Siglap and the Cat Story

I needed to write a story on Siglap for an anthology of place-based Singapore stories. My mother's family had spent a long time in Suglap. They had a wooden house in front of the sea, and my great-grandfather used to fish. Growing up, my mother had all sorts of stories about how it was like to live in a kampong.

Theirs was the biggest house in the kampong, with 2 garages (1 of which doubled up as a badminton court) and a billards room. They had a Malay driver, Mahmud, who drove the children to and from school and my grandfather to and from work. During the racial riots of the 1950s between the Malays and the Chinese,  he told the children to duck at the back, so that they would not be seen by the rioters.

For Portfolio 3, I wanted to revise the cat story, which has been hanging in the air for a year. The last revision, for Portfolio 2, was easily the most thorough edit. Yet I felt (as did my writing group) that I had taken the characters too far. Kiat was just meant to be a socially awkward closet gay, not a pedophile. Alison, just a girl harbouring a long-time crush, not a divorcee.

So I decided, for Portfolio 3, that I would combine both aims, and relocate Kiat to my mother's Siglap house. What if the house remained stubbornly, instead of being demolished when land reclamation started? What if Kiat had inherited it and used it for his storeroom of cats and clutter? What if Kiat remained a nice person, just a bit kooky, and the (albeit one-sided) sexual tension was brought back?

The Cat Story V 11 April was my attempt at doing that. I struggled with description quite a bit --- how do you describe an old house that you have never seen? I asked my mother to draw a picture of the house, and took a video of her describing the house. I had imagined that it would be dark, but she said it was light and airy. I had difficulty imagining how the fence looked like --- she said it was see-through, and people could sit on it --- so she dug out photos to show me exactly.