I Joined My Father in the Food Business, and We Fight Every Day

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ethan Tan, a 24-year-old prawn noodle hawker from Singapore. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve always loved cooking with my mother and watching cooking videos. It took me three painful years studying computer engineering and one corporate internship to decide hawker life was the way to go.

My parents wanted me to learn something traditional and study engineering or become a doctor.

So I thought, “I like playing computer games, so let’s pursue computer engineering.” I didn’t think much about it, and I didn’t do much research.

When the course started, I hated it. I didn’t get coding at all. Examinations were hard for me, and I just suffered through them.

The point where I really felt like this wasn’t the right path for me was when I got caught cheating during an exam. I managed to lie to the examiner and pretend I wasn’t cheating.

But that made me realize something: If I have to resort to cheating, this is really not what I want to do.

I did an internship at Accenture. It was the same thing every day: sitting at the same table from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., queuing for lunch at a crowded food court, and taking the train home.

The only comfort was sleeping in the office chair. I slept there every day for two hours. It was very boring.

Joining my dad in the hawker business

With a corporate job out of the question, I looked for other career paths.

After graduating and completing my military service, I joined my father at his seafood hawker stall.

After about three years of managing the stall, and a short stint at the kitchens in The American Club in Singapore for some restaurant experience, I told my dad I wanted to build something of my own.

In August 2024, I opened Udang Udang, a halal prawn noodle stall right beside my father’s stall in Singapore’s northern Woodlands neighborhood. I used my grandmother’s recipes and a recipe I learned from a streetside vendor I met in Penang, Malaysia.

Before I hired staff, it was rough. I got in early in the mornings to fry up 40 kilograms of prawn heads to make the broth. It needs to boil for six hours, and in Singapore’s heat, that’s no joke.

But now, more than a year on, business is faring well. I sell an average of 600 bowls of noodles daily, earning about 3,000 Singapore dollars, or about $2,300, in sales every day. I manage both my dad’s stall and my own.

My plan is now to expand to more outlets around Singapore, with one new store every year.

Maintaining a father-son relationship

It was tough working with my dad at the start. We fought almost every day for the first two years, and many tables were slammed in frustration.

We don’t see eye to eye on many things. I tried to convince him to spend more money on marketing, including hiring influencers to try our food and creating promotional videos, but he prefers for the word to spread organically. We feel differently about how we price our products as well.

It’s been challenging to learn how to work together. But we’ve nailed it down now, learning how to separate life and work, and talking through our differences.

At work, we’re not father and son. We can fight and argue all we want. But when we get back home, I’m still his beloved son.