Our Bedok Kampong House Singapore

The matriarch and first named owner of the Bedok kampong house was our grandmother Mdm Chan Ah Siew. The house was gifted to her and her children by our grandfather Ah Gong who passed away barely 3 months after everyone moved into the house in November 1954.   Born in July 1897 in Singapore, she along with the rest of the family lived here until her death at age 73 in December 1969. Mama (that was how we addressed her) came from a humble background where she had to work to fend for herself, and circumstantially met our grandfather.  She was a great cook, which pleased our Ah Gong tremendously and as a result she taught her children the same skills. Interestingly, besides the Baba Patois (we are a Peranakan household) and Cantonese dialect, she could also speak the Seyap( 四邑 ) dialect, which originated from the Guangdong province of China.  What made our grandmother so great was that she decided to adopt all her children who all came from poor families thus giving each of...

The younger of us brothers joined the cub scouts at St Stephen’s Primary School, where we studied, in the 70’s. The interesting thing was that a March 1973 Walkathon fund raiser was held and the route included walking through Upper East Coast Road and onto Bedok Road going round the bend and passing by the slip road onto where we lived at our Bedok kampong house, opposite Bedok corner food centre that opened a few years earlier in 1971. A memory with a photo to remember by! Left- giving the scout salute in the garden of our house, at age 9 Right- Looking at the camera and holding onto his straw hat, at just 10 years of age (Bedok SIR camp in the background)

This post was made possible by former neighbour Daniel Koh. In our chats on the Heritage SG Memories FB group, Daniel shared that he and his family lived across the Sungei Bedok bridge from our Bedok kampong house side, at Padang Terbakar (name later changed to Siak Kuan Road), as part of the vast estate of Koh Sek Lim, since 1953. His former home was the second one from the edge of the riverbank, with the fence facing the sea and opposite the WWII pillboxes erected by the British (which you can see from some photos here). On December 10, 1969, Singapore experienced its worst flooding in 35 years (then). It was Hari Raya Puasa and the relentless torrential rain caused the Sungei Bedok bridge to collapse! At 16 years of age then (this writer was just 8), he took this photo with his trusted Kodak Instamatic. He also remembered a man with a sampan doing a roaring business ferrying people who wanted to get across, charging 10 cents or 20 cents. He and his family moved out in 1973 before th...

The morning wet market was really just a few steps away from our Bedok kampong house and hawker food was also sold there. From time to time, in the late 1960's our mother would take us there to eat the delicious Yong Tau Foo ( 釀豆腐 ) ! We remember sitting on small stools at the cart which were on wheels and pushed in and out of the market when the day was done. There was always a row of patrons sitting side by side as we enjoy the piping hot food. As children, we were completely satisfied with each of us just having two fish balls in soup in a small bowl. But we would drop in the red sweet sauce ( 甜 酱 or tian jiang ) and stir to colour the soup red, then lap it all up.. ah this is a childhood happy comfort-eat for the memories! The yong tau foo stall looks like this one here with much lower stools. Photo not ours, full credit to the owners. This is a recently taken photo to illustrate the fishballs in soup. Unfortunately the sweet sauce was brown in this instance, not the tradition...

She is our cousin who joined our live-in household in 1950 when she was born and our grandparents took her in to raise her in Kampong Soopoo then our Bedok kampong house when the family moved in in November 1954. 11 years older than the older of us boys, she helped to take care of us as well, becoming a close family member. Moving out of the kampong in October 1974, she continued to live with us still then. Today we commemorate her 75 th birthday with a clip showing some memorable moments at the kampong house and surrounds… Happy birthday Che!

This weekend we remember our dearest late paternal youngest aunt (her rightful title in our Peranakan/Straits Chinese world was Ko Chik but we brothers called her ‘Nya Nya’). She would have been 85 years old this weekend but left us 8+ years ago. Part of the original family who moved from their Kampong Soopoo home in Kallang into our Bedok kampong house, she can be described as someone who was fearless, but also extremely kind. Fearless in the belief that things that had to be done should not be avoided but embraced, for eg, she was bold to buy a fresh chicken from the market, then have its neck slit to drain out the blood (yes we were with her with she did it, no trauma), pluck out the feathers then cook and serve us steamed chicken rice for lunch! Very hands on and even able to plant tapioca plants in the house garden, pull them out of the soil when ripened , steam them and have it for tea (dipped with sugar) and for the entire family to enjoy. She was also a kind person in nature. E...