Paktor

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EDITOR // LIZZY LEETEXT // JOEL TANPHOTOGRAPHY // IVAN TANDESIGN & ART DIRECTION // LIZZY LEE

Old photos used with permission.

Published by: National Library Board, Singapore100 Victoria Street#14-01 National Library BuildingSingapore 188064Republic of SingaporeTel: +65 6332 3255 email: [email protected]

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. The text, layout and designs presented in this book, as well as the book in its entirety, are protected by the copyright and intellectual property laws of the Republic of Singapore and similar laws in other countries. Commercial production of works based in whole or in part upon the text, designs, drawings and photographs contained in this book is strictly forbidden without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 978-981-07-7043-3

This work was exclusively created for the Singapore Memory Project, NLBwww.SingaporeMemory.sg

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There is a green etching of my mother’s face on my elder brother’s arm. It’s based on a photo of her on her wedding day. When my brother first came home with it, we were all torn between the sweetness of the gesture and the

corporeal eeriness of literal face-on-flesh inking. The youthful face of my mother in her twenties is in a way immortalised on the muscled arm of my elder brother. I believe the tattoo had such a strange effect on us because we don’t otherwise think of that face or imagine that our parents were ever young. Seeing that face flex and taut on my brother’s arm, it’s as if another woman, not my mother, had been re-animated.

Yet I know our parents were young once like we are now. Many of my friends remark that it is around this time in our lives, our twenties, that we realise our parents are (as odd as this sounds), in fact, human (i.e. that they genuinely had rich and interesting lives before our births.) Perhaps, we learn to be more interested in the lives of others when we are in our twenties.

This thought experiment, while fascinating, is also slightly disturbing: we realise our parents might have had the same hang-ups, the same urges, the same idealism, the same politics and ambitions as we do now. They had the same vigour, the same passion, the same talent. Often, it’s hard to reconcile this with the middle-aged versions of our parents that we’re so familiar with – they might as well be from another planet.

In a sense, our parents are from a different planet: the past.

The past is a strange place that feels only tangentially connected to the present. It’s murky and distant, captured only in reflections: milky, faded photographs, dinner-time recounts and misrememberings; and in my brother’s case – impulsive tattoos.

But I think it’s important, responsible and filial to plunge into our parents’ stories and flesh them out, i.e. the stories of these figure heads whom we’ve only known as providers, disciplinarians, adults, parents; whom we look up to as protectors when they pull through for us and failures when they don’t; whom we think of as figures to blame for present unpleasantness, and whose duty it is to make things work. Especially in our twenties, it becomes easy to think of them as strangers, aliens, irrelevant, superannuated, outmoded. But that’s because we tend to think of our parents in service to our own existence, and not as individuals with their own ongoing predicaments, triumphs, heartbreaks and adventures.

And there’s no better place to look for humanity than in romance. Falling in love involves a paradoxical set of human qualities: selflessness, selfishness, strength,

AN INTRODUCTIONn n

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vulnerability, fear and courage. We are at our finest and most human selves when we love someone else. Everyone can do it, even our parents, and the romance of our parents is special because it has lasted long enough to involve us. This book is a collection of interviews, memories and photographs about the romances of our parents’ generation. It explores what it was like to be romantic – to fall in love – in the 60s and 70s. What were some of Singaporeans’ favourite dating traditions? Where did dates take place? What was it like to be in love in the 60s? In a way, it’s not just our parents whose stories I’m investigating in this book. Faded photographs capture places as much as they do people. As people fade, so do places. This is especially true in Singapore where preservation and heritage are institutional catchphrases more than they are habits and mindsets. The logic of our city dictates a washing away of old things for the new. In a way, this book acts against that. It is a project of nostalgia, one that involved sitting down with people and urging them to remember. Many afternoons were spent in the glow of such recollection. And it was often very moving because there is a sense in this country that when something is gone, it is irrevocably, unapologetically gone.

Nostalgia is sometimes a tricky business because we tend to overcompensate for the past: in re-tellings, the best bits are made bigger, the worst bits smaller. Nostalgia is “rose-tinted”. Our generation is a nostalgic one: there’s a sense that we feed hungrily off the past because it’s made so scarce for us, and we tend to make a fetish of old things as a way to make the way we live in the present seem quirkier, more interesting and cool. But, based on the stories that have been collected for this volume, in this instance the past might have some very crucial and valuable lessons to offer about the way we conduct our lives today.

