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Low Tech, High Rise: Cottage Industries in Singapore
| Article
# : |
12615 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1987 |
5,308 Words |
| Author
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Margaret Sullivan
Margaret Sullivan, currently a Washington-based writer, has
spent nearly 30 years living in and writing about Southeast
Asia, specializing in the Malay world that includes Indonesia. |
In the shadow of Goldhill Tower, one of Singapore's more distinctive high-rise buildings, Haji Ahmad makes capal (traditional Malay slippers) in a converted chicken coop. Although he apprenticed in the trade as a young man, he was formerly a prison guard, turning out slippers on the side. Now in his retirement, he does it full time.
Chow Lai Keng, nearly eighty, sits on the downtown corner she has occupied for forty years, selling sweets and stitching patchwork. In the kitchen of his tenth floor high-rise public housing "flat" on the other end of the island, Kusasir bin Lenggang converts newspaper and velvet into songkok, the brimless hat Malay men traditionally wear, at least on special occasions, as a token of their Malayness. Kassinathan leaves his family in India for two years at a time, earning money for them by grinding spics in a haze of pungent dust in a shop on Serangoon Road. Steven Lim, the youngest son in a family that has traditionally practiced the exacting carpentry and mathematics required to make daching (Chinese beam scales), plans to take the family business into manufacturing electronic scales. Yit Kai Worn, along with is son and daughter, turns plastic into replicas of traditional ornately carved wooden deity houses.
Five years ago, Samynathan added garland stringing to his sundries business in response to the increased demand from Singapore's growing number of Indian families. Although she is illiterate, Chan Sai Loey runs a small factory that makes women's shoes by hand, enabling her to contribute to the support of her family and care for her children at the same time. Fong Kai Wah ad his younger brothers fabricate automobile number plates and plastic signs, a business that started in the 1960s in one
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