W AH! SIX slices of bread for breakfast: Sng Mui Hong was unusually hungry. She knew what that meant. The spirit of her father, dead these past 25 years, was with her, and he was starving. Not that Ms Sng could see her father—she never had been able to see ghosts—but she could sense his presence: a heavy weight on her shoulders or a yawning pit in her stomach, hungry for white bread.
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She was grateful he had shown up today. Torrential rain had fallen that morning, the drops hitting the zinc roof of her house like a hail of bullets. The open drains slicing through the village had clogged with twigs and leaves, as usual, and Ms Sng had to clear them. She did not thrill at the prospect. At 69 she was not as strong as she used to be, and her knee was giving her trouble. It was not as if the tenants would complain if she left the drains blocked. But clearing them was just what she did, what she had always done. The bread, and her father, would give her strength.
So she limped out into the drizzle. Along with her three siblings, Ms Sng owns Kampong Lorong Buangkok, the last village in mainland Singapore. The kampong, which means “village” in Malay, is in the middle of the city-state, and is about the size of three football pitches. Unlike her siblings, Ms Sng lives there and manages the property and the 25 tenant-households. Her skin is rumpled and weathered.
The burden of managing the place weighs heavily on her. It is not just that the land frequently floods or that tourists, eager to catch a glimpse of a way of life that is vanishing in Singapore (how could anyone live without air-conditioning?), snap pictures of tenants through their windows as if they were zoo animals. The tenants may be forgiving when it comes to the drains but otherwise they “are exhausting”, Ms Sng sighs. Rent is dirt-cheap—anywhere between S$6.50 and S$35 ($25.85) per month in one of the most expensive cities on Earth—but Ms Sng is forever chasing late payments. “People take advantage,” she says.
Ms Sng (pronounced “serng”) has every reason to sell the land, as the gadfly property agents buzzing around the kampong remind her. It is worth millions. The government intends to requisition it for redevelopment at some point anyway, so she might as well cash in. But whenever such agents come knocking, Ms Sng hides or sets her dogs on them. She has never considered moving out. “If I were to leave, what would become of the kampong?”
Suburban Singapore is a hymn to monotony: there are beige high-rises and municipal leisure centres and multistorey car parks and pink high-rises and municipal leisure centres and multistorey car parks. But in a quiet neighbourhood in the east of the city, just beyond tower block 998 A, there is a winding dirt path shaded by tamarind and banana trees leading past ramshackle wooden houses. Kampong Lorong Buangkok does not seem very Singaporean. The powerful state, governed by the same party for 70 years, owns about 90% of the land, and it has measured, levelled and engineered almost every inch of it. Jungle has long since made way for a spotless metropolis, where everything has been optimised for efficiency and everything is in a place allotted by bureaucrats.
Suburban Singapore is a hymn to monotony
Kampong Lorong Buangkok offers a respite from the relentless modernity. Villagers and nature do their thing. Silkie chickens promenade past one-storey clapboard houses, while vines grow wild round a bi cycle rusted in place. The farther you penetrate the village, the more you begin to notice the chatter of mynas and burps of frogs. In a few places the jungle grows thick, perhaps as thick as when Singapore was a mere fishing village. Elsewhere, the ground is turfed with neatly mown grass, making the village feel like a small park. Life in the kampong, away from the hurly-burly of the city, affords a certain freedom. As Suleiman, a 64-year-old resident, puts it, in the village, with its parklike spaces, “Your mind is open.” People here are used to doing things their own way.
Seventy years ago, most Singaporeans lived in villages like this (though without the running water and electricity). In 1960, a year after the ruling party was first elected, 1.3m out of 1.89m Singaporeans lived in kampongs. But the government, sniffing at what it described as the squalor of kampong life and concerned about the lack of space in the tiny city-state, spent the next few decades razing the villages and stuffing their residents into hulking tower blocks. Better to build up than out. By 1990, 87% of Singaporeans lived in government housing. Today the average monthly rent for a five-bedroom government flat, the second-biggest on offer, is between S$2,000 and S$3,000. (That is cheap by Singaporean standards but extortionate by kampong ones, especially given that the average kampong home is several times larger than the typical government flat.)
Ms Sng’s father was one of the holdouts. In 1956 he was turfed out of his village in the west by the colonial-era housing agency. He had no interest in living in a government flat, says his daughter. He reared pigs and picked and sold herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine—work that would be impossible to do in a high-rise (when the resettlement programme began in earnest in the 1960s, many farmers, refusing to break with their livelihood and identity, herded their ducks and pigs up the stairs to their new flats). So Ms Sng’s mother prayed to a local Chinese deity, asking which village the family should pick as their new home. The answer came in a dream: Kampong Lorong Buangkok. Mr Sng bought the land for a song, inheriting a handful of tenants. Ms Sng was four years old.
She grew up in a community where everybody knew everybody else and residents left their doors unlocked. At weekends villagers gossiped on their sprawling verandas, or helped each other repair roofs or hack away at weeds—as they do today. Children ran wild and splashed about in the drains when it rained.
