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Low Tech, High Rise: Cottage Industries in Singapore
| Article
# : |
12615 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1987 |
5,308 Words |
| Author
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Margaret Sullivan
Margaret Sullivan, currently a Washington-based writer, has
spent nearly 30 years living in and writing about Southeast
Asia, specializing in the Malay world that includes Indonesia. |
In the shadow of Goldhill Tower, one of Singapore's more distinctive high-rise buildings, Haji Ahmad makes capal (traditional Malay slippers) in a converted chicken coop. Although he apprenticed in the trade as a young man, he was formerly a prison guard, turning out slippers on the side. Now in his retirement, he does it full time.
Chow Lai Keng, nearly eighty, sits on the downtown corner she has occupied for forty years, selling sweets and stitching patchwork. In the kitchen of his tenth floor high-rise public housing "flat" on the other end of the island, Kusasir bin Lenggang converts newspaper and velvet into songkok, the brimless hat Malay men traditionally wear, at least on special occasions, as a token of their Malayness. Kassinathan leaves his family in India for two years at a time, earning money for them by grinding spics in a haze of pungent dust in a shop on Serangoon Road. Steven Lim, the youngest son in a family that has traditionally practiced the exacting carpentry and mathematics required to make daching (Chinese beam scales), plans to take the family business into manufacturing electronic scales. Yit Kai Worn, along with is son and daughter, turns plastic into replicas of traditional ornately carved wooden deity houses.
Five years ago, Samynathan added garland stringing to his sundries business in response to the increased demand from Singapore's growing number of Indian families. Although she is illiterate, Chan Sai Loey runs a small factory that makes women's shoes by hand, enabling her to contribute to the support of her family and care for her children at the same time. Fong Kai Wah ad his younger brothers fabricate automobile number plates and plastic signs, a business that started in the 1960s in one side of the family grocery shop and now occupies the old shop house on Middle Rod and a modern "flatted factory" (space in a one or multistoried building of workshop spaces) in Ang Mo Kio.
Modern Singapore
Cottage industries - as these people and thousands like them illustrate - are alive, well, and surprisingly productive in aggressively high-tech, high-rise, high-finance Singapore. This sounds like a contradiction in terms. However, throughout Asia this contradiction is imbedded in the rapid process of urbanization and technological change and the resulting shifts - and continuities - in the work people do, the skills they possess and value, the structures within which they earn their living, the ways they look at themselves and their elders, and the aspirations they have for their children.
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