Tangent Special Issue, 6 (2), 2007, edited by Loh Kah Seng

Synopsis

In this special issue of Tangent, the twelve contributors will examine an oft untold side of history. What follow are our reflections on ongoing or recently-completed research into Singapore’s history after World War Two. We write of our engagements with the “makers” and “keepers” of this history, of how, because the period is close to the present, both the archival and oral records are frequently difficult to obtain.

By “makers”, we refer to participants who had a hand in shaping the past, including the elites and ordinary people. By “keepers”, we mean public officials who manage access to government archives, and also the “makers” who, when interviewed, decide what and how much of their experiences are to be shared.

It is, we maintain, important to talk about our attempts to engage the makers and gatekeepers of history, because while history is about the past, an account of the research is invariably about the present. This issue, in other words, considers the uneasy, ambivalent relationship between present-day Singapore society and its past, and the mediating role of historians in between.

Huang Jianli opens the discussion of parleys at the gates of history with an examination of archival and oral history holdings in Singapore for the study of a complex and oft-misrepresented facet of Singapore’s history, student politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Huang’s observations set the context for the next four papers detailing journeys to the British, American, Dutch, Australian, Chinese, and Taiwanese archives by current or recent doctoral candidates.

Akin to a flanking manoeuvre, the authors arrive, so to speak, at the “back gates” or “side gates” of our political and social pasts: Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied in his pursuit of the iconic 1950 Maria Hertogh controversy, Joey Long and P. J. Thum on the little-studied American role in Singapore’s decolonisation and labour history in the 1950s and 1960s, and Jason Lim on the social and economic history of Chinese tea merchants in 1920–1960.

The second half of the issue concentrates on social history and oral history. Stephen Dobbs outlines his efforts to engage the elite and ordinary makers and keepers of the past in his study of the place of the Singapore River in our national history and the lives of lightermen toiling along the riverfront.

The next six chapters focus on the challenges and rewards of engaging the voices of the past. Through a linguistic analysis of his interviews, Ernest Koh uncovers the agency of Chinese workers in the period 1945–2000. Kelvin Low and Lai Ah Eng reflect on their conversations, respectively, with the samsui women and elderly women in general, noting ways to access the “semi-official” and “unofficial” gates to these crucial but underwritten parts of our history. Personal endeavour, luck and recent events are, as Lim Cheng Tju notes, important in engaging the artists and cartoonists of the postwar years.

The issue concludes with two papers on the history of the vanished: kampongs in Singapore city. C. C. Chin considers research into the anti-colonial rural associations in postwar Singapore, and finally, the editor for this special issues, Loh Kah Seng recalls his encounters with the makers and keepers of the documents and memories of the great Kampong Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1961.

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Calvin Low. 10-Stories: Queenstown Through the Years. Singapore: National Heritage Board, 2007. 173 pp.

For scholars, history buffs and elderly Singaporeans seeking an ‘authentic’ slice of Singapore’s history in a time of social change and adaptation, 10-Stories is a welcome breath of fresh air. The National Heritage Board (NHB) coffee table book, completed in collaboration with the Housing and Development Board (HDB) and the Queenstown Citizens’ Consultative Committee (CCC), is the latest in a long line of public histories on places and communities on our little island. It retains some of the characteristic motifs and problems of preceding publications but also sets out on important new paths which future social histories can take.

The subject-matter of 10-Stories is Queenstown New Town, Singapore’s pioneer suburb, which the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) – the de facto colonial housing authority – first began building in 1952 and was subsequently completed by the first generation of HDB architects. The book is written in a light style for the general reader, who will also find the numerous beautiful photographs of old and contemporary Queenstown useful. The copy-editing, however, is shoddy and a later print should correct the grammatical errors.

The book is divided into ten chapters – hence the cheekily-punned title which also refers to a well-known cluster of flats of a certain height at Tanglin Halt. They cover aspects of social and economic life in Queenstown such as the experiences of moving into a flat, relationships between neighbours, the trades and recreational activities plus well-known personalities of the estate.

Much of the material is based on oral history interviews conducted by the National Archives of Singapore (NAS) and the NHB project team. Interspersed between the chapters are shorter ‘inside stories’ which utilise official records to map out the historical context within which the development of Queenstown took place. In these pieces, we learn about the genesis and implementation of the neighbourhood concept and the link between Singapore public housing and postwar British town planning ideas.

