Red Earth & Citrus Streets
It begins the moment I step off the bus, pocket my earphones, whip out a book, and read while walking home.
I am not in any hurry. My feet move resolutely and unthinkingly along this habitual route. Balls slam off hoops in a basketball court in the nearby secondary school. Ash and incense waft from the stately Buddhist temple, but I spare the monument only a passing glance. I am insensate to the residence that doubles as a cat boarding house, with its thrilling cardboard sign, “STOP THROWING CAT FECES INTO OUR GARDEN. IF CAUGHT WILL REPORT.”
Instead, I am following another will-o’-the-wisp story into the vortex of the pages before me: perhaps spinning out a dying father’s last breath in Istanbul, or poised on the edge of a serpent’s tooth with the strength of a High Fae. I have surrendered to another yarn spun, am somewhere far away; following the rise and fall of cities and empires, stranded in a past century or far-flung future. The wind is in my hair as I ride with mavericks in a gritty motorcycle noir, or tearing at my face as I teeter on the precipice of a volcano in the Galápagos. I try not to trip over my feet as I run within a crowd in Tiananmen Square or hike through thistle and bush in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee.
Sure, sometimes I stumble into things. More often than not, I get thwacked by broad, vindictive heliconia leaves jutting out from the rails of houses, or tripped by the thorny leaves of mischievous pineapple plants. Once, I walked right into the path of a gigantic, shamelessly untrimmed citronella grass bush. And during the month of August, when scores of the national flag were erected along the green expanse of the dog run in preparation for National Day, I was smacked in the face consecutively by these flapping emblems of country and nation as I made my distracted way home.
When these mishaps first happened, I looked around, self-conscious. What if someone had seen? But I quickly learned to sidestep the lemongrass, garden ornaments, and parked cars. To skip over the fallen mangoes on the pavement and avoid the house with the paranoid dog. Even as my imagination transports me to other countries and times, my body follows a fixed trajectory hardwired into some other part of my brain. Some unconscious part of me knows it all: when to look up to check for vehicles before crossing the road, to follow the pavement as it starts and stops. To turn left here and keep right there. It is as if my mind carries a portable mental map of my neighbourhood, one I can take for granted, because this walk home is stitched into my memories of growing up on these streets.
I have drifted through these roads a thousand times, seen this view a thousand more, always thinking of something else.
I have rambled and hurried through these junctions and crossings, accompanied or alone, on the way to the dentist or an after-school tuition centre. Have rounded their bends on bicycles that increased in size over the years, and dragged wheeled trolleys laden with groceries on determined excursions to the market. I have meandered through these lanes in manners so throwaway they hardly register, spun steering wheels curving bends, and given taxi drivers the same repeated litany of directions so many times that they have become mantras for homecoming and departure.
So even as my legs bring me forward, it often feels like I am travelling backwards. And sometimes the uneven surfaces of the road beneath my feet rise up as if from a long-ago dream, and the afterimage of things no longer here murmur from over the crown of the story in my hands.
During the years when I resided in America, after our mother passed away, when our childhood home on Limau Purut lay shut and abandoned, my dreams often featured these familiar streets and houses. The topography wasn’t faithful: more often than not, they were uneasy roman-à-clefs where familiar streets appeared with fictional names and stranger facades. The sidewalks were unpeopled and quiet, the shut windows and doors of each house terrible in their silence. I wandered around lost in this labyrinthian illusion, unhurried though faintly troubled, for I was trying to get somewhere, but didn’t know the way.
Yet, even through the shaky distortion of my dream eyes, I knew by some deep and intractable sixth sense, some innate reserve in my unconscious, that this neighbourhood was mine. It’s hard to say where this certainty came from. But the most conspicuous feature of the web of streets in my nocturnal wanderings was an emotional matrix of sureness; a quiet recognition that though these houses and pavements were deep-water reflections of the actual place, these were the streets I grew up on.