In short, it’s this: we should respect our memories of being in love – they are the ones we go back to, over and over again. This is even after the places and people and feelings are gone, which makes each re-visit harder and harder. We should do what we can to help each other remember our romances, because they bring out the best, most heroic and human things in us, and because they bring us together.

This is a book for Singapore as much as it is for our parents.

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Chapter 1

FIRST MEETINGSn n

Boo Geok Kwang & Rebecca Ng Sok Tuan

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They’d seen each other numerous times at the hawker centre near the old CID building in Shenton Way. Soebirin (50) was serving his National Service as a policeman and Azizah (49) was helping out at her mother’s nasi padang

stall. It was a flirtation conducted over packet lunches, they say, because they were both incredibly shy.

Eventually, Soebirin plucked up enough courage to ask Azizah out, which in the 1980s meant asking for her mother’s permission.

“Her mother liked me very much,” Soebirin says proudly, and so it was a done deal.

Prior to that, the young pair had not traded many words with each other. Both coming from strict religious backgrounds, they’d never had very much to do with the opposite sex. The evening of their first date, the pair caught a movie, had dinner at the Taman Serasi hawker centre outside the Botanic Gardens, then took a late evening stroll in the gardens. It was Azizah’s first ever visit, and that was their first date – effortlessly classy and romantic.

On the day of our interview with them, the pair met us at the same spot where they had their first date – right by Swan Lake at the Botanic Gardens.

Today, Soebirin and Azizah have been married for 28 years and have three children; two sons and a daughter.

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Soebirin Soeradi & Azizah Kasim

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In 1972, Rebecca (59) was still in Pre-U when she was invited to a chalet party along with six other girls. There were to be three guys there – a trio of classmates from the University of Singapore. As it turned out, all three chaps eventually

married within the same group of girls that had been gathered at that chalet that fateful evening.

Perhaps the Singaporean love affair with chalets can be traced back to at least 1972. Maybe something of an old kampong getaway appeals to them. The old chalets at the village of Mata Ikan at Tanah Merah were wooden, one-storey attap houses next to the beach and young people would gather for outings such as the one Rebecca soon found herself singing at. Entertainment during the 60s and 70s, were much more easily found with a simple guitar and some seaside bonhomie than it is today with the sleaze and booze of after-dark establishments.

One of the chaps, Geok Kwang (62), played the guitar very well. He sang(‘Forget me not’), a song so old it seems almost to have no history. It left a pretty big impression on Rebecca.

Even though she tells us that there were “no feelings” during that first encounter, Rebecca and Geok Kwang, now married for 31 years, recount their first gathering together with a kind of reverence.

Rebecca and Geok Kwang were “just friends” for a while after that first meeting and “didn’t really click,” but some encounters got more meaningful through repetition. Over the years, they saw each other fairly infrequently, mostly at those chalet “outings,” but they grew closer through their combined love and talent for singing. The pair eventually got married nine years later, in 1981.

The chalet where they first met went on to become a big part of their life together, and their friends’ lives, even after marriage. While it is now gone, having given way to coastal redevelopment as with most parts of Singapore, but as their first shared song urges – ‘forget me not’; the legacy of that first gathering – a boisterous, energetic and unexpectedly momentous – survives even the reclamation of land.

Rebecca and Geok Kwang have three children; two sons and a daughter.

II.

Boo Geok Kwang& Rebecca Ng Sok Tuan

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Sometimes romance is a slow but bright burn. In 1976, Kue Ma (65) and Yuan Yu (58) met at the law firm of Kue Ma’s friend, where Yuan Yu was an intern. They describe their first encounter as unremarkable, which perhaps underplays

how they knew, early on, that they’d each found the right match.

“We spent a lot of time at friends’ houses, playing mahjong,” Yuan Yu says. “I used to just sit there watching him play. Very unromantic!”

Most of their time together was spent in a group of friends, they say; very little one-on-one time, very little by way of making any special plans. Just being together was enough. “We just knew, not like you young people, so complicated!”

