Firsthand: Community is a new series by Mothership, where we explore the spirit of community in Singapore through in-depth articles and videos.
From Tampines to Tuas, we’ll investigate the untold stories of the different neighbourhoods in Singapore — firsthand.
Queenstown was Singapore’s first satellite town. Which meant they had all the amenities needed to be a “self-sufficient housing estate” located outside the city centre.
The usual plaudits came along with the title of “first”. Local heritage website Roots described Queenstown’s development over the years as reflecting “the country’s pioneering and innovative spirit”.
A Straits Times article back in 1970 compared the rows of flats in Queenstown to a “mini-Manhattan”, and also praised the “modern urban comforts” it offered.
It was a pretty hyped place, “a town of many ‘firsts’”. The very first HDBs, the aforementioned satellite town status, and the first full-time branch library.
It was also the place where the first two point block HDBs, Block 160 and 161 in Mei Ling, were developed.
Image from Roots.sg.
Point blocks were built to break the monotony of the slab block designs.
In contrast to the standard slab design, point blocks had shorter corridors and accommodated fewer units on each floor. They’re way more common now, of course.
So 160 and 161 were firmly in the crosshairs of the modernisation of Singapore, but in a nearby slab block, Block 162, a more overlooked “first” for Queenstown was also being set up.
Photo from My Community on Facebook.
Stationery
In 1968, Queenstown’s first stationery shop opened at Block 162 in Mei Ling to little fanfare.
Ker Ah Kin and her husband Wee Kak Choo had moved from their book shop in Beauty World to the burgeoning satellite town.
55 years later, I found myself in the back of that unassuming store with the smiley proprietress of the longstanding establishment.
You might have the same impression I did about what Mei Ling, and on a broader level Queenstown, was like then.
I’d imagined a ready-made futuristic town, but as Ker shared, it was very much a work in progress throughout the 1970s.
The Queenstown Ker moved into wasn’t in any way self-sustaining just yet. In fact, the area was still very much infrastructurally lacking, and surrounded by muddy hills.
The Mei Chin primary and secondary schools would not be open for nearly a decade after Ker moved in.
So who were the customers for the upstart Long Hwee back then?
“I’ve completely forgotten, it’s been so long.”
The still-sprightly Ker replies with a laugh as she conjures up some chairs for us.
The store is cluttered with an eclectic mix of old-school toys, slightly newer-school playing/trade cards, and a mishmash of stationery.
Our talk however is interrupted by a customer carrying a file. They greet each other, and Ker promptly asks her how many pieces she needs photostated.
The kind of interaction that comes only with repetition.
Ker tells us later that business has been poor for a while, and that even those looking to photostat documents, which used to be a good source of income for her, had dried up.
So who are the customers coming to Long Hwee on the daily now?
Ker laughs in a more resigned fashion this time.
It might seem quite intuitive to figure out who comes to stationery stores. School kids who need some notebooks or pens, and who really really need that new Pokemon trading card pack.
But there’s a short supply of these kids in Mei Ling nowadays.
Mei Chin
While Ker might not recall the days pre-Mei Chin schools, she’s quite clear on when the heydays of Long Hwee were.
Images from MOE Heritage Center.
Mei Chin Primary had an initial enrolment of 1,400 students in 1976. 2 years before its shuttering, Mei Chin Secondary in 1997 had 603 students.
That’s a lot of potential customers.
And Long Hwee was apparently quite the spot for these youngsters.
The comments on Facebook posts by heritage non-profit My Community about the Long Hwee store paint quite the picture of how popular the shop was then.
We spoke to a Mei Chin Primary alumni about what he remembered about the place, and he gave a pretty good overview:
“(I) always go to that shop for the 20 cents cards machine for Dragonball, Sailor Moon, Rockman etc. and for magazines”.
Ker chuckles as she talks about how some of these kids would come back to her shop decades later, all grown up, and while pointing to their 30, 40-year-old selves ask her if “Auntie, you remember me?”, leaning in closer in case that would somehow help.
