i’ve been thinking about the WP’s latest win in Hougang.
No, not because I am thinking about joining any political party, but because of something my sister said, and because i used to live there.
We lived there, in Hougang, since before i was born. We moved away after i finished my PSLE, which was quite a while ago.
And, y’know, for all the upgrading nonsense, I can tell you that it was a great place to stay in. We lived right behind the community centre, and I remember playing in and around it with my brother and cousins. We also had a huge churchfield nearby that we used to catch butterflies in.
The wet market was amazing, and my grandma knew all the stallholders. There were shops that sold all and sundry and more, there were strange eerie semi-industrial parks that were home to car repair workshops, noodle-makers and coffin-makers.
My whole childhood was spent there in Hougang.
I have memories that probably can never be made again by any other child. I remember the otah-woman that used to sit by the edge of the concrete badminton court and chat with whoever came up, and sold otah for 20cents a piece. There was a coffeeshop with the most amazing chicken rice stall, and the roast duck stall we sometimes still go back to just to buy roast duck. Whenever there was some taoist festival, the temple across from the coffeeshop would have a stage set up for wayangs and the smoke from the giant carved candlesticks would spill over on to the walkway.
We used to know the man who ran the provisions/grocer’s shop. I even remember the name of his shop - Kong Hwa. He might still be alive, but more probably than not, he’s already passed on. We’d extort money from our parents on Saturday nights, and us band of cousins would troop over to Kong Hwa to buy amongst other things, crisps, chocolates, icicle-tubes, soft drinks and bubble solution.
After the shopping expedition, we’d sit on the tiled benches that were a semi-circle surrounding a circular table topped with a chessboard. Or we’d go to the dragon playground. Or we’d just walk around, making fools of ourselves as only children can. We’d sit and talk, and laugh and sing. We’d tell ghost-stories and watch the stars.
There was a tree across the road that my mother taught me was called the pong-pong tree, with sickly sweet-scented flowers. After a rain, the flowers would like smooshed on the ground and turn brown then black and then disappear into the rough concrete pavement.
I learnt to make and shoot with cherry guns on that street, and fished in the monsoon drains with my brother. I bought my first cassette-tape from an open tray set up outside a shop that also sold plastic footballs and children’s sand-buckets wrapped in netting and raffia and hung from hooks in the ceiling.
If it was to be upgraded to the point where I no longer recognise its bones, then i’d rather never see it again, so my dreams don’t change. Upkeeping and upgrading are two very different matters altogether.
But then again, i no longer live there, so what right do i have to say anything about the issue? I’m not the one having to struggle climbing up and down stairs because the lifts don’t stop at every floor, i’m not the one that has to live without an extra utility room.
Still, it pains me greatly to think that my childhood may exist purely in the abstract; that there will, one day, be nothing still standing that can prove to me i was not merely making it up in my imagination. That I was once there. That at one time, this was who I was and where i was, and the only place I knew I belonged.