It is surely a fallacy to feel that time is in abeyance, especially in a city where everything has an expiry date; a ticking countdown of years until land gets zoned for redevelopment. But when I returned to this street after nine years and moved back into our childhood home, so many things appeared unchanged. Walks home became a way of mapping my memory’s illusions to the solidity of the present, and sometimes the selves I have been overlap and blur at the edges: I am at once a schoolgirl trudging home with an atrociously heavy backpack, as well as a mother reading while in motion after dropping her child off at school.
I walk these streets and remember tearing around them on my bike as a child, each day daring to explore further, pushing against the boundaries of the known, breathless with the realization that the world was so much larger than I had hoped. And now that I have returned, I’m unsure what to do with the discovery that apparently I am made of more adhesive material than what my youthful aspirations towards cosmopolitanism would have liked. Did I betray or meet myself? Is my world enlarged by circling back, or smaller? When did the sickly sweet fragrance of frangipani trees stop being so suffocating? When did the streets I tried hard to get away from begin to cradle the tint of family and memory? I wonder how a place I thought I had shallow rooting in turned out to have richer and more aerated soil than what the paved terrain suggested. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I recall music critic Hanif Abdurraqib moving back to his hometown in Columbus, Ohio after being away, even though he could have, for the first time in his life, worked remotely anywhere he wanted, and his confession: “But I wanted to come home. Being from this place had become inextricably linked to my identity, and so I push myself to love it.”
My neighbourhood isn’t one that stands out. It has no unforgettable landmark, no particular unique identifying trait. This thin slice of the city is tucked away from the hustle and bustle of Bedok Town. It doesn’t have the resilience and colourful histories of Jalan Besar or Geylang, nor the hipness of the heavily gentrified Katong.
I can tell you which dwelling has a majestic queen’s wreath in full bloom; the shrivelled house with a family of blue-eyed cats; which unit has large, romantic bales of hanging Spanish moss, or the darkened estate that has little pots of orchid cuttings growing quietly in the moist. I could point out which house has a psalm printed on its walls, which has a courtyard of nine bonsai trees; or which has walls damaged by creeping figs that have dug their roots in deep and dark. I could say, look— that shuttered house there? That’s where an elderly expat couple refused to get into a flashing police car, their German shepherd barking up a storm during the conflict: an unsolved mystery. That one? That’s where I had supplementary lessons for math; my tutor a short woman with intense, swivelling eyes. I can point out the house where an old art teacher once resided, who had once made me hold my arms above my head for over an hour because I committed the travesty of not submitting the art I was meant to produce. I can say: if you go this way you’ll reach Bedok Corner, and if you head that way, that’s Fengshan. The masjid near Jalan Haji Salam is eastward; Kew Drive is to the south.
I can tell you any of this but these keyhole observations would tell you nothing, because the stories and histories of this place are far richer than my limited curbside knowledge, and go far deeper than those hidden behind the neighbours’ automatic bifold gates. And so even as my body makes its programmed way home, it turns out I know much less about my neighbourhood than I think.
Though as I bring my child to the playgrounds I frolicked in as a child, I can never recall their names. New community gardens germinate as haphazardly as spores travelling wild in the wind, and the flurry and drama of the wet market continue to astonish. My mind draws a blank when asked to point out where certain streets are, and the names of the newer condominiums continue to elude me. Rumours are flying of a mysterious, fatal bacteria in the soil of the nearby dog run. Speaking of intrigue, did anyone ever solve the case of the skeletal human remains found in the woodlands behind Tanah Merah train station?
And so, although I have known them since girlhood, these streets still have things to say.
Still, even as I muse about the area where I grew up, I have fallen into an uneasy but necessary confrontation where proportioned land has favoured a personal history of generational wealth. The affection I have for my particular neighbourhood is inextricable from reaping the benefits of a grossly unequal system I shamefully did not even work for. What does it mean to say that this neighbourhood is mine? What prerequisites to belonging am I presuming and what complicities am I aggravating?
