Ambulance or college degree, 'Uncle Potato' is your make-it-happen genie

The Star

a day ago

GLOWING in her commencement robe, gripping the scroll that would set her on the path to being a doctor, Lim Jia Jia's megawatt smile carries all the pride deserved by her truck driver father and homemaker mother.
Also beaming for her was Malaysia's "Uncle Kentang (Potato)". It's a moniker that has stuck with Kuan Chee Heng (left) since his early portly days, despite him dropping a few sizes now. The potato avatar, however, symbolises hope for kids like Jia Jia who have the dream — but not the money — to make it through college.
It's not just education. Whatever the need, be it an ambulance, funeral service, eyeglasses, prosthetics, wheelchair — even a car with paid road tax and insurance — both Chee Heng and his unclekentang.com mission (which uses the Malay word for potato) are there to help.
From dawn ('I'm up by 4.30am,' he says) to dusk ('my bedtime is decided by the urgency of people's needs'), Chee Heng and his crowdfunded mission operate with a small army of ambulance drivers, paramedics, nurses and other skilled individuals ready to perform any humanitarian deed — often for free and sometimes a nominal fee.
To give you an idea of what those deeds are, there's a production crew that shoots videos with a green-screen backdrop to later insert images of businesses run by retirees and single parents needing to make a little more money.
There's a hospitality desk that arranges RM1 hotel rooms for poor families arriving from out of state for medical treatment in KL. Need to cook as well? No worries, there's a homestay — for the same RM1.
There are teams that oversee multiple food and grocery programmes, including at a cafe and shop where the hungry and poor can purchase food and other items for RM1. There's also a RM1 market, where preloved items, from furniture to clothing and motorcycles, are refurbished and sold to the underprivileged.
The RM1 seems to be a recurring theme, when the services could be free, I observed. Why?
'It gives people dignity when they pay for something, instead of getting it for free,' he told me.
'Believe me, I've been there. I know what it's like to be poor and to beg.' Deciding between optics and need
The visibility unclekentang.com attracts — not a day goes by without it making news for handing out a new scholarship, car or hospital bed — has led to scrutiny at times on how deserving its recipients are, since the organisation is declared as a "badan amal", or charity, that runs on community funds.
'We do our due diligence, of course,' Chee Heng said, 'But what's more important is that no needy person should be deprived of our services.'
That can be difficult. One woman who received a car from him was accused — at least by appearance on social media (left) — of carrying an expensive mobile phone and handbag. Uncle Kentang had to clarify later that she was a single mom using a cheaper-than-thought phone and a fake luxury bag. The RM18,000 car was wilfully donated by an anonymous contributor to unclekentang.com. Yet, it didn't help the optics in this case.
On another level, his interactions with preacher Ebit Lew, who faces a battery of sexual harassment charges, and fugitive businessman Nicky Liow, who's been linked to suspects of organised crime, have raised questions about Uncle Kentang's own character.
Chee Heng makes no apologies for either.
'If you bring meaningful change to what I do, your past is of no concern to me. Everyone deserves a second chance, even a murderer or rapist. What's done is done.'
What he regrets though is the negative chatter that sometimes deprives his organisation — and the people that can count on it — the aid it needs. In January, he made a call to Sports Toto winners to spend some of their windfall on ambulances for his mission. He was elated to get three pledges, only to lose one later when some people trolled him for bothering lottery winners.
In a polite post later, he invited commentators to think first of 'the poor, sick and bedridden' before having their say, adding: 'It can be your loved ones needing an ambulance and by then, it may be a bit too late. We should consider supporting good causes. Do not kill good initiatives for the people. Thank you.'
Kuan Chee Heng with an ambulance that runs under his unclekentang.com mission Doing the job others are supposed to
Viewing the unclekentang.com site makes one wonder how an organisation with fewer than two dozen ambulances can manage the sort of first responder services typically expected of hospitals with far greater resources.
