Chinatown Unspoken

By Eddie Chan

Think you know Singapore's Chinatown?

 

Let veteran architect, Eddie Chan Fook Pong, take you on a journey back in time through a Chinatown as you have never imagined it. Chinatown Unspoken is a historical story of Singapore set against a wonderfully colourful landscape. Eddie's account roars through two decades of turmoil, with characters ranging from gangsters and soldiers to prostitutes and clans, samsui women and even government officials.

 

A tribute to the beloved neighbourhood where he grew up, Eddie takes an affectionate look at the bustling part of town that has bewitched him ever since he was a child. By interweaving his own personal experiences in his storytelling, he beautifully captures its vivid stories, giving readers a deeper look into what "Chinatown" meant to its inhabitants—and to Singapore at large.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Candid Creation Publishing
• Release date: Sep 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9789811480102

Eddie Chan

Eddie Chan Fook Pong was born in 1939 and migrated to Singapore with his parents from Hong Kong in 1942. He lived in Chinatown for 23 years, beginning from the outbreak of the Second World War to 1963 when Singapore became part of Malaysia. His parents were teachers from Guangzhou, who founded a private school in Chinatown. He was educated in his parents’ school and later, Yeong Cheng Chinese Primary School, Beatty Secondary School and Singapore Polytechnic where he read architecture. He co-founded Archinamics in 1967 and later his own practice, Regional Development Consortium Pte Ltd (RDC) in 1974. He retired in 2001 after 34 years in the industry, during which he designed many landmark buildings both locally and abroad. He was elected a valued alumnus by the National University of Singapore. His interest in art and music led him to establish the Thomson Jazz Club and Jazz@Southbridge. The former, a non-profit community organisation in its 25th year, is still in service. He was given the award for supporting jazz by Compass, an association of composers and writers, in 2004. From 1984 to 2001, he served as Chairman of the management committee of Thomson Community Club and was awarded the Public Service Star BBM by the President of Singapore in 1997. He is also the co-author of the book, In Their Own Words: Pioneer Architects of Singapore Polytechnic, which was published in 2019. Chinatown Unspoken is his second book.

Book preview

Introduction

The Past Is Another World

Chinatown occupies an area of approximately five square kilometres with a network of streets and service back lanes. The buildings consist of rows of two- to three-storey shophouses with South China and British colonial design influences, constructed with brick walls, timber floors and roofs covered with Indian roof tiles.

Each typical unit is rectangular in plan, 13 ft x 40 ft, with a rear air well. Straight flight staircases, accessible from the street, linked the floors. The ground floor, where the shops are, is recessed to provide a continuous footway. The upper floors are divided into multiple cubicles which serve as dwellings. The common kitchen and shared bathroom are located at the rear of the building. The toilet works on a bucket system and the night soil is cleared every morning via the service lane.

With a few families packed into one floor, sharing the kitchen and bathroom, it often created conflicts and misunderstandings between the tenants. Often, the houses were ventilated through the windows at both ends of the unit, with the middle room ventilated only through an opening in the roof. Street life was a hustle and bustle with shops of all trades—from selling coffins, brothels, eating houses to general merchandise—lining the five-foot way, a sheltered shophouse walkway measuring five feet wide. Few outside of Chinatown dared to tread the streets, but for us residents, we meandered through the streets without a care even as life was unbearably hard in those days.

THE STREETS OF CHINATOWN

When I was 12 years old, I was most fortunate to own a pair of professional binoculars worth around $10. In today’s money, it would have cost a lot. In comparison, the other boys only had plastic ones that cost 50 cents each.

With the binoculars, I could look right into the brothel which faced the rear window of the partitioned apartment in which my family lived. While only shadowy figures could be seen through the curtains, my imagination more than made up for it. The gossips from the maidservants filled in the rest.

I lived at 19 Kreta Ayer Road. If you scan the streets around where I lived, you would see that what we call Chinatown actually encompassed a much bigger space. Inner Chinatown itself was (and still is) bounded by Pagoda Street, Eu Tong Sen Street, South Bridge Road and Cross Street, and stretches all the way down to Bukit Pasoh, Keong Saik Road and Kreta Ayer Road.

Where I used to live is now a trendy enclave of conserved shophouses, home to restaurants offering multicultural cuisines and concepts, offices and cafes. Back then, this notorious area was known as The Street of the Hoods. Gangsters roamed the area and I was an eager participant in their melees. This was a Singapore without modern amenities, a city sprawling with scruffy inhabitants. It was nowhere near the clean air-conditioned garden city we see today.

The streets of Chinatown.

Right in front of where I grew up on Kreta Ayer Road was Banda Hill, which sadly no longer exists. Next to it was Sago Lane, colloquially known as Death Street. The street was lined with death houses where people went to wait for death to claim them and where their bodies would be given the final rites for their funerals.

From here, you will meet Spring Street, so named because water was being collected from a spring there and then transported by bullock carts to other areas. It is not for nothing that Chinatown got the nickname ox cart water which you can still see on the signages at the train station there. It was also known in Cantonese as fan tsai mei or end of the foreign brothels. There were many Japanese prostitutes who worked there in the prewar years.

In the past, hawkers congregated at Smith Street to sell their food. I remember seeing vegetable sellers clustering on Trengganu Street where it met Banda Street. The current Chinatown Food Street, described as a gathering of street food vendors, is situated around this site on Smith Street. Sadly, preservation of the past—like this one—has been the exception rather than the rule. Many of the places of yesteryears, whether due to changing social conditions or government fiat, are gone