SINGAPORE – By 7am, six days a week, former actor Huang Yiliang is at MacPherson Market and Food Centre, scaling and cleaning fish at his wet market stall.
At 11am, he walks to Circuit Road Hawker Centre, about 400m away. There, he mans the stove at his new stall Old Fisherman, stir-frying crab dishes and steaming seafood for the lunch crowd up to 2pm.
That is followed by a short nap at home before he resumes food preparation for the dinner crowd from 5 to 8pm.
In a plot twist, the 64-year-old, who originally intended to import and distribute crabs, has become a fishmonger and hawker in his third act.
Former actor Huang Yiliang has opened a hawker stall selling seafood dishes, including crab.
ST PHOTO: HEDY KHOO
He was a popular face on local television. He joined Mediacorp (then known as Singapore Broadcasting Corporation) in 1985 as a 24-year-old, where he went on to win Best Supporting Actor at the annual Star Awards three times – in 2002, 2003 and 2006.
After 23 years with the broadcaster, he left in 2008 to run a plumbing business and start a movie production company. Wanting to try his hand at producing and directing, he released his first film, Autumn In March, in 2009. The movie, made on a $1 million budget, was rejected by three movie distributors and released on DVD.
His plumbing company once employed up to eight workers. The business is still active, but instead of full-timers, he hires local plumbers on an ad-hoc basis.
In recent years, Huang has been dogged by legal troubles. In 2021, he was sentenced to 10 months’ jail for assaulting a Bangladeshi worker he had hired. In 2024, he was fined $3,000 and banned from driving for five years after colliding with a cyclist, leaving the victim with a fractured elbow.
He does not flinch when asked about his time behind bars.
“Yes, I went to Changi University,” he says in Mandarin sheepishly, referring to his time in prison, adding that he was released after five months for good behaviour.
Asked if he feels awkward being a hawker after two decades on television, especially when so many customers recognise him, he waves it off.
“I don’t care how people view me. I can put my pride down,” he says. “Being a hawker is a retirement job for me. I want to do something I truly love. I am an active person. I cannot sit still.”
Even as an actor, he had a side hustle as an insurance agent, making cold calls at industrial estates and approaching strangers at MRT stations between filming. At his peak, he led a team of 19 agents and earned about $10,000 a month.
Before acting, he was a licensed plumber in his late father’s plumbing, landscaping and construction business. A year into acting, he joined friends to start a tropical fish farm in Lim Chu Kang, wading into knee-high mud to dig ponds. The venture incurred a loss, leaving him $20,000 out of pocket.
“It was a learning experience. I can take hardship,” says the former star, who married actress Lin Meijiao, 62, in 1991.
The couple divorced in 1997, when their daughter, actress Chantalle Ng, was only a few months old. He is estranged from Ng, now aged 30. He has since remarried and has a son, 21, an undergraduate.
Huang says the idea to venture into seafood came during his time in prison.
“I was in a cell with seven people,” he says. “We spent a lot of time chatting. Some of them had experience in the food business. They gave me the idea to sell crab.”
