Goodbye My Kampong

by Josephine Chia

  Reading this book was like spending a weekend in intimate conversation with a good friend. While savouring the pages, I wanted to shout, “hear hear” as Josephine Chia expressed sentiments concerning kampong life, family relationships, technology, politics and inevitable change. As an expat in Singapore, I am truly appreciative of the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of this tiny country’s roots. Many readers will see that their memories strongly align with those of the author—a poignant reminder that borders and oceans have little significance when considering mankind’s commonalities. Thank you, Josephine Chia, for sharing your passion, and for enriching your readers’ levels of historical awareness.

  ~ Margaret Johnson (Teacher and librarian from Australian International School)

  An evocative presentation of bitter-sweet memories. The loss of strong community relations prevalent in a multicultural kampong, in exchange for desirable housing with necessary facilities, is sad. The scarcity of land in an island state, a burgeoning population, and the need for rapid economic and societal development regrettably necessitated the loss of some of Nature’s gifts, such as lakes with fish—the price of progress!

  Josephine Chia’s fortitude and drive in rising from her humble beginnings to provide us with a clear record of the colourful cultural history of early Singapore is most impressive.

  ~ Raja Arasa Ratnam (Former resident of Singapore, and author of four books on immigrant integration)

  GOODBYE MY KAMPONG! POTONG PASIR, 1966 TO 1975

  © Josephine Chia, 2017

  ISBN 978-981-11-5038-8 (Print)

  ISBN 978-981-14-3256-9 (E-Book)

  Published under the imprint Ethos Books

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  The work herein refers to and discusses historical matters in connection with a Singapore location and does not, and should not be construed in any way as referring to or creating any association with the current owners, tenants, occupants, customers, visitors or their related affiliates and any such express statement or imputation is disclaimed. This work documents a past which is no longer linked to the present, except as a matter of historical record.

  This is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. The book reflects the author’s memories of experiences as much as recollection permits and/or can be verified by research at press time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, some dialogue have been recreated and some names have been changed to respect the privacy of individuals.

  COVER DESIGN by Ben Lai

  LAYOUT AND DESIGN by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

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  First published under this imprint in 2017

  TYPEFACE: Cormorant, Bell MT

  MATERIAL: 80gsm GHS Ivory Woodfree

  National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data

  NAME(S): Chia, Josephine.

  TITLE: Goodbye, my kampong! : Potong Pasir, 1966 to 1975 / Josephine Chia.

  DESCRIPTION: Singapore : Ethos Books by Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd, 2017.

  IDENTIFIER(S): OCN 1007791514 | ISBN 978-981-11-5038-8 (pbk) | ISBN 978-981-14-3256-9 (ebk)

  SUBJECT(S): LCSH: Communities--Singapore--Social life and customs. | Urban renewal--Singapore--History. | Economic development--Singapore--History. | Country life--Singapore--History. | Potong Pasir (Singapore)--Social conditions--History.

  CLASSIFICATION: DDC 307.762095957--dc23

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  “We are going to have a multi-racial nation in Singapore. We will set the example. This is not a Malay nation; this is not a Chinese nation; this is not an Indian nation. Everybody will have his place: equal; language, culture, religion.”

  Lee Kuan Yew

  Founding Prime Minister of Singapore

  Excerpt from a transcript of a press conference at

  Broadcasting House, Singapore, 1965

  Contents

  Preface

  Happy First Birthday Singapore! (1966)

  A Murmur Rebellion (1967)

  Sunshine Opportunities (1968)

  Water, Water Everywhere (1969)

  Year the Metal Dog (1970)

  When Will the Good Apples Fall? (1972)

  Singapore’s First Chingay (1973)

  And Then There Was Colour (1974)

  Those Were the Days (1975)

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  MANY of my readers wanted to know what happened after 1965, the last chapter in my book, Kampong Spirit—Gotong Royong: Life in Potong Pasir, 1955 to 1965, which won the Singapore Literature Prize for Non-Fiction in 2014. They wanted to know: When did kampong life end? How did it end? What happened to the villagers who had lived there? So, I am writing this book to answer those questions and also to lay my kampong life to rest.

  For many, the exodus and transition from kampongs to Housing Development Board (HDB) flats was difficult, painful and emotional. Writing this book does not mean that I, or the kampong folks, did not approve of the move or of modernisation. On the contrary, we welcomed progress, rejoiced in the new creature comforts offered to us—like flush toilets, electricity and running water. And yet, inevitably, we were also human and thus grieved for the loss of a way of life which would be impossible to replicate.

  At that stage, we couldn’t imagine Singapore becoming the Singapore of today, catapulted into international renown as a First World country, with housing and job opportunities for everyone, easy availability of food, a safe and clean country, free from political strife. This was the dream of our great visionary, first Prime Minister Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who made that dream come true. Because the majority of people in my generation had suffered extreme poverty and deprivation, and the fact that Mr Lee and his team took us out of those dire circumstances meant that our generation unashamedly admired and respected him. It did not mean that we agreed with all his policies, but we knew that whatever he did, he did with the interest of the country and the people in his heart. As he himself once replied when asked about what he gave up to build Singapore, “What did I give up? Just my whole life.”

