Motormouth: Thank you, mother, for letting me play with cars too much

No mothers would mean no editors, ever.

The editors include yours truly, whose editorial journey started on a Tuesday morning in 1973 when I exited my mother’s womb workshop with a little pedal to the metal.

She gave me the most precious gift of human life in the very first minute of my birthday, without which I won't have any chance at all to hit the road towards my eventual career as an automotive creative. 

The first few kilometres of said journey started on a Chinatown street (a stone’s throw from today’s Tanjong Pagar MRT station), where I spent the first few years of my childhood. 

I was the youngest child in my family of six. My father was a sailor and odd-job labourer, while my mother was a housewife who did well in primary school but had to quit because her elders believed that education for girls was a waste of what little cash they had. 

The Tings and our things were crammed into one tiny room. We shared a communal kitchen and common toilets with other crammed-in families, all on the same second storey of the shophouse stuck between basic and bleak. 

For some reason, my recollection of that kitchen and those squatting toilets remains as dark as the creaky Chinatowny stairway.

Maybe my home-cooked meals as a low-SES youngster were always simple and never memorable, even the Chinese New Year feasts with a bit more protein than usual. Maybe I didn’t shower often, because the whole family needed to save water/money.

Or maybe I prefer to remember playing with a handful of toy cars in that humble Tras Street abode.

I cannot confirm whether one or none of those little cars belonged to me, even though these earliest "motoring" memories of mine are less hazy than the exhaust fumes from the sooty tailpipes of a dirty diesel lorry.

But I'm pretty sure that my mother asked the kind neighbour to encourage her kid to share his wheels with me and hand-drive the vehicles together on the wood floor. 

Since I was the have-not, I happily let the other boy play the towkay driving a Mercedes-Benz while I was his kar kia with a trustworthy Toyota. I think I performed well as an underaged Hokkien henchman, because I got upgraded to a classy Caddy for weekdays and a cheap Celica for weekends. 

My next automotive upgrade was the huge open-air carpark below the Clementi HDB flat my family moved into after Chinatown.

There, I developed a quirky hobby of jotting down the different makes, models and registration numbers of the many cars parked downstairs and at nearby blocks.

My mother was probably worried that my teenage ambition was to be a random parking warden, patrolling public carparks islandwide to issue summonses and check out the nicer cars at the same time.

Thankfully, she nudged me to study hard while allowing me to indulge in my lifelong passion for cars, from pin-ups to write-ups. Luckily, my favourite subject was the English language, which would support my automotive storytelling several decades down the road.

The chapter with my 81-year-old mother closed in 2018 when she departed to heaven. She would have turned 90 this month (May 2026). 

2018 would have been even tougher for me if my mum didn't deploy her blessings from beyond to help change my car-reer path for the better a few months after her passing. She blessed me again when that delightful detour ended at a U-turn back to motoring media as Motorist editor. 

Thank you, mother, for letting me play with cars too much and quietly helping me along the way.

The columnist with his past cars and late mother (1936-2018).

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