22 Holiday specials The Economist December 18th 2021
government flat, says his daughter. He reared pigs and
picked and sold herbs used in traditional Chinese
medicine—work that would be impossible to do in a
highrise (when the resettlement programme began in
earnest in the 1960s, many farmers, refusing to break
with their livelihood and identity, herded their ducks
and pigs up the stairs to their new flats). So Ms Sng’s
motherprayed to a local Chinese deity, asking which
village the family should pick as their new home. The
answer came in a dream: Kampong Lorong Buangkok.
Mr Sng bought the land for a song, inheriting a handful
of tenants. Ms Sng was four years old.
She grew up in a community where everybody
knew everybody else and residents left their doors un
locked. At weekends villagers gossiped on their
sprawling verandas, or helped each other repair roofs
or hack away at weeds—as they do today. Children ran
wild and splashed about in the drains when it rained.
Ms Sng was lucky to live in such a close community.
When her mother died “a month and two days” after
they moved in, Ms Sng often went hungry—not be
cause the family was poor but because neither her fa
ther nor her siblings could cook. Two women from
neighbouring households regularly fed her, bringing
round rice or fried fish.
Ms Sng left school at 11, to help her father manage
the village. She tagged along as he collected rent and
chatted with the tenants in Hokkien or Malay, and
helped him muck out the drains, chase the snakes
away or collect herbs for his medicinal potions. As a
young adult, Ms Sng picked up odd jobs as a babysitter
or an attendant at a nearby psychiatric hospital. Some
of her friends married outsiders and moved away. The
siren call of an airconditioned flat was difficult to re
sist—it was, after all, what growing numbers of Singa
poreans called home—and most outsiders could not
hack life in the village. Gradually the number of house
holds declined from a peak of 47 to 25. But Ms Sng nev
er married, and never dreamed of leaving.
It was the family’s bad luck to live in a tiny country.
In 1966 the Land Acquisition Act empowered the state
to requisition land if it deemed it in the public inter
est, and to pay compensation below the market rate.
Singapore had no hinterland or natural resources, and
was stuck between two hostile neighbours. The gov
ernment argued it had to move aggressively to secure
Singapore’s future as a booming entrepot.It began
seizing landto build roads, bridges and flats, and de
nied citizens the right of appeal.
Kampong Lorong Buangkok was not immune.
When her father bought the village, the tract had the
shape of a bird, says Ms Sng. In 1977 the government
took a chunk. In 1988 it carved off more land to conduct
roadworks. Ms Sng’s siblings lived in a part of the vil
lage that was seized and had to leave the kampong,
which was full at the time. In total, the government
took about half the land, decapitating the bird, says Ms
Sng. And it is coming for the body. In 2014 the Urban
Redevelopment Authorityreleased its master plan: the
village will eventually make way for a big road and two
schools—though the government will not say when.
Given the high probability, now inevitability, that
the family would lose the land, one might have
thought the Sngs would preempt the government by
selling.In 2007 the land was valued at S$33m ($21.8m
at the time). That year parliament amended the Land
Acquisition Act, requiring the government to compenthrough their windows as if they were zoo animals.
The tenants may be forgiving when it comes to the
drains but otherwise they “are exhausting”, Ms Sng
sighs. Rent is dirtcheap—anywhere between S$6.50
and S$35 ($25.85) per month in one of the most expen
sive cities on Earth—but Ms Sng is forever chasing late
payments. “People take advantage,” she says.
Ms Sng(pronounced “serng”) has every reason to
sell the land, as the gadfly property agents buzzing
around the kampong remind her. It is worth millions.
The government intends to requisition it for redevel
opment at some point anyway, so she might as well
cash in. But whenever such agents come knocking, Ms
Sng hides or sets her dogs on them. She has never con
sidered moving out. “If I were to leave, what would be
come of the kampong?”the past is a foreign country
Suburban Singapore is a hymn to monotony: there are
beige highrises and municipal leisure centres and
multistorey car parks and pink highrises and munici
pal leisure centres and multistorey car parks. But in a
quiet neighbourhood in the east of the city, just be
yond tower block 998a, there is a winding dirt path
shaded by tamarind and banana trees leading past
ramshackle wooden houses. Kampong Lorong Buang
kok does not seem very Singaporean. The powerful
state, governed by the same party for 70 years, owns
about 90% of the land, and it has measured, levelled
and engineered almost every inch of it. Jungle has long
since made way for a spotless metropolis, where
everything has been optimised for efficiency and
everything is in a place allotted by bureaucrats.
Kampong Lorong Buangkok offers a respite from
the relentless modernity. Villagers and nature do their
thing. Silkie chickens promenade past onestorey
clapboard houses, while vines grow wild round a bi
cycle rusted in place. The farther you penetrate the vil
lage, the more you begin to notice the chatter of mynas
and burps of frogs. In a few places the jungle grows
thick, perhaps as thick as when Singapore was a mere
fishing village. Elsewhere, the ground is turfed with
neatly mown grass, making the village feel like a small
park.Life in the kampong, away from the hurlyburly
of the city, affords a certain freedom. As Suleiman, a
64yearold resident, puts it, in the village, with its
parklike spaces, “Your mind is open.” People here are
used to doing things their own way.
Seventy years ago, most Singaporeans lived in vil
lages like this (though without the running water and
electricity). In 1960, a year after the ruling party was
first elected, 1.3m out of 1.89m Singaporeans lived in
kampongs. But the government, sniffing at what it de
scribed as the squalor of kampong life and concerned
about the lack of space in the tiny citystate, spent the
next few decades razing the villages and stuffing their
residents into hulking tower blocks. Better to build up
than out. By 1990, 87% of Singaporeans lived in gov
ernment housing. Today the average monthly rent for
a fivebedroom government flat, the secondbiggest
on offer, is S$656. (That is cheap by Singaporean stan
dards but extortionate by kampong ones, especially
given that the average kampong home is several times
larger than the typical government flat.)
Ms Sng’s father was one of the holdouts. In 1956 he
was turfed out of his village in the westby the colonial
era housing agency. He had no interest in living in aSuburban
Singapore is
a hymn to
monotony