The Singapore stories that made 1.6 million people stop scrolling, cry a little, and call their mother.
Why 3AM?
Some stories only come out at 3AM.
At 3AM, the house is quiet. The phone stops buzzing. And the things you spent all day not thinking about finally come and sit beside you.
The father who never said much. The green packet with $2 inside. The plate where the drumstick always landed, and the person who made sure it did.
These are the stories I write at that hour.
They’re not about famous people. They’re about your mother, your uncle, the aunty at the kopitiam who remembers your order. People who loved us in ways we only understood twenty years too late.
Over 600 of these stories have gone out on Facebook. Some have been read by more than a million people in a single week.
But Facebook forgets a post in two days.
This place doesn’t.
The CEO Who Writes at 3AM
By day, I’m Alvin Huang. I’ve spent 22 years building e-commerce businesses from Singapore, bootstrapped, no investors, now with a team of 70 across six countries. That’s the part of my life with spreadsheets in it.
But somewhere along the way, I started writing down the stories that wouldn’t let me sleep. A hawker’s hands. A funeral where nobody cried until the food arrived. The last National Day my grandmother watched from her window.
I posted one at 3AM. Then another. Then people started tagging their mothers. Now millions of Singaporeans have read them, shared them, and argued in the comments about whether they cried or not. (They cried.)
I still run my companies in the daytime. But this, honestly, is the work I’d do for free.
I already do.
Start with the Ones that Broke People.
Every story is true to life, set in Singapore, and short enough to finish before your teh gets cold.
Featured story cards (3):
Card 1 You Ate It in Nine Minutes It took him twelve hours to make. You never asked how. Read by over 300,000 people. [Read the story]
Card 2 The Green Packet Had $2 Inside You laughed at it once. Now you’d give anything to receive one more. Read by over 100,000 people. [Read the story]
Card 3 The Drumstick Was Always on Your Plate You never asked how it got there. She made sure you never had to. Read by over 100,000 people. [Read the story]
The Table
The first 3AM Stories book.
Every family has a table. The one where report cards were signed, where silences were served alongside dinner, where the important things were almost said.
The Table gathers the stories readers asked to keep.
Not screenshots. Not saved posts that disappear when an app decides so.
A book you can hold, dog-ear, and leave where your children will find it.
Coming soon. Join the list and you’ll be the first to know when it’s out.
One Story a Week. Pass it on.
Every week, I send one story to your inbox, along with something Facebook readers never see: a short note on why I wrote it, and which detail was real.
No ads. No selling. Just the story, the way it was meant to be read… slowly, quietly, probably at some hour you should be asleep.