In the estate I live in, two shadow worlds exist uneasily side by side. In one, the upwardly mobile middle-class families who moved in one or two generations ago now have aged, single- or double-storied houses with cracked walls blackened with guano. These properties have looping Art Deco grills, and are overrun by tangled vines or overwhelmed by large, ungovernable fruit trees. On the other side of this shadow world, a new generation of younger, richer people are moving in and constructing four-storied McMansions that maximize the given plot of a semi-detached terrace. The shadow worlds clash: many old residents refuse to let the new entrants lay scaffolding on their roofs to build their third and fourth stories. The new residents complain the old are unfriendly, unneighbourly. Yet the latter’s crotchety resistance betrays a querulous foreknowledge: their houses will be torn down and replaced by these large glass-encased Brutalist behemoths. They will soon be forgotten, swept away, supplanted.
The future of these streets seems destined to follow the script of all landed residential enclaves in this land-scarce city where income inequality is becoming increasingly obscene: the demographic will skew richer, favour traditional nuclear families, and be less diverse. I grapple with the knowledge that the streets I privately hold dear— where it is safe enough to read while walking home— are also streets of exclusion; a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.
The hereafter already seems so overdetermined, but the history of this area remains a vague and alluring blur, as history usually does. So even as I am lost within the spin of an hourglass, tracing the crumbling fortunes of a family of aristocrats, or following the tense psychodrama of a domestic thriller, my mind is wandering, as it always does; chasing stray thoughts, following inattention’s bend; its contours and digressions. Maybe it reaches out below, imagining how the soil suffocated beneath the asphalt under my slow footsteps used to incline upwards and out— how they formed the red, earthy landscapes of hills near the cliffs along the coast visible from the sea. Or how the exposed red lateritic soil—the tanah merah—were important reference points for the seafaring Orang Laut centuries ago. Maybe it is recalling writer Yeo Hong Eng, who grew up in an attap house right where my street is, who recounted how in the 1960s he saw “the first load of earth being removed from the cliffs and dumped into the sea, levelling the famous landmark of ancient sailors and cartographers,” and the intense sadness he had felt witnessing that erasure of history. “Future Singaporeans will know this place as Tanah Merah, but may not realise its significance and origin,” he foretold.
The invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything the sun touches has once been something else. I am maybe thinking about how this area used to be a kampong called Kampong Tanah Merah Kechil, filled with Chinese and Malay fisherfolk and farmers; how a thin gurgling stream separated the races from each other, how they might have tethered their boats on a coast snaking around Bedok and travelled downwards on a hill that doesn’t exist anymore to access the sea. How, during colonial times, as the estate where I currently live was zoned by Far East Organization, and streets named after different species of citrus— Limau Bali, Limau Kasturi— were built and steadily expanded, the size of the kampong shrank and shrank until it disappeared completely, and now the only traces of it are preserved in black-and-white scenes from old Cathay-Keris films like Sumpah Pontianak, or in ink on fragile yellowed land surveys beneath cold glass cases at the national archives.
These background thoughts are flashes of apprehension quick as a mynah in flight. They skid and skim, make contact and drift away. My steps do not falter and the pages of my book do not rustle as the gravel unhurriedly peels away from the ground. Concrete liquifies. Sand and silt rise from the sea and pack themselves backwards onto conveyor belts where excavators regrow the hills of Bedok. The contours of the southeastern coast of Singapore reverse inland, draw nearer; and the ghosts of reckless and forgotten sea breezes flood my neighbourhood. Cars reverse out of the streets and older models replace them. Winds batter down the neighbours’ gates and pummel against the British pillboxes and the artillery guns along the reforming coastline. The cliffs calmly resurrect, both of them— Temasek Primary School disintegrates to rubble and there Tanah Merah Kechil rises, clumps of red lateritic soil packing itself back into age-old sediment. Further away, eastward, the taxiways of the world-renowned Changi Airport crack and crumble as the larger cliff of old Tanah Merah Besar unbends, tall and erect— and hear that? The steady, thunderous crash of waves against its rocky base; the ancient sound echoing deep within the cliff’s thousands of hollows and cavelets: the roar of the past, tremendous.
