As a history student, an area of inquiry that has always intrigued me is my own family history. In my attempt to gain greater insight and understanding of my family’s past, particularly as it also applies to Chinese immigrants in early day Singapore, I had decided to use the life history approach, focusing on the migrant experience and religious practices of my Ah Ma (an affectionate Hokkien term for grandmother), a Chinese woman from Fujian province, China, who had immigrated to Singapore in 1935.

Many questions remained for me about my Ah Ma. Although I used to stay with her when I was younger, I still knew little about her past. Therefore, I wondered: What was her family like back in China? Why did she leave her homeland? Why and how did she come to Singapore? What was her World War II experience? (And as I am very interested in religious history), what were some of her religious beliefs and practices?

It was a wonderful experience interviewing my Ah Ma and finding many of the answers to those questions. What emerged from this research was a short article entitled “Ah Ma and her Beliefs: The Migrant Experience and Religious Practices of a Chinese Immigrant Woman in Twentieth Century Singapore”.[ii] For now, I would just like to share some of the methodological issues and problems that I faced when interviewing Ah Ma and in my quest to find out more about my family’s past.

In any interview, it is always useful for a researcher to understand and speak the language of his or her respondents. As such, knowing and speaking my Ah Ma’s dialect – Hokkien in this case – is an advantage in my research. Nevertheless, it was still a major challenge to prepare my interview questions in English and then translating them to Hokkien. For example, one of my interview questions was “What are some of the places of worship that you visit?” It took me quite awhile to translate terms like “places of worship” into Hokkien. In the end, I decided to rephrase my question to something that is more familiar to Ah Ma: “Li ki toh lor bai sin? (Literally translating into: Where did you go to pray to god?)” She immediately understood my question and provided me with much information on the places of worships in 1930s and 1940s Singapore.

The interviewer also has to be empathetic and patient in conducting interviews with grandparents. Sometimes, grandparents can be quite lor soh (talkative) and have decidedly short attention spans, e.g. not answering the interview questions directly. This was also the case when I conducted the interview. Ah Ma sometimes digressed from the interview and started telling me things that were rather irrelevant to the interview questions, for instance going on and on about her favorite Taiwanese drama on Channel 8 in response to a specific question. Whenever she does that, I had to try to redirect her attention back to the interview question by re-asking the same question several times but in different ways.

In addition, because Ah Ma has some difficulty in hearing, she was sometime unable to hear me properly and of course ended up misinterpreting my questions. Hence, I had to repeat my questions a little louder (but of course not too loud) to ensure that she was aware of what I was asking for. While it could be rather tedious and tiring to repeat the same questions over and over again, the process did help me to relate and empathize better with Ah Ma, something that perhaps would not have be possible if I had not conducted the interview. Our grandparents have plenty of stories and experiences to share with us. The question then is whether we have the patience to listen to them?

Another important issue to take note of is to clarify the meaning of vague or unfamiliar terms. When conducting interviews, respondents may sometimes employ names and terms familiar only to them to describe certain events or places. It is important not to make assumptions and jump to conclusions, and to immediately clarify such terms with the respondent.

For instance, my Ah Ma told me that during her younger days, she used to work in a farm in Hai Lam Swa 海南山. Not knowing where is Hai Lam Swa, I initially thought that it sounded pretty much like a place in Chinatown. After clarifying with Ah Ma, Hai Lam Swa actually refers to a place in present-day Bishan. Therefore, it is essential to clarify the meaning of vague and unfamiliar terms, and this has saved me from making embarrassing blunders in my research.

Finally, it is important to rely upon information provided by other members of the family as a technique to assess the reliability of my Ah Ma’s account. Besides interviewing her, I also conducted an interview with my mother to check and recheck for possible discrepancies, and at the same time elicit information that further enriched Ah Ma’s story. Ah Ma’s religious beliefs and practices was one area where I used this technique quite often. Because my mother often followed Ah Ma to temples and took part in the religious rituals, she was able to provide much information to supplement Ah Ma’s account. This greatly helped me to achieve a better understanding of what my Ah Ma had told me earlier.

Conducting interviews with grandparents can be an enriching, enjoyable, and at times, a very challenging research experience. They often have lots of stories and hidden insights that they would like to share, but are frequently unable to find people interested or patient enough to listen to them.

In delving into my family’s past, I not only learn more about them, but also my place within the family and my relationship with them. I feel a lot closer to them than before and can even perceive certain threads of continuity. As a student of history, I feel that it is a great pity and loss if we do not take the time or bother to know our own family history. Writing my family history has now become a new life long project for me.

The author graduates in July 2007 with a BA (Hons) in history, from the National University of Singapore (NUS). He has been awarded the NUS Research Scholarship to pursue his MA degree in history.

[i] I am grateful to my Ah Ma for her readiness and openness in answering my endless queries. Needless to say, any shortcoming remains my sole responsibility.

[ii] Chia Meng Tat Jack, “Ah Ma and her Beliefs: The Migrant Experience and Religious Practices of a Chinese Immigrant Woman in Twentieth Century Singapore,” in Marburg Journal of Religion 12, 1 (May 2007), http://web.uni-marburg.de/religionswissenschaft/journal/mjr/pdf/2007/chia2007.pdf (accessed 14 May 2007).

One of my on-going pet projects is putting together a collection of oral interviews with old folks on their war experiences. This interest is the direct result of Professor Kevin P. Blackburn’s history graduate module at the Nanyang Technology University (NTU). Part of the requirements was to conduct an oral interview with any octogenarians I could find. Obviously for a six thousand-word essay, you cannot very well fudge the issue by doing a perfunctory half-hour interview. You would have nothing to write. Another reason is my command of the dialects is a disaster – thanks to our government’s language policies, which did not really have a place for dialects. Hence, it was with great trepidation that I interviewed my first subject, Mr. Tang S. Y.

