Beneath the tanned, tattooed and seemingly tough exterior that is Dawn Lim beats a tender heart that nurtures neglected babies, houses the homeless and rescues animals that have been abused and abandoned.

One of the kittens Dawn rescued. What started out as a love for animals and volunteering at animal shelters weekly soon turned into fostering animals in her home. Dawn has housed dogs, cats, guinea pigs and chinchillas.

The 47-year-old is difficult to decipher; she is a whirlwind of disparate activities, all vastly different from each other.

By day, she is a sales manager for a company that provides portable toilets and diesel refuelling services. By night, she handles the online sales of a fish stall at a Bedok wet market run by her husband Alvin Kong, 36.

The Chapalang Shop at Bedok which Dawn and her husband Alvin run.

Come weekends, the couple are private chefs for hire. They cater for intimate gatherings as well as mass events of hundreds. Live stations featuring Hokkien mee fried over charcoal fire and barbecues are their specialty.

And as if they do not have enough to do, Dawn and Alvin regularly cook and deliver food to some 200 low-income households in Chinatown.

Dawn specialises in Hokkien mee which she fries over charcoal fire.

Her Hokkien mee – chockfull of ingredients – is a hit with diners.

Much of her motivation to keep doing more comes from her childhood experiences and something else that she can only explain as “God, I think it’s only God”.

That in itself is a miracle because Dawn would be the first to admit that she never used to consider herself a “Christian Christian”.

Nobody’s child

When Dawn was two years old, her parents divorced. Her father, too busy working to care for a small child, left her to be raised first by her paternal grandmother, then by her aunt when her grandmother passed away.

Dawn never saw her mother again till she was 11. That year, her aunt, her father’s sister, had picked up the phone to call Dawn’s maternal grandmother. The young girl took the opportunity to take a peek while her aunt dialled. She memorised the number, called her maternal grandmother and asked for her mother. That was how she reconnected with her mother.

According to her father, her mother was irresponsible. From what her mother later told her, her father had “snatched me away and didn’t let her see me”.

“Of course my childhood was not happy. Everybody goes to school and has parents. I live with my auntie, hardly ever saw my father, didn’t know where my mother was,” she told Salt&Light.

In her teens, Dawn moved in with her cousin before going to live with her father.

“Nobody wanted to look after me. Every family had their own responsibilities,” said Dawn.

The only bright spark was her maternal grandmother whom she used to visit every weekend when she was young.

Dawn’s grandmother who took her to church on weekends and who would give her coins to put into the offering bag.

“Grandma was a Christian and I would follow her to church as a kid. I would go to Sunday school. But when I moved in with my aunt, the visits stopped and I never went back to church.”

One small step

Though short-lived, her time in church had an impact on Dawn.

“I always said I am a Christian even though I didn’t behave like one.”

In her teens, she was “just very rebellious”. While still in secondary school, she would party late into the night. There were times she ran away from home. In Secondary Three, she dropped out of school.

“I didn’t like studying though I liked school. I just liked to meet my friends.”

By her 20s, she had worked a variety of jobs and was living it up. “I drank, smoked, partied and would get drunk.”

In her youth, Dawn was not one to turn down invitations to hang out over drinks.

She would also go on to get married at 25, become a mother, get divorced and then become a mother again. Somewhere in between, at age 32, Dawn suddenly made the decision to return to church.

“I sent my children to a children’s church. I had also sent them to a Christian kindergarten as well. What I thought was that if I put them in a Christian school, they would grow up with proper values,” she told Salt&Light.

“Since they were attending a children’s church, I went for the worship service as well.”

Dawn returned to church because she wanted to raise her sons in the Christian faith.

Even though she was “never regular in church, it was an on-off thing”, it was still a step, however small, towards a bigger faith.

“I wanted to be a Christian Christian”

It would be well over a decade of drifting in and out of church before Dawn took the next step, compelled by “something” that she would only later realise was God.

First, she renounced the practices of her past. Amulets that had been given to her that she had worn or kept in her handbag “for peace”, she threw out.

“I am supposed to be a Christian, why do I have these things?”

Then, she decided to go to church for real.

“During COVID, bigger churches couldn’t meet face to face. But something was urging me to go back to church. It was something that I cannot explain.

“I love fishing and had a fishing kaki (buddy) who went to church. So I asked him to bring me with him. I don’t know why I did it.”

Her love of fishing would not only lead her back to church, it also led her to the love of her life, her husband Alvin.

What Dawn did know was that the life she had lived was beginning to lose its lustre.

“I liked to drink and hang out with my friends in bistros. But at that point, I just didn’t like it anything anymore. I started to be uninterested in many things I used to like. I found it bo liao (meaningless).

“It wasn’t that I was going through a bad patch. I just wanted a change, wanted to go back to church and be a Christian Christian.”

In March 2021, Dawn attended her first service at Covenant Presbyterian Church. Shortly after, she signed up for the Alpha course.

“Because I didn’t really know God even though I called myself a Christian. I wanted to be a Christian Christian.”

It was so uncharacteristic of her that her friends were surprised.

“They said, ‘You started to go back to church? You this kind of pattern, your Pastor can take you, meh?’”

