Our Bedok kampong - at night

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It was past 9pm, and an eleven‑year‑old me was making my way home from a Mandarin tuition session. My teacher was one of Ah Yam’s daughters—the owner of Swee Aun provision shop along Bedok Road—and lessons were held at their place. The fastest route home was a shortcut through the back lane, though it meant pushing my bicycle where the paths were too narrow to ride.

Back then, bicycle lights ran on dynamos pressed against the wheel, which only worked when you were moving fast. So I pushed my bike as briskly as I could, trying to coax some light out of it, passing the now‑closed and darkened ice‑ball cum tikam‑tikam shop, a cluster of banana trees on my left, and then cycling past the famously haunted kapok tree on my right—careful not to glance in either direction.

Such were the low light levels we endured in the kampong after nightfall, lit only by weak incandescent street lamps. The fluorescent glow spilling out from nearby houses offered some reassurance of human presence, but the imagination still ran wild in those stretches where light did not reach. Somehow, I made it home—alive to tell the tale today.

In trying to find a photograph that captured just how dim the streets were back then, I turned to Jackie Munro’s image and used AI to recreate a night scene. It felt right, especially judging by how our old neighbours, Daniel Koh and Ronald Ho, reacted when I showed it to them. What do you think?



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