  Potong Pasir is no longer a kampong in this century. Houses are no longer made of wood and attap-thatched roofs. It is now a modern, concrete high-rise HDB town, known for its sloping roofs. These days, whenever I mention its name, people say, “Chiam See Tong”. Indeed, Mr Chiam was the first and only (so far) opposition leader to hold the ward. In 1984, Mr Chiam, as leader of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), contested the seat against the People’s Action Party’s (PAP’s) Mr Mah Bow Tan, won with 60.3 percent of the votes against the PAP, and thus created history. He was the second opposition politician ever to be elected to Singapore's Parliament, after J. B. Jeyaretnam of the Workers' Party
(WP) in 1981, and is Singapore's longest-serving Opposition Member of Parliament (MP) in a Single Member Constituency (SMC). In 2009, Mr Chiam celebrated his 25th year as MP for Potong Pasir. The previous year, he had suffered a stroke, which led to some reduction in his active participation in his party. PAP’s Mr Sitoh Yih Pin won back the seat for PAP in 2011. The most interesting personal connection in all this for me was that Mr Chiam was my science teacher in Cedar Secondary School in the 1960s, before he went into politics. He was a mild-mannered and inspiring teacher.

  Besides the HDB tower blocks, there are now posh private bungalows and condominiums in modern Potong Pasir. Of course, they all come equipped with running water and electricity. Upon my return from UK, after having been away for more than 30 years, I visited Potong Pasir. The fish ponds that had characterised our kampong had long been filled up. Its vegetable farms, trees, fields of wild lallang, and cottage industries like the char kiak maker, envelope and rattan factory, were all gone. Its face had changed radically. There was no longer any village. I roughly estimated that the site of my family attap house would have been located around the present Block 107. I guessed this because of the mock-Tudor houses on the hill nearby, which are still standing, and which my family house had faced.

  The hill at Woodleigh, which we used to call Atas Bukit, is now not as high as it used to be from Potong Pasir’s ground level. This is due to the building up of a layer of foundation and drainage for the new HDB town of Potong Pasir. The Kallang River used to be almost on the same level as our village ground, which was why our kampong used to get flooded often when the river burst its banks. Now the river is far below the steep, grassy banks, so the modern town is in less danger of getting flooded. The river used to flow past our village to pour out under Merdeka Bridge, but this has now been diverted to Marina Bay, after the East Coast land reclamation and the creation of Marina Bay.

  The river has also been cleaned up after the Public Utilities Board (PUB) launched the Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters (ABC Waters) Programme in 2006. A beautiful linear park with splendid rain trees and floral bushes has been created along the banks of the Kallang River. These days, people can take walks along the river, through the tunnel under the Central Expressway (CTE), and go right into Toa Payoh. After flowing past Potong Pasir, going towards the sea, the river passes through Kallang, where another beautiful park had been created. Today, there are modern shops and a shopping mall in Potong Pasir, which has its own Mass Rapid Transport (MRT) station on the North East Line.

  Construction work is currently going on to build a most sought-after HDB complex at Bidadari, the former Christian cemetery across from Potong Pasir. Its close proximity to town has jacked up the Build To Order price of properties here. This location had been our park and playground when I was a child. Next to it used to be the beautiful lake and verdant green hills of Alkaff Gardens, where we swam and picnicked. The lake has been filled and the hills have been levelled. Soon all these will be history, and the scenery and recreational activities these places had provided will become fragments of memory for those of us who grew up around here. And when we have passed on, only books like this will attest to their original use and beauty. Fortunately, one pair of Victorian wrought-iron gates that used to be at one of the entrances to the cemetery has been preserved, and they will stand in the grounds of the future HDB estate. Also, a small pond has been incorporated into the design to pay homage to the sprawling gardens which had once graced the landscape for generations and had attracted locals, tourists, film-makers and film stars. I understand that it will be called Alkaff Lake in honour of its eponymous gardens.

  Several places that existed in the kampong days and were associated with the kampongs are still present, though transformed: the historic part of St Andrew’s School and the Sri Sivadurga Temple are both on Meyappa Chettiar Road, though the road leading to the school is now called Potong Pasir Avenue 3, which didn’t exist before. The mock-Tudor houses on the hill still exist; so too the Masjid Alkaff on Pheng Geck Avenue, across the road from our village. But by the time this book is published, the building of the residential/shopping complex linked to Potong Pasir MRT station will be completed. The site stretches from Meyappa Chettiar Road to Potong Pasir Avenue 1. All this will thrust Potong Pasir very much into the twenty-first century and change its landscape forever.

  Though this book is specifically my final goodbye to my own kampong, it is also a goodbye to all the kampongs in Singapore and a now-extinct way of life.

  My desire to write about my kampong was to record a piece of history for my grandchildren and the young people of Singapore. Not so that they would think that the kampong was a better place than modern Singapore, but for them to know what Singapore used to be like, and how far our nation has come, so that they can appreciate all that they have.

