Page 84 - Stories from our Grandparents

hen I was young, I lived in a At a young age, I had to start working, because my family was
kampong on a hill opposite
Bukit Timah Hill called
Mdm ng Ah Huay Born 1952 WJurong Kechil. There was
no clean water from taps, so when we
By Chloe Lim Eu Hwee needed water, we would go to a public
Millennia Institute well at the bottom of the hill to get water.
Our life then was very tough. When we wanted to
go to school, we needed to walk through the forest
to get to school and back home as there was no
transportation for us. We had never owned an
umbrella because our mother didn’t have money
to buy us umbrellas. We only had one set of
uniform per person as well as only one pair of
shoes. So when it rained, our shoes
and uniforms would get wet and we needed to
use the heat from the fire to dry them.
Children didn’t have toys, so they followed the teenagers to go to the
drains and rivers to catch fish, birds, spiders and even snakes. In the
past, there wasn’t much entertainment. Since our parents would go
to work, once we came home from school, we played.
Since we grew banana trees, pineapple trees and
guava trees, we would climb trees and pluck fruits.
We also owned chickens and pigs.
Jurong Kechil
very poor. So I would follow my mum to where she worked,
which was at a factory. Sometimes we would work the whole
day and as children, we couldn’t do much so we would only
earn 50 cents per day.
I started to work since I was 13 years old to support my family
because my mother and father retired early. The people who stayed
in the kampong bonded well with each other. We never needed
to lock our doors, whether it was the main door or kitchen door
because we trusted each other. In the day, we left our doors wide
open but when we turned in for the night, we closed the doors but
did not lock them.
“If strangers came to harass someone from the kampong,
everyone from the kampong would work together to take care
of the children and people living in the kampong. Usually the
men would be the ones protecting the kampong.”
During the Racial Riots in 1964 between Malays and Chinese,
the men protected the villages and kampongs. The elderly and
women stayed at home to take care of the children while the
men went to the bottom of the hill and guarded the hill as they
were afraid that strangers would come and disturb or harass us.