The singular strength of 10-Stories is its human element. The commissioned writer, himself a long-time Queenstown resident, takes us to interesting events and places through the collective memory of the elderly dwellers. Through their recollections, Queenstown’s colonial trappings quickly recede into the background. What emerges, in Hokkien, Mandarin and Hakka, is a sense of the strong ties which Singaporeans have with their physical environment and the people – relatives, neighbours and friends – who live in it.

We learn that Queenstown was really Boh Beh Kang (‘No Tail River’ in Hokkien), while fourteen-storey blocks of flats were, literally, chap si lau. The oral histories affirm, in their own vernacular, the experiences of a generation of hitherto un-named Singaporeans who made the momentous transition from unauthorised wooden dwellings to modern public housing from the 1950s onwards.

In some remarkable ways, the book eschews political correctness and takes us, as all good histories should do, into a different world which once existed. It shows empathy for aspects of social and economic life which were criminalised or officially frowned upon.

Two stand out in particular: the affinity of dwellers for the fare peddled by unlicensed hawkers (indeed some of the individuals featured hawked in their younger days) and the social memory of high-rise flats as places of tiao lau (‘jumping off a high-rise building’). The ‘attap hut’, we also discover, may turn out to be a fairly spacious housing for an extended family, not the cramped, insanitary dwelling typically so depicted in the usual official and public histories of housing.

We hope for elaborations of such social history in future publications. In 10-Stories, secret societies are yet to be properly viewed as an embedded part of community life in post-World War Two Singapore. My own interviews with elderly Singaporeans show that while gang fights were understandably feared, the secret societies were neither ‘secret’ nor ‘dangerous’ to the residents.

The book also fails to give politics an appropriate place in the lives of the residents. When the SIT first tried to clear Boh Beh Kang in the early 1950s, many kampong dwellers joined the Singapore Attap Dwellers’ Association, led by a Labour Front politician, to actively contest it. The first neighbourhood, Princess Estate, was consequently delayed by the resistance and not completed until 1956.

The book quotes a former kampong dweller as saying that the resettlement was ‘bo bian’ (‘no choice’, p. 18) but this is evidently a reflection from hindsight and not how the situation was appraised at the moment in time. Queenstown, too, was for a brief period in the early 1960s the constituency of the late Dr Lee Siew Choh, the former PAP and Barisan Sosialis leader. Yet the book is silent on this facet of the past.

The main theme of 10-Stories is this problematic relationship between the past and present. ‘The story of Queenstown’, as the author writes, ‘is where past, present and future come together’ (p. 166). There are, he argues, strong continuities in the history – a spirit of tenacity and the close neighbourliness which survived the transition from kampong to new town.

Yet there are pressing questions which this affirmative approach does not address. On the graying of Queenstown and the migration of the children of the elderly generation to outlying housing estates, the book simply states, ‘[t]he remaining older residents of Queenstown nevertheless took the decline of their physical and social environment in their stride’ (p. 146). This surely is inadequate if the purpose of the book is to be served; one needs to confront the generational fractures in family life which took place from the 1970s onwards.

The elderly residents’ longing for a warmer and simpler past also does not belong to the early chapters on Queenstown’s history but more properly to a late chapter on social memory. In fact, the book’s nostalgia for a treasured past indicates an uncertainty towards the future. Present-day Queenstown, it is noted, ‘enjoys the honour of being one of the most desirable estates in Singapore’ (p. 6) and is lauded as the ‘undisputed king of HDB estates’ (p. 150).

These statements, however, come from different voices. It is unclear if the elderly generation has as strong an affinity with the ‘remaking’ of Queenstown which the HDB is presently undertaking as with the past. Nostalgia is further strengthened, not lessened, by rapid social change. The book’s chief value is as a document of the mental landscapes and reflections of an older generation of Singaporeans.

Loh Kah Seng is a PhD candidate at Murdoch University, working on a social history of the 1961 Kampong Bukit Ho Swee Fire. He has a keen research interest in Singapore history, particularly the official use of history, the Great Depression, leprosy, the student movement, and oral history and memory. He received his BA (Hons) and MA degrees from the National University of Singapore in 1996 and 2005 respectively. In between those years, he was a History teacher in a junior college, and still teaches and gives lectures to school students.