Quitting Our Jobs, Fleeing a Pandemic, and Fighting Landlords: My Raw 6-Year Singapore Survival Story

Moving your whole family to a foreign country gets sold as a clean, calculated career move — good salary, clean infrastructure, everything sorted out on paper. What nobody tells you is the actual emotional chaos underneath it, especially if you're navigating the local rental market with basically no safety net.

Six years ago, my wife and I did something a little reckless. We both quit stable corporate jobs in Korea with one simple plan: travel the world for a while. While we were sketching that out, my wife noticed a job opening in Singapore almost as an afterthought and said, "Why not just apply?" Against reasonable odds, the interview went well, the offer landed, and everything lined up at once — timing, luck, all of it.

Then the world fell apart.

Right as we were packing up our apartment, moving what was left to my in-laws, and selling off most of what we owned, COVID hit. In the middle of our actual moving day, the Singapore office called in a panic — the government was shutting the borders, and if we didn't get on a flight immediately, our visas would be canceled.

A spike in infections back in Korea meant Singapore was about to block entries starting at midnight. We abandoned the apartment mid-move, changed our flights on the spot, and ran for Incheon while the movers were still hauling boxes out of our old place. At check-in, our bags were badly overweight. We had to rip them open right there at the counter and dump piles of personal belongings, no time to think about it. My brother-in-law, who'd come to see us off, ended up carrying two entire suitcases back home with him because we simply couldn't bring them. I still feel a little guilty toward the airline staff and the passengers stuck behind us in that line.

That frantic packing saved us, though. We landed in Singapore exactly two hours before the midnight lockdown. Two hours later, and none of this happens.

split image of Botanic Gardens green space and a queue outside a Singapore convenience store

The Room in Bishan

We landed in a ghost town and rented a common room in a Bishan HDB flat, living directly with the local landlord. My wife had worked in Singapore years earlier, so she understood the culture going in, but shared living during a pandemic bred friction fast.

Three months into the lease, the landlord told us to leave. The reason: we were cooking "too much," and it didn't match their household habits. We were under lockdown. Cooking wasn't optional. Their rules were, apparently, non-negotiable.

Earlier in the stay, I'd complained the mattress smelled strongly of mold. The landlord waved it off as tropical humidity trapped in the wood frame, nothing unusual. On the day we moved out, that same landlord flipped the entire bed frame upside down and inspected every joint with a flashlight, hunting for any excuse to keep our deposit. They found nothing. We took our money and left, but the bitterness of being searched that closely over nothing stuck with me for a while.

Despite the eviction, Bishan was genuinely good to us. During circuit breaker, when malls capped headcounts and masks were mandatory outdoors, Bishan Park was basically our only real escape. I remember looking out our window one evening and watching paramedics wheel a neighbor away fully sealed in a biohazard cover. Terrifying, honestly. With nowhere else to put that anxiety, I started running myself into the ground with daily workouts at the park instead.

triptych of condo window views with city skyline and home office desk

The Toa Payoh Curtain War

We upgraded to a proper condo in Toa Payoh — master bedroom plus study. Felt like a step up, until we realized our bedroom shared a wall with a temple, and a multi-year construction project had just started directly across the street. A year of incense smoke and drilling noise, windows sealed shut the whole time.

When the lease ended, the handover became a genuine ordeal. At move-in, the agent had shown us a professional cleaning receipt and told us we'd need to match it exactly at move-out, curtains included. We paid a vendor, had the curtains cleaned, reinstalled, and figured we were done.

At the final walkthrough, the agent pointed to a few loose threads on the curtains and declared them destroyed, demanding a full whole-unit replacement so everything would "match." Our deposit got locked.

My wife was back in Korea recovering from delivering our first child. I was completely alone in the apartment, still with barely functional English, and I'd skipped hiring an agent to save on commission. No advocate, no backup. Just me, a stubborn cleaning vendor, and an aggressive local agent.

Something shifted in me standing in that empty condo. I remember thinking, plainly: I'm a father now. I'm not backing down from this.

The cleaning vendor refused to pay, offering a cheap Malaysia-sourced replacement instead, except cross-border logistics were frozen because of the pandemic. They told me to wait indefinitely. Months passed.

With the landlord's permission, I cut a hand-sized sample straight from the damaged curtain. Every weekend for months, I traveled across the island — Woodlands in the north, Tampines in the east — walking into more than ten curtain shops, holding that scrap of fabric up against thousands of rolls, hunting for a match.

While I was out doing that, the cleaning vendor snuck back into the condo and tried quietly shaving down the loose threads with scissors to hide the damage. Their plan fell apart the moment they noticed a chunk of fabric was already missing — I'd cut it out weeks earlier. He called me furious, demanding to know why.

The agent called too, panicking, saying the cleaning contractor had been rude and wasted everyone's time, that they'd never let him back into the unit again.

I finally went straight to the curtain manufacturer's corporate office instead of dealing with the vendor at all. Their technician came out for a final measurement. I asked him directly why the fabric had torn like that.

He looked at it and sighed. The cleaning crew, he explained, had thrown the whole curtain into an industrial washer without removing the sharp metal mounting hooks. The hooks shredded the fabric during the spin cycle.

That was it. With a corporate technician's statement on record, the cleaning company had no defense left. They accepted full responsibility and paid for a brand-new curtain installation across the entire unit. Six exhausting months of isolation and back-and-forth later, I got every cent of our deposit back.

What I'd Actually Tell Another Expat

Two things from those months still shape how I handle every rental now.

Document everything the moment you get the keys, before the excitement of a new place distracts you. Treat the walkthrough like an inspection, not a celebration. Photograph every scratch, stain, and hinge, store it somewhere timestamped, and send the link to your agent immediately. When someone tries to pin pre-existing wear on you months later, you don't argue — you just hand over the link. I only learned to do this properly with an agent's help on our next move, because doing it entirely alone, the way I did in Toa Payoh, was genuinely too risky to repeat.

Watch for the fake receipt trick, too. That same Toa Payoh agent once quietly offered, off the record, to fabricate a cleaning receipt for a hundred dollars cash so I wouldn't have to actually clean the place. I said no, hired a real vendor, and kept every document. When they later tried to claim a toilet cover was stained and demanded five hundred dollars for it, I pulled out my move-in photos and killed the claim on the spot.

Surviving here isn't only about the bigger structural stuff — coordinating BIM submissions under LTA standards, or filing taxes correctly every April. It's just as much about the small, exhausting battles that protect what you've already worked for. It took six months of language barriers and screaming phone calls, but we kept every dollar of that deposit, packed up, and brought our growing family back to the quiet green of Bishan, the same neighborhood that had once evicted us. That's where our actual Singapore story really started.

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