The question was more often than not met with a heavy squint, a noncommittal (but very warm) smile and Ker asking them how they had been doing.
That very nice lady
Now if you read through the comments, you might come out with two broad takeaways.
1. Holy moly they had a Pacman machine? That’s awesome.
And
2. Ker is really nice.
It’s almost absurd how many people use that word, or a synonym of some kind, to describe Ker.
When I told Ker’s neighbouring shopkeeper I was doing a profile on Ker, she offered a “she’s very nice” without any further prompting.
And that sentiment is not limited to those who interact with her on a regular basis.
In fact, reading some of the articles or reviews on the shop through the years, a conspiracy theorist might be forgiven for thinking there was some grand lobbying from Big Kindness or something.
Here are two of the five Google reviews for the shop.
Even random university projects talked about how nice she was.
Bloomize, a lifestyle journal, noted Ker’s “big smile” as they entered the shop. They also made an interesting observation that we’ll get back to later.
Here’s a great summary from a really heartfelt post on the blog, My Queenstown.
“(Ker’s) smile has left a deep impression on me. Her smile and friendliness has made me feel that some things in life does not need to be beautiful, fashionable or exotic. These are simple things in life, like the simple things she sells in the store. There may not be another 40 years for this shop. But it may well be a lifetime of recollections for many of us who did manage to interact with her.”
It’s not just platitudes either. In a 2016 ST article detailing the declining number of payphones, they pointed out how the people who use them are those who might not have mobile phones.
These include the elderly and people from low-income families.
One of those rare places with a payphone is Long Hwee. Here’s Ker explaining to ST why she kept it around.
“I don’t keep track of whether or not it makes money. I just maintain it in case someone wants to use it.”
Even now, while Ker herself might claim that there are no customers, it does not mean that she isn’t busy.
Ker can often be spotted standing near the front of her store, waving back to the many folks that wave at her as they pass at a pace that Uniqlo staff would find intimidating.
She was having a lengthy chat with some folks passing by right before our interview.
I don’t know much about footfall or customer conversion, but on the metric of “waves and smiles per 36 minutes”, Ker would be up there with the best of them.
These are small acts of niceness/kindness that might not register on any sort of national scale, but there’s a multitude of these stories nestled within Queenstown’s oldest stationery shop.
In fact, when I was living in Stirling Road back in the early 2000s, I stayed rather near Long Hwee.
Screenshot via Google Maps.
Every time I passed the store, I would go to check out some of the comic books they stocked. Of course, there was no way I could afford the books on a primary school stipend, so just a few flips here and there to make sure it would be easy to play it off as mere perusing.
That was until they got this bad boy in.
Image from Bulbapedia.
The storytelling was just like the Pokemon cartoon, except that Ash wasn’t stupid and didn’t use Pikachu for every single match. Without knowing it I had read multiple volumes while sitting cross-legged in the store, potentially disrupting would-be customers.
Maybe if I had stopped at Bulbasaur’s first evolution, I could possibly have gotten away with saying I just decided this comic wasn’t for me, but I was stuck firmly in the Elite Four battles, basically the last volume in the shop, when Ker approached me.
Before I could mouth “Oh I remember, I actually have these at home,” Ker told me that she would be getting the next volume in the next two weeks, so I could come back to read when they arrive.
About 20 years later when I approached her for a possible profile on Mothership, I couldn’t help but relay this story, before excitedly pointing at myself and asking “Auntie, you remember me?”.
Ker just squinted for a bit, smiled warmly, and asked if I had been doing well.
Progress
But let’s circle back to that Bloomize quote we touched on earlier. Here’s the full quote:
“It opened at the end of the 1960s and even though the retail space has shrunk more than half compared to its heyday, the owner Madam Ker’s big smile has not.”
Long Hwee is far removed from its heyday, and Ker would be the first to tell you that.
The store appears to be perennially listed as “temporarily closed” on Google, but Ker tells me she has no idea who listed it as such.
Screenshot via Google Maps.
But it is not wildly inaccurate, there are some days when Ker doesn’t open her shop at all.