On the site, a team of 50 trained operatives handle more than 30 calls a day coming in from all over to its Puchong base just outside the capital and route them to ambulances, mobility vans and other trauma services.
When lives are lost, the kereta jenazah — hearse to transport the remains — and funeral assistance usually follow.
Often, the 62-year-old Uncle Kentang can be seen in the thick of the action (left). When I rang one afternoon, I heard him talking over the siren of an ambulance racing to hospital with a heart patient onboard.
Why do you do this, I asked when I got to speak to him later that day. What I meant was why he felt the need to provide emergency services when there were so many hospitals in the country, from government to private, to do that. Wouldn't dialing 999 itself get someone an ambulance? How much difference did his service make?
'It all has to do with the response time,' he replied.
'In an emergency, our affirmation for an ambulance is 10 seconds and 15 minutes to get there. Before asking why I do this, ask how many have those targets.'
Proving his point, unclekentang.com — despite its limited resources — was the first to reach Putra Heights after the Petronas gas pipeline explosion on April 1 and provide initial response to victims with third-degree burns.
'But you're right about what you asked,' Chee Heng said in an afterthought to my question. 'I wouldn't have to do this if those in positions of responsibility had done what they were supposed to.'
Whatever the case, he seems to have done his job well enough to receive the Commonwealth Points of Light award in 2021, in recognition of his exemplary voluntary services to community.
At that time, Chee Heng was the only fourth Malaysian chosen for the Queen Elizabeth honour among recipients in 56 Commonwealth countries.
More remarkable is that while running his emergency services, he also looks to the needs of the police and fire departments and various municipalities, regularly donating special purpose vehicles and other items they need.
'There's a lot of bureaucracy in this country that prevents things from getting done in a timely manner and the more you get into public services, the more you realise that,' he added.
'As I said, my organisation doesn't discriminate or dwell on the problems; we try to solve them. If we can positively change a situation or save just one more life, we are the happiest.' A directionless teen before becoming celebrated giver
In the post hailing doctoral student Jia Jia (left), Chee Heng said as a teen he himself was 'useless, not productive' and a 'mother's lousy son'.
'I did not possess any good results throughout my school time … (was) never an excellent student,' he wrote, adding that he did not 'have any successful story to break during family dinners or gatherings.'
As though that wasn't enough, he appealed to readers to 'bear with me as I don't (know) how to narrate properly … my vocab is lousy'.
But seated across from me, I found a man who not only spoke with near-perfect grammar and diction but could probably hold the attention of any room.
'Oh, that's 30 years of work,' he said, before walking me through that history.
Born into a large family of ten siblings — six girls and four boys — Chee Heng was the ninth child to a pair of rubber tappers in Johor. From childhood to his young adult years, he could not remember much beyond poverty.
He finished school at 17, with neither the interest nor intellectual capacity to do more (as he said in the post he authored on Jia Jia). A string of odd jobs, including an extended run as a despatch rider, followed over the next 12 years as he moved to Kuala Lumpur, then returned home, before trying his luck in the capital one more time. Saying it right with flowers
It was on his second venture out of Johor that Chee Heng found his first calling: flowers. Working for a friend who was a florist, he learned not just how to arrange and sell bouquets but also how to get people to say it with flowers.
Opening his own little floral nook in Jalan Sultan Ismail, he began making definitions for flowers no one had thought of till then. Red roses everyone knew were for love. How about white? Answer: Sincerity. Yellow? Apology. Champagne? Romantic love. Amber? Deep love.
There's more: One rose = I want to be your friend. Two roses = Can we have a date? (Really? Why didn't I know that when I was dating? I was buying them by the bunches!) Eleven stalks = I can't stop loving you. Twenty-four roses? I'm loving you every minute. Ninety-nine roses? I won't stop loving you eternally (I really have to hand it to this guy).
He helped his customers craft those messages onto the stalks and bouquets they bought. Soon, it became a trend as other florists latched on to his innovative floral messaging that appeared in newspaper ads. Chee Heng's own customer base rocketed from retail to corporate VVIP.