A year and half later, they were married, and off to the UK where Kue Ma would further his studies, and have been married 35 years. They have two children, both daughters, and a 10-month old grandson.

III.

Tan Kue Ma& Lee Yuan Yu

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Dolly (62) finished her ‘O’ levels in 1969, which meant at that time that she was fairly hot property. At 19 years old, with a Cambridge certificate, the world was her oyster; and so she took to selling refrigerators. The work

was hard and boring, and so she made fast friends with the other Frigo girls on her route – a girl called Margaret, who had been a year her senior at Cedar Girls’, and a gargantuan figure of a young woman called Jenny, freakishly tall for her age and by Singapore standards. One afternoon, Alice, one of the senior girls at the company, turned to Jenny on the lorry back to the office and asked if she’d like to go on a blind date with her brother. “My brother, John, is very handsome,” Alice began, and all the girls fell silent, for this was certainly the hand of Providence, “...and very, very tall, like you!” He was a sailor and had just come back from a two-year voyage. He had seen the world. Alice liked to boast about her brother. She had a photo of him where he looked like John Lennon (in 1969, this was a good thing). Jenny demurred, but Margaret was game, and so Margaret and Alice’s brother went dancing.

Margaret and John (65) didn’t hit it off. (Author’s note: If they had, I wouldn’t have been born.)

My mother, Dolly, eventually met the famous John at a traffic crossing on the way to a shoe shop with Margaret. My to-be father was so smitten by my mother that he tagged along at the shoe shop all afternoon. Dolly, hitherto only exposed to the boys from church at that time, was drawn to John’s worldly charm, his seafaring gentlemanliness and striking good looks. They adjourned for coffee and sandwiches to a coffeehouse called Talk of the Town and he asked her out to dinner. They met at the old Ruby cinema at Balestier and had dinner at the tze char joints along Albert Street. He told her over dinner that they’d met once, long ago, when he was shopping for Christmas decorations at her mother’s goods and sundries shop, and had always been on the lookout for her since. The rest was history.

Today, John and Dolly have been married 35 years and have three sons.

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John Tan Jiok Say& Dolly Wong Siao Yin

Chapter 2

GO PAKTORn n Azizah and Soebirin on a date at Botanic Gardens, 1980s. The couple married in 1987.

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HAWKER CENTRES1. Satay Club (Padang)2. Taman Serasi Hawker Centre3. Orchard Road Hawker Centre4. Albert Street Food Centre5. Changi Village Food Centre6. Old Newton Circus Food Centre7. Hill Street Hawker Centre8. Radin Mas Hawker Centre

COFFEE HOUSES AND RESTAURANTS9. Mondo (Outram Park)10. Talk of the Town (High Street)11. The Skillet/ The Silver Spoon (Today’s Park Mall)12. The Holiday Inn Coffee House (opposite Scotts)13. Jack’s Place (Killiney Road)

CINEMAS14. Capitol Theatre (Stamford Road)15. Cathay Cinema (Handy Road)16. Alhambra Theatre (Beach Road)17. Galaxy Theatre (Onan Road)18. Victory Theatre at Gay World (Mountbatten)19. Jubilee Theatre (North Bridge Road)20. Lido Theatre (Scotts Road)21. Majestic Theatre (Eu Tong Sen Street)22. Metropole Theatre (Neil Road)

NIGHTLIFE23. Golden Million Lounge, Peninsula Hotel (Coleman Road)24. New World Amusement Park (Kitchener Road)25. Gay World (Mountbatten)26. Pink Panther (Orchard Road)27. Cathay Nite Club, The Cathay (Handy Road)28. Golden Venus (Orchard Hotel)

PARKS, WALKS AND GARDENS29. The Botanic Gardens30. Queen Elizabeth Walk 31. Mount Faber32. Chinese Gardens33. Changi Beach34. Katong Park35. East Coast Park

POPULARPAKTORSPOTS

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I.

