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Chapter 1
Taking the Street
Out of Street Food
Chua Beng Huat
INTRODUCTION
One of the consequences of the practically complete physical reconstruction of Singapore since the Peopleâs Action Party came to power in 1959 was the sprouting of âhawker centresâ. To clear the streets of clutter that impeded traffic flow, which resulted in unproductive wasted time, itinerant hawkers (whether on wheels or pedestrianised) were herded into purpose built hawker centres. Historically in Singapore, âstreet foodsâ used to be available according to routinised schedules and routes of the itinerant hawkers; consequently, the rhythm of hawkersâ movements structured the routines and cycles of social life of the consumers. Now, hawkers and their fare are available simultaneously, at one place and time with minimal scheduling; those which are in public housing estates (tied to wet market facilities) serve predominantly breakfast foods and stretch into lunch, with largely stable public housing residents as clients. The less locality defined hawker centres can run from early in the morning to the the wee hours of the night, with different hawkers opening and closing their stalls at different times throughout the business day, and with consumers drawn from everywhere, including tourists. In addition to the spatial organisation, the production of street food has also undergone radical changes. In the past, the food items were wholly produced by the hawkers themselves, often in their own kitchen. Today many stalls, especially those in food courts (which are not to be equated with hawker centres), are supplied by industrially produced food and to add to insult to injury, the industrial food is cooked by migrant workers or new immigrants. For a discerning local consumer, there is a constant search for the artisanal, the âauthenticâ foods. Every Singaporean has his/her favorite hawker stall for a particular food and is willing to travel to different points across the island just for a particular hawker or food, thus reversing the travel pattern between hawkers and consumers. Now consumers go to hawkers rather than hawkers travelling to consumers, leading to âauto-tourismâ, i.e. Singaporeans touring Singapore. This chapter is essentially a biographical account of the experience of street food consumption (drawn from life in a Singapore neighbourhood) that was interrupted by the spatial and temporal transformation of street food into hawker food.
ROUTINE STREET FOOD
Broadly speaking, food can be divided into two major categories: daily food and occasional/occasioned food. Daily food might be available but need not be eaten every day; what makes a food item âdailyâ food is that it is not considered exceptional; it is unremarkable. Occasioned food is that which is tied to special occasions, which follow different cycles, such as weekly, monthly or annually; a typical example would be food consumed on religious or other ritualistic occasions. In Singaporeâs past, hawker foods were loosely similarly structured; nevertheless, this distinction has been âblurredâ over time by the concurrent/simultaneous availability of the foods in a hawker centre.
Bukit Ho Swee was a kampong (Malay for village, neighourhood) of houses with wood sidings and atap roofs, at the edge of the colonial city; it began where permanent housing built by the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), the colonial housing authority, stopped. Through the 1950s, the following hawker foods were available through the day in Bukit Ho Swee: chai tow kuay, trishaw noodles, char beehoon, peanut porridge and mee jian kuey were regular breakfast foods, for adults and children alike. They were sold typically in small quantities and rather inexpensive, never costing more than thirty cents. In the mornings, these hawkers would gather to sell their foods at the major intersection of the two main roads, Beo Crescent and Jalan Bukit Ho Swee, which constituted the âcentreâ of the kampong (see Figure 1). Breakfast was the only meal which was most commonly purchased from the hawkers; hence, business could be quite brisk. The lunch offering included yong tau foo â of which two different âtypesâ were available: the Hakka and Teochew versions. The former worked around âtofuâ as the basic ingredient and had limited offerings, while the latter included a wide variety of items with fish-paste as the main ingredient, including as filling for various vegetables, such as chilli and bitter gourd. Interestingly, the distinction appears to have survived till today.
Figure 1: Road side hawker selling food to children, 1963.
