I am standing close enough to feel the air shift.
Just moments ago he was radiant — laughing, greeting guests, shaking hands too firmly, shoulders lifted by pride. A father in full celebration. Exuberant. Almost triumphant. The day had arrived, and he had carried it on his back with dignity.
I do not have time.
The door closes, the engine hums, the air is already in motion. I am inside the vehicle and the world is slipping forward. Two cameras hang from me — the Olympus waterproof with the 8mm, wild and curved like a horizon bending; the Fujifilm XE with the 35mm, steady, intimate, human. There is no luxury of hesitation. Hyperfocal set. Trust the distance. Trust the body. No time to focus.
The five-foot way—narrow, shaded, functional—was never meant for comfort. It was a corridor of survival. Shophouses rose above, paint peeling, drains running shallow along the edge. Light entered from the side in hard diagonals, carving shadows across cracked cement. There she was, bent forward, ageing spine curved like a question mark history never answered.
Morning in early-Eighties Chinatown did not begin with birdsong. It began with steam.
The sun had barely cleared the shophouse roofs when the market was already alive—metal clanging, water sloshing, voices bargaining in Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew. The ground, uneven and broken, held yesterday’s residue. By mid-morning the soles of my feet would darken to an almost charcoal hue, as if the street itself had marked me as witness.
There are cities that remember themselves honestly, and there are cities that remember only what flatters them. The early 1980s in Singapore stood somewhere in between—caught in the tremor between kampung residue and modern ambition, between drainage ditches and rising towers, between raw blood on asphalt and the polished marble of what was to come.