90 Years in Singapore

By Irene Lim

Irene Lim writes vividly about her life, family and friends over a period of 90 years. Except for a few years spent in Bukit Mertajam, Penang during the Japanese Occupation, Irene's account is also a small Singapore Story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd
• Release date: Nov 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9789813300200

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90 Years in Singapore

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Accompanied by wonderful private family photos, Irene Lim's memoir fills the textures of our understanding of myriad aspects of everyday life, places, people and institutions in Singapore, by skillfully weaving many fine details into a captivating read. Spanning over a century of family history, this story richly illustrates what the broader themes of overseas Chinese, particularly Straits Chinese, history in Malaya and the region, was like at the level of lived histories. So much echoes what I heard from my own grandmother, and of my own family history.

—Dr. Chua Ai Lin, historian and Executive Director, Singapore Heritage Society

I cannot express how happy I am finally to see the birth of this book which Irene and I have talked so much about for years. We had the same upbringing, and the collection of photos really brings me back.

—Yeap Joo Kim, author, The Patriarch (1975)

90 Years in Singapore

90 Years in Singapore (POD edition)

ISBN: 978-981-14-6578-9 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-981-33-0020-0 (ebook)

© Irene Lim, 2020

Published by

Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd

28 Sin Ming Lane #06-131

Singapore 573972

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author.

Printed by

Ho Printing Singapore Pte Ltd

National Library Board

Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data

for the first edition

Name(s): Lim, Irene. | Loh, Kah Seng, contributor. | Lim, Linda, contributor.

Title: 90 years in Singapore / Irene Lim ; with contributions by Loh Kah Seng and Linda Lim.

Description: Singapore : Pagesetters Services Pte Ltd, [2020] | Includes index.

Identifier(s): OCN 1146323921 | ISBN 978-981-14-5416-5 (paperback) | ISBN: 978-981-33-0020-0 (ebook)

Subject: LCSH: Lim, Irene. | Singapore--History--Personal narratives. | Malaya--History--Personal narratives.

Classification: DDC 959.5--dc23

Dedicated to the memory of

the many family members and friends

whose lives, stories and memories

enriched mine

Contents

Contributors

Preface

Prologue

A Small Singapore Story by Loh Kah Seng

Chapter 1

My Families in Malaya 1870s–1920s

Chapter 2

My Early Years 1930s

Chapter 3

Food, Clothing and Daily Life in Pre-War Years 1930s–1940s

Chapter 4

School Days 1930s–1940s

Chapter 5

Wartime in Bukit Mertajam 1940s

Chapter 6

River Valley Road 1940s–1950s

Chapter 7

Upper Serangoon 1950s–1960s

Chapter 8

Holland Road 1960s–1980s

Chapter 9

River Valley Road Again, And After 1980s–2010s

Epilogue

The Social Significance of A Life by Linda Lim

Index

Contributors

Linda LIM is Professor Emerita at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where she also served a term as Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies in the International Institute. A Singaporean economist, her most recent books are Singapore’s Economic Development: Retrospection and Reflections (edited, 2016) and Business, Government and Labour: Essays in the Economic Development of Singapore and Southeast Asia (2018), both from World Scientific Publishing in Singapore.

LOH Kah Seng is a historian of Singapore and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore (NUS Press 2013) and Tuberculosis—The Singapore Experience, 1867-2018: Disease, Society and the State (with Hsu Li Yang, Routledge 2020). He runs Chronicles Research and Education, a research consultancy on the rich and varied heritages of Singapore—housing, industrial, medical, culinary, and economic.

Preface

This book, which I started writing in 1989, was not meant to be. But I have always been interested in other people’s personal stories and life experiences. I like listening to them in conversation. And I enjoy reading memoirs, especially those published by my own friends, and those which remind me of experiences from my past.

Stories have long been part of my life and, I suspect, the lives of Singaporeans in decades past. Long ago, when I was a child, we had time in the evenings to sit in the garden and chat. We usually asked for stories about the family. Then our parents would tell us about how things were in the old days.

We also regularly visited close friends and family members, even very distant ones. That is how I got to know third and fourth cousins. I remember the distant uncles who had up to 10 concubines each, their children and their stories. And I remember the slave girls, even though slavery had been abolished before I was born.

Few homes had telephones then, and visits were key to exchanging news and gossip. They were also a form of entertainment, and an expression of friendship. Today, families do not seem to spend much time together, especially across generations. So many other activities, including those available on electronic devices, compete for scarce time. Thus, past ways of life are not shared, and they become lost and forgotten.

