He remembers when $350 a month was a good wage, when 50-cent chicken rice made it stretch, and when queuing an hour just to ride a train felt like the most exciting thing in the world. Sixty-three years old this year, he’s watched Singapore transform from kampong zinc roofs to underground trains — and NS, factory shifts, and roadside supper sessions along the way. His son finally asked him to tell the whole story.
So I finally sat down with my dad last night to do a quick interview about his childhood, and honestly, it completely blew my mind how different Singapore used to be. He’s 63 this year, born in 1963, so essentially witnessed the whole nation-building era firsthand.
He spent his early years in a kampong near Potong Pasir. He told me that whenever it rained, the sound on the zinc roof was so deafening they had to raise their voice to hear each other. No smartphones back then, obviously—his entertainment was just catching fighting spiders and playing marbles in the mud. When they moved to a Toa Payoh HDB flat in 1972, he felt like they moved into a palace, mostly because they finally had a proper flushing toilet instead of the old “bucket system” (which sounded pretty gross).
After NS in the 80s, his first job was a factory tech in Kallang. Get this—his starting pay was just over $350 a month! But back then, a plate of hawker chicken rice was only 50 cents, so I guess it actually stretched quite far. He told me he really misses the kampung spirit / communal spirit from those days, like hitting up roadside supper spots with his colleagues to complain about their boss after a brutal night shift.
The coolest part was hearing him talk about the MRT opening in 1987. They were so used to hot, sweaty buses that stepping into a freezing underground station felt like entering the future. He actually queued for over an hour with my grandparents just to ride from Yio Chu Kang to Toa Payoh for fun.
Interviewing him made me realize how much we take our comfortable, first-world life for granted. Our parents’ generation literally lived through the upgrade.