  I write also to portray the resilient spirit of all villagers, neighbours and friends, and their zest for living, even when life was hard and challenging in the kampongs. This is to show modern youngsters that they are materially well-off compared to the generations before, especially the pioneer generation, which had to blaze trails. I personally missed the pioneer generation status as I was born six years after the war. For the majority of people living in Singapore today, their basic needs are met. For kampong folks, even very basic needs like food, water from a tap, electricity, one’s own bed, room or private bathroom were not available, let alone luxuries like a mobile telephone, eating out in restaurants, store-bought clothes, toys or world travel.

  I wanted to show too that without modern technology, iPhones, iPads, Facebook or Twitter, people can actually relate better, as we looked into each other’s eyes and faces and read each other’s joy, pain or struggle that way. We talked and we shared, not closeted in our own cyberworld, heads always bent down focusing on our PDAs. Before the advent of television, kampong folks sat outdoors to chat, sing songs, recite poems and tell stories, nurturing our creative selves. It is this sense of closeness and community that needs to be fostered again.

  We don’t have to give up our flush toilets or the Internet to revive the kampong spirit. All we need to do is set aside some quality time when phones and computers are relegated to their places; when families and friends at the same table or room actually talk to each other. And we can learn to be more open rather than insulate ourselves, and look up to acknowledge neighbours or people with a smile or kind word when we encounter them in the lift, corridor, hawker centre, bus or MRT, regardless of our race or religion. Modern people have a tremendous quantity of material things in their lives but I fear that sometimes they appear to lack human empathy. Too much reliance on technology for sustenance will make people less able to communicate graciousness and good human values.

  These non-fiction stories are mostly about villagers from my own kampong, but they reflect those from all the other villages which thrived during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. I have changed the names of the villagers to protect their families. I cannot regurgitate exactly what they had said so many decades ago but hope that I have captured the essence of what they had meant. Memories are fallible. I cannot vouch that what I remember here was exactly how events happened, so you have to forgive me. But I hope that the years covered in this book will give you a flavour of that unique period in Singapore’s history and development, when tremendous changes were wrought, to accelerate its growth to make it into the Singapore of today. I hope you can experience the atmosphere of the period and learn about our legacy and heritage.

  Josephine

  2017

  Happy First Birthday Singapore!

  (1966)

  EVERYONE growing up in the 1960s will tell you it was a magical era.

  To borrow the lyrics of the pop group, The Beach Boys, the 1960s indeed had “good vibrations”. Not that there were no bad vibrations. Indeed, there were world-wide challenges testing the might of nations: the on-going Vietnam war, the Berlin Wall, Chinese-Communist infiltration and the numerous plane crashes. In
our home country, we had faced Konfrontasi, bombings, racial riots, conflagrations and a Caesarean separation from Malaysia. But there was a certain element of “happening” which made the period memorable. There were interesting developments in science, medicine, industry, fashion and music. It was a time of spectacular growth. Internationally, an exciting event was mankind’s quest for new frontiers. Since John F. Kennedy had voiced his dream in 1961 of putting the first man on the moon, the Americans and Russians were racing to be the first nation in outer space.

  The irony was that as billions of dollars were being spent on rocket fuel, billions of people around the world were starving in so called Third World Countries. Singapore was amongst them. We had just wrested our independence from the British via a circuitous route through merger with Malaya and Sabah but were now forced to stand alone. We were faced with the challenges of self-governance and were encountering problems with shortages of food, water, housing and jobs. Nonetheless, the 1960s were exciting life-changing years for Singapore as we toddled on our new-found feet as a newly-birthed nation.

  Our island was still largely rural, with numerous hills, huge tracts of tropical forest and large expanses of smelly, muddy swamps. Kampongs were plentiful, stretching to the coastal edges and into the hills. Those furthest away from town, like the kampongs in Chua Chu Kang, Mandai, Seletar, Sembawang, Punggol, Loyang and Changi were called ulu, the Malay word for remote. For the folks living in those parts, a trip into town was a marathon journey on foot, bicycles, tricycles and bullock carts until they got to the main roads, where they boarded rickety old Tay Koh Yat or Singapore Traction Company (STC) buses that were not air-conditioned and still had a conductor issuing tickets. Most of the villages had yet to get electricity.

  However, in the city we had a different problem. Some 550,000 people were living in over-crowded, ramshackle shophouses in the central area, in Chinatown, making them prone to disease. In pre-war years, immigrant Chinese men came on their own but subsequently they brought their families over, so the families had to crowd into small spaces to get by. The previous year, just after independence, the Minister for Health, Yong Nyuk Lin, had submitted a White Paper to Parliament on family planning, so this year the Family Planning and Population Board (FPPB) was set up, to educate the people on birth control. Maternity and health clinics were quickly built, especially in rural areas, where it was not uncommon to have families with eight or more children. The rural folks were not so easy to persuade. When they were taught the use of condoms to prevent conception, this was what they said, grumpily: “How can you enjoy eating a banana with its skin on?”