I like remembering and retelling my own experiences of bygone times. So, thirty years ago, after my husband of forty-one years passed, my daughter Linda suggested that I write down my memories. I did this, and over the years since, have written more bits and pieces about what I remember from the dim past, mainly in letters emailed to Linda and other family members. This was not for publication but only to enlighten the younger generations of the family on our family history.

Later, seeing many around me steadily losing their memory, I feared that the same could happen to me. This gave me another motivation for writing down my memories. Linda thought it was a good way for me to keep mentally engaged, and said that memoir writing has now become quite popular among senior citizen programs in the US.

In 2013, Linda wrote the history of her four grandparents’ families in a self-published volume to share with members of those extended families. She drew from the information, documents and photos I provided, but her narrative did not provide detail or go much beyond my parents’ generation.

Then in 2019, I learnt about a National Heritage Board project on foods of the past, and wrote to the research team about my recollections. One of the historians involved in that project, Dr. Loh Kah Seng, interviewed me in person and over email. It was he who suggested I write my memoirs.

I thought the task was too daunting and so declined. But Linda encouraged me. She had painstakingly compiled together what I had written over the past thirty years, adding the new material I wrote in response to Dr. Loh’s questions and suggestions. I could not have done this book without the assistance of these two scholars. I am very grateful for their encouragement and patience, especially when I was forever having problems with my computer! Without Eddison Lim’s help with the computer for over 20 years, this book would also not be possible.

I hope that what we have produced together will help preserve for current and future generations a record of what life was like in Singapore over the more than 90 years that I have been fortunate to have been living here.

Irene Lim

February 2020

90 Years in Singapore

Prologue

A Small Singapore Story

by Loh Kah Seng

In the pages that unfold, Irene Lim writes vividly about her life, family and friends over a period of 90 years. Except for a few years spent in Bukit Mertajam, Penang during the Japanese Occupation, Irene’s account is also a small Singapore Story. Few people will match the historical scope and drama in the memoirs of the late former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, titled The Singapore Story . ¹ But Irene’s story, besides being of interest to her personal circle, offers a glimpse of Singapore from the perspective of an ordinary Singaporean. It fills gaps in some areas of social, cultural, community, and gender history, while bringing detail and depth to others. The ‘big history’ of Lee’s Singapore Story—of politics, diplomacy, economics, and policy—is present here, in the background providing the context for the micro-narrative.

One of Irene’s remarkable stories is the numerous times her family moved house, from Katong to Oxley Road and Dover Rise across urban and rural Singapore. This was largely due to her father’s unceasing quest for a clean and safe home, but also points to rising social awareness of hygiene and sanitation in the early 20th century as the Singapore Municipality grew increasingly concerned about typhoid and tuberculosis.² Together with the schools, shops, markets, offices, buildings, and public places she remembers, Irene’s homes comprise what British historian Raphael Samuel calls ‘theatres of memory’. These are places that people remember and invest with meaning, although the physical sites may be gone. By rooting the past in such memories, as Samuel concludes, ‘History is made by a thousand different hands’.³ Irene’s story forms part of the rich tapestry of Singapore’s modern history.

Singapore itself was a theatre of memory. Far from having no interesting history as some foreign observers or cynical locals may allege, the past 90 years have been a momentous period of change for the tiny island in Southeast Asia. The urban, physical, economic, and technological transformations, driven by the state and private capital, are perhaps most notable. Many of the places and buildings Irene writes about had vanished or changed beyond recognition. Rent control and wooden huts are no more, giving way to a new city of public housing; but in her old age, like many elderly people, she dreads the en bloc.⁴ Similarly, computers, smartphones and WhatsApp have become commonplace—Irene uses them, if reluctantly—but they have superseded the use of the phone and personal visits for staying in touch.

War was a big part of the early decades of Irene’s life. This did not involve only the fall of the supposedly impregnable British fortress in 1942, but also the long shadow of world conflict drawing closer to the island. Irene learnt much about war in far-flung places from newspapers, showing the importance of print culture in expanding the cosmopolitan world view of locals.⁵ As a sign of her curiosity about the world, Irene cut out and kept many old newspaper articles. When Singapore fell and her family escaped to Bukit Mertajam, her story reinforces The Singapore Story in some ways. There was much death, deprivation and fear in her life for the next three years or so, as for many people. But it was also a formative time when she learnt to cope and did some craftwork, making a hen house from a broken antique cabinet. Irene’s account suggests how we might find new, more nuanced narratives of war about how people coped creatively—and sometimes in amusing ways—with the difficult circumstances.⁶

After 1945, war gave way to development as an overriding theme in Singapore’s history. Being of Peranakan descent, Irene’s marriage and subsequent family life in this period was fairly typical of that in her community. But it also coincided with the rise of the nuclear family in the last 70 years, as Singapore developed rapidly to become an industrialised nation-state with a citizenry made up of model families and workers.⁷ Irene worked only briefly, which differed from many Singaporean women who ventured out into the factories to become joint breadwinners.⁸ Most of her life in this time centred on her family and friends; her chief concerns were about such matters as the children, domestic affairs and voluntary church activities, as was likely true for many women. The political history of decolonisation and nation-building in the 1950s and 1960s was usually in the background, although the detentions of 1977 had a marked effect on her family.

