Growing up, Agnes Tan could not have been more abandoned and rejected.

Her parents left her at an orphanage when she was born.

A few years later, a wayang actress adopted her. She lived with her adoptive mother, uncle and grandmother in a room at the back of a place of worship as her uncle was its medium.

“Not many people understand what it means to be abandoned. I was quite dark-skinned when I was young. When somebody asked me ‘Are you Chinese?’ I told them I don’t know,” said Agnes, now 60.

When she was barely eight years old, her adoptive mother got married and left for Malaysia without her.

The wedding photo of Agnes’ adoptive mom.

Eating scraps and fish bones

Her adoptive mother relinquished Agnes to her brother, promising to send $100 a month to defray the costs of bringing Agnes up. The money never came.

Agnes’ uncle, who has children of his own, suddenly found himself with an additional – and unwanted – mouth to feed. Thus, he and his wife saw Agnes as an eyesore and abused her. She was constantly beaten, pinched and had her hair pulled, Agnes recalled.

“Till this day, whenever I wash a plate, it has become a habit for me to hold it against the light to check that there is no mark or stain on it. In the past, I would have my eyes pinched painfully if the plates were not spick and span,” said Agnes.

At mealtimes, the family would eat first and leave the scraps to her.

“I often had soy sauce and pepper with porridge water. The porridge I had, you can’t see the rice in it as they had all been eaten. Today, I like to eat fish a lot because back then, they ate the fish and just left me the bones,” she said.

While her uncle’s two children were sent to school on a trishaw, Agnes had to run behind the trishaw to get to her classes.

However, there was a silver lining. For some reason unknown to Agnes, the grandmother of the family took a liking to her.

Each time Agnes was picked on, the grandmother tried to defend and protect her. As a result, however, she also received the ire of her son and daughter-in-law, and was mentally and emotionally abused by them, said Agnes.

Encountering the love she never had

Believing that having a good education was the only thing that could change Agnes’ life, the grandmother scrimped and saved to put Agnes through school.

Agnes managed to get into (now-closed) St Thomas Secondary School, where its students had to attend Mass every Wednesday.

“In the Mass, they keep talking about ‘God, God, God’. I wondered what kind of God He is. My house also got a lot of gods but for this God, they shared so many wonderful stories of love, healing, taking care of one another and blessings.

“I wanted to find out more,” said Agnes.

She joined the Youth For Christ club in her school to learn more about this God called Jesus Christ. Unlike at home where she faced bullying and humiliation, her fellow club friends were kind to her.

“They passed down their uniforms and books to me. I was puzzled why they were so good to me when I don’t even know them and could not do anything back for them,” said Agnes.

“They told me that their God is Love and that Christianity is nothing without love.”

Their kindness to her inspired her to find out more about the stories in the Bible.

Eventually, someone led her to visit Living Waters Methodist Church, which was in Toa Payoh at the time. In church, she found the worship songs deeply meaningful.

Agnes’ report book from her time in St Thomas Secondary School, where she first experienced God’s love.

On one particular Sunday after coming home from church, her uncle – who usually could not care less about her whereabouts – suddenly asked her: “Where did you go?”

“I went to church,” Agnes bravely replied. Her uncle promptly took off his belt and whipped her with it.

Then he warned her sarcastically: “If you go to church one more time, you go and live in the church.”

For the whole of the next week, Agnes felt her strong faith slowly turn to fear. After all, she was only 13 years old then and could not risk losing the roof over her head.

“I don’t know anybody. I don’t have any other place to go,” said Agnes.

Yet, against all logic, Agnes still went to church the following week.

When she returned home and knocked on the door, she found her uncle waiting for her.

Keeping the door ajar, he asked her where she had gone. When she told him that she had been to church, he grabbed a plastic bag of her clothes and tossed it out the door.

Homeless at 13

Before he slammed the door shut, Agnes could hear her grandmother pleading with her to come back in.

Agnes later found her grandmother in an old folks home and began visiting her regularly.

“I will take care of myself. My God will take care of me,” thought Agnes as she picked up the plastic bag and made a beeline for Living Waters Methodist Church.

The church was not a big church with many members. After Sunday service, they would usually lock the gate and no one would be seen in it till the following Sunday.

But as Agnes ran back to the church, she saw the pastor and some church members waiting for her. They knew her uncle had issued her an ultimatum and had anticipated that she would need help. 

Seeing them from afar, her eyes welled up with tears.

“To run to the church and see that there are people waiting for me there, I began to experience what God’s love felt like. God had promised me that He would provide for me, and He did,” said Agnes.

In the end, one of the church members opened up her house for Agnes to live in temporarily.

Without financial support, Agnes had to juggle school and part-time work as a waitress at a Bras Basah restaurant. She eventually earned enough income to rent a room.

As it became too tiring for her to study and work at the same time, Agnes dropped out of school after her ‘O’ Levels to work full-time.

