Posts tagged "history"

Mei Ling Street

Between 2013 and 2018, I lived near the Mei Ling Street estate. I felt like if I was a housing estate, I would be Mei Ling Street. It's old and crumbly, but it's also got fantastic third wave coffee, one of the best cheese shops in Asia, and a few of my favourite hawker stalls (Sin Kee, Shi Hui Yuan, Ah Pang Seafood, Hui Wei Lor Mee). It's quiet and sleepy, on the surface, but full of interesting stuff if you know where to look!

Old apartments.

Flags.

Grass.

Danger. In all languages.

One of the national dishes. One of my favourite stalls.

(All photos taken on Nikon FE, 50mm f1.8 pancake lens, Kodak Gold 200, dev and scan by Whampoa Colour Centre, Singapore)

Borders Real and Imagined

San Francisco's Chinatown is one of the oldest ones in the United States. Chinese people, mostly from the "Sze Yap" region of Toishan and surrounding areas, came to northern California almost two centuries ago. They were boxed in in certain areas, within cities and regions, both in the city and outside it.

Great acts of discrimination and violence happened to them. In nearby Antioch, Chinese residents were prohibited from walking on the streets after sundown. This led to the development of secret tunnels that brought them to and from work. I recently learned about the town of Locke, just outside Sacramento, formerly known as the last rural Chinese town. People fled there to flee the racial violence in Sacramento and San Francisco.

As a much more privileged ethnic Chinese immigrant to this country who came with far more money, a better passport, I have it a lot easier, of course.

But that doesn't mean I don't feel the occasional challenges of living here at a time of increased anti-Asian hate. I've had far less of a problem living in California than in parts of Europe, Australia, but there are some among of us who never miss a moment to let others know that they are not welcome.

In the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid, Chinatown stands with its lower rise buildings from an earlier time. The Financial District to one side, the Italian community of North Beach to another. Borders real and imagined are continually defined here. Some decades ago, a minority within a minority resided on the edges of Chinatown and the Financial District, not far from here.

Manilatown was in Chinatown, San Francisco, until one day it was no more. It was the site of a fierce battle between those who wanted to build high rise buildings, and those who wanted to keep a home for the 'Manong Generation', the Filipino men who came here, were discriminated in many ways (they were not allowed to bring their families), who then aged out. It was said that they were not welcome outside the borders of Manilatown, for a long time. So this was literally a refuge and a home away from home for them.

I'm reminded that borders are defined not only in maps, but also in minds. Walking away from Chinatown and into the Financial District, when I see signs for 'French Laundry', I'm also reminded of how, not too long ago, that was thinly veiled code for 'no Asians', but now it's just one of the most famous restaurants in the world. California is weird like that. Everyone tells you you are welcome, until you're not, but until then you're free to build your community, until you're not. For what it's worth, it's now home.

Tan Boon Chye

When I came home (to Singapore) a couple of days ago, I instructed the taxi driver to go to the Caltex station at East Coast. Most cabbies know this place, but he didn't. He's 74 years old, so he only knew this spot as "Tan Boon Chye & Co" (brain GPS never update firmware). Tan Boon Chye & Co was the 3rd Caltex station in Singapore, and that was its original name — in 1961.

Growing up in Singapore and spending most of my childhood (and teen-hood) around grandparents who spoke mostly Teochew (and more Malay than Mandarin, really), I'd always felt intimately connected to their brain GPS. If I was to tell them where I had spent all my time (and money — they can't believe anything costs more than 50 cents in Singapore), I'd have to cross-reference the 1940s street directory that exists only in our minds, among the people of a certain stripe.

If I went to the jazz club at SouthBridge (way back when there was a jazz club), I'd have to tell them I was in 大坡大马路 in Teochew, dua pou dua beh lou (or tua po tua beh lou depending on your romanization preference, or if you said it with a Hokkien inflection). If I had to change money for my travels, I'd have gone to "ang teng" reminiscent of the red lights that once lit up Collyer Quay from Johnston's lighthouse. My fave — instead of going to Cecil Street to work in the CBD, I've have gone to the "opium company", where opium dens once stood instead of buttoned up, stuffy suits. Because corporate life is a different kind of opiate of the masses. Years after the passing of the two people I'd spent so much time with, existing in a different language and setting, I find myself grasping at anything that lets me learn a little bit more about the lives of people I loved but did not know fully. In part because I never had the language of their lives in full — I could order food, talk to them, talk to old people, even give speeches in this language they bestowed on me, but I could never have had the tools to create legends for their maps, their history, their worlds filled with poverty, civil war and world war.

I'm learning as much of their language as I can. Instead of being merely conversational, wet market level conversant, I've started to learn how to write it, read it, romanize it, and exist in this other plane of my life I've always inhabited but never occupied.

The taxi driver took me to Tan Boon Chye. From the way he pronounced the Tan, the same one that is present in my own name (pretty much like a surprised sound effect), I switched to it for the rest of the ride.

"Where did you return from?"

I don't say Jakarta, as in 雅加达 (ya jia da).

I say I've just returned from 巴斜, pah sia, and he knew it. I wonder what destinations my grand dad saw at the port. 巴斜 (Jakarta), 金塔 (ghim tahp, Phnom Penh), or 坤甸 (khun diang, Pontianak)? Yet somehow he ended up here, the land of red lights and big horse carriage roads and small ones, so that when I go off into the world I feel I'm merely following the same sense of adventure (and need) from more than 80 years ago.

Before & After The Fire

1961.

Rain falling on zinc roofs. Neighbours having sex

Hoping they won't be suay again. They have no money.

The news coming from the sole television set. Children peeping for a glimpse of world affairs. Condensed milk cans

filled with coffee. Ah Ba will have to go to the office.

The office is also a shed. He carries sacks to and fro sheds

All day. Sometimes all night too. Last week someone tried to chop him in the head. He doesn't care. A bowl of porridge a day makes Ah Ba strong. Insulates him from the world. Protects him from things such as emotions. And cleavers.

If there had been rain yesterday, everything could have been saved. There was no rain. Now there is no television set. No neighbours. No sex. No house. Ah Ma ran everywhere with his two youngest children. They were at the provision shop looking at candy they could not afford. When it happened they ran into temple. Stayed there. Crouched in a corner. Waiting. Shaking. It did not rain. The firemen worked all day. Ah Ba ran from the office shed but he could not find them. He almost cried, but, porridge.

He found them in the temple. Waiting. Shaking. Crouching. Ah Ba held his children tight. But he never found the words.