True to herself

By MAK MUN SAN
Actress Tan Kheng Hua may be best known for her role as haughty Margaret in PCK, but she’s quite the opposite in real life.
For 10 years, she played a nose-in-the-air, somewhat insufferable woman on television.
In real life, full-time actress-producer Tan Kheng Hua is thankfully not quite like Margaret, that sister-in-law character she portrayed on the popular sitcom Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (PCK).
She is unaffected and friendly as she welcomes you into her home – a beautiful three-storey restored shophouse in the East – with a warm handshake.
“I was just about to SMS you. I hope you’re not afraid of cats. I have two,” says Tan, who turns 45 on Jan 17.
The other occupants of the house are her 42-year-old husband, full-time actor Lim Yu-Beng, and their nine-year-old daughter, Shi-An. The family has just returned from a skiing trip in Japan and Tan is looking recharged.
Making you a fresh cuppa on her coffee machine– the attentive host quietly reheats the mug halfway through the interview when she discovers it has turned cold – she breaks the ice by prattling on about the “interesting neighbours” she has.
Later, when the photographer asks if she could explore the house for suitable spots to shoot, Tan flings both arms in the air in a dramatic fashion and cries: “Please feel free to do so. Set yourself free!”
Showing you around her “living museum”, she morphs into a seasoned guide, pointing out items in her home with great enthusiasm: a painting done by her mother; an old cabinet from her grandparents; a bed used by her father; a rocking armchair she found abandoned by the roadside.
When you marvel at what a photographer’s dream her stylish habitat is, she turns and exclaims: “It’s easy to make my house look good. It’s hard to make me look good.”
The punchline is delivered with perfect timing, and when you laugh, she grins, clearly relishing the moment.
The theatrics are reminiscent of her PCK screen persona, but it is also to be expected of someone who has spent over 20 years of her life doing serious theatre.
Tan’s resume is so impressive that if you name all the landmark plays in Singapore theatre, chances are she would have been a part of many of them.
Roles that this versatile and dependable thespian has tackled include a prostitute in Beauty World, a lesbian lawyer in Invitation To Treat and even a horse in Animal Farm.
And she has the accolades to show for it.
Displayed on a shelf outside the study is the trophy she won for Best Actress at the 2002 Life! Theatre Awards for her performance in Action Theatre’s Pillow Talk. She played a sick woman confronting her mortality.
And it’s not just the stage that has won her accolades.
In 2001, her work in PCK gave her the Best Comedy Performance By An Actress prize at the Asian Television Awards.
“If we can win awards and get paid twice the amount, that’d be great,” she quips.
Switching to a more serious tone, she adds: “But it does help when you are an ‘award-winning actress’. People know you are not a baby and they do have more respect for you.”
Task-oriented
Dressed in a white halter top from Singapore label M)phosis and three-quarter jeans from budget chain This Fashion, Tan is pencil-thin – a mere 45kg on her 1.6m frame.
It is possibly a result of her hyperactive personality.
With a laugh, she admits to being a “relentless sorter-outer” and cleaning out wardrobes.
“I can’t sit still. If there is no mountain, I will find a mountain to climb,” she says dramatically.
“I’m so irritatingly task-oriented and will always keep looking for the next thing to do or else I just don’t feel right. Blame that on my Mum. She’s exactly like that as well.”
One of the “mountains” she has chosen to climb this year is producing It’s My Life. Directed by her husband, this is a year-long project where teens aged between 15 and 19 receive theatrical and design training, culminating in a youth musical. It is sponsored by insurance company Great Eastern Life, with venue and production sponsor NUS Centre for the Arts.
“We’re committing one year of our lives to it because we feel that when we want to impart something to young people, we can’t and shouldn’t do it quickly,” she says. “Everything in Singapore always seems so rushed.”
Actress Pam Oei, 35, affectionately calls her close friend of 18 years a “kan cheong (Cantonese for anxious) spider” who likes to philosophise about life.
“She would like other people to think that she’s calm and collected, but beneath that cool exterior, she’s actually paddling furiously underwater,” says Oei.
“But she’s also very wise and understands human emotions very well. She can sit and talk to you for hours regarding matters of the heart.”
Long-time friend Valerie Lim, 44, who is co-producing It’s My Life with Tan, describes her as a “motivated person who is always two steps ahead”.
“Some people might find it hard to keep up with Kheng and could be a little intimidated by the way she works so quickly, but that’s the way she is, very focused on what she wants,” she says.
“She is also very true to herself. I’ve never seen her try to be someone she isn’t.”
Indeed, it is the uncensored Tan Kheng Hua who shows up at this interview – not bothered even when her tummy rumbles embarrassingly loud in the middle of our chat.
She tells you blithely that she is the sort who cannot remember important dates like wedding anniversaries, while “Yubes (her term of endearment for Lim) can remember even my old pager number”.
Not surprisingly, she does not know which year they met and had to SMS him to find out.
