"Hard-working" is the word operations executive Jack Kow, 40, uses to describe Ms Sun Xueling, the incumbent MP in Punggol West.

A working mother with two young daughters, Ms Sun - who turns 41 on Polling Day - has a day job as Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Home Affairs and National Development. She is also often on the ground in her constituency, meeting residents like Mr Kow and seeking their views.

In his eyes, she has done a lot for the community.

She has just launched a jobs and legal clinic in the ward, where residents can get help with their search for jobs in the area and other employment-related issues, as well as with legal contracts.

"I have been working hard on the ground for the past five years," she said.

"I've done many walkabouts. So I think many of the residents are actually very familiar with me. I've also worked out several programmes. The most recent one deals with our jobs and livelihoods."

BILINGUAL, AND LEARNING MALAY

Since entering politics in 2015, Ms Sun has sought to engage residents both young and old, in person and online, and in various languages.

She started her career in the Economic Development Board, then worked for DBS Bank, Deutsche Bank and Temasek International. From 2015 to 2018, she was chief executive of Business China, a non-profit organisation set up in 2007 to work with the public sector and private enterprises in strengthening ties between Singapore and China.

Fluent in English and Mandarin, although she has joked that her mother tongue is really Hokkien, the alumnus of St Nicholas Girls' School - known for its strength in the Chinese language - is now learning Malay so she can converse with her Malay constituents in their mother tongue and better understand their culture.

She uses WhatsApp, Facebook and Zoom to reach residents and is thrilled that a recent Zoom session held to mark the Dumpling Festival saw some 70 seniors gather online to toast "yam seng" and celebrate the traditional Chinese holiday together.

"A lot of young people have been using Zoom to keep in contact with one another," she said of online engagement due to Covid-19 safe distancing measures. "But seniors also want to be part of the larger community."

Her Zoom experiment with seniors was "a good start" and shows they can and do use digital platforms.

Earlier on in her tenure as MP, she tapped Google Forms to gather feedback from couples with young children on their cost concerns for items such as infant milk formula and pre-school fees.

Within three days, 3,000 residents had filled in the forms and shared their views with her.

Being a new town, Punggol West has a young population. The new single-member constituency has 26,579 electors, and more than 60 per cent of its residents are below the age of 40.

Six in 10 of the Housing Board flats in the area were built in the last five years and they are mostly owned by young families.

Ms Sun has raised her residents' cost-of-living concerns in Parliament.

In 2017, she was a member of the government task force that put in place measures to mitigate the rising prices of formula milk.

Last year, through the People's Action Party Women's Wing, she and five other MPs called for pre-school education to be made more affordable.

Back in her Punggol West patch, Ms Sun is happy with the response to her outreach efforts online but said "we have to complement that with physical outreach, going door to door, because only then will you hear the stories and it will give you that qualitative feedback on top of the quantitative feedback they are providing online".

ENGAGE AND COLLABORATE

If elected to another five-year term, Ms Sun will invite the residents of Punggol West to collaborate with her on a new community centre.

She wants their input on its design: Should it have outdoor play areas for children? What about a gardening area where people can grow edible greens? And what about recycling?

"I would have to engage residents and find out more because, at the end of the day, I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all solution."

There is also the development of Punggol town and Punggol Digital District to work on. And even after that is built and the hard infrastructure put in place, the work on the "soft programming" of "collaborative community activities" for the young and old will need to be done.

It seems that Ms Sun, the energetic hard worker, plans to keep busy so as to meet the expectations of residents like Ms Susan Tan, a healthcare worker in her 40s.

"As a part of the sandwich generation, residents like me want to have facilities that cater to both our elders as well as children," Ms Tan said.