medical report just came out,” he said. “I have high cholesterol and high blood pressure. The doctor says I don’t have enough sleep.”

Mr Ng does not know if he can carry on manning his distribution point.

“I’m only trying to see how long I can continue,” he added. “I’ll try to find someone to take over because my medical problem is quite bad.”

PERSEVERANCE AND PRAISE

Until then, Mr Ng continues to give. He sends the elderly to traditional Chinese medicine and dialysis sessions for free, raise donations to buy them adult diapers and organise get-togethers with live music and free food.

“If I can get enough support, I want to organise an eight-course dinner for them,” he said.

Mr Ong, the MP who oversees the Woodgrove division, said residents are “very appreciative” of Mr Ng’s work.

“He’s been going around corralling resources to help these poor people not only in terms of food, but also in terms of adult diapers,” Mr Ong told Channel NewsAsia. “He’s doing all this out of his heart – it’s all goodwill and he’s got nothing to gain from this.

“So, I’m very supportive of his work, and I think he’s a great example for a lot of us in the community who are trying to help people.”

It is no surprise then that everyone in the neighbourhood seems to know Mr Ng. Just after 11.30am, a garbage truck pulls in on one of its regular rounds. The driver waves at Mr Ng, who in turn signals that the food has finished. “He came too late,” Mr Ng said, laughing.

For Mr Ng, it is never too late to start contributing to society. He was in his 40s when he started, but admitted that “the more I did it, the more I got into it”. “Now, I spend most of my time doing charity work,” he said.

Indeed, Mr Ng says he does not drive a taxi to earn a salary, but to help others. He spends about S$70 a month on diesel and car park fees for his food distribution.

“My friends ask how I am going to earn money by helping people,” he added. “But I told them never mind, as long as I am happy.”