It was 1989, when she was working in Tangs department store as a marketing executive and he went to borrow some clothes for a play with actor Lim Kay Siu.
According to Tan, it was “lust at first sight”.
“He was leaning against a pillar near the information counter. I saw him and thought to myself how handsome he was. He was hot,” she recounts in her animated way.
Soon after, she happened to attend an acting class at TheatreWorks conducted by him, and they hit it off even though they were both seeing other people then.
Within a month, he moved into her family home, and they lived with her parents for about three years before they got married in 1993.
Fifteen years later, they are still happily together, although Tan candidly reveals they “drive each other up the wall” and have “tested” their marriage.
“Let it be said that, yes, like most married couples who have been together for such a long time, we’ve gone through some major ups and downs but ...” she pauses, searching for the right words.
Then, she looks up and continues in a tender voice: “They (Lim and Shi-An) are my favourite people, you know?”
And what has kept them together all these years, you ask.
“I can’t live without the man,” she says with the certainty of someone who has just stated a time-honoured fact like “I can’t live without air”.
“He knows me so well. He is so much a part of my history and I still have loads of fun with him. Man, that puts him waaaay above anybody else.”
Chasing the dream
Acting-wise, Tan was a late bloomer, having her first taste of it only when she took an elective course at Indiana University in the United States from 1981 to 1983.
Growing up, she was “a jock”, preferring outdoor activities such as canoeing and long-distance running.
The second child of a bank manager and a housewife, she remembers being caned and having chilli rubbed into her eyes whenever she or her two brothers misbehaved.
At Indiana University, she pursued a Bachelor of Science in public and environmental affairs, specialising in mass communication.
As fate would have it, she chose an acting elective class and “instinctively knew I could probably do this”.
After graduating, she started a marketing job at fashion company FJ Benjamin. She then moved to Tangs, where she remained for nine years.
During her corporate career, she juggled work and theatre, often rehearsing and having supper with her fellow actors till the wee hours. After a few hours of sleep, she would be up again, chasing yet another crazy day.
The first play she performed in was John Bowen’s The Waiting Room, directed by Ivan Heng, who is her cousin.
When she turned 30, she decided to become a full-time actor, and tells you with a laugh that she left Tangs before she could receive a watch as her 10-year long-service award.
“I had earned enough for me to use as a buffer. For once in my life, I wanted to feel what it was like to devote one whole day to acting,” she says of her decision.
But in the first two years, she had to do a lot of freelance marketing work to earn some extra income. Then, the TV acting jobs came rolling in one by one, starting with the English drama serial Masters of the Seas.
She soon joined PCK, which “paid for a lot of things” in a decade. Other programmes she appeared in include the variety show Food Chain and the serial Beautiful Connection.
Throughout her TV career, she never gave up theatre, and is now one of the most respected thespians in Singapore.
In 2004, Tan presented her with a much-needed lift when she was facing a “midlife crisis”.
That “strange period” started when she was involved in playwright Eleanor Wong’s trilogy, Invitation To Treat, in 2003, in which she played a lesbian lawyer. The SARS epidemic was then raging, and Tan says she became “a basket case”.
“I was very scared stiff of the uncertainties brought about by the onset of Sars, and this was made worse by the fact that the role was also extremely emotionally challenging,” she says.
It was so bad that she actually cancelled two performances of the trilogy so that she could get herself together, the first time she had ever done so. Eventually, she did get back on stage and finished the run.
But after the play ended, she cancelled all her projects and stopped work for about a year, and travelled with the family.
Then Tan called to ask if she would produce The Revenge of the Dim Sum Dollies, the third in a series of six original satirical musical cabaret shows.
Prior to that, she had also said yes to acting in Cages, her first full-length film in which she played the lead role of a single mother of a blind child.
She says this of the Dim Sum Dollies experience as a producer: “Just standing at the back of the Esplanade Theatre, and watching a full house each night waving their Singapore flags up in the air with fervour and enthusiasm for a show you’ve helped put together brought new feelings in me for theatre. I could love the theatre in a different way.”
In a way, she has come full circle, as her newly acquired role as producer requires her to make use of her skills learnt in the corporate world.
“It’s great to be able to pick up the phone and offer jobs to actors, and write cheques to them,” she shares.
Besides It’s My Life, upcoming projects for this year include hosting a Channel 5 infotainment programme, Slurp; acting in a Peranakan TV dramedy; a performance art piece which might take her to Brussels; and performing in the Beatrice Chia-directed musical The Full Monty.
Towards the end of the interview, Lim and Shi-An return with lunch, and a ravenous Tan tucks into her bowl of fish ball bee hoon soup.
As they banter easily – sometimes noisily as each of them competes to be heard – you sit back and observe Tan in the midst of this picture of familial bliss.
The difference is barely noticeable, but she somehow appears happier and more at peace than at any point during the interview.
“They are my favourite people, you know?” she seems to be saying again, between mouthfuls of her favourite lunch. – The Straits Times Singapore/ Asian News Network