The Story of Mr Tan Pan Beng

Once a month, I follow some Christian friends to visit the old folks at the Lentor Residence. Recently I discovered that one of the residents knew my father. Like my dad, Mr Tan Pan Beng was a member of the Serangoon Garden Citizens’ Consultative Committee for a number of years. Initially, I was a bit suspicious of this 80-year old’s ability to remember things from such a long time ago. But when he was able to describe our kampong, as well as tell me the name of the other village representative from Lorong Kinchir, a certain Mr Low Thiam Aik, I was convinced, and of course thoroughly amazed. In fact he could even recall one occasion when he visited our kampong to mediate in a dispute between us and our tenant, a certain Mr Tan Kuan. And so, I asked him to tell me a bit of his life to share with you on this blog.

(Note: What I report here is merely what Mr Tan told me in Mandarin. I did not verify the accuracy of the facts he narrated)

Mr Tan Pan Beng was born in 1927 in a small Malayan town known as Paloh, situated 10 miles or so north of Kluang in Johor (see map here). Like his father before him, Mr Tan was a pork seller. In 1943, and at the tender age of 18 (yes I know the numbers do not quite add up, but I quote what he told me), Mr Tan joined the underground resistance forces to fight the Japanese occupying army(possibly the MPAJA or Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army). They engaged mainly in guerilla warfare, and operated in squads of about 9 to 10 men. This he did for two years until the war ended in 1945 with the surrender of the Japanese. Then, at the age of 20, he was asked to join the army (I think he was referring here to the communists who fought the British after the war). He was reluctant to do that, and so he decided to come to Singapore. At that time, Singapore was part of Malaya, and so he did not actually migrate to another country.

For a few years in Singapore, he worked as an employee for another pork seller. Later, he began to operate his own itinerant business selling pork in the Serangoon Garden area from a bicycle. When the Serangoon Garden market was built in 1962, the government offered him a stall which he operated until his retirement. The rental then was about $5 a month. At that time, he stayed at a kampong in Yio Chu Kang, near the Kok Wah Theatre. Young people would probably not know where that was. It was at the junction of Yio Chu Kang Road and Upper Serangoon Road. He bought his pigs from local farms which were quite plentiful in Singapore those days.

As I reflected on this fact, I realized that I very likely could have patronized Mr Tan’s stall. You see, during the sixties, for a short period, and for reasons I cannot recall, I was tasked by my mother to cycle from our kampong in Lorong Kinchir to do simple marketing in the Serangoon Garden market. I learnt how to buy a few basic items like pork, bean curd (tau kua), bean sprouts (tau gay) and noodles.

I am also reminded that my father did try his hand at rearing pigs for a short while to supplement our income. We only had 2 pigs and after that we stopped. Presumably, it was too much work and not cost effective. Of course we did not slaughter the pigs ourselves.

When the PAP (People’s Action Party) came into power in 1959, Mr Tan joined the Serangoon Garden CCC. He recalled that the first MP (member of parliament) he served under was a Mr Liang Jing Sheng (pronounced in Mandarin) who later left to join the Barisan Socialis. I checked the internet, but was not able to find anyone in the Barisan Socialis by this name. I suspect it was somebody called Dr Sheng Nam Chin. His fellow CCC members, like my dad, were from the surrounding kampongs like Cheng San, Hwi Yoh, Yio Chu Kang and Ow Kang (Hougang).The next MP was a Mr R. A. Gonzales, followed by Mr Rodrigo and Dr Lau Teik Soon. If Mr Tan is right, then I have made a mistake when I told you earlier that we had a MP by the name of Tan Kia Gan (my eldest brother Chun Chew; the one with the supposedly ‘elephant’ memory, to be blamed for this misinformation .. haha) Mr Tan continued to serve all the way until 1997 when he was asked to join the Aljunied GRC (Group Representative Constituency). He declined saying that he was getting on in age and could not speak English.


Photo from the National Archives of Singapore showing member of parliament, R. A. Gonzales leading members of the Serangoon Garden Citizen’s Consultative Committee in a ‘gotong royong’ project to repair Cheng San Road.

Altogether, Mr Tan had 6 children; 3 sons and 3 daughters, and 8 grand children, the oldest of which is in his thirties and married with children; which meant that Mr Tan is a great grand father. He said his children did not excel in studies and consequently were in the pork business like him. His is widowed. His wife passed away about 10 years ago. Except for a problem with his leg, he was mentally alert and could move about on his own with the aid of a walking stick.

