SAN FRANCISCO – Care for chicken rice with a side of geopolitics? Singaporeans in Silicon Valley certainly did, when Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong visited them for more than an hour on Tuesday evening.
“It’s a complicated world we live in,” said PM Lee in a short speech punctuated by applause and laughter from the 500-strong crowd.
“We need friends. America is one of our very old friends. We have a lot of business with them, we trade with them. Singaporeans travel here to work and to study. Americans come to Singapore in quite large numbers also.
“Through these interactions, we get to know one another. And, hopefully, we get to like one another and be able to cooperate with one another,” he said.
That works well for the most part even though Singapore and the United States are disparate in many ways, he added, speaking on the second day of his six-day working visit to San Francisco, where he is set to attend the Apec leaders’ annual summit.
“We’re not quite the same as our American friends. And they are not quite the same as us. We are a tiny country in the middle of a very complicated part of the world. They are a huge continent, the greatest power on earth now.
“But it doesn’t stop us from working together, from getting to do many things, and to benefit each other through our relationship and friendships,” he noted, pivoting to people-to-people ties to bring his message home.
“You are an important part of that,” he told the mix of professionals, trailing spouses, young couples – some with toddlers – and grey-haired retirees gathered in the ballroom of The Westin San Francisco Airport.
“Some 2,000 of you live around the Bay Area. I’m very grateful that you came.”
Some had driven over six hours from Los Angeles. Singapore Ambassador to the United States Lui Tuck Yew called it the largest gathering of overseas Singaporeans after Covid-19.
“It felt like an intimate event,” said Ms Jasmin Young, the emcee of the evening in a red cheongsam. The chief executive officer of Netreo, a fast-growing software firm, is also the co-founder of SingaporeConnect, a 20-year-old social club of Singaporeans in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“We felt like he cared and shared what was going on in his mind, like you might within a family. That it was not just a social visit, we are seen and heard and remembered even as an overseas community.”
For Ms Emily Lim, 32, PM Lee’s words hit home when he called on people from the “little red dot” to show people “what Singaporeans are and what we can do”.
It is exactly what Ms Lim, a trained chef, had to do when she found herself in a challenging situation during the pandemic. Suddenly retrenched from her job at a restaurant, she mustered the courage to found Dabao Singapore, delivering laksa, chicken rice and other dishes that she cooked in her kitchen.
She has not looked back. It has since grown into a four-member team operating out of a professional kitchen, as word of mouth spread.
“It’s not just the Singaporeans – there is a market here that is curious to try our cuisine,” she said.
When PM Lee mentioned that her chicken rice tasted good, she felt vindicated. “I made my family proud,” she said.
Mr Sean Tan, a 23-year-old National University of Singapore student interning at an AI-enabled e-commerce start-up, patiently waited his turn for a selfie with the PM. He said he had seen PM Lee only on TV and did not want to let go of this opportunity.
“Coming to San Francisco opened my eyes to how big the US is, how big the world is. And how small but global Singapore is. To know that is quite cool,” said Mr Tan.
