Background
Tan"s father is Chinese Teochew and her mother is Japanese.
Tan"s father is Chinese Teochew and her mother is Japanese.
She completed her General Certificate of Education "A"-Level education at Anglo-Chinese Junior College in 1981, later describing her two years there as "very happy ones", and went on to attend the National University of Singapore.
She was formerly the editor of The Sunday Times and magazines team On graduating with a Bachelor of Arts, she joined The Straits Times as a reporter in 1985. Writing in The Sunday Times in 2013, Tan said that she had lived in the Kovan neighbourhood all her life, though the area was not popularly known as Kovan in her earliest years: "People called it the Hougang 6th Milestone in Teochew."
Tan married her junior college school mate, Quek Suan Shiau, an electrician and chess teacher based in Wales, United Kingdom, in 2010.
Referred to as "H", he has featured in a number of Tan"s newspaper articles