His non-linear thinking also brought him his single biggest paycheck for a task when a businessman dared him to make a flower arrangement so large that it wouldn't get through the entrance of the Parkroyal Hotel in Bukit Bintang, in an effort to impress his girlfriend who worked there.
No problem, said Chee Heng, who strung together dozens of baby-bouquet baskets holding about 1,000 stalks of roses to make a structure wider than the entrance. He won the bet for RM10,000; then turned the whole arrangement sideways and delivered the roses anyway to the woman — as a bonus. Keeping a good thing going
All this happened in the 1990s and Chee Heng was just in his thirties. His fortunes were changing but so was something else within him. The poverty that shaped nearly three decades of his life had instilled in him deep empathy for the downtrodden. Uncle Kentang, the champion of the poor, began to emerge.
Chatting with a moneychanger friend gave Chee Heng the idea of handing the vagabonds who hung outside his florist store RM5 each day to buy food. The Sultan Ismail-Bukit Bintang vicinity — long before today's Golden Triangle lure — was once a haunt for drug addicts and the homeless.
'No one plans for a life of addiction; it's all about circumstances and once you're trapped in there, there's usually no way back,' said Chee Heng. 'Society shuns addicts but we forget that these people have stomachs and they feel hunger too.'
Chee Heng also made arrangements with a restaurant in Bukit Bintang where the addicts could take away meals when they did not pick up money from him.
It wasn't long before his initiative to feed the destitute morphed into an idea of providing aid for the poor everywhere. The seeds for the unclekentang.com movement were sown.
Chee Heng leaned heavily on his top 1% customer base for help and contributions began piling in. At the height of it, he was sitting on a cash pile of RM7mil — something he couldn't believe himself.
But those were days before the Covid-19 outbreak. When the pandemic struck, demand for aid went through the roof and unclekentang.com had to double down on its services, unleashing a response it could no longer slow.
The problem was that it also set in motion a cash drain the movement hadn't seen before. In just five years, Chee Heng's mission burnt through RM5mil — or an average of RM1mil per year — leaving it with just a couple of million from the total he had raised.
Contributions have thinned further since the Covid-19 era. Unclekentang.com estimates it needs between RM300,000 and RM350,000 a month now to keep things going.
At least 70% — or RM240,000 — is required to pay the 60 people on board, who receive an average of RM4,000 each. But what Joe Public itself is giving unclekentang.com is less than RM30,000 a month — leaving the movement more than 90% underfunded.
Chee Heng has come up with all sorts of ideas to raise more money, including a goofy one where he put himself up as a 'rental boyfriend' available for candlelight dinner with lonely women at RM50 an hour.
'Book early to avoid disappointment. I promise I will not disappoint you' he wrote in the post that pictured him in two shots — one in a biker's jacket (left) and another hugging a lamppost (I kid not).
Probably sensing how the whole thing sounded, the father of three quickly added that he had 'just dinner and nothing else' in mind.
'Too many ladies get conned by virtual lovers. At least your money will go to the needful and hungry,' he said, summing up. It's not known if any woman took him up on the offer.
In a more serious effort, he ran as an independent candidate for Puchong in the 2022 elections, losing so badly that the deposit he placed vanished too. 'Most people are still unable to accept someone not affiliated with a political party in this country, no matter how hard the person works for society,' he told me.
'But I guess that's democracy.'
In the meantime, his movement continues to bleed cash. At the rate it's going, it could run out of money in six to seven months.
'Or we could keep going, with the will of the divine,' said Chee Heng. 'Without that, a pauper like me could have never dreamt of being a philanthropist.'
I thought about that for a moment. Chee Heng was neither Disney's Tinker Bell with the magic wand, nor the lamp genie acting on Aladdin's command. But he was the real deal that made it happen for Malaysia's downtrodden.
God, I sure hope he continues!