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
