The Economist December 18th 2021 Holiday specials 23
sate landowners at market value. Prospective buyers
may wager they can buy low from the Sng family, then
turn a profit when the government comes knocking.
The family has at times considered taking the money,
but Ms Sng always puts her foot down.
One reason is her devotion to her father. In 1996,
when he was dying in hospital, he asked his children
to take him home. He wanted to remain in the village
for ever, he said, to look after them and their children
after them. So that is where they took him, and that is
where Ms Sng believes he has stayed. Sometimes his
spirit trails her, giving her strength or warning her
when something bad is about to happen. Sometimes
he just wants to be fed. But most of the time he wan-
ders the kampong, as he did when he was alive. “How
can I leave this place?” she says. The kampong is the
only place she can feel her father’s presence.
Another reason for spurning the money is that Ms
Sng likes her life. She eats simply and does not “go for
pretty clothes”, preferring mildewed checked shirts
and black sweatpants. She picks her medicines from
the foliage around her: Indian snake grass for fevers
and borage for colds. Sometimes she wishes for more
money. “$6.50 [the lowest monthly rate she charges] is
not enough to go out for a meal these days,” she gripes.
But some tenants kick up a stink when she attempts to
raise the rent, so she backs down; they have to be “will-
ing partners”. “If I wanted to be wealthy by now, I
would be,” she says. “As long as we have enough to eat
and enough to get by, we are ok.”it takes a village
There are also her friendships forged over a lifetime.
There are the two women who practically adopted her,
and the twins, now in their 20s, who used to follow her
around the village. Residents have nicknames for each
other like Jangot (Malay for “beard” in honour of a
straggly salt-and-pepper tuft) and Botak or “cook”.
Such friendships are harder to sustain when living ver-
tically. The government tried to resettle villagers from
the same kampongs in the same high-rises. But the
“kampong spirit”—the trust and neighbourliness of
village life—was hard to transplant and often fizzled.
“We only meet neighbours along lifts or corridors and
then sometimes it’s barely a hi or bye,” says Dr Intan
Azura Mokhtar, Ms Sng’s former mp, of life in public
housing. “But in kampong, it’s really about opening up
their doors and the neighbours just walk in and out.”
It is unclear why the government has not yet taken
the land. Ms Sng thinks it is because she is not a “trou-
ble-maker”. That underplays her stubbornness and
savvy. In recent years she has welcomed tourists, and
she tolerates questions from journalist after journal-
ist. One resident suspects Ms Sng hopes the publicity
will deter the government. She certainly has a champi-
on in Dr Intan, who gave a speech in parliament in
2017, when she was still an mp, asking the government
to preserve the kampong so that young Singaporeans
could get a taste of village life. The government re-
sponded that it was not likely to seize the village for
“several decades”. That may be because state planners
do not regard the neighbourhood as a priority for de-
velopment. Whatever the reason, the government
seems content to bide its time. “Until the day the no-
tice letter arrives,” Ms Sng says, “I won’t worryaboutit.
Otherwise I will get heart disease.” With that she
smiles and limps home. There are chores to do.n←Kampong Lorong
Buangkok