To save an old-school ‘zi char’ stall from COVID-19, a family comes together

SINGAPORE: He did not want his children to know just how badly COVID-19 had hit his business.

Whenever they called to ask about his zi char stall, Albert Choy Xiong Fa — or Uncle Albert to his customers — would only say he was slightly affected.

But business had dropped by 70 per cent, and from 30 fish heads sold daily to zero. At one point during the “circuit breaker”, he was collecting S$100 plus in sales each day, compared with S$1,000 plus before the pandemic.

“He just kept it from all of us,” recalled Chris, his 34-year-old son.

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“He’d say, ‘I think it’s fine’ … But you could sense that he wasn’t convincing. Then you sort of worry, yet you don’t really want to ask further, in case it hurts his feelings.”

His daughter Tina, 37, said:

“(He’s) a typical dad figure, like, ‘I can manage.’”

Indeed, he was soldiering on and dutifully paying his workers’ salaries. But within two to three months, he lost S$10,000. “I wasn’t just worried but very worried,” Uncle Albert, the chef and owner of Ji Xiang Seafood, told CNA Insider.

• "I’ve been here for so many years, and I didn’t want to let it go … I really held on to it for those few months. It was very tough."
• “Here” is a coffee shop in Old Airport Road, which he moved to in 2003 — a move precipitated by the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) coronavirus, which had caused his previous restaurant business to close.

 

 

“In these 17 years, I didn’t think that I’d meet with this virus again. This time, the virus is even more severe,” said the 58-year-old, speaking in Mandarin.

He thought things would improve after the circuit breaker. But when it was extended for another month, he was ready to admit defeat for the second time.

“I knew I’d lose a lot,” he said. “I didn’t want to carry on.”

What he did not know, however, was that his children would swing into action when they found out the extent of his losses.

And what was also different now was that his old-school dishes, such as fried intestines, white pepper crab and deep-fried fish roe, could find new customers in this digital era.