I was a rental block kid

For the first 10 years of my life, I lived in a one-room flat in Bedok North that could be likened to a shoebox.

My sister and I slept on mattresses squeezed between the front door and the kitchen. A flimsy wooden partition separated us from my parents’ ‘bedroom’.

There was little space to manoeuvre during the day, which meant that much of our childhood was spent outside in the corridor.

I was certainly exposed to a lot.

I remember a female neighbour – possibly deranged – who walked around topless.

Once when I was walking down the stairs, I shrank in fear when I saw an old man pouring boiling water from a kettle onto a litter of kittens. He then kicked them down the steps.

There were rumours that a neighbour on another floor smoked opium. Another woman regularly ‘borrowed’ (she never paid back) rice and money from her neighbours because her husband was a gambler.

Such memories came back last week when I read about how some residents in Tampines and Pasir Ris are fuming about the construction of rental blocks at their doorstep.

Their list of complaints was long. The value of their flats would drop, they said. The rental blocks were too tall and would block their view and eat into their privacy, they whined.

One remark jumped out at me: ‘Smokers and drinkers may gather at the void deck. Many families here have young children and teenagers. We don’t want them led astray.’

I hope it was a minority view.

Surely smokers and drinkers aren’t confined to residents of rental housing? And I’m sure children of higher-income blocks would not go astray if they have a firm hand (that is, their parents) guiding them.

It is true that rental housing tends to attract poorer folk. After all, if you had the means, would you want to live in so small a flat that watching a late night TV show would mean disturbing the sleep of your family members?

And when you’re poor, it’s inevitable that your life is difficult. And when your life is difficult, some may find refuge in certain ways – a propensity to drink, for example, or to gamble. It is a vicious circle.

Yet, growing up in a rental block, I didn’t have the feeling that there was anything to fear or to be ashamed about.

Yes, there was that half-naked neighbour and the cat-hating one, but they were the exceptions.

Many of my neighbours were more normal than dysfunctional. The majority were decent, hardworking people trying to make a living. Some might have been wayward in their youth – gangsters and such – but they were now trying to play catch-up with their lives. They took honest, albeit low-paying jobs as painters, cleaners and factory operators.

My parents were young, blue-collar immigrants from Malaysia who were saving up for the day we could move into a bigger flat. (We eventually moved to a four-room flat in 1992.)

For families like mine, rental flats are a godsend because cheap rents provide a respite for them as they work to do better in life.

So it saddens me when Singaporeans adopt a ‘not in my backyard’ mentality. It brings to mind too the complaints from landed property residents about the siting of foreign worker dormitories in their midst.

As Singapore progresses, the amount of land left to build homes has become smaller, and rental blocks have to be sited somewhere, don’t they? But have people’s hearts shrunk in the process too?

When I was a child, I would follow my parents when they visited friends living in non-rental units in neighbouring blocks. I don’t remember being given the cold shoulder because we were from a rental block.

In fact, we entertained visitors, too, in our little flat, and had nothing to feel ashamed about. We were part of the community.

Has so much changed in less than 20 years?

Source: Sunday Times, 14 Feb 2010