小黑

Born in Johor, Malaysia He is Indian and sang many Chinese and Hokkien Songs His Name Xiao Hei sometimes spell Siau Hei in Indonesia He grew up as the third child in a Tamil family of five, living in a largely Chinese kampung where Hokkien was the lingua franca among the 200 families. “It was natural to pick up the dialect,” he says, just like everyone else in his family, who stayed there because his father worked as a caretaker in the kampung’s school. After finishing his primary school education, he started working as a construction worker in Muar. “Hence my poor English,” he says apologetically, although he is adept in Malay, Tamil and other Chinese dialects. A few years later, after working his way up to become a contractor, he went to Singapore in the 1980s to work as one. That was when friends noticed that he sang all the time when he was working and introduced him to getai organiser Power Jackson in the mid-1980s.