Food

Pak tor (a Cantonese term for dating) in the 1960s and 70s involved, in true Singaporean fashion, lots of eating. The 60s and 70s were the last heyday of bona fide roving hawkers, who were already beginning to settle into permanent

locations (though many of these hawker centres have since been closed, and the stalls dispersed across the island). Fancier options existed too, particularly a type of eatery fondly called the “Coffee House”. Today, we’d call them cafés, but in the 60s and 70s, it was fashionable to be seen at one of these Western outfits.

i. Hawker Centres

Soebirin and Azizah describe the ambience of hawker centres in the 1960s and 70s as “one of a kind”. Sweaty and noisy, they might not have been highly regarded today, but the best food in Singapore was found in these places at very low prices. These open-air food centres were big hangout spots for families, friends and couples in the days before shopping malls became a mainstay. The couple say the only way to recapture the same energy is to head up to Johor Bahru. “People remember you and you don’t even need to tell them your order! Just nod at them and they’ll bring your food to you!”

One of the most sorely missed places is The Satay Club, formerly at the Padang. It was a major hangout location and an iconic part of our parents’ lives. There was also the famous Orchard Road carpark hawker, which would turn into a bustling food centre as hawkers came in and set up their stalls in the evenings.

POPULAR HAWKER CENTRES (MAP ON PAGE 21)1. Satay Club (Padang)2. Taman Serasi Hawker Centre3. Orchard Road Hawker Centre4. Albert Street Food Centre5. Changi Village Food Centre6. Old Newton Circus Food Centre7. Hill Street Hawker Centre8. Radin Mas Hawker Centre

I.

Foodii. Coffee Houses & Restaurants

Couples sometimes go to more atas (high-end) establishments for their dates. The most fashionable of these were the Coffee Houses (precursors to our modern cafes) with quaint names like Talk of the Town, Mondo and the Silver Spoon. John and Dolly remember these as being very ornately furnished for the time: European ambience, wooden trappings, spiral staircases, waiters and tea sets. They mainly sold Western staples like cake, coffee and sandwiches. For more substantial fare, there was the famous Jack’s Place, the classic Singapore-style Western diner; which for many at that time, was considered a luxury.

POPULAR COFFEE HOUSES & RESTAURANTS (MAP ON PAGE 21)9. Mondo (Outram Park)10. Talk of the Town (High Street)11. The Skillet/ The Silver Spoon (At today’s Park Mall)12. The Holiday Inn Coffee House (opposite Scotts)13. Jack’s Place (Killiney Road)

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II.

Entertainment

Watching a movie back in the day wasn’t the same as it is today. Then, cinemas were owned by big Hong Kong film distribution houses which usually played their own movies as well as major Hollywood pictures.

The names of these iconic distribution-houses, Cathay, Shaw, Eng Wah, are familiar to us today, but they were major one-of-a-kind theatres in our parents’ time. One of the most majestic of these was the Capitol Theatre along Stamford Road, owned by the Shaw Brothers and fallen into dilapidation today.

There was also a thriving night scene in the 1960s, made up mostly of lounges, bars and ‘nite clubs’ at hotels, along with amusement parks like Gay World and New World that combined various forms of entertainment. Local acts like Naomi and the Boys, The Quests, P. Ramlee, The Crescendos, Mike Ibrahim and the Nite Walkers and The Thunderbirds would play at these night spots. Chinese and Malay love songs dominated the airwaves alongside overseas imports from the West like Air Supply, ABBA, The Carpenters, Paul Young and the Bee Gees. Geok Kwang and Rebecca remember hit songs like Jacky Chung’s (‘Some day I’ll wait for you.’) and Soebirin and Azizah remember a Malay classic, Gurindam Jiwa (‘Poems of the soul’).

POPULAR CINEMAS (MAP ON PAGE 21)14. Capitol Theatre (Stamford Road)15. Cathay Cinema (Handy Road)16. Alhambra Theatre (Beach Road)17. Galaxy Theatre (Onan Road)18. Victory Theatre at Gay World (Mountbatten)19. Jubilee Theatre (North Bridge Road)20. Lido Theatre (Scotts Road)21. Majestic Theatre (Eu Tong Sen Street)22. Metropole Theatre (Tanjong Pagar and Neil Road)

POPULAR NIGHTLIFE (MAP ON PAGE 21)23. Golden Million Lounge at Peninsula Hotel (Coleman Road)24. New World Amusement Park (Kitchener Road)25. Gay World (Mountbatten)26. Pink Panther (Orchard Road)27. Cathay Nite Club at The Cathay (Handy Road)28. Golden Venus (Orchard Hotel)

III.

