Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore

Chapter 9: Bukit Ho Swee Estate

212 Squatters into Citizens 212 9 Bukit Ho Swee Estate Despite its modern façade and officially sanctioned ways of life, Bukit Ho Swee Estate maintained a tenacious hold on its past. As Gerard Ee, a social worker in the estate since 1982, observed, “You can take the guy out of the kampong, but you cannot take the kampong out of the guy.”1 This statement is a good starting point for examining the long-term social impact of the 1961 inferno and the balance of change and continuity. Among the estate’s residents, including former fire victims, newcomers relocated from elsewhere in the 1960s, and their children born after the fire, something of the semi-autonomous kampong culture persisted. In the official mind, too, Bukit Ho Swee Estate remained a “black area”, underlining the continuing ambivalent relationship between citizens and the state. Renewing the Estate The demographic profile of the residents of Bukit Ho Swee Estate changed over time along with attitudes towards housing, family and work. In 1970 Bukit Ho Swee had 45,066 inhabitants and was the third-most densely populated housing estate in Singapore. Its population was youthful, a quarter being under 10 years old and just 6 per cent aged 60 and above. Subsequently, Bukit Ho Swee’s population matured much faster than the rest of Singapore’s. By 1980 there were only 20,773 persons in the estate, with only 12 per cent aged 10 and younger, well under the national average of 17 per 1 Author’s interview with Gerard Ee, 13 Nov. 2006. Bukit Ho Swee Estate 213 cent. This demographic change stemmed from young married couples leaving their parents for larger, newer flats in outlying HDB townships . As early as 1977, the Singapore Parliament heard from a member that “aged and weak parents have been forsaken by the children”.2 By 1990, the proportion of children in Bukit Ho Swee aged 10 and younger had dropped further to 9 per cent. A decade later, a fifth of its population of 19,737 persons were aged 60 and above. The out-migration of younger residents echoed the movement of their parents to the kampongs a generation earlier. It also precipitated an intergenerational cultural clash that shaped the outlook of the older generation towards both past and future. Png Pong Tee, a widowed former resident of Taman Ho Swee, struggled to support her four children, earning just $2.80 an hour as a shipyard cleaner (long sai) and having to borrow from unlicensed moneylenders (ah long). When the children married they moved out of the flat, a common practice among young couples in post-independence Singapore . Living alone in her flat in Queenstown, Png became resigned, for “if one has a hard life (pai mia), it will always be like that the whole life”.3 Family tensions marked the children’s migration to newer flats. When his son moved out to a condominium in the west, Tan Tiam Ho “cursed him no end” and demanded, “Why did you have to stay in such a big house?”4 Jimmy Yi, who moved into a three-room flat in Block 16 in Bukit Ho Swee with his family in 1963, later found himself alone. His brothers had left when they married, because, as he said, “They don’t care about our father and mother.”5 High-rise living overturned former kampong dwellers’ conception of space. It required a period of adaptation for those used to living on the ground and also created new social tensions. As an HDB survey in 1969 revealed, many residents living on the lower floors cited “rubbish thrown from upstairs” as the main cause of dissatisfaction with the floor location of their flat.6 Wet laundry hung 2 SPD, 16 Feb. 1977, p. 220. 3 Author’s interview with Png Pong Tee, 10 Jan. 2008. 4 Author’s interview with Tan Tiam Ho, 12 Mar. 2007. 5 Author’s interview with Jimmy Yi Pak Weng, 4 Feb. 2007. 6 Stephen H.K. Yeh, Housing and Development Board Sample Household Survey, Vol. 2 (Singapore: Economic Research Centre, University of Singapore, and Housing and Development Board of Singapore, 1969), p. 33. 214 Squatters into Citizens out on bamboo poles outside windows was a constant source of irritation for both the owners of laundry drying on lower floors and passers-by below. This simple method of drying laundry, a Chinese custom long...