‘If only I had gone ahead with Enlistment Day’

Mr Yeo Hai Chin, 59

On his Enlistment Day 40 years ago, Mr Yeo Hai Chin was thrown off guard with a question from an army personnel: “Do you want to serve National Service (NS)?”

Then 19 and a stateless Permanent Resident (PR), the teenager thought he had a choice. After a quick discussion with his elder brother on the spot, Mr Yeo, a Malaysian who relocated to pre-independence Singapore with his family when he was three, said no.

It was a decision the self-employed mover would come to regret, as he failed to gain Singapore citizenship over the subsequent decades. The ninth of 15 children had assumed that he would be given Singapore citizenship “automatically” like his four elder brothers who weren’t called in for NS.

That was not the case, he came to realise.

“I was not against serving the army,” said Mr Yeo, the sole breadwinner of his family of four. “If only I had been better informed of the consequences for saying no when given a choice…which 19-year-old would not want their freedom?”