I think it is really fated that I should meet Mr Tan Pan Beng and share this story with you. One thing I learned from this story is that, one does not have to be in a highly ‘intellectual’ job to have a good healthy brain; and pork apparently is not so unhealthy a food after all.

Kampong Fruit Trees (Part 3) – by Chuck Hio

I would like to pick up from where Chun See left off by sharing a bit of history about the fruit trees from my kampong days.

I grew up in a kampong near the Hill View area. There were many fruit trees in the nearby Bukit Gombak. As children, we often went up there to pluck fruits - either by climbing the tree, or using our ’ Lastic’ (catapult) to shoot down the fruits, or simply by throwing dry branches at them. All these happened about 30 years ago. Unfortunately, the Bt Gombak area is now part of the Mindef, as thus a restricted area.

Besides the common fruit trees that Chun See mentioned, I would like to touch on those fruits that are not so commonly seen in the markets; and probably not so familiar to young Singaporeans.

1) Buah Suntol

It’s not easy to find a Buah Suntol tree nowadays in Singapore. But I managed to spot one recently. Can you guess where this picture was taken?



This tree is in the MacRitchie Reservoir just next the slope where I took the pictures of the kids playing with the Carton Boxes.

Here’s what the fruit looks like. (Please don’t ask how I managed to ‘pluck’ the fruits.) The taste is hard to describe, a bit sour and sweet; not like any other fruit that I can think of. Surprisingly, even a ‘kampong boy’ like Chun See have not tasted it before. If you are curious to taste it, you can go to the Thai emporium at Golden Mile Complex where they sell for about $5 per kilo and the size is much bigger than the ones below.



* A note for foreign friends - 'buah' is Malay for fruit

2) Buah Longlong (Bell fruit)

The fruit is slightly bigger than an egg and has the shape of the avocado, and tastes quite sour. The skin is green when unripe, and brownish-yellow when ripe. The seed is very hard and has lots of fibres. You can find them in many shops in the pickled form.

3) Jambu Bol (Malay Apple)

I am not talking about the water apple that Chun See talked about. It is more rounded in shape. And the seed is round like a marble, and the colour is a mixture of beige and reddish stripes. The only time I saw this tree in Singapore was at the Singapore Science Centre about two years ago.



By the way, if you want to see what the common jambu (water apple) tree look like, you can go down to Bishan Park – the section between Marymount Avenue and Thomson Road.


4) Hor Pow Kor (Nam Nam)

I bet not many of you know about this fruit. Not even my ‘kampong boy’ friend Chun See has seen this one. Hor Pow Kor is the Hakka name for this fruit, because it looks like a purse. It sprouts in clusters from the tree trunk near the base of the tree. We eat this fresh immediately plucking from the tree. Your can see some pictures of what this fruit looks like at http://toptropicals.com/catalog/uid/Cynometra_cauliflora.htm.


5) Mata Kuching

This is a smaller version of the longan which we can buy in the market. The tree is very hard to climb because the trunk is very thick, so we used dry branches to throw at them.

6) Buah Limbeh

Shape is roundish, and size is slightly bigger than grape. The fruits grow like a string of beads from the branches. Tastes sour but some are sweet. Inside the fruit are seeds which we swallow (but later pass out)


7) Buah Susu

The buah susu is creeper that can still be found growing along roadside fences in many parts of Singapore. I wonder how many of you know that the ‘fruit’ is edible. It has a sweet and sour taste. But the fruit is too small to fill your stomachs though.





The above are just some of the many fruits that I used to pluck and eat as a kampong kid. Others include buah cherry, mangosteen, buah luku, langsat and of course the more common ones like durian, mangos, rambutan and its cousin the pulasan (by the way, do you know that the seed of the pulasan can be eaten?)

This is what the area looks like today. Bukit Gombak CC and the surrounding HDB flats have all gone.

If you know where we can find these fruit trees in Singapore, please let us and our readers know. I sure would like to bring my son to see and learn about fruits that his old man used to have such a great time plucking. And if my friend Chun See can use his ‘guanxi’ with his Army Museum friends to arrange for me to visit Bukit Gombak with my son, that would be a dream come true.

Kampong Fruit Trees (Part 2)

After I moved out of our kampong, I stayed in an HDB (Housing & Development Board) apartment for about 12 years. Then in 1986, I moved to my present home, a terrace house in the Bukit Timah Sixth Avenue vicinity. One night it rained, and I realized that one of the things I missed most about living in a kampong was the sound of rain drops