Chinese Singaporeans should be in a fairly good mood to celebrate Chinese New Year this Wednesday and Thursday, Jan 29 and 30. About 1.2 million households have already redeemed their $300 CDC vouchers, an indication that at least a portion of that amount will help ensure good food and drinks for the reunion dinner and goodies for visitors.
The Year of the Snake will be ushered in with fine style in Singapore. This $300 CDC ang pow contribution to each eligible household’s New Year F&B budget will see to that in the HDB heartlands from Clementi to Yishun.
No one will go hungry. I think of Singaporeans’ years of hunger. These years were real and not too long ago. My father and mother struggled to survive, to feed a family of eight children. We were not unique. Many other families were like us.
Where did we get our food and groceries from? How did we observe the Chinese New Year?
There was no CDC, no RC. We had heard of some “social welfare” offices where desperate people were supposed to be able to turn to for help. No one knew who, where or how. Few tried.
For the record, those were the pre-self-government days. You were on your own.
You took any odd job. You became a domestic servant for the ANZUK forces, staying in Serangoon Gardens like my mother did. There, you were assured of decent meals, and my mother would usually eat only half her meal and reserve the other half for our own family when she got back. We had never seen meat pies before in our life. And we never had the privilege of good milk powder until a tin was brought back to a family of grateful and hungry children.
Starving family. We had porridge with black sauce most days. Any kind of protein would be on credit from the squatter village grocery store. Rice, simple bread, sugar and other basic provisions. The shop owner was normally kind enough to extend credit rather generously.
Being part of a squatter village or colony ironically was a big advantage. Shared poverty saw families taking care of one another. Sometimes, some person would subcontract out some activities like paper bag folding or cloth ironing. My mother used to accept thick pads of brown paper and fold them into bags, earning 2 cents for every bag done.
There were other ways to earn cash to put food on the table.
Selling homemade goodies to neighbours. My mother was both a good cook and kueh-maker. She would take the ingredients on credit from the village provisions store and generally sold enough red bean soup and cakes to cover the credit and make some profit.
We survived. No CDC vouchers. The squatter village was the CDC, and voucher rolled into one.
Happy Chinese New Year.
Tan Bah Bah is a former senior leader writer. He was also managing editor of a magazine publishing company