Ecosystems recalibrate as time continues its backwards propulsion. Jaegars harass terns in the air. Seagulls shriek. Day darkens to night, night enlivens to morning. Buildings collapse and others erect. The stately Buddhist temple ceases its clang of bells. It folds like a house of cards and a demolished girls’ school reinstates itself, its walls vibrating with shouts of sweat and clamour. The private terrace houses of Eastwood Park tumble; timber and steel fly to reassemble Bedok Rest House and Long Beach restaurant. Up goes Kampong Bedok Laut, up goes its small masjid with its dome over a pitched zinc roof. The large seafront restaurant bungalows revivify: Wyman’s Haven, Vienna Inn— paint flies back onto their walls and saline air whips their terraces. The forgotten seaside villas and bungalows—Plymouth, Newquay—pop back up like fungi in mulch after a bout of rain; lights blaze from their windows and an indistinct tide of people stream in and out of the doors: waving farewell, greeting hellos. The thatched roofs of the coastal village Ayer Gemuroh straighten and lift.
The gaps of time between histories escalate; prefabricated worlds of disappearance and existence. The facades of Masjid Al-Taqua flex and crimp as it cycles through the centuries. The just-resurrected Kampong Bedok Darat melts and empties: felled trees grow their roots back deep into the ground and backfill into a rubber tree plantation. Horse-drawn carriages clop rearward from Villa Haji Kahar. Kew Green Condominium withers away and exhumed Muslim and Teochew cemeteries burst back into life. The disinterred remains of residents from the kampongs around Jalan Bilal, Jalan Haji Salam, Jalan Greja and Jalan Langgar Bedok return to the soil and rise from the graves; vacant eyes reform their viscera and relight: bodies once dead become infirm, then healthy. People walk and haggle; they reverse in fast motion around me, they sidestep around this clueless slow-moving fool with a book. Like the murmur of a sideward breeze, the past sweeps by. It implicates and locates me within an invisible throng of people— those who have drifted through these roads a thousand times, seen this view a thousand more, always thinking of something else.
The centuries curve and the landscapes of time shift, restless. My neighbourhood is a terrain undulated with cliffs overlooking the sea. The nipah palms rise again, and the swampy marshes bubble. Seeds of the nyireh and bakau pasir return into the pregnant wombs of fruit as the Malayan Tiger prowls backwards into the grass. Hundreds of meters below, the bedrock sings: fine and coarse-grained malfic and felsic rocks from the Triassic period thrum, forgotten—
But I am not thinking about how everything vanishes, how the asphalt beneath my feet hides history I have only just begun to decipher. I am not paying attention to the lively stories waiting to be reached up, the past waiting to be revivified. I am hopelessly distracted, as I always am, by the story in my hands, to the world made up in my head.
Still, sometimes it isn’t just the things read, but the places where we read them. So even as I am lost within the whirl of a time-travelling romance where the threshold between past and present runs thin, or a tale of a sprawling city beneath the ground, the shuffle of my feet on the pavement and the sound of pages turning becomes a small, private way of threading these disparate ventures into the world I actually inhabit. And perhaps it’s because I see things clearer through proxy, or maybe my laughably inefficient hermeneutic method is errantry and the sideslip, but the lightest of allusions— a stray word, some earthbound turn of phrase or fricative consonant— spins me right back to these familiar streets and lanes; the quiet longkang shortcuts and the tumult of playgrounds, the community gardens and cul-de-sacs, the garrulous neighbour and unlovely shut-in.
Something interrupts. I finally look up, because— what? Small wet smudges bloom on paper. It is beginning to rain. The colours are ebbing from my reverie, the attention demanded by other worlds fading. The trees whisper, and the lightest drizzle falls. Once again I plunge into the quiet shock of the actual: I am someone whose book is getting wet. The rain crinkles the view before me, and my street blurs in on itself; its many layers dappled onto the reflection of the rainwater collecting in shallow puddles on the ground. I shut the pages of a world that had claimed me, and run all the way home.