Huat Kao started during a season with no plan in it. I'd just been retrenched, and after months of using AI at work to move faster, I found myself with time and no employer — so I started pointing that same habit at my own ideas instead. JiXiang Lab is what that turned into. Huat Kao is what showed up somewhere along the way.
The name comes from 发糕 (huat kueh) — the steamed rice cake families make for Lunar New Year and other auspicious days. Tradition says the luck is in the crack: the more the top blooms open while it steams, the more "huat" — prosperity — you're in for. A cake that only counts as lucky once it's split wide open felt like the right namesake for a character built out of an uncertain, cracked-open year.
Say it fast and "Huat Kao" also lands close to "wah kao" — the reflexive Singlish exclamation somewhere between disgust and disbelief. Which tracks, since that's usually the exact sound people make right before, or right after, someone gets rich.
Huat Kao grew from there into a slightly sarcastic, very Singaporean voice — someone who's watched enough hustle-culture advice, enough "how I got rich" reels, enough kiasu logic, to roast it a little from the inside. Comics, shorts, a growing cast, all circling the same joke: everyone's chasing huat, and everyone's a little ridiculous doing it. Me included.
Huat Kao's now-iconic bowl-cut didn't come from nowhere. It was inspired by a comedic sketch character — "Benedict Chowdhury" — that Gurmit Singh played opposite Violet Lim in a Lunch Actually interview. The hair and the larger-than-life energy stuck in my head long enough to become part of how Huat Kao looks.
Off paper, Huat Kao goes by an English name too — Benjamin, chosen quietly to echo Benedict.
To be clear: Huat Kao isn't based on Gurmit Singh, and this isn't an endorsement of any kind — just an honest nod to where a piece of the character's look came from, and thanks for the laugh that started it.
A friend told me, in the middle of the worst of it, that being retrenched isn't a doomsday. Huat Kao is some of what came after — and if it grows into anything real, the hope is for it to give back the way the rest of JiXiang Lab is trying to: to educate, entertain, and maybe empower someone else going through their own uncertain season.