SINGAPORE: Taking my seat at a table in the Reunion space at the National Museum of Singapore, I wondered what I might learn about Singapore’s history from a senior.
After all, it was my first time at a “human library”, and I was anticipating stories from the human “book” whose time I was “borrowing”.
“Makan with Seniors” is a regular event organised by digital magazine Ageless Online, intended to create a place for people to get to know complete strangers, inter-generationally, and to make seniors in Singapore feel heard and valued.
But this session was rather special: The five seniors in attendance all feature in the series Let Me Tell You A Story, airing on Aug 8 and 9, which centres around the stories of seniors who have experienced Singapore’s history first-hand.
PICKING UP LANGUAGES LEFT, RIGHT AND CENTRE
In his time as a coolie, Uncle Tan met people from round the world. Through these interactions, he learnt Malay, English and more.
The native Teochew speaker picked up Hainanese from the chefs he delivered groceries to and Hokkien while working in the market. At the same time, he was surprised by British officers who spoke fluent Hokkien and Cantonese.
As a student of linguistics and multilingual studies at university, I was floored.
Learning all these languages was not easy, Uncle Tan shared. But “nothing is ever easy”, he told us. English, for example, was utterly foreign to him. But he made the effort to learn it from the British officers he befriended.
As he wrote in Son of Singapore, “How is it there are all these foreigners speaking our languages, yet I cannot speak one of theirs?”
‘TOO GOOD’ A STORY TO KEEP TO HIMSELF
His journey as a writer, on the other hand, started purely by chance — after he travelled to the United Kingdom with his British friends and experienced the hippy culture of the 1960s.
This new, Western world was a culture shock for him, coming as he did from conservative Singapore. It made him want his life story to be a legacy he could leave to his children.
Later on, while working in Hong Kong as a driver for a British diplomat he had befriended previously, he began to write Son of Singapore at night in his quarters.
The Briton, intrigued, asked if he could read the book. As it was written in Mandarin, Uncle Tan translated some excerpts and read them out to his boss.
“He told me, ‘Kok Seng, this is too good to keep to yourself! You must publish this,’” Uncle Tan recounted. “I told him there’s no way I can write this in English.”
His love of storytelling made me realise how valuable it was to hear his stories in his own words.
Hearing about the intricacies of his life, I realised that history books do not do justice to the experiences of the generations before ours.
Besides Uncle Tan, the series Let Me Tell You A Story features Rasamal Nadayson, who was raised in poverty and was in an arranged marriage. Her story spoke to me because of the myriad of languages she spoke.
Lai Kum Yoong, meanwhile, was a midwife who once delivered a baby in a car, even though the baby had emerged backwards.
I could not hear their stories all in one afternoon, but the experience reminded me of the chats I had with my grandparents as a child and my sense of wonder at the people who have lived through Singapore’s history.