One-eyed Dragon to hang, but wife takes news calmly
SHE had stood firmly by her husband, even though he had an affair.
Madam Seow outside the court in January this year.
Madam Seow Fung Fung, 26, had also religiously attended her husband's trial.
But she was a no-show yesterday morning in court when her husband's death sentence was passed.
When contacted after the verdict, Madam Seow told The New Paper in Mandarin: 'I know what kind of man I had married. I'm prepared to accept any consequences.'
Madam Seow, who is in Singapore, said that she did not turn up in court because she was busy attending to some matters.
Sounding calm over the phone, she said that her brother-in-law had told her about the verdict.
'I don't know how to describe how I felt when I heard he was going to die...'
She has always been calm, even when she discovered that her husband, gunman Tan Chor Jin, 40, had a mistress who had borne him a daughter and a son.
She just accepted it and treated the children as her own. Madam Seow and Tan do not have any children.
When The New Paper spoke to her in February this year, she said she considered Tan's mistress, Madam Lian Yee Hwa, 28, a sister.
Madam Seow said she found out about Madam Lian when her husband was arrested in February last year.
Madam Seow and Madam Lian, both Malaysians, would travel to Singapore whenever Tan was due to appear in court.
Madam Lian would bring her newborn son along, so that Tan could see him when they visited him in prison.
The three of them would stay in Tan's three-room flat in Hougang when they were here.
Madam Seow lives in Johor Baru but travels to Singapore often.
When The New Paper visited her in the Hougang flat in February, she was looking after Tan's baby boy, now 7 months. Madam Lian had gone out to shop.
When the baby cried, she dropped all household chores immediately and attended to him.
She carried him into the living room and cooed to him in Mandarin: 'Yi yi bao, bu yao ku.' (Aunty will carry, don't cry).
The baby stopped crying soon after and she gave him some water before putting him back to bed.
When asked if he was Tan's son, she just smiled.
But Tan's childhood friend, who was also present in the flat then, said that Madam Seow would help look after the boy when his mother was not around.
She was also protective of him.
When asked if Tan was the one who had named the boy, Madam Seow said: 'Don't write too much about the son, lah. He's innocent. Don't drag him into this.'
Madam Lian returned soon carrying two plastic bags.
Madam Seow asked her in Hokkien what she had bought. The two women then chatted casually like sisters.
When we tried to interview Madam Lian, Madam Seow requested that we leave her alone. She would do the talking instead.
Madam Lian sat at a corner of the living room quietly, occasionally getting up to go to the room to check on her son.
Madam Seow said that she and Tan got to know each other in 1999 through mutual friends.
It was love at first sight for Tan.
Madam Seow recalled: 'We were dining together with a big group of friends in JB and he kept looking at me. When our eyes met, he would wink and smile.'
The next day, Tan asked her out.
The long-haired, fair-complexioned Madam Seow was then helping out at her parents' business in JB. She did not want to say what the business was.
'He would come to the shop every day to look for me. This carried on for a few months before I was won over by his charms,' she said.
After dating for about a year, Tan met with an accident which resulted in his being blinded in his right eye.
Madam Seow said that Tan was in the front passenger seat of the car at that time.
'It was a head-on collision. Glass shards from the windscreen pierced his right eye and he lost his sight in that eye.'
But it didn't matter to Madam Seow. A year later, in 2001, they got married in Singapore legally.
She claimed: 'He was a charming and responsible man who took good care of me and my parents.
'His parents passed away a few years ago, and he treated my parents like his own. He would buy them gifts on their birthdays and during festivals.
'My parents even travelled from JB to visit him in prison and they cried when they saw him.'
It emerged in court that Tan was a headman of the Ang Soon Tong triad. But he said that after he lost one of his eyes, he stepped down as the headman.
But Madam Seow claimed he was not violent towards her.
'I'm so small-sized. He won't be fierce to me.'
He would give her a few thousand ringgit as allowance every month, she said.
And when he was awaiting trial, she and Madam Lian would take turns to visit him in prison almost every day.
Sometimes, Madam Lian would bring their two children - 5-year-old daughter and 7-month-old son - to visit Tan.
DOTING DAD
Madam Seow said: 'He (Tan) was always very happy and couldn't stop smiling when he saw his son. He wanted to carry him but could not.'
Tan's son was born after he was arrested.
She said: 'He always put on a brave front when I visited him. I know he didn't want me to worry for him.'
Knowing that Tan was involved in the underworld when she married him, Madam Seow said: 'I know he would ask me to find a good man to re-marry if anything happened to him.'
Yesterday, when asked if she would still marry Tan if she could choose again, Madam Seow said: 'Can the clock be turned back? If can, then I'll tell you the answer.'