Ms Sng was lucky to live in such a close community. When her mother died “a month and two days” after they moved in, Ms Sng often went hungry—not because the family was poor but because neither her father nor her siblings could cook. Two women from neighbouring households regularly fed her, bringing round rice or fried fish.
Ms Sng left school at 11, to help her father manage the village. She tagged along as he collected rent and chatted with the tenants in Hokkien or Malay, and helped him muck out the drains, chase the snakes away or collect herbs for his medicinal potions. As a young adult, Ms Sng picked up odd jobs as a baby-sitter or an attendant at a nearby psychiatric hospital. Some of her friends married outsiders and moved away. The siren call of an air-conditioned flat was difficult to resist—it was, after all, what growing numbers of Singaporeans called home—and most outsiders could not hack life in the village. Gradually the number of households declined from a peak of 47 to 25. But Ms Sng never married, and never dreamed of leaving.
It was the family’s bad luck to live in a tiny country. In 1966 the Land Acquisition Act empowered the state to requisition land if it deemed it in the public interest, and to pay compensation below the market rate. Singapore had no hinterland or natural resources, and was stuck between two hostile neighbours. The government argued it had to move aggressively to secure Singapore’s future as a booming entrepot. It began seizing land to build roads, bridges and flats, and denied citizens the right of appeal.
Kampong Lorong Buangkok was not immune. When her father bought the village, the tract had the shape of a bird, says Ms Sng. In 1977 the government took a chunk. In 1988 it carved off more land to conduct roadworks. Ms Sng’s siblings lived in a part of the village that was seized and had to leave the kampong, which was full at the time. In total, the government took about half the land, decapitating the bird, says Ms Sng. And it is coming for the body. In 2014 the Urban Redevelopment Authority released its master plan: the village will eventually make way for a big road and two schools—though the government will not say when.
Given the high probability, now inevitability, that the family would lose the land, one might have thought the Sngs would pre-empt the government by selling. In 2007 the land was valued at S$33m ($21.8m at the time). That year parliament amended the Land Acquisition Act, requiring the government to compensate landowners at market value. Prospective buyers may wager they can buy low from the Sng family, then turn a profit when the government comes knocking. The family has at times considered taking the money, but Ms Sng always puts her foot down.
One reason is her devotion to her father. In 1996, when he was dying in hospital, he asked his children to take him home. He wanted to remain in the village for ever, he said, to look after them and their children after them. So that is where they took him, and that is where Ms Sng believes he has stayed. Sometimes his spirit trails her, giving her strength or warning her when something bad is about to happen. Sometimes he just wants to be fed. But most of the time he wanders the kampong, as he did when he was alive. “How can I leave this place?” she says. The kampong is the only place she can feel her father’s presence.
Another reason for spurning the money is that Ms Sng likes her life. She eats simply and does not “go for pretty clothes”, preferring mildewed checked shirts and black sweatpants. She picks her medicines from the foliage around her: Indian snake grass for fevers and borage for colds. Sometimes she wishes for more money. “$6.50 [the lowest monthly rate she charges] is not enough to go out for a meal these days,” she gripes. But some tenants kick up a stink when she attempts to raise the rent, so she backs down; they have to be “willing partners”. “If I wanted to be wealthy by now, I would be,” she says. “As long as we have enough to eat and enough to get by, we are OK.”
There are also her friendships forged over a lifetime. There are the two women who practically adopted her, and the twins, now in their 20s, who used to follow her around the village. Residents have nicknames for each other like Jangot (Malay for “beard” in honour of a straggly salt-and-pepper tuft) and Botak or “baldy”. Such friendships are harder to sustain when living vertically. The government tried to resettle villagers from the same kampongs in the same high-rises. But the “kampong spirit”—the trust and neighbourliness of village life—was hard to transplant and often fizzled. “We only meet neighbours along lifts or corridors and then sometimes it’s barely a hi or bye,” says Dr Intan Azura Mokhtar, Ms Sng’s former MP, of life in public housing. “But in kampong, it’s really about opening up their doors and the neighbours just walk in and out.”
It is unclear why the government has not yet taken the land. Ms Sng thinks it is because she is not a “trouble-maker”. That underplays her stubbornness and savvy. In recent years she has welcomed tourists, and she tolerates questions from journalist after journalist. One resident suspects Ms Sng hopes the publicity will deter the government. She certainly has a champion in Dr Intan, who gave a speech in parliament in 2017, when she was still an MP, asking the government to preserve the kampong so that young Singaporeans could get a taste of village life. The government responded that it was not likely to seize the village for “several decades”. That may be because state planners do not regard the neighbourhood as a priority for development. Whatever the reason, the government seems content to bide its time. “Until the day the notice letter arrives,” Ms Sng says, “I won’t worry about it. Otherwise I will get heart disease.” With that she smiles and limps home. There are chores to do. ■
Corrections: The original version of this story mis-stated the average monthly rent for a five-bedroom government flat. It also said that Botak meant “cook” in Malay. In fact, it means “baldy”. Sorry.
This article appeared in the Christmas Specials section of the print edition under the headline "The last holdout"
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