It seemed like life had unfairly dealt Agnes a bad hand, but looking back she sees the presence of God.

“I had a lot of anger and sadness within me. I had no one to talk to and so I would turn to God to pour out my sorrows. But He has always provided enough for me so I didn’t need to turn to a life of crime,” she said.

One-track mind

After dropping out of school, Agnes tried her hand at all sorts of jobs.

Many doors slammed shut in her face as she went door to door to sell expensive encyclopaedia sets.

Young Agnes, pictured here at 19, had to work several odd jobs after dropping out of school.

Following that, she excelled in commercial sales ticketing as a travel agent but eventually quit due to workplace politics.

Nevertheless, these jobs trained her to face rejection, deal with challenges and manage people relations.

Agnes working in Prime Travel, where she did corporate ticketing sales.

As a result, when she eventually became an insurance agent, she excelled. All the odd jobs she had worked before had sharpened her people skills, multitasking ability and capacity to persevere.

She worked day in and day out, sacrificing her weekday nights and weekends, for one goal: to work as hard as she could, to make as much money as she could.

“I was sick of having to rent a room and move around. I wanted to make enough money to buy my own house and have my own space to feel safe in.”

Owned four private properties at 28

By the age of 28, she had amassed enough wealth for the downpayment of four private properties. She then rented each of them out to finance the mortgages.

Agnes receiving an award at an AIA awards ceremony.

However, her drive to make money came at a cost. Her Sundays were spent working instead of spending time worshipping in the house of God.

“In my greed to make money, I had forgotten God,” admitted Agnes. 

At the time, she loved sports cars. She felt that owning a sports car would give others the impression that she was well-heeled and not a fly-by-night insurance agent.

Then, she decided to become a sports car dealer.

“Sports cars were rare and hard to come by at that time. So, whenever we saw a potential car up for sale, we rushed in to buy it,” said Agnes.

Agnes invested in the sports car business, but later lost everything after making a hasty decision.

Losing it all 

During a particularly urgent purchase, Agnes decided to mortgage one of her houses to take up a loan and buy a sports car.

Unfortunately, she soon found herself unable to repay the loan. Her properties were all taken away by the banks.

“I lost everything that I had worked for. I became suicidal because I didn’t want my family to suffer alongside me,” said Agnes, who was married with two young children then. 

Agnes and her husband with their five young children.

Her Jewish husband tried to reassure her.

“You only lost money, right? You still have your family. You can always do it again and this time, we’ll do it together,” he said.

He started a civil engineering firm and employed Agnes to help him with it.

It was not easy to do business in the construction industry, but the husband-and-wife pair persevered.

Agnes with four of her grown up children.

For the next 15 years, Agnes and her husband, with five children in tow, continued renting houses to live in.

“It was back to square one. Each time the rent was raised, we moved. I no longer dared to commit to making such big purchases,” said Agnes.

It was only in 2009 that Agnes and her husband finally purchased their first matrimonial home in Serangoon Gardens. Agnes was 45 years old by then.

Returning to faith 

Perhaps it was no coincidence that she discovered a church – Trinity Methodist Church – just opposite her new home.

“I believe everything happens for a reason. It was time to stop backsliding and return to God,” said Agnes.

For the next five years, she served actively in the church choir and as a Sunday School teacher.

Agnes at a Bible study session with her cell group.

Along the way, she experienced more of God’s love through answered prayers, including when He miraculously surfaced her wedding ring which she thought was irretrievably lost.

These encounters with God have healed her heart and enabled her to love those around her.

For example, she once went to the community centre for a computer course and discovered that the trainer, John, desperately needed another job due to familial circumstances.

Moved to do something for him, she asked him to come for a job interview at her company the next day even though she had no job openings for him.

She ended up hiring him though he seemingly had no relevant skills for the work that they do. To her husband’s chagrin, John hung around the workplace helping out with ad-hoc tasks for three months.

Unknown to them, a grateful John was diligently observing how things were done at the firm. At the end of three months, he proposed a brilliant solar-powered solution for one of their monitoring systems, which saved the company many man-hours.

John ended up working for her company for the next 14 years.

Passing it on

Acknowledging God’s goodness in her life, she now feels strongly about sharing what He has blessed her with.

“I realised that giving is indeed more blessed than receiving,” said Agnes.

In her free time, she befriends and supports caregivers of those with mental health conditions. She also once housed and cared for a fellow church member for six months while the church member received treatment for cancer.

When she had the opportunity to purchase more properties over the years, she used them to house her firm’s foreign workers, as she felt the conditions of their dormitories were dismal.

“God gives and takes away in His perfect timing. He found me when I had nothing. When I was distracted by greed and backslid, He took it all away,” she said.

“When God blesses us, what is more important is what we do with the blessings. Material things come and go. Don’t hold on to them.

“Instead, what would be one’s greatest loss is not giving one’s life to know Jesus and have a relationship with Him.”

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