FIRST STOREYS by Sean Cham

“First Storeys”

Reviewer: Teo Xiao Ting
Performance: 3 March 2019

Dear Bee Kiao,

In the former Bukit Ho Swee Community Centre, you are with me as I stroll past ageless white walls with 19 other people, on a “HDB tour”. We listen as Ah Du (Darren Guo) explains how wonderful our new housing estates would be. You interrupt, and grumble that it’s the fourth time you’re here, and yet your case remains unresolved. You don’t care for the “wonders” of HDB. For an hour, I am a fellow resident, about to be relocated from my cosy pondok – or so states the particulars on the form given to me upon registration.

I know that you are a composite character, distilled from hours of conversations that Sean Cham and his team had with people who have lived in the various housing estates in Singapore, and who were dislocated and relocated between the 1950s and 1990s. You tell me your name, and you become Bee Kiao, instead of just Ms. Liu. Your name feels strange latinised, but I don’t know how else to address you. Kaki lang, 自己人, untranslatable.

The magic of theatre allows me to first meet you in 1985 as a feisty Ms. Liu threatening to punch the relocation officers, specifically, Mr. Ng (Isaac Tan). We spend the later part of my time at First Storeys together in the waiting room, with other residents, clutching onto our queue numbers. The air is humid; it clings onto our skin. The television, clunky and bulky, plays in the background. We sit and wait, until Hidayah (Hasyimah Hassan) burst into the room, upset. She, too, is an “unresolved case”. We later find out that it is because she’s a single woman, just as you are. As a compromise, the two of you will be housed together in a single flat. You shout, incensed, that you “cannot live with a Malay”. Hidayah too, is reluctant and together, you try to protest. The two of you are ushered out of the waiting room and we are told that the office will be closed early to “deal with the issue”.

Towards the end of the performance, I walk down the stairs to a space reassembling an HDB flat. In those few minutes, your black ponytail has given way to a grey bob cut. You managed, yet again, to build a home for yourself. I write to you because I know you best. I regret that I wasn’t able to speak more with Hidayah – the smatterings of Malay I understand wasn’t enough.

In the flat, I find out that the two of you found a way to live alongside each other. I wonder about your initial distaste towards her. You fought so fervently, insisting that you cannot live with someone who is Muslim. Where did you inherit these sentiments, and were they common back in those days? How did the two of you spend those decades, and did you truly find a shared language? Are these the right, important questions to ask? They leave me uneasy. An hour is not enough for me to understand the multitudes that the term “resettlement” holds.

Perhaps I need to return to the archives – the browned fraying pages, or voice recordings of persons perhaps no longer alive. Perhaps I need to listen more to the older persons strolling near my childhood home at Hougang, which I recently discovered will soon to be demolished. The act of relocation necessarily demands a dislocation. First Storeys gives me a peek into the resignation that comes with relocating, rehoming. The performance ends with a letter delivered to you and Hidayah: you are told to move, again. You both sigh, and sit to watch the television. Yet another advertisement of how wonderful the new housing estates will be. Our cue to leave arrives, and I return to the registration counter to collect my phone, which was confiscated at the beginning. The exercise of rehoming, relocating continues.

Take care, wa eh kaki lang.

Yours,
Xiao Ting
2019