Source:
MINISTRY OF INFORMATION AND THE ARTS (MITA)
Unedited Description Supplied by Transferring Agency:
A ROAD-SIDE HAWKER SELLING FOOD TO THE CHILDREN
Between lunch and dinner, one could savour kok-kok mee, so named because the hawkerâs assistant would announce their arrival in the late afternoon by beating a wooden stick on a piece of hand-held bamboo, to create a melodious, rhythmic sequence. This would be an itinerant hawker on wheels; a threewheel leg-pedal cycle mounted with a custom-built platform that held a glass cupboard (for the ingredients) and a boiling cauldron (with compartments for holding soup and boiling water) to cook the noodles. While the cart was parked at the street intersection, the assistant would walk through all the narrow lanes of the kampong with his âmusicalâ instrument to register his presence and solicit business. A duck porridge hawker would arrive at around three in the afternoon and set down his stall at the intersection for the rest of the day until his food was completely sold by the evening. This stall consisted of two parts: a small platform for the braised ducks and an earthen pot of porridge set on top of a charcoal burner, one at each end of a wooden pole that was used to lift both items on the shoulder as the old man, with severe short-sightedness (judging by the thick and heavy lens of his round-rim spectacles) made his rounds. The laksa man would also make his brief appearance around this time (Figure 2). Few hawkers were present around dinner time. But, just before the kampong went to sleep, there would be the birdâs nest soup man, again on foot, swinging the two constituent parts of his stall on a wooden pole; the hot soup in the back and cold ingredients in the front. The temporal regularity of the appearance of these itinerant hawkers suggested that each had his own daily distribution circuit, of which Bukit Ho Swee was just one stop. The circuits were unknown and of no concern to customers at each of these stops. However, the daily fixed sequence of their appearance marked/segmented the different times of the day for the residents of Bukit Ho Swee. This could have been either in anticipation of the hawkersâ arrival so as to purchase the foods or remained in the background as a âseen-but-unnoticedâ element in their perceptual horizon of a structured day. Apart from the hawkers who came daily to Bukit Ho Swee as part of their regular business routes, there were also the occasional ones who brought different foods. Of these, two are recalled as notable: one was yua kuey, a very dense steamed rice cake in a deep bowl (thus the Hokkien name) with very little other ingredients except some dried shrimps and slivers of Chinese mushroom with or without a thin layer of egg baked onto the top of the cake: the other was mee the, nothing more than rice flour fried with fragrant oil to which one simply added boiling water and stirred it to get a fragarant rich brown coloured gruel, to which eggs were sometimes added. The first of these two items has made a recent appearance in the Whampoa hawker centre as a âweekend specialâ in a chwee kuey store; the last time I had tried the latter item was in Taiwan and I had found it quite a ânonsensicalâ food as the basic ingredient was flour fried with onion-scented oil and when mixed and stirred with boiling water it turned into a heavy and indigestible glue. Any lingering âfondnessâ for it, carried over from kampong days, dissipated completely with this last experience.
Figure 2: Hawker selling Laksa at Club Street, 1983.
Source:
NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF SINGAPORE
Unedited Description Supplied by Transferring Agency:
HAWKER SELLING LAKSA AT CLUB STREET
In addition to these itinerant hawkers, there was the kopitiam at the centre of the kampong. With its very wide frontage, it rented space to a wanton noodle stall (Figure 3). Parked to the side of the kopitiam in the open space was the ice kacang stall. All these three were immobile. The kopitiam was the exclusive centre of sociality of the neighbourhood/village. This was where the unemployed and underemployed men âhung-outâ all day, with or without buying any coffee; women were not to be seen in this establishment, except for a few known gamblers. Without much or any money, the men engaged in swapping stories, challenging the veracity of the more outrageous ones. As the central meeting place of the kampong society, the kopitiam was open all day from six in the morning till around ten at night, after the nightly, onehour broadcast in Hokkien of a wuxia serial. The attached wanton stall began business before noon until shortly after dinner and, ice kacang was an afternoon âfoodâ, from late morning till before sunset.
