ANDESSEN IMAGERY Posts

The airport was heavy with a quiet, sterile tension. She asked, softly, almost to herself: “Will we make it?”

I looked at her, then at her daughter. My answer wasn’t a rehearsed speech; it was just the truth: “We will do what we can. That’s all we can promise, and it will be enough.”

Tears traced quiet paths down their faces. I carried that weight with me—their fear and their hope—as I walked toward immigration. Every step felt heavier, a physical echo of the responsibility I was taking back with me.

And the line closed behind me.

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The new space was smaller, rundown, and stubborn. Each corner demanded imagination: car parks laid out for flow, a water tank shifted for a second-floor pump, a back nook reinvented as a shower. The plan wasn’t improvised; it was a pivot built from years of customer patterns and blueprints that had been waiting for their moment. COVID didn’t create the idea. It made it urgent.

Her daughter arrived with a suitcase and a school bag—teenage energy, questions, rebellion—and suddenly the space we were shaping had to make room for a future, not just a business. I saw her through her mother’s eyes, mindful of the missteps of history. I held steady, guiding without force, offering the boundaries she needed to breathe while the world outside pressed in.

Her cousin stepped in from the studio—hands already familiar with the work—and the circle widened just enough for the load to be shared.

She carried her own fatigue. Between cleaning, moving boxes, and worrying for her daughter, the physical strain mirrored the emotional. We worked side by side, navigating the burden together, each of us carrying something we didn’t put down.

Then came Krapow Power. The name didn’t arrive as a launch—it arrived as a question we kept testing in the kitchen late at night: could something small carry the weight of something much bigger? We turned a second-floor room into a home kitchen. The Foodpanda jingle became a small, persistent thread of continuity.

Portions, price, packaging—I kept them high, not because we could afford to, but because I didn’t want survival to look like compromise. We even joked that if this worked, Aonang Haven could finally take a rest.

By the time the systems were holding, the days had found a rhythm. The spaces we carved out stood firm—anchored in quiet strategy and a care that refused to break.

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The end of the lease loomed like a clock we couldn’t pause. Money would last only until year-end. The team gone, the business fragile, it was just the two of us now—navigating uncertainty floor by floor. Five floors of inventory, a legacy of effort, waiting to be carried, shifted, stored.

The 8-seater became a lifeline. Rear seats removed, every inch pressed into service. Boxes, racks, tools—the pieces of a business we had poured ourselves into—packed, stacked, carried. Sweat and focus stitched each movement together.

We found a new space. Monthly rent instead of annual. Smaller. Simpler. A place to hold what remained, enough room to breathe, enough space to begin again.

Each day became choreography: carry, sort, organize, strategize, pause, adjust. Decisions made in real time, risks weighed in silence. The quiet between actions was full—full of questions, full of responsibility, full of the work of preserving what still mattered.

In the motion, in the labor, in the slow reassembly of our lives, something else returned—not certainty, but momentum.

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It was March 2020. The streets grew quieter. Tourists vanished. The familiar rhythm of days—bookings, arrivals, the hum of a small town coming alive—stretched into pauses that grew longer with each sunrise.

The shuttering wasn’t a choice; it was a ghost town’s command. I gathered the team—the faces that had become the backbone of everything we built—and saw their futures suddenly suspended. We didn’t just close the doors. We broke the bank to make sure they could get home, to their families. Money pressed into hands—not a severance, but a bridge.

“Go home,” I told them. “This is just a pause. When the world wakes up, we’ll bring you back.”
I believed it then.

We moved through the space, noticing the absence: empty tables, silent corridors, inventory sitting in the dark like museum exhibits. Conversations about the future grew heavier, circling the same questions: What now? How do we keep going?

News arrived like a relentless tide—rates rising, borders closing. What we thought would be months began to feel like something without a horizon.

We reached out to the landlord—the one we had paid faithfully for so long—and were met with silence. No empathy. No negotiation. Just the cold weight of a lease that did not care about a global catastrophe.

The world outside had shifted.
We were still standing inside what we had built, trying to understand what it meant now.

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