"We shared everything in our kampung"
Sulaiman bin Yahya reminisces about kampung life as a child during the wartime years. His father was a fisherman - whatever he caught would be their meal for the day.
I was born in 1935, and my early years were spent in Kampung Ayer Gemburu, which is near current day Changi Prison. My father earned a living as a fisherman, and we lived in houses raised on stilts. There were 5 of us living together in my family.
Kamping Ayer Gemburu , 1963
Courtesy of Wikipedia
I was around 7 years old when the Japanese came. The Japanese arrived very early one morning, armed with guns, and forced everyone from the different races to gather in a field. They wanted to scare us and to observe our behaviour - to see if we wanted to resist or if we were willing to stand there quietly without fighting.
The Japanese would occasionally visit our kampung to hire people to cut palm leaves. These hired individuals would be transported to Potong Pasir to cut down and collect palm leaves.The collected leaves would be put aside and kampung people who needed the leaves were free to take and use them to repair the roofs of their houses. Each hired person was paid one packet of cigarettes and one packet of ubi (tapioca) for their work.
The Japanese army included conscripts from Taiwan. If you were respectful to the Japanese, they were alright. But the Taiwanese conscripts were especially terrible to us.
The Japanese disliked gambling. So when they caught a group of people gambling, they forced them to drink soap water, which would make their stomachs swell.
Fried shredded tapioca
Illustrated by Julia Tay
In our small kampung, we shared everything. Our daily diet consisted mainly of tapioca, and we even shredded ubi (tapioca) into noodles as thin as mee siam for consumption. The Japanese really liked eating chickens, so all our chickens were taken away by the Japanese. If you had chickens in the house, the Japanese would come everyday to see what chickens you had and they would take what they wanted away.
My father did net fishing. So whatever he caught in the net would be what we would eat. There wasn’t much to be caught in net fishing, nothing that could be sold. It was just enough for the family to eat. Sometimes you’d get prawns, shrimp or small fish like tamban (herrings) or ikan bilis (anchovies), or small crabs. We would share what we caught with the kampung.
To capture sotong (squid), we used a small light at night. My father would go out in his boat, hold the light just above the water, and the sotong would be drawn to it. Then, he would catch them. Certain areas in the sea had sotong, certain areas had tamban. So you had to know where to fish.
We used assam, chilies, and spices to prepare the seafood we caught. The chillies were plucked from the area around us. We would pluck assam pods, take out the berries and soak the assam pods in water. Then we would throw away the pods and only the assam water to cook.
Pucuk paku with asam
Illustrated by Julia Tay
Pucuk paku (fiddlehead ferns), a vegetable shoot, was also part of our diet. “Pucuk” means vegetable shoots, and “paku” means nails. It used to grow along the wooden planks placed by the longkangs, which were nailed in place. That’s why we called it so, “the shoot that grows near the nails in the wood”. We made lemak pucuk paku by cooking it with coconut milk and chilli. We would also just stir fry it with assam.
Ubi begedil. These savoury patties were made with shredded tapioca, and sprinkled with shredded coconut
Illustrated by Julia Tay
We also made begedil, a savoury patty, with shredded ubi kayu (tapioca), and ate it with coconut.
We used coconut to make oil. We would take the shredded white flesh of the coconut and boil on a wood fire until oil floats to the surface. Then we would scoop up the oil whenever it came out. This process takes very long, around 8 hours. We would use the leftover coconut (tahi minyak) which by now had become dried coconut crumbs, and we would season our food with it.
Squeezing shredded coconut to make tahi minyak
Illustrated by Julia Tay
Tahi minyak
Illustrated by Julia Tay
We didn’t forage for food. Day to day, we only relied on what my father caught to eat. If it was raining that day and he couldn’t go out to sea, then we wouldn’t have anything to eat that day. Our meals were small and made with what we had on hand.
We also attended school during the Japanese Occupation, where we were taught the Japanese language and sang Japanese songs.
When the British returned, I found work as a cleaner at Changi army camp, earning S$1 a day, which also came with the perk of free coffee. Those were challenging times which shaped my early years.