A work trip.
The boy stayed with his grandfather.
He’s nine.
Primary Three. His name is Ethan and he carries a bag with wheels because the bag is too heavy to carry and nobody in the family finds this strange anymore.
On Friday evening, the grandfather received a text from his daughter. It was the schedule.
Saturday 9am: Chinese tuition (online, login details attached). 11am: Math assessment paper (in the blue folder).
2pm: Science revision (chapters 7-9).
4pm: Piano practice (minimum 45 minutes).
Sunday 9am: English comprehension (two passages, red folder). 11am: Math problem sums (green folder). Free time after 1pm.
The grandfather read the text.
Read it again.
Looked at the boy, who was sitting on the sofa with his school bag between his feet, waiting to be told what to do next.
Then the grandfather put his phone in the drawer.
Took the boy’s hand. And walked him to the coffeeshop downstairs for kaya toast.
The grandfather is 74.
And he raised three children.
None of them had tuition or enrichment or a schedule laminated on the fridge or a bag with wheels or a colour-coded timetable that accounted for every hour between 7am and 9pm.
His children did homework at the kitchen table.
They went downstairs after.
They came home when the street lights came on.
One became a teacher. One became an engineer. One became Ethan’s mother, who sends schedules by WhatsApp to ensure her son doesn’t waste a single hour of a weekend at his grandfather’s flat.
The grandfather doesn’t judge his daughter.
He understands.
Singapore is different now. The stakes feel higher.
The competition feels sharper.
The fear of falling behind has become so loud that silence, actual silence, feels dangerous. An unscheduled hour feels like a risk. A Saturday without revision feels like negligence.
He understands all of this.
He just doesn’t agree with it.
And he’s never said so.
Because a father doesn’t tell his daughter how to raise her son. Not in this family. Not out loud.
So he put the phone in the drawer. And he took the boy for kaya toast.
At the coffeeshop, Ethan sat with his hands in his lap.
The kopi uncle put two cups of Milo on the table. The kaya toast arrived, warm, butter melting through the bread. The grandfather ate. Ethan didn’t. He was looking around the coffeeshop the way tourists look around temples. Like he’d never been inside one.
“Ah Gong, what time is my Chinese tuition?”
“No tuition today.”
“But Ma said…”
“Ma is in Bangkok. Today you’re with me. Eat your toast.”
So Ethan picked up the toast. Took a bite. Then a question that nearly broke the old man’s heart.
“After the toast, then what?”
“Then nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
The boy stared at him.
The word “nothing” landed on him like a foreign language.
He looked like someone who’d been given an exam paper with no questions on it. He didn’t know where to start because there was nowhere to start.
His whole life was structured around the next task, the next paper, the next session. Remove the structure and the boy didn’t know who he was.
He was 9.
And unstructured time frightened him.
The grandfather felt something tighten in his chest.
Not anger.
Something older than anger.
The sadness of watching a child who’s been so thoroughly optimised that an empty Saturday feels like a crisis.
So they sat at the coffeeshop for forty-five minutes.
The grandfather didn’t plan this. He didn’t have a lesson. He didn’t have an agenda. He just sat. Drank his kopi. Read the paper. Let the boy exist without a task.
But it took about twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes of Ethan fidgeting.
Scanning the coffeeshop.
Checking whether his grandfather was going to give him something to do. Twenty minutes of a nine-year-old boy doing the hardest thing he’d ever done: sitting still with nothing expected of him.
Then something shifted.
He started watching the kopi uncle. The way the man poured the teh from one cup to another, pulling the stream high, the liquid arcing through the air in a brown ribbon. Ethan watched this three times before he said: “Why does he pour it like that?”
“Makes it cool. And frothy. They call it teh tarik. Pulled tea.”
“Can I try?”
“You want to pull tea?”
“Can or not?”
The grandfather called the kopi uncle over.
Said something in Hokkien.
The uncle laughed. Brought two cups. Showed the boy how to hold them. Ethan poured. The tea went everywhere. All over his hands, the table, his shirt.
The uncle laughed again. Ethan looked up, terrified that he’d done it wrong, and saw that nobody was disappointed. Nobody was writing a score on his attempt. The uncle just handed him a cloth and said: “Try again.”
He tried again.
Less mess this time.
Not good.
But less mess.
