Southeast Asia Publications Series. Honolulu: Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xxvii, 315 pp. (Maps, illus.) US$32.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3946-8.
In May 1961 a huge fire ripped through the wooden houses in the urban kampong of Bukit Ho Swee, leaving 16,000 people homeless. Singapore, still a British colony, had two years earlier negotiated a form of self-government that brought the People’s Action Party (PAP) into power, led by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Lee promised that all victims would be rehoused within nine months by the newly formed Housing Development Board (HDB). The story of how that was achieved has become part of the state-sanctioned historical narrative of Singapore and its extraordinary transformation into the ultramodern global city-state of today, and is the focus of Loh Kah Seng’s engaging book.
Loh, who grew up in the 1970s in the one-room flats built to house fire victims, has written an absorbing and detailed social history of the fire, based on oral histories, official records, photographs and media reports. The book is structured chronologically, moving through the complex neighbourhoods of the kampongs, the fire and the immediate response, to the subsequent rehousing of victims. In so doing, he presents a complex and nuanced analysis of the fire, its consequences and its place in the narration of the nation.
Wooden kampong settlements were common in Singapore at the time, as in many other parts of Southeast Asia, with over a quarter of the population living in what the authorities regarded as slums where disease and the potential for disorder were ever present. Loh turns the stereotype of the residents as backward “squatters” on its head, arguing instead that they usually paid rent, worked in formal and informal employment, were optimistic about the future, and increasingly engaged with politics. He argues that they constituted “an alternative modernity on the margin” (10).
The unplanned nature of the settlements meant that they were regarded by the authorities as an “ambivalent zone, where the state felt its control to be tenuous” (11). Here Loh argues that the government, like the British before them, sought to regularize the settlements and move to a planned, well-ordered urban society. The scale of the fire in Bukit Ho Swee gave the new government the opportunity to demonstrate that it could rehouse families quickly and efficiently. This was the beginning of Singapore’s massive public housing program. Today over 80 percent of Singaporeans live in HDB flats, and of these, over 90 percent own their flat. The housing program is hailed as an early success of the fledgling government and an ongoing and crucial part of nation-building after independence in 1965. In this scenario, the Bukit Ho Swee fire has been described as a “blessing in disguise,” since it cleared the slum and kickstarted the public housing program.
The continued hegemony of the People’s Action Party, which has held government since 1959, has been of ongoing interest to scholars of Singapore. Loh continues this in arguing that the fire enabled the government to remodel the kampong dwellers into disciplined citizens, in planned housing, with regular rental payments and as workers in the new industrial economy. In other words, it tamed the ambivalent zones of the kampongs and wedded the residents to the new Singapore, and in the process, to the government. The transformation effectively became a metaphor for the progress of Singapore under the PAP.
What adds particular interest to Loh’s analysis are his interviews with survivors of the disaster who describe their lives before and after the fire. They express a mixture of views, with some regretting the loss of their former lifestyle, and others grateful for the new housing provided. Perspectives have mellowed too over the years, with many residents now reconciled to the advantages of high-rise living. Their candour is engaging: one informant who prefers life in public housing to the hardship of the kampong, demonstrated an understanding of how the fire had helped the political legitimacy of the PAP, saying, with a laugh, “Now we Singaporeans are obedient like a dog to the government” (251).
Loh argues that the fire and the response have generated three myths that have come to define beliefs about modernity in Singapore. The first is the official celebratory depiction of the public housing miracle of modern Singapore rising out of the ashes of the Bukit Ho Swee fire, replacing the unsanitary and unregulated squatter settlement with a planned modernity. He criticizes this as a selective account which places culpability for the fire with the residents and which ignores the dissatisfaction of many fire victims with the emergency flats. Loh identifies the second myth, which coexists with the first, as the romance of the harmonious kampong. He asserts that the term “kampong spirit” has been used by the government to establish the success of public housing and to rally support for the HBD’s upgrading and en bloc development of older estates. In this way, it is used to showcase the resilience of the fire victims who overcame hardship through the kampong values of neighbourliness, thrift and hard work, values which the government seeks to encourage in young people.
Most interesting, though, is the third myth, or rather the “countermyth,” as he terms it. This is the unwritten and persistent rumour that the fire was an intentional act of arson by the government to clear the kampong and enable redevelopment of the site to occur. The rumour has persisted despite the reluctance of Singaporeans to discuss the possibility openly. Loh argues that its longevity “indicates the deep-seated tension between self and nation” (260), an example of the pragmatic and ambivalent relationship between the PAP and the people, where restrictions on freedoms are tolerated in exchange for continued economic progress.
Loh uses the story of the fire and its ensuing myths to tell a bigger story: one of housing the nation and of the contested nature of modernity. In shining a light on a historical moment at the intersection of the colonial and postcolonial, Loh reveals an important national story, and also one that speaks to the history of Southeast Asian urban redevelopment more broadly.
Sandra Hudd
University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia
pp. 739-741