"I only ate dried carrots with porridge"
Koh Hoon Choo looks back on a harsh childhood washing clothes to make ends meet.
I was merely 3 or 4 years old when the war started. Both my parents had their roots in China. My father was only 33 years old when he passed away from measles shortly after my birth. My mother's health also took a severe hit after giving birth to me, and my siblings were sent to Malaya to live with relatives while I remained alone in Singapore.
My mother took up work as an Ah Ma (a term used for women employed by families to perform household chores and to care for the children in the household). She would stay with these families, returning to visit me once or twice a month. I stayed in a humble attap house in the Joo Chiat area, with a kind neighbour occasionally keeping an eye on me. As it was a kampung area, there wasn’t any place to farm or grow food at all.
Most of the time there was nothing else to eat except dried carrots with porridge. This is what I would eat for three meals a day, every day for a month. I didn’t have money to buy anything else.
Dried carrots in porridge
Illustrated by Julia Tay
Sometimes when I was hungry, I would go to coffeeshops and eat the crusts of bread. These were the remains of the bread after the coffeeshop workers cut the loaf. Sometimes the patrons would offer them to me.
In the Katong area, there was a river where I would forage for cockles and snails when the tide receded. I'd carefully knock the snails off the rocks and cook the cockles by pouring boiling water over them. The mud could get quite deep during low tide. My mother would occasionally give away my hard-earned cockles to my neighbours.
As I grew a bit older, my mother sought out cleaning jobs for me. I would travel from house to house, washing clothes for different families. I charged $2 per person to wash their clothes for an entire month. I used a washing board and a bar of soap to scrub their clothes, then I would hang them on a string. I did this for 6 families a day, and I would start very early in the morning. I would walk to wherever they lived, I would walk from Joo Chiat to Jalan Besar even, just to wash their clothes. Sometimes the families would give me a little something to eat, like a biscuit.
Before setting out for work, I'd prepare a pot of porridge with the dried carrots over an open fire. My neighbour would step in after I had departed and take it off the flames. When I came home at night, this would be my dinner.