Getaways

Most of the iconic parks, walks and gardens that our parents remember as paktor must-dos have thankfully been preserved, though ironically they may have become less popular because of our air-con generation’s

aversion to the outdoors and preference for shopping malls (or staying indoors with our computers) instead. Many of these were built as colonial-style promenades, and naturally became romantic getaways from the rest of the city. Though quieter and not as well known today, Queen Elizabeth Walk was once a popular location in the 1960s, filled with people who thronged the nearby Satay Club. The landscape surrounding the area has since changed significantly with the Esplanade Theatres by the Bay, Marina Bay Sands and the Singapore Flyer dominating the skyline that one used to be able to enjoy from Queen Elizabeth Walk.

POPULAR PARKS, WALKS & GARDENS (MAP ON PAGE 21)29. The Botanic Gardens30. Queen Elizabeth Walk (Gor Jang Chew Kar “Under the Five Trees”) 31. Mount Faber32. Chinese Gardens33. Changi Beach34. Katong Park35. East Coast Park

Chapter 3

GETTING HITCHEDn n Geok Kwang and Rebecca’s wedding photo shoot at the newly opened Changi Airport Terminal 1. The couple married in 1981.

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Many of the couples we spoke to married fairly young (by today’s standards): in their mid-20s. It was considered timely for ladies to marry before the age of 27 and men just a year later, at 28. Interestingly, many of

the couples were also each other’s first loves, which turns out to have been a fairly common phenomenon back in the day. As Geok Kwang puts it, work wasn’t such a major concern back then. “There were no investment bankers,” he joked, “and work ended promptly at 5pm. No overtime.” It was easier, he and Rebecca claim, to be in love, as there were generally fewer distractions and obstacles.

Although the way we paktor these days may have changed along with the city’s landscape, many of the rituals and traditions surrounding weddings haven’t.

The pre-wedding photoshoot was a big deal in the 1960s and 70s, much as it still is today. The timeless Botanic Gardens was a popular destination for wedding photography and remains so today. Couples also often sought out the newest “attractions” in town for their wedding shoots. In the 1960s and 70s, there were lots of new buildings in rapidly modernising Singapore, and strangely enough, the new Changi Airport became a major feature in many wedding photographs of the time. Although we laugh today at our parents’ awkward wedding photos in an extremely outdated Terminal 1, imagine how our children will be laughing 30 years from now, when they see wedding photos shot at Terminal 3.

Put it down to a generational difference, but Chinese parents in the 60s were more likely to insist on certain wedding-day traditions. Rebecca and Geok Kwang, as well as Yuan Yu and Kue Ma, who all got married in the late 70s and early 80s, remember that the wedding proceedings involved the customary “matchmaker”, a woman who would fetch the bride from her home and bring her to the groom’s home. The matchmaker would say good things in praise of the match and bring betrothal gifts. In some even more traditional households, the matchmaker would be sent by the groom’s family to request the young maid’s hand in marriage, though this was rarely practised in the 70s and almost never done today.

Feasting, has always been a big part of wedding proceedings. The customary nine or ten course Chinese dinner is a familiar tradition. Today, this tends to take place in an elaborate hotel ballroom, but in the 1970s that was a rarity. It was much more common for Chinese wedding receptions to be held in popular Chinese restaurants, which typically had wedding packages and did a roaring business with weddings before hotels became more affordable (or the population more affluent). According to Yuan Yu and Kue Ma, some of the more acclaimed Chinese restaurants (mostly Hokkien or Cantonese style establishments) included Si Chuan Restaurant at Grand Central, the Mayflower at the DBS building, Jiu Chiong Rong at the Cathay, Tin

Yi Jing at Maxwell Road, Hong Xin at the Manhattan Building and Huang Ho Restaurant at Middle Road. Many of these restaurants are no longer in operation, and today most wedding receptions are serviced by the kitchens of major hotels and held at their ballrooms.

According to Soebirin and Azizah, weddings took on an added significance for Malay families. Malay weddings tend to be stereotyped as noisy, low-cost void-deck affairs, but this assessment doesn’t take into account the heartwarming philosophy behind the proceedings. Soebirin and Azizah tell me that a lot of it has to do with gotong royong, the communal spirit of the kampong which involves mutual assistance, community and shared values. Thus, Malay weddings are open-concept affairs and run entirely by volunteers drawn from the couple’s friends and families.