“My next marriage has to be a Christian marriage”

During this time, Dawn was dating Alvin. They had met because of their common interest in fishing. But he was of another faith. In fact, he had been a temple medium since his teens.

Fishing and fish continue to be a big part of Dawn and Alvin’s lives.

Yet when Dawn returned to church, he went along with her.

“Because I love her and I wanted to make her happy,” Alvin told Salt&Light.

That Dawn was very clear that she would only marry a fellow believer might have weighed on his decision-making.

“I told him, ‘If you really want to be with me, I am determined to be in a Christian marriage, or else I don’t want the relationship anymore.’

“My first marriage was a civil marriage and it broke down. So the next one has to be a Christian marriage or I don’t want a relationship at all. I was 200% sure.

“He was very upset, He said, ‘How come we cannot be together despite our different beliefs?’

“I didn’t have an answer. I was not a Christian Christian at that time. It was just that I was so adamant about it. There was Something telling me. In the past, I was never have bothered about it.”

Dawn and Alvin got married in 2022.

While Alvin went to church because of Dawn, he signed up for the Alpha course with her for other reasons.

“I wanted to understand more about Christianity and I was tired of being a temple medium.

“When I attend church, I find peace. So after I started Alpha, I stopped being a medium,” he told Salt&Light.

Transformed into His likeness

Alpha gave Dawn a clarity she never had before.

“When I went through Alpha, I really came to understand who God really is.

“It’s not like I didn’t know from the past because my grandma used to bring me to Sunday school. But now it is more in-depth.”

In August 2021, about six months after returning to church, Dawn got baptised.

Dawn (right) at her baptism in August 2021 with her aunt and grandmother (centre).

Dawn being baptised. Her friends whom she had invited to witness the event joked that she should have been held under water longer because she had so many sins.

“After I got baptised, the change came gradually. Before, my friends call me to go out, in five minutes I am out of the house.

“Now when they ask me to go out for drinks, I say, ‘Okay, okay.’ But then I go to bed instead. All the things I used to like, I am so tired now. All the human pleasure, leisure, I don’t find anymore happiness in doing them.

“My friends know I have stopped drinking. So they stop offering me alcohol. They gave up because now I can say ‘no’ when I couldn’t in the past because I loved to drink.

“It’s not me. I just can’t explain it. It is the Holy Spirit because I would never be able to do this on my own. I had been drinking and partying since my teenage years till my 40s.”

Sharing the love of God with others

Now bringing the love of God to others is what gives Dawn pleasure.

Every few months, she and Alvin cook for some 200 households in Banda Street in Chinatown. They also hand out food rations like rice, oil, bread, sugar, coffee and even ice-cream for the children. On one occasion, they gave out dim sum.

Instead of spending the day on herself, Dawn used her birthday to raise funds for the lower income families in Chinatown whom she has been feeding.

“I want to give them food that is slightly better, not what they usually get. I just want to help in any way I can. Even if you get me down and dirty, heavy stuff, I can do it,” she said to Salt&Light.

When a Facebook friend reached out to her asking for help to provide temporary care for a one-year old girl, Dawn did not hesitate. The child’s parents live in a rental one-room flat and have no childcare support. Often, the children were shunted from one place to another.

“Girls are more vulnerable. They may get sexually abused if they fall into the wrong hands.

“I grew up in a divorced family. One of the reasons why I try to love kids a lot is that children shouldn’t suffer from the mistakes that their parents make.

“They should be given full love, not just a house but a home full of love and comfort where they can rest peacefully and be well taken care of.”

What started out as babysitting over a weekend became a regular child-minding arrangement. Dawn’s friends and church came together to help set up Dawn’s home for the girl.

Alvin and the little girl Dawn and he are fostering.

“Overnight, we had a cot and all the things we need to have a home suitable for a baby.

“We treat her like our own. We bring her out and to church.”

When a man Dawn got to know because of their shared interest in birds was thrown out of his house after a quarrel with his wife, Dawn took him in. He had meant to move in with a friend but that friend also ended up without a roof over his head for some reason. Dawn housed both men for a few weeks so they would not have to camp out at the beach.

“A Voice within me just said, ‘Do it. You will be safe and fine.’ To me, the reason why they are homeless is irrelevant. They need help, they need to be fed.

“I believe God will not throw anything to me that I cannot handle.”

Alvin even ended up providing them part-time work at their fish stall in Bedok.

Dawn is also Agony Aunt to strangers who reach out to her through social media.

“I post fun and funny stuff. They reach out to me and tell me about their problems. They say, ‘Dawn, I see you are very strong, I cannot get through my life. How do you carry on?’

“I tell them, ‘If your god is not doing anything for you, why don’t you try mine. Just come to church and sit with me. Anybody can come.’”

Some take up the invitation. Of those who do, a few have even stayed on in church.

Asked why it is that God seems to have such a hold of her life even at times when she was ignoring Him, Dawn said: “It’s my grandma. She brought me to church, she planted the seed.

“And my grandma prays a lot and reads the Bible a lot. She is 93 and she still prays and reads the Bible.

“When I look back, I remember she would always tell me that God is love. Now I see in my life, everything she talked about God is happening.

“I don’t know how to thank Him for seeing me through all the ups and downs. I am so blessed.”

Look out for Part 2 of their story which traces Alvin’s journey from temple medium to a man transformed.

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