Bittersweet Singapore: Forty Years Later, Tracing My Roots
📸: Old photos of buildings from the Singapore National Archives
Akiko “Aileen” in Singapore, 1980s
I (Akiko, aka. “Aileen” to some…another story for another time) am overcome with emotion as I get to share a part of my family’s Singapore story with you! You see, the 3 years I spent in Singapore in the early 1980s as a child were some of my happiest, freeing, and impressionable moments of my life.
Back then, Singapore was still an emerald jungle covered rural landscape that was starting to undergo the “Garden City” vision with a mix of rapid industrialization and construction alongside lingering colonial and provincial charm under the leadership of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. LKY was serious about transforming post-colonial independent Singapore into a civilized, orderly, modern society; starting with enforcement of 3 behaviors. Consequence? Caning.
No chewing gum
No spitting
Queue-up in lines
Singapore also happened to be the Far Eastern Division (basically, most of Asia) headquarters for the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) church. As such, there were quite a lot of parochial infrastructure such as churches, offices, schools, a college, media and press, housing, and a hospital.
Youngberg Memorial Adventist Hospital
In 1981, a variety of circumstances led our family to move back to Tokyo from our 8 years living in California. A year later, my parents were called to fulfill the church's healing mission and went to Singapore to a serve as a family practice physician (my dad) and pharmacist (my mom) at Youngberg Adventist Memorial Hospital. Sadly, the iconic British colonial hospital building was demolished in 2018.
Youngberg Terrace
We lived on a compound near the hospital called Youngberg Terrace. And just down the way was Southeast Asia Union College campus—all located off of Upper Serangoon Road. This road was a 4-lane paved main artery flanked by some suburban housing, a lot of open space with jungle remants.
Youngberg Terrace was nestled in a hollow surrounded by dense foliage with lots of palm trees, fruit trees, cobras, and many other deadly wildlife. A fenced-in jungle lay behind the compound with a gate that was never locked. This whole area was my playground. Me and my friends with our bicycles (and lots of mosquito spray!) would be gone for hours, climbing trees, “sledding” down slopes on cardboard boxes, finding critters, and ruining our appetite for supper by feasting on wild rambutan picked directly off the trees.
Today, the compound is long gone and is now Avon Park Condominiums with a brand new MRT (subway) station called Woodleigh that goes right to it.
When I got off the Woodleigh bus stop, I had zero expectations of seeing any signs of Youngberg. But to my surprise, I cried a little (okay, a lot! 😭) when I encountered the Youngberg Terrace street sign—the actual road that led to the compound still intact! And just like before, the jungle still intact behind a fence at what used to be the top of the hill that we used to slide down into the hollow.
Bidadari Christian Cemetery
Across the street from Youngberg Terrace, the Bidadari Christian Cemetery was a major historic burial ground in Singapore that was exhumed in the early 2000s for redevelopment into the Bidadari Housing and Development Board (HDB) estate. There were distinct Christian, Muslim, and Hindu sections. For a kid, it was the perfect protected environment for miles and miles of cycling between tombstones without worrying about getting hit by vehicles.
While the former cemetery is also now built up of high rise apartments, the developers did turn a chunk of it into a lovely park. I read that they also left one of the original cemetery gates as a memorial, so we went in search of this gate! It was behind a construction wall, but what I could see of it, looked exactly like what I remembered.
800 Thomson Road
I attended 4th through 6th grade at Far Eastern Academy, an American school at the SDA headquarter campus at 800 Thomson Road. We barely had 20 students total from K through 8th grade with a separate high school with some students staying in a dormitory (because their parents were missionaries in neighboring Asian countries and they did not have a high school there to attend). Not all students were associated with the church. I had one classmate whose dad designed fountains for the Hyatt hotel chain. They were living at the Hyatt for 1 year on assignment and needed an American school to attend.
We only had two teachers in the elementary school and we were all in the same classroom so I often eavesdropped on lessons from all the grades! With a small group, we got to go on some wild field trips. The most memorable was attending the Hindu festival—Thaipusam—where devotees paint themselves, go into a trance, walk on fire, and pierce their skin, tongue, or cheeks with metal skewers with no trace of bleeding. They often carry heavy burdens called kavadi to honor Lord Murugan (god of war; we saw the tallest statue in the world at Batu Caves in Malaysia!), sometimes attaching a cart with hundreds of small hooks to their skin.
To be honest, I really don’t remember doing much schoolwork or studying. It was a magically creative time of my life where I felt free to explore and learn what interested me.
Today, 800 Thomson Road is another high rise complex. Ugh. They’ll never know what it was like to be on acres and acres of beautifully manicured, British-era, colonial style estate with trimmed palm trees and raised buildings with the whitewashed walls and dark timber beams.
The main gated entrance has been paved over with brick and an imposing security gate installed. The Southeast Asia Conference Church has since moved from Upper Serangoon Road to a small section of Thomson Road that the church has been able to hang onto. It’s not as grand as it used to be, but I definitely recognized certain landmarks and footprints from the prior glory of this beautifully lush landscape.
Akiko—The Bratty California Kid
Random Fun Fact: I entered a drawing contest at the Singapore Dunkin Donuts. We were each assigned one store glass pane to draw on from scratch. It obviously had to be a DD theme but the rest was up to us. I won the contest! Can’t recall what I actually got as a prize. 🤔
Don’t worry. In case Singapore was all nostalgic unicorns and rainbows, it was not for my parents, because I was still a bratty California kid that turned my nose up at going to the local markets with my mom; or refusing to eat local street food at the hawker stalls; or giving the stink eye back at stinky durian (I love it now!); or complaining incessantly about walking or taking the bus when I thought we should be bougie enough to drive our Fiat everywhere; or horrified to witness my neighbor casually strangling and preparing live chicken in their backyard (did I mention I grew up in California?); or freaking out to see the recent black cobra that was terrorizing Youngberg Terrace now lay dead and coiled in a friend’s freezer. 🐍
Bonus Random Fun Fact: In the 1980s, the only McDonald’s in Singapore was at the Changi Airport. Anytime we got to go to the airport (which was rare) we definitely begged to go to McD. By the way, the airport had a flat parking lot surface and we could easily go into the one building...like going to Walmart.
Though there’s hardly a trace from 40+ years ago, I feel immense closure and satisfaction after years and years of wonderment about a place I loved dearly and reluctantly left when my parents’ appointment was up.
So long Singapore--but this time, goodbye feels complete.
