The Phone Call at 11pm That Actually Made Me Move to Singapore

My phone rang at eleven at night, Korea time, and I almost didn't pick up because I assumed it was a scam call about a car I didn't own. It was a recruiter calling from Singapore, apologizing for the hour, saying the hiring manager wanted to talk to me before the weekend because another candidate was already deep into their own process for the same role. I remember standing in my kitchen in socks, half asleep, trying to sound alert while my wife stood in the doorway mouthing "who is it."

That call happened about six weeks before I actually landed at Changi with two suitcases and a job I'd accepted mostly on instinct. Before it, I'd sent out maybe a dozen applications over the better part of a year, mostly half-heartedly, the kind of applying you do when you're curious but not actually ready to uproot a family. Most went nowhere. A few got form rejections. This one moved fast enough that it scared me a little.

The interview itself was over video call, three engineers and a hiring manager, and about twenty minutes in someone pulled up an actual project drawing and asked me to walk through how I'd approach a specific clash between MEP routing and structural beams. Not a hypothetical. An actual unresolved problem from a live project. I talked through it for maybe ten minutes, got two things wrong that they corrected on the spot, and somehow that felt like it went better than getting everything right would have. They wanted to see how I thought, not whether I'd memorized the right answer.

Telling my parents came before telling most of my friends, and it went about how I expected. My father asked three questions in a row about salary, healthcare, and whether Singapore was safe, in that order, and my mother mostly just went quiet on the phone for a few seconds before asking when we'd visit. Neither of them said don't go. Neither of them said we're thrilled either. It was somewhere in between, which felt honest.

The Number That Almost Made Me Say No

The offer came in about a week later, and the base salary was actually lower than what I was making in Korea at the time, once I ran it through a currency converter and stared at it for a while feeling slightly deflated. I nearly turned it down on that number alone.

What changed my mind was sitting down with my wife and actually running the full picture, cost of living adjustments, the housing allowance built into the package, and honestly just being blunt with each other about what we actually wanted versus what a bigger number on paper would have bought us in Korea. We went back to the recruiter with a specific counter, not asking for more base salary, but restructuring part of the package toward relocation support and a signing bonus that covered our first three months of rent. They agreed within two days, which told me more about how badly they wanted the hire than the original offer had. I remember re-reading their email three times before actually believing it said yes.

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My first actual day on a real project here, about three weeks after landing, I sat through a coordination meeting where I understood maybe seventy percent of what was being discussed, partly the accent, partly just not knowing the local project shorthand yet. I said very little that first meeting. By the third one, I was the person other people were asking to clarify a clash resolution, which happened faster than I expected, mostly because the technical fundamentals transfer even when the local context doesn't yet. Six months in, I got handed my first section of a tunnel coordination model to own outright, no supervision, which felt like a strange kind of arrival, quieter than I expected it to feel.

What Actually Made the First Year Hard

Nobody warns you properly about the specific texture of missing home. Not the big dramatic homesickness, but the small stuff. My mother called during a video chat once holding up a dish she'd made that I used to eat every week, just to show me, not even expecting me to say much back, and I had to mute myself for a second because I wasn't handling it as well as I thought I would.

There were stretches, maybe four months in, where speaking English all day at work left me genuinely drained by six pm in a way I hadn't anticipated, translating my own thoughts back and forth in my head even when I didn't need to. That faded eventually, but it took longer than I expected, closer to eight months than the two or three I'd optimistically guessed before moving. There was also a stretch around month five where I seriously considered whether we'd made a mistake, not because of anything dramatic, just an accumulation of small tiredness, and I never actually said that out loud to my wife until almost a year later, when it had already stopped being true.

That eleven pm phone call feels like a strange hinge point looking back on it now, years later. Nothing about it felt momentous while it was happening, I was just tired and trying not to sound tired on the phone. But six weeks after that call I was on a plane, and everything about how I think about my career, my family's life, even how I negotiate anything now, traces back to deciding to pick up a call I almost let go to voicemail.

If you're on the fence about a move like this, the number on the offer letter matters less than you'd think going in, and the stuff that actually determines whether it works, the housing situation, how fast you adapt to daily logistics, how honest you are with your partner about the hard months, is exactly what I ended up writing about once we'd actually settled in, in Why This Small Island Won Me Over More Than I Expected.

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Why This Small Island Won Me Over More Than I Expected

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