National Development

Serangoon Garden:
Cheery News in Bad Times
Some private estates in rich Singapore look as haggard as any old Asian city, but better days are ahead for one of them.
July 22, 2001

Some 40 feet from the make-shift platform, an elderly worker was picking up a crushed can from a road swept clean earlier on. Some one was testing the microphone.

This was the centre of Serangoon Garden Estate, one of Singapore's oldest estates.

It was 7.30 am on a Sunday. In two hours, Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was to arrive to launch the Estate Upgrading Programme.

At the market where housewives haggled on prices, a Filipino maid was heard telling the carrot cake hawker: "Wah! Last week I bought 4821 and it opened 4812."

Next stall, the man selling deserts remarked: "Eh, you'd better not spend all you money buying 4-Digits (lottery). Otherwise no money to send home to Philippines." The banter continued.

At the bus-stop, two Indonesian maids, spoke to each other in Bahasa Indonesia but with a smattering "Wa lau," a popular local slang for "Wow!"

This 45-year-old estate of 40,000 residents is uniquely colonial-sounding. Its roads still bear well-known English names like Berwick or Carisbrooke or Farleigh, neatly arranged alphabetically.

Immediately upon independence, the Singapore government decided not to repeatwhat many developing countries did when the Western rulers left - throw away the colonial names. "They are part of our history," declared Mr. Lee Kuan Yew.

The roads are narrow, designed for an era of bicycles and bullock carts rather than cars.

There were more than 2,100 landed houses, making it by far the largest of five private estates that are earmarked for upgrading. The others are Hoover Park, Tai Keng Gardens, Thomson Gardens and Woodland Park. The total bill for all five is $38 million.

The Serangoon Garden market was built for only a couple of thousand residents.

Four decades ago, the residents were mainly British troops. The senior ones had amahs, who did the marketing for them, anyway.

Some of those amahs may well be grandmothers today whose children are employing Indonesian maids.

These post-war houses, costing a mouth-watering $20,000 or so then, belonged to the relatively wealthy who rented them out to British officers. Few Singaporeans possessed even Housing Development (HDB) flats, let alone a landed property.

I was told they lived according to ranks. The senior most officers, captains and colonels, were given bungalows; lower ranking mortals were placed in semi-detached and terraces.

Today, one sees little of such distinction as one moves around this rapidly expanding place.

This is family town. On Sundays, Yuppies move among its numerous eating places with babies in prams or carried by grandparents; others head for nearby churches. Not quite America's Bible Belt, but a conservative streak is here.

At the right time, you may walk into a conversation of mothers talking about the society's increasing access to smut, Internet Porno, the threat to human decency.

Middle class and generally hard-working, the majority complain about not enough freedom and vote for jobs and stability like many other private estates. In better times, every one was a millionaire at least by assets. Ssix years ago, even the smallest terrace house was worth a million dollars..

Today, there are probably more cars per family than many other places in Singapore, which explains the big double-parking problem at peak eating times.

Politically, the constituency is part of the large Marine Parade GRC (for foreigners reading this - it means Group Representative Constituency for group voting), where Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong stands. This will probably mean a walkover come election.

Traditionally, Serangoon Garden has always contributed a large bloc of votes to the government.The upgrading will make it even harder for the ruling party to lose.

I moved into this kampong 15 years ago. Most of the surrounding pig farms had disappeared long ago, replaced by new homes and two large parks. But some of its old underground inhabitant - the python - still pops up once a while even today.

These pitiable fellows have become victims of progress as humans send in their bulldozers. Last year, I returned home from a Sunday night dinner to be confronted by an excited maid pointing beneath a cupboard.

Sleeping evidently from a full dinner (some luckless hen probably) was an uninvited guest - a seven-foot white python.

A couple of experienced policemen woke the fellow up from his nap, placed him in a sack and took him away. The human activities are still displacing these reptiles from their habitat, forcing them to flee in search of new homes.

And they are going to be harder to find. If they can talk, they'll probably say "upgrading is a terrible idea." These relatively harmless reptiles are going to be scarcer in the coming years. There'll be a lot more piling and bulldozing as more humans move in.

During the past few years, modernisation had been thick and fast.

Some brand names have moved into the neighbourhood, Coffee Bean, a Chinese seafood restaurant, a few high-class Western restaurants and cafes, adding on to the famed "Chomp-Chomp" eating place.

In a couple of years, Holland Village will have a tough competitor. The S$10.22 million upgrading programme will transform Ang Sar Li (as some taxi drivers still call Serangoon Gardens) into a little ultra-modern corner of a cosmopolitan city.

Actually renewal is taking place in the estate's homes as well. After the British troops moved out, the owners moved in. Many have aged. If you visit the estate, you'd probably see some of the highest number of three-tier families in Singapore.

I've seen the place going through its own self-renewal in the past decade or so.

Some old-timers have sold off and moved away; others still live with their better-off children or have passed away, leaving them to the new generation.

The state of the homes tells you the story. If the home is old, dilapidated, it probably means the old folks are still living there and who find renovation too expensive (me included.)

Those who want to beautify them are either new owners or the children or grandchildren of the original old-timers, obviously better off financially.

So while the estate is being upgraded, renewal is happening in the homes, too; the baton is being passed from one generation to another.

Seah Chiang Nee