The uncle nodded. Ethan smiled. Not the polite smile he gives his mother when she checks his work. A real one. The kind that starts in the stomach and arrives at the face before the brain can approve it.
And that smile cost nothing.
Required no tuition fee.
Had no assessment rubric. And it was the most alive the grandfather had seen the boy in two years.
They walked home slowly.
The grandfather didn’t hold his hand. He walked next to him, matching the boy’s pace, which was slow because the boy had never walked slowly. The boy had been driven to tuition, walked quickly between sessions, rushed through meals. Speed was the default. Slow was a luxury nobody had offered him.
And they passed the playground. Ethan looked at it. Then at his grandfather.
“Can I…”
“Go.”
Ethan walked to the playground. Stood at the bottom of the slide. Looked around. The playground was empty. It was 10:30 on a Saturday morning and no children were there because all the children were in tuition.
He climbed the slide.
Slid down.
Climbed again.
Slid down.
Did this six times with the mechanical repetition of a boy who was teaching himself how to play because nobody had left him enough time to remember.
But on the seventh time, something changed. He went down the slide and instead of climbing back up, he ran to the swing. Not walked. Ran. Like a boy. Like a nine-year-old boy who just remembered that his legs could do something besides walk between a car and a classroom.
The grandfather sat on the bench. Watched. Said nothing. Did nothing. Offered nothing except presence and the absence of a schedule.
That’s all the boy needed. Presence and the absence of a schedule. The two things his life had the least of.
By Sunday afternoon, Ethan was a different child.
Not transformed. Not fixed. Just… looser.
He talked more. He asked questions that had no answer. “Ah Gong, why do birds fly in a V shape?” “Ah Gong, do fish get thirsty?” “Ah Gong, if you could be any animal, which one?”
Questions that had no mark scheme.
No model answer.
Questions that existed purely because a nine-year-old brain, when it’s not being drilled, does what it was designed to do: wonder.
The grandfather answered some. Made up answers for others. Said “I don’t know, what do you think?” for the rest. And each time, the boy’s face did something it rarely does at home: it thought without fear. It explored an idea without checking if the idea was worth marks. It played.
On Sunday evening, the parents came home.
And his mother walked in. Looked at the dining table. The blue folder was untouched. The red folder was unopened. The green folder was exactly where she’d left it. No assessment papers had been completed. No chapters revised. No piano practised.
“Pa. He didn’t do any of the work.”
“He did other work.”
“What work?”
“He learned to pull tea. He went to the playground. He asked me why birds fly in a V shape.”
Silence. The specific silence of a daughter who wants to say something sharp to her father but can’t because he’s her father and this family doesn’t have that conversation.
“Pa, PSLE is in three years.”
“I know.”
“He needs to prepare.”
“He needs to play.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
The grandfather picked up his keys. Walked to the door. Turned around.
“He smiled this weekend. Real smile. When was the last time you saw that?”
And he left before she could answer. Not because he didn’t want to hear the answer. Because he already knew it. She didn’t remember. And the not remembering was the answer.
====================================
I think about this because I think every overworked child in Singapore has a version of that grandfather’s flat.
Or needs one.
A place where the phone goes in the drawer and the schedule stops and nobody is measuring anyone and kaya toast at the coffeeshop counts as a plan.
The grandfather didn’t teach the boy anything.
Not English or Math or Science or Chinese. He didn’t drill a single assessment paper or correct a single composition or count a single mark.
Because he gave him something that Singapore’s entire tuition industry, all two billion dollars of it, can’t sell.
He gave him a Saturday.
An empty, unscheduled, unmeasured Saturday where a boy could pour tea badly and slide down a slide seven times and ask why fish get thirsty and smile the kind of smile that starts in the stomach and nobody grades.
If you have grandchildren, you might be that flat.
You might be the drawer where the phone goes. You might be the coffeeshop and the playground and the question nobody else has time to answer.
And if you’re a parent, ask yourself the grandfather’s question. Not about the grades. Not about the PSLE. Not about the schedule.
When was the last time your child smiled? Really smiled. The one that starts in the stomach. The one that no tuition centre has ever produced.
And if you can’t remember, maybe this weekend, try something.
Put the phone in the drawer. Take them for kaya toast. And when they ask “then what?” say the most terrifying, most generous, most necessary word a Singaporean parent can say to a child in 2026.
“Nothing.”
And let the nothing do its work.
3am Stories. Pass it on.
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