The Economist December 18th 2021 Holiday specials 21
singaporeT HE LAST
HOLDOUT
W
ah! sixslices of bread for breakfast: Sng Mui
Hong was unusually hungry. She knew what that
meant. The spirit of her father, dead these past 25
years, was with her, and he was starving. Not that Ms
Sng could see her father—she never had been able to
see ghosts—but she could sense his presence: a heavy
weight on her shoulders or a yawning pit in her stom-
ach, hungry for white bread.
She was grateful he had shown up today. Torrential
rain had fallen that morning, the drops hitting the zinc
roof of her house like a hail of bullets. The open drains
slicing through the village had clogged with twigs and
leaves, as usual, and Ms Sng had to clear them. She did
not thrill at the prospect. At 69 she was not as strong as
she used to be, and her knee was giving her trouble. It
was not as if the tenants would complain if she left the
drains blocked. But clearing them was just what she
did, what she had always done. The bread, and her fa-
ther, would give her strength.
So she limped out into the drizzle. Along with her
three siblings, Ms Sng owns Kampong Lorong Buang-
kok, the last village in mainland Singapore. The kam-
pong, which means “village” in Malay, is in the middle
of the city-state, and is about the size of three football
pitches. Unlike her siblings, Ms Sng lives there and
manages the property and the 25 tenant-households.
Her skin is rumpled and weathered.
The burden of managing the place weighs heavily
on her. It is not just that the land frequently floods or
that tourists, eager to catch a glimpse of a way of life
that is vanishing in Singapore (how could anyone live
without air-conditioning?), snap pictures of tenantsS INGAPORE
Before the skyscrapers there were rural villages.
The government razed almost all of them