Part of Irene’s story belongs to Peranakan cultural history—of the community’s rich languages, dress and food. She writes with much fondness about her cheongsams (which were donated to the National Heritage Board and have been on exhibition in the National Museum), and nonya cakes (many of which are no longer made today).⁹ She displays a characteristic criticality towards commercial Peranakan cuisine and love for home-made meals. But the narrative is arguably not merely Peranakan history, for the Straits Chinese, as Mark Frost explains, is quintessentially a local and a Malayan or Singaporean. He or she is not just a migrant from another country, but someone who adapts to local circumstances and creates a hybrid way of life in the process. We can understand why Irene says she is unsure if she is Peranakan—that she is Peranakan in some ways but not in others. It is insightful to read her memoirs for the fascinating and important story of how the mass majority of migrants from China, India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East became local and Singaporean in the second half of the 20th century.

Irene’s background and connections are those of an upper middle class, English-educated woman. Her social world, from studying in Raffles Girls' School to lunching with banker Tan Chin Tuan, was far removed from the milieu of the rickshaw coolies, prostitutes, lightermen, trishaw riders, kampong dwellers, and factory workers who have populated and enlivened the social history of Singapore.¹⁰ There was much social inequality in the past as there still is today.¹¹ But this is not to say Irene connected only with the social elites. Although the narrative is framed by her vantage point, one of the key subjects Irene writes about is the domestic help in her home. The transition from ‘black and white’ amahs in the colonial era to the ‘maids’ of the present day reflects the changing history of the family and its domestic help in Singapore, and Irene tells in a small way how the city-state has become heavily reliant on migrant labour since 1970, both in the industries and homes.¹²

Writing a memoir does not seem to be a popular engagement for Singaporeans of the Pioneer and Merdeka generations, although they seem to write an increasing amount on social media today. It took a bereavement for Irene to begin to write down her story on paper starting in 1989. But in a situation where the state archives are still largely closed to public access, Irene’s memoirs, vividly and candidly recounted, are a key source for Singapore’s history.¹³ They can be read for the interesting people and events that passed through her life, or for the perspectives and concerns of an educated, upper middle class woman. And they can also be read for a less known side of The Singapore Story.

FOOTNOTES

¹ Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings, ¹⁹⁹⁸); Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 (Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings and Times Editions, ²⁰⁰⁰).

² Loh Kah Seng and Hsu Li Yang, Tuberculosis—The Singapore Experience, 1867-2018: Disease, Society and the State (London and New York: Routledge, ²⁰²⁰); Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore: Singapore University Press, ²⁰⁰³), ²nd edition.

³ Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, ¹⁹⁹⁴), p. ⁶.

⁴ This refers to the Selective En Bloc Redevelopment Scheme (Sers), which affects both public and private housing in Singapore. On the effects of public housing Sers, see Ng Kok Hoe and the Cassia Resettlement Team (eds.), They Told Us to Move: Dakota-Cassia (Singapore: Ethos Books, ²⁰¹⁹).

⁵ Chua Ai Lin, ‘The Domiciled Identity in Colonial Singapore: Understanding the Straits Chinese beyond Race, Nation and Empire’, in Leo Suryadinata (ed.), Peranakan Chinese in a Globalising Southeast Asia (Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre, Nanyang Technological University and Baba House, National University of Singapore, ²⁰¹⁰), pp. ¹⁴⁵-¹⁵⁴; Mark Ravinder Frost, ‘Emporium in Imperio: Nanyang Networks and the Straits Chinese in Singapore, ¹⁸¹⁹-¹⁹¹⁴’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies ³⁶ (¹) February ²⁰⁰⁵: ²⁹-⁶⁶

⁶ Chin Kee Onn, Malaya Upside Down (Singapore: Printed by Jitts, ¹⁹⁴⁶), ²nd edition.

⁷ W.G. Huff, The Economic Growth of Singapore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ¹⁹⁹⁴); C.M. Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore, 1819-2005 (Singapore: NUS Press, ²⁰⁰⁹).