The cost of the hawker food seemed to vary according to the time of day it was sold and consumed. Breakfast foods were the cheapest, with practically no meat included. For example, trishaw noodles had only yellow noodles boiled to mushy texture, a taste of dried shrimps in the stock and overcooked chye sim. Lunch food and mid-afternoon foods were slightly costlier, with meat included, in dishes like wanton mee and yong tau foo. Duck porridge would be the most expensive because duck was rarer relative to the greater ubiquity of chicken and pork. Birdâs nest soup in the night was obviously a luxury; a small teaspoon full of birdâs nest with boiling sweet soup of rock sugar in a tiny bowl could cost as much as a bowl of wanton mee. Not surprisingly, the volume of food sales varied correspondingly with their costs. Overall, the cost of any of these routine hawker foods never exceeded fifty cents. However, consumption was not as causal and commonplace as the prices might suggest. This was also reflected in the fact that in spite of the small quantum of food produced for sale (produced in homes with limited labour and few instruments not amounting to âtechnologyâ) the itinerant hawkers had to travel through different individualised circuits for the better part of an entire day to sell their food. With few exceptions, the residents of Bukit Ho Swee were poor and being able to purchase hawker food was out of the ordinary rather than a routine event. Children seldom bought hawker food beyond breakfast. However, coming from the small-business family, who owned one of the two kedai at the centre of the kampong, I was a regular customer of all these hawkers, even though I was barely a teenager at the time. As always, consumption was a reflection of the relative financial standing of the consumers.
Figure 3: Noodle hawker stall in a coffee shop, Hill Street, 1980.
Source:
NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF SINGAPORE
Unedited Description Supplied by Transferring Agency:
NOODLE HAWKER STALL IN COFFEE-SHOP, HILL STREET (C1980)
Many of the hawker foods sold in Bukit Ho Swee were produced by hawkers who also resided in Bukit Ho Swee. These hawkers were known and generally addressed by their trade, such as the âman who sold Hakka
yong tau fooâ or the â
wanton mee auntieâ. Only the name of the
kopitiam owner â Zhong Peng â was known to the Bukit Ho Swee residents. On the other hand, interestingly, the names of the hawkersâ children were known to all. Perhaps this was because they grew up in the kampong in contrast to their parents who had moved there from elsewhere. Not only was I a regular customer of all these hawkers, there were additional (what network sociologists call) âweak linksâ between some of them and myself. In immediate spatial terms, the
wanton mee sold in the
kopitiam were made in our house; my family rented out a room to the Hokkchiu man, who produced the noodles for his stall here. He subsequently fell into serious debt and abandoned his wife, son and daughter. The mother and son continued running the stall but ceased to produce their own noodles and bought it from a supplier instead. Unfortunately his son, Ah Ti
, left a couple of years later too, leaving the mother and daughter, Ah Choon
to manage the work. Our immediate neighbour to the left also had a big house; one room was rented to the Hakka
yong tau foo man, who had a teenage daughter, Kau Mui
. Perhaps as a result of the physical stress of âlifting the stallâ on his distribution rounds, he paid the price in acquiring heavy varicose veins on his legs (
Figure 4). The daughter was quite self-aware that she was attractive in her tightly fitted
samfoo ensemble; but nothing is known of her mother. A little further down the road from our house was the â
mee jian kuey manâ and his wife, but no children. My family supplied the flour that he used for his
kuey and I often carried the fifty-pound bag of flour on my shoulder to his house. The Hakka
yong tau foo was very popular; this hawker punctually began selling his food at around eleven in the morning and would return home, his stall emptied of food, within two to three hours of starting his business. It was thus an advantage to be his neighbour. The fragrance of the deep frying that wafted through the house told us that he was ready to start business and we were often the very first customers to purchase the food from his workplace/home, before he started on his route.
Figure 4: Portable hawker stall, 1930s.
Source:
SINGAPORE PRE...