Traditionally, a large space is required to accommodate up to 500 guests at a time. This was especially important in the 1970s. In the wake of the rapid disappearing old kampongs as the villages made way for new, modern estates, many closely-kit communities were broken up, and weddings were one of the few occasions when these communities could reunite. Typically, these celebrations weren’t very expensive affairs because all the food, music and decorations were provided by friends and family. Invitations were often informal, and communicated by word of mouth. People could even turn up uninvited to join in the festivities. The generosity at the heart of Malay weddings, even today, is reminiscent of the gotong royong spirit embodied in the old kampongs.

Azizah and Soebirin on their wedding day. One of John and Dolly’s few wedding photos, as their photographer missed his appointment on their wedding day.

Chapter 5

LOOKING BACKn n It was at a chalet like this that Geok Kwang and Rebecca first met, bonding over a mutual love and talent for music.

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“More expensive, less communication. More expensive,” Azizah repeats for emphasis when asked what the main differences are between the way we romance today and the way they did it in the 1960s and 70s.

“These days, even having a meal is so expensive, and we didn’t use to have all these iPhones and gadgets!” her husband chimes in, invoking the common image of a couple sitting across each other at a table lost in their smartphones. It used to be, the couple say, that all you needed for a good date was good, inexpensive food and time spent together. Yuan Yu and Kue Ma also echoed the same sentiments. “Time together, that’s all we needed. It didn’t have to be one-on-one. We spent a lot of time in groups. We didn’t make any special effort to be romantic, but we saw each other a lot.” As the typical work day in the 60s and 70s didn’t stretch, as it often does today, past 8 or 9 in the evening, there was typically more time for fixed dinner schedules, long strolls and movies.

Although Yuan Yu and Kue Ma claim there was very little effort put into dating, paktor in the 60s sounds exhausting to those of us born in later years. Parks, walks and beaches feature substantially in the memories of the couples interviewed. “We used to do a lot of outdoor things,” says Rebecca, “we would fly kites at Marine Parade, go for picnics, the zoo, the Botanic Gardens, the Bird Park. This was all before the MRT, so we took buses”.

Soebirin and Azizah recall that a big part of their early romance, spent with groups of friends and family, involved all-day camps and picnics at Changi Beach, Sentosa (before it became a theme park) and East Coast Park. “We were very active,” says Dolly of her generation, “we didn’t sit at home all day like you”.

Going through the memories in the older days by the couples, there’s a sense that romance in the older days was more effortless; it was simple, heartfelt and sincere. The couples enjoyed exploring Singapore in a way that would seem alien to us today. All the couples seem to agree on one thing: the activities were as elemental as spending time together.

The romance of our parents’ generation seems enviably simpler and purer. In contrast, the present generation are faced with more distractions and obligations.

This is not surprising as Singapore’s rapid modernisation and radically ramped-up work lives since the 1980s has made scarce the fundamental ingredient in romance: time. Walks in parks, long dinners over sticks of satay in the city centre, movies, chats over coffee, dancing at a night club… all in one day? Seems a tall order for anyone with any energy left after a day in the office.

The Singapore we discovered while pursuing this story has long gone. The memories had long faded even for our interviewees. They were all hardpressed to find photos of the past to share with us. “Photography was very expensive you know,” we were told.

So do these couples miss the past?

“It’s sad lah, so much of it is gone. Food doesn’t taste the same, places don’t feel the same”. For Soebirin and Azizah, those early days together were a time where people breathed easier, lived a little freer, were kinder and more authentically involved in each others’ lives. It was a time where time served people and not the other way around.

But Geok Kwang disagrees. “Not really. We have good memories of the old days, but you know, we’ve moved on to something better. There’s more to do now, things are of a better quality.” That’s one way of seeing it. Still, from the wistful memories we had the privilege of uncovering, it was clear that it was not merely buildings and places, but an entire way of life, that people miss.

Dolly and John. Rebecca and Geok Kwang.

Azizah and Soebirin. Yan Yu and Kue Ma.

FIN.n n