POV: Singapore in the 1990s, When Nobody Had a Phone

The games that needed nothing

Slide one is a dozen kids in batik and school shorts holding hands in a circle on a patch of grass, mid-spin, and you know exactly what song was being sung even if you cannot name it. Nobody had a schedule. Someone's mother shouted a name at 6.30pm and that was the end of the session.

Then there is the kerb. Six boys squatting in a tight circle on a concrete ledge, singlets and bare feet, completely absorbed in whatever was on the ground between them. Marbles, cards, a beetle, a stick. It did not matter. The point was the circle. We put together the rest of the repertoire in the void deck games Singapore kids played before phones and the second round with block catching and zha, if you want to argue about the rules of pepsi cola 123 with someone.

The longkang was the swimming pool

Two of the photos are the ones that got the most comments. A flooded drain after a downpour, water up to the chest, a red ball floating past, one kid grinning at the camera and someone's bicycle abandoned on the bank. And a wide concrete canal, three girls running along the sloped wall while a boy leaps the channel with one leg out like a hurdler.

Your mother would have screamed. Ours did too. The longkang was a river, an obstacle course and, after a storm, a pool, and nobody ever brought a towel. If you grew up in the north, Yishun in the 1990s will hit the same nerve.

Kampung afternoons and the school tree

The attap-roof house with the whole gang walking down the dirt path in front, barefoot, is the one that dates the set. For most of us that was a grandparent's place or a cousin's, visited on weekends and remembered as pure freedom. Only one kampung is left on the mainland today, Kampong Lorong Buangkok off Sengkang East Avenue, which the National Library's Infopedia describes as the last rural village on mainland Singapore. Go gently if you go. People live there.

And the tree. A kid halfway up a thick trunk in a school compound, a crowd of classmates at the bottom giving directions and absolutely no adult in sight. Half of us have a scar from a version of that afternoon. The snack that followed is covered in the mama shop snacks every Singaporean kid ate.

What we did instead of scrolling

Nothing in these photos is posed, because there was nothing to pose for. No one was going to see it. That is the part that stings a bit now: the photo exists only because a parent or a photographer happened to be there, and the kids did not care. The next post in the series goes a decade forward to Suntec City in 2010, which is a different kind of nostalgia, the mall kind, and we covered a close cousin in VivoCity on your first visit in 2006. Different decade, same feeling.