Books ¢ Corinne Tan worships at Kampong Kapor Methodist Church. / Photos from the book, Journeys of an Octogenarian, are reproduced with permission.
Tales of a Chinatown boy
N
g Fook Kah is a well-loved member of Kampong Kapor Methodist Church. In his autobiography, “Journeys of an Octogenarian”, 89-year old Ng writes of the people and events that have shaped his life.
“Journeys” is written with candour, describing people and experiences with touching honesty. Calling it a “people story”, Ng (known as ‘Papa’ to many) plays storyteller to his family and friends as he weaves their stories into his own.
A youth spent in hardship and turmoil Ng was born in 1932, in Chinatown’s infamous Sago Lane, known for its “death houses”. As a young boy, he lived among coffin makers and undertakers, rickshaw pullers, lion dancers and Chinese opera troupes. The sights and sounds of funeral processions and Chinese rituals were familiar to the Chinatown “street urchin” who lived just four doors from these death houses. Grandma was a “sew-sew woman” who fixed buttons for a living; grandpa was kepala (chief) in the Carpentry Section of the Singapore Municipality, while father was a plain-clothes mata gelab (detective). Ng lived through some of Singapore’s most tumultuous times—the Japanese Occupation, British colonial rule and Singapore’s transition to independence. During the Japanese Occupation, Ng worked as an apprentice blacksmith in a Japanese factory, “pushing bellows day in and day out” at a furnace, till he almost went “berserk”. Events in later years left a deep impression on Ng, including the fire at Bukit Ho Swee in 1961, which destroyed lives and homes, but miraculously, left him and his home unscathed. A student in Raffles Institution (RI) (Class of 1950), he was a determined young man who joined the RI Cadet Corps, trying hard to “come alongside the elite class of 1947”. He later graduated from New Zealand’s Otago University Dunedin as a Colombo Plan Scholar, and was awarded a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship. In recognition of his service to Singapore, he was later conferred the Public Administration Medal, Silver (1975), Public Service Medal (1982), and Public Service Star (1989) by the Presidents of the Republic of Singapore. In addition, as a grassroots leader in Ulu Pandan Constitu ency, he was awarded the Long Service Medals (Bronze and Silver). Ng also recalls happy times like watching his first English movie “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” at Roxy Cinema with a Magnolia ice-cream, owning his first car and meeting his sweetheart Anne Wong, who was a teacher like him. 20
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METHODIST MESSAGE June 2022
