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I spent the first three years of my life raising hell in and around a shophouse on Lorong 19 in Geylang. Today, it’s a district that never stops thrumming — you come here for supper at one of its many storied kopitiams and eateries after closing the bar or club down. Or maybe you keep partying on at one of its hostess-headlined karaoke dives or have a happy ending within one of its little bungalows with entrances lit by red lanterns.
But in the last three years of the 1970s, I hustled up and down the stairs to our third floor home, taking care of important business like clamoring for ice cream from the street level Magnolia factory; hiding and seeking with fellow neighborhood ragamuffins; ratcheting up a lorongs-wide reputation for mischief to “the 101st degree” (if you believe the neighbors) — Spinal Tap had nothing on me. As the first grandchild in the extended family with plenty of doting aunts and neighbors to prank and terrorize (bamboo laundry poles were my weapons of choice for jabbing unsuspecting butts, I often left overturned bins of rice in my wake, it was a rare occasion when I didn’t have to stand on a chair in the nursery classroom corner for 10 minutes before I was let out), I was plenty busy all day and evening. Then, as now, I found naps a waste of time and energy. Much of the world awaited.
But in that world of scrawny, terriblest two me, I never noticed this building, now home to Kang Ha Pheng Sim Kok, a Chinese clan association. Art Deco-Moderne etched into colonial architecture unique to Southeast Asia and garnished in Singaporean hybridization — wooden Malay framework, glazed Peranakan tiles, louvred French windows, neo-Classical cornice work, Indian soldiers carved in Chinese fashion — was out of my purview. I often dashed about and never slowed down to smell the Straits Chinese sculpted roses. I didn’t know that this thriving lorong, with our family ophthalmic lens-making workshop tucked away in our kitchen (and the next one, where my dad sprouted a humble expansion of that business) thrived with hustle and vibrant life because our country was in the midst of on an upwardly post-World War II run, its trajectory boosted by the independent vision of Lee Kuan Yew. These days, my parents reminisce about those Lorong 19 times of us three crammed into one simple metal-framed bed because they couldn’t afford to buy me a cot, that two Baby Boomers who never went to college could raise two kids in modern Singapore and send them to overseas universities, who worked hard enough to go places they had only seen in the movies or on TV. My parents have road tripped across America, gone on Mexican jaunts, traversed Europe, criss-crossed Asia many times, lived it up Down Under, and shown and gave those kids the world while enjoying some of it themselves. They sometimes ask each other, bemusedly, rhetorically, “Did you ever even dare to think then that we would have this life?”
I didn’t know I would have this life either. Four decades later, I remember so many great moments on Lorong 19, but standing halfway down the street today, I’m glad for everything I know now, and where it all started.