But before delving into the interview proper, I would like to highlight a significant change in the search and retrieval of archival information as the result of the Internet revolution. As far back as 1999, the Internet portal offered by the National Archives of Singapore (NAS) was primitive and unfriendly. In other words, keyword searches will turn out irrelevant material. Many wasted hours, perhaps even days, had to be spent sifting through the search results.

Another charming feature of the 1999 version was that the search engine would irrationally reset itself after you had painstakingly gone through a couple of pages! One other alternative at that time was to plough through the catalogue, Syonan: Singapore under the Japanese: a catalogue of oral history interviews (1986), which is also published by the NAS. As a general sign of amateurish endeavors, the catalogue only has name entries with a brief description of the reel. The sore lack of index meant again you have to go through the thick catalogue with a fine-tooth comb.

This has changed significantly. Today, the portal is divided into more manageable sub-portals. For oral interviews, the CORD (Collection of Oral History Recording Database) is immensely useful. Now the entries can be easily searched by using keywords which can be set to only search the oral reel archives.

So, many a fruitful weekend – especially for bachelors – could be spent there reading the three thousand four hundred and eighty items that are war-related (which I personally find much better reading than Stephen E. Ambrose’s Band of Brothers!) More than half of the oral interviews even have transcripts. So if you are in a hurry, the transcripts are a god-send. But I always have the nagging feeling that somehow the ones without the transcripts are the “real McCoys”, the genuine stuff.

I did try listening to one interview without a transcript with little success. The interviewee had a thick teochew dialect, which is the subset of the main dialect group. Even my older friends had trouble deciphering that reel. So there I was, looking forlornly at that reel descriptor, which tantalizingly included some of the more significant historical events in Singapore – for instance, General Tojo’s visit, Chin Peng’s march-past, the Bukit Ho Swee Fire etc.

In the Central Library of NUS, there are several oral history books related to the Second World War. The Japanese Occupation: Singapore 1942-45 (published in 1985 by the NAS) is out-dated and picture-heavy. But the Oral History Manual (1992) has an idiot-proof sample questionnaire, which is useful for amateur interviewers. Needless to say, I was armed with that during my interview. Keeping up with the times, the NAS has also recently published Memories & Reflections: Documenting a Nation’s History through Oral History – The Singapore Experience (2007). For those who may be interested, the Oral History Department conducts one workshop per year on the actual practice of conducting oral interview. I have been to one – ostensibly for “work purposes” – and I must say the workshop is light, digestible and unpretentious.

Let’s return to Mr Tang. Once the interview started, all rules and sample questions got thrown out of the window. Mr Tang was as energetic as Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew; in fact he was probably just as forceful. He insisted that he would talk and do his household chores at the same time. So up and down I went, shadowing him around the house trying to conduct the interview. He did not help much either by suddenly side-tracking into another topic, which was only marginally connected to the war – for instance, his search for a wife. As it turned out, the blur of activity he was engaged in was gathering ingredients to prepare herbal-chicken soup, especially for his granddaughter and myself – and yes, the time it took for soup to boil was exactly how long the interview took.

Interestingly as well, Mr Tang has no concept of time or dates. He would suddenly cut me off saying, “Hello?! That was very long ago!” He would often take references from the year when “he had a toothache”, or “Tek Pui sold me that damn %#$@& bicycle!” Even more alarming, he would sometimes refer to the Chinese drama serial, The Awakening, produced by the then Singapore Broadcasting Corporation (SBC), and starring a young Xiang Yun for those who remember. With a twinkle in his eyes, he would ask if I wanted dramatic events like those. He was somewhat deflated when I insisted on the more mundane such as the prices of vegetables and eggs.

Reflecting on the interview while transcribing the oral tape (no MP3 recorder at that time), I realised that Mr Tang was rather anxious for the interview to be successful. But some of the information he provided were completely counterfactual to the mainstream narratives, for example by Mary Turnbull. I was perhaps on a naïve theory-proving mission, trying to fit Mr Tang’s story into what I have learnt. He would gently reproach me, “This is real life mah, ah boy. You think textbook, har?”

Some incidents were so outrageous that I was forced to dig up numerous memoirs of Singaporeans published just to counter-check. But once I started digging, some events recorded in the memoirs were even more incredible! For example, one chap spent a better part of the war gambling and having a whale of a time with the Japanese. He was none for the worse after the war. In the midst of my literature search, John Boyle’s China and Japan at War: The Politics of Collaboration (1972) became the most significant. I actually stumbled upon an interpretative insight not discussed by Singapore scholars. Not a bad result for what was a simple oral history project.

In conclusion, writing on and about the top honchos of Singapore politics and businesses have focused most of our scholarly attention on the so-called “Big Events”. Even if you had wanted to interview one of those “honchos”, there are a host of restrictions. For example, the NAS has forty-eight reels of interviews with George Edwin Bogaar, but most of which are restricted. My interview with Mr Tang has opened my eyes to a whole host of new questions and possibilities of counter-narratives, which could be used to complement our understanding of the Singapore Story, or mischievously tickle it (a la Rudolf Mrazek in Engineers of Happy Land) to tease out previously un-highlighted information.

Amongst us are rich institutional memories of common peoples who were and still are at the receiving end of government policies. Rather than bang needlessly (and without reward) against the door of restricted documents and archives, we could perhaps make better use of the more readily available and accessible sources of information. If Mary Margaret Steedly could use her interviews with spiritual mediums to tell various compelling stories in Hanging without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland (1993), Singaporean historians can do no worse. Better yet, troop down to an old folks home and start work today!

The writer is a former history teacher at one of Singapore’s junior colleges. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of History, National University of Singapore.