Singapore’s Pritam Singh trial: ‘lao hong’ biscuit debate, ‘Gigachad’ lawyer trends online

A former Workers’ Party member testifies about ex-WP MP Raeesah Khan’s character by using a term describing biscuits that have gone soft

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The Workers’ Party Secretary-General Pritam Singh attends a press conference in Singapore last year. Photo: Reuters

Published: 9:01pm, 18 Oct 2024Updated: 11:36pm, 18 Oct 2024

The unexpected topic of lao hong biscuits, Hokkien for cookies that have lost their crunch, became fodder for a criminal trial against Singapore’s opposition leader Pritam Singh on Friday as the hearing briefly took a light-hearted tone.

Singh, 48, is embroiled in a controversy stemming from former Workers’ Party MP Raeesah Khan’s lies to parliament in August 2021 about accompanying a rape victim to a police station. He faces two charges for giving false evidence in his testimony during parliamentary committee hearings held in December that year.

In front of a packed courtroom on Friday, Singh’s lawyer Andre Jumabhoy cross-examined prosecution witness and former party member Loh Pei Ying and asked if she had described Khan as lao hong during a party disciplinary hearing in November that year.

What followed was a debate on the meaning of the Hokkien term, which translates into “leaking air” in English and is often used to describe crackers or biscuits that have gone soft or lost their crunch.

Loh disagreed that the term meant “weak”, but said she used lao hong because she felt Khan was “quite susceptible to criticism”.

Raeesah Khan, former MP from The Workers’ Party in Singapore. Photo: Facebook

Asked what her understanding of the dialect phrase meant, Loh said: “Would you call a lao hong biscuit a weak biscuit? … It’s just not a crispy biscuit.”