⁸ Linda Y.C. Lim, Women in the Singapore Economy (Singapore: Chopmen, ¹⁹⁸²)

⁹ The cheongsams were showcased in the National Museum publication, Lee Chor Lin and Chung May Khuen, In the Mood for Cheongsam (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet; National Museum of Singapore, ²⁰¹²).

¹⁰ James Francis Warren, Rickshaw Coolie: A People's History of Singapore, 1880-1940 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, ²⁰⁰³); James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870-1940 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, ²⁰⁰³); Stephen Dobbs, The Singapore River: A Social History 1819-2002 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, ²⁰⁰³); Jason Lim, A Slow Ride into the Past: The Chinese Trishaw Industry in Singapore, 1942-1983 (Clayton Victoria: Monash University Publishing, ²⁰¹³); Loh Kah Seng, Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore (NUS Press and Asian Studies of Australia Association Southeast Asia Series, ²⁰¹³); Ernest Koh Wee Song, ‘On the Margins of the Economic Miracle: Non English-Literate Chinese Factory Workers in Singapore, ¹⁹⁸⁰-⁹⁰’, Southeast Asian Studies ⁴⁴ (⁴) March ²⁰⁰⁷: ⁴⁶⁶-⁴⁹³.

¹¹ Janet W. Salaff, State and Family in Singapore: Restructuring a Developing Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, ¹⁹⁸⁸); Teo You Yenn, This is What Inequality Looks Like (Singapore: Ethos Books, ²⁰¹⁸).

¹² Pang Eng Fong and Linda Lim, ‘Foreign Labour and Economic Development in Singapore’, The International Migration Review ¹⁶ (³) Autumn ¹⁹⁸²: ⁵⁴⁸-⁵⁷⁶; Pang Eng Fong and Linda Y.C. Lim, Labor, Productivity and Singapore’s Development Model, Singapore Economic Review Vol. ⁶⁰, No. ³ (²⁰¹⁵), ¹⁵⁵⁰⁰³³-¹—¹⁵⁵⁰⁰³³-³⁰; T.W. Devasahayam, ‘Placement and/or Protection? Singapore’s Labour Policies and Practices for Temporary Women Migrant Workers’, Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy ¹⁵ (¹) ²⁰¹⁰: ⁴⁵-⁵⁸.

¹³ Loh Kah Seng and Liew Kai Khiun (eds.), The Makers and Keepers of Singapore History (Singapore: Ethos Books and Singapore Heritage Society, ²⁰¹⁰)

Chapter 1

My Families in Malaya

1870s–1920s

Iwas born on 24 th June 1927, in Kuala Lumpur (KL). Father Ooi Chor Hooi (1905-1972) was then working as a clerk in government service. Mother Edna Kung Gek Neo (1910-2003) was studying shorthand so she could work in an office. She had trained as a nurse, but Father did not like her to do the shift work that nursing required. I was their first child, and they named me Irene.

Father was the oldest of three children of a Hokkien family that had owned and operated extensive landholdings, mostly coconut plantations, in Bukit Mertajam, Province Wellesley, for several generations. His great-grandfather Ooi Tung Kheng was one of the founders of Bukit Mertajam, after sailing from Amoy, China to Balik Pulau, Penang in the 1840s.

90 Years in Singapore

Father studied at the Methodist Boys’ School in Bukit Mertajam, then at the Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) on Penang island. This required catching the 4.30 a.m. mail train from Singapore to Prai when it stopped at Bukit Mertajam, taking the ferry to Georgetown, and cycling to school. He wrote essays for some of his rich classmates for a fee, and won a scholarship for coming first in a state-wide exam. Under his pen-name of R.B. Ooi, Father worked mostly as a journalist and newspaper editor for the Straits Echo (1923-28), Malaya Tribune (1934-42, 1945-49), Singapore Standard (1954-58), Eastern Sun and Malayan Times (1950s-60s). One of his colleagues at one time was S. Rajaratnam, later a PAP cabinet minister. Father also held other supervisory or managerial jobs, and served as Press Officer for the Information Department in KL during the Communist Emergency (1949-54), working with the British High Commissioner Sir Gerald Templer. He travelled to Britain, Japan, the US, Manila, Saigon and Jakarta in connection with his work. He was acquainted with the Malaysian Prime Ministers Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Abdul Razak, and in 1968 he received the Ahli Mangku Negara (AMN) decoration from Malaysia’s Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King).

90 Years in Singapore

Mother was the youngest of three daughters born to Kung Tian Siong (1876-1958) and Siauw