It makes sense, Ker herself says she is doing this to pass the time. Also back in the day, Ker used to stay right above her shop, the commute is a tad longer now that she’s staying with her children in Ghim Moh.
The changes to that iconic signboard are almost representative of Long Hwee’s current status, from the big bold spaced-out English-Chinese letterings to a more cramped, faded, and slightly tattered sign.
It’s tempting to think a scene is settled once you see it at its best, but Long Hwee likely won’t be around for much longer.
A then-69-year-old Ker said in a 2016 ST interview that she was planning to run the shop for two more years.
Seven years later, her answer to when she plans to retire is a lot more nebulous, but oddly more concrete at the same time.
“I can retire at any time.”
Before adding that she will take things one day at a time for now.
Throughout our interview, Ker often notes how quickly time passes. A blink of an eye, as she describes it.
The satellite town too has gone through quite a shift.
The “mini-Manhattan” has now become a mature estate, with one of the oldest populations in Singapore.
The idea of being self-sustaining has also become more complex. Sure, a stationery shop with really cool toys was absolutely critical back in the 80s, but the smartphone and the laptop have rendered much of these offerings obsolete.
Ker herself acknowledges the changing tides. The business didn’t suddenly take a dive once the Mei Chins left in the late 1990s. In fact, Bhavan Indian International School soon took its place (and stayed till the late 2010s), but perhaps more crucial than the comings and goings of schools, it was the times themselves that had changed.
It would be ideal if the Mei Ling area, after serving its time at the forefront of progression in Singapore, was now given an honorary discharge from the progression arms race, and allowed to live in a stasis of “those good old times” for as long as they can.
But that’s not how it works.
Ker’s fondest memory of her time in Mei Ling, and there is a lot to choose from, was watching her sons play in the muddy hills beside her shop.
And at the end of the day, they would all head back to their house upstairs to clean up. Ker’s neighbours would remark that the boys looked like they had just slaughtered pigs because of how dirty they were.
The hills are now a very functional, nice-looking carpark.
Now, I’m not parroting a Counting Crows-esque mantra of anti-parking lot, pro-paradise rhetoric, the carpark is probably way more useful for some than a muddy hill.
But what I will say is progress can be quite jarring.
Here’s the view from Stirling Road in 2008.
Screenshot via Google Maps Street View.
Here’s the view from when I went there a few weeks ago.
The freak is that thing?
That thing is Sterling Residences, a “luxury residential development” that, according to their website, was set to “transform the Queenstown skyline with a stunning set of iconic triple towers”.
Very organic language.
It looks real sleek though.
Image from Stirling Residences.
So just like that, the place where I used to play football with my friends had now become a tennis court that I don’t think I would have had access to.
And the worn-down HDB buildings with hastily patched windows (might or might not have something to do with the football) had given way to skyline-altering behemoths.
And I completely understand why this could be considered a net positive overall, but it’s just a bit jarring.
In some ways, it felt like this popped up in the blink of an eye.
Moving
With all these changes, from small things like new carparks, to the closing down of schools. We asked Ker if she had ever thought of moving to another location.
She thinks for a minute before resolutely replying in the negative. All of her friends are here, and she really loves the area.
She repeats something she had hinted at in the aforementioned 2016 ST article.
“There is no place for me to go.”
But Mei Ling is not immune to the march of progress.
Even now, there is quite a bit of construction going on at the former Mei Chin/ Global Indian International School sites.
These sites have been earmarked for housing, so maybe the skyline will be altered some more.
More folks will mean more investment and most likely newer shops and amenities around the area.
And that progress could be awesome, and really well received. But here's something for those who might have some vertigo or whiplash from how fast things are moving, and who are also for some reason walking along Mei Ling Street.
If you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse of a very nice lady with a warm smile waving from her small stationery shop.
I promise it will make you feel better.
Have something even more interesting going on in your neighbourhood? One-up us at firsthand@mothership.sg.
Firsthand is a new content pillar by Mothership, featuring in-depth stories about people and their issues.
Top photos by Nyi Nyi Thet