Never Take Anything for Granted (2E5 Benjyamin's grandmother)

Interviewer:

Name: Benjyamin Chin Hsui Yang

Date of interview: 27-7-06

Location of interview: Grandmother’s house

Interviewee:

Name: Tan Mui Ngo

Present Address: Blk 724 Clementi West Street Two

Date of birth: 1929

Place of birth: China

Background information of interviewee’s parents:

Parents’ Names: Tan Buck Song [DECEASED]   Yeo Siew Hong [DECEASED]

Occupation: Clerk and a farmer

Family life with parents: she had to work very, very hard

                                               

This is the story of my grandmother…..

   My grandmother came to Singapore when she was merely eight years of age. As a child, she had to help in the making of candles and bundle up noodles to earn money, because in those days, people had to get every helping hand they could get so as to supplement their income. Back then, my grandmother had no games to play because she was too busy helping around the household nor did she have any holidays. Also, kids in those days were very obedient so they rarely played pranks on anybody. And if they did, their punishments included raps on their heads with their parent’s knuckles or by being slapped.

    Her responsibilities in the house was to help out in the cooking of meals, washing clothes, looking after the farm animals and getting water from the well. During her time, her family was too poor to afford schooling for her. Her family members were all Buddhist so her religion was Buddhism. For their marriages, they had no say in it. Their parents went to a match-maker to decide their weddings. Another interesting fact about my grandmother’s wedding is that they did not use a wedding car at all! Instead they used bicycles as their so-called ‘wedding cars’. The brides also purposely made themselves look ugly or they cut their hair very short like a boys so as to escape the clutches of the Japanese soldiers because if they were beautiful, the Japanese soldiers would take them away and rape them!

    My grandmother stayed in squatter houses which had very poor sanitation, water systems and road systems. Back in her time, they had no HDB flats yet as they were not that advanced with technology. During funerals, the people tried to make sure they did their best for the dead person so as to be blessed in return for helping the dead person because the people were still very superstitious back then. For their gatherings, since there was no TV, radio nor movies, people used to spend their evenings drinking tea, smoking and chit-chatting with each other. They did some of their shopping at ‘pasar malams’ as there were no shopping centers near my grandmother’s house. My grandmother liked to go to the pond and lakes to swim in her free time. She also recalled liking to watch other children climbing up fruit trees to harvest the fruits.

      During World War 2, my grandmother and her family were still in Singapore. They lost their house during a bombing raid. That period of time as my grandmother recalls was a very chaotic time. Luckily my grandmother’s family was prepared for the bombing raids as they had dug bomb shelters underground before hand. As the war went on, food got scarcer and scarcer, people were also forced to share homes with other people who had not lost their homes to the bombs. But my grandmother’s family managed to pull through the food crisis only because her fathers’ boss was in the rice business and he was a generous man. 

     The main disasters at that time were flooding. The Bukit Timah area was the most prone to floods during heavy rains as the drains could not dissipate the water quickly enough.

      My grandmother only remembers the Maria Hertogh riots. She said that the riots were sparked when the parents of a girl called Maria Hertogh tried to claim her back from her adoptive parents. She also said that many Europeans were attacked and killed when the Malays took to the streets against the forceful handover of the girl. She also remembers what life was like under the British rule. She said that the locals like the Chinese, Malays or Indians were often treated like lower class citizens even in Singapore their homeland. At the end of the interview, my grandmother gave me this piece of advice:’ never take anything for granted’.