Book Review: The Fairchild Singapore Plant

The Fairchild Singapore Plant by Liu Fook Thim
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very well written narrative of the Fairchild Singapore story. It is a unique Singaporean book, as there are almost zero books published in Singapore that goes into such amazing detail about the company's history, the factory, the products, and the people of this multinational corporation in the electronics industry.

The original raison d'etre for the book was to compile a collection of stories and anecdotes told to Liu by past Fairchild Singapore employees. However, over the 4 years that the book has been in gestation, Liu shaped and sharpened the text of the book to evolve it into an engrossing work that covers overlapping categories such as a history book, a management book, a coming-of-age biography, and most importantly, a Singapore book. In this last category, there is absolutely no other Singapore book like Liu's work at the moment.

Liu's writing style is extremely readable, and he has structured the book in a very elegant way to allow him to ingeniously weave the employee's stories into the various chapters of the book. One criticism I would levy is that the book lacks a timeline chart that puts all the key historical events in an easy to read visual. Although Liu is an engineer by training, the presentation in this book is very text based, and lacks almost any tables or charts that are practically the metier of engineering writing. But despite their absence (or perhaps because of their absence), this book makes for a very engaging read.

At first, I thought that the book would only be of interest to ex-Fairchild Singapore employees. However, after completing it, I can state emphatically that this is absolutely not so. The story that is told will be intriguing to anyone who is interested about the electronics industry, or working in a large corporation, or human stories about Singaporeans, or Singapore-history buffs. Ex-Fairchild employees will obviously get more of a bump, seeing that it is their story that is being told. But if you are a reader who falls into any of the 4 categories I mentioned, you will not be disappointed by this book. It is interesting, informational, and surprisingly, touching.

(Disclaimer: I am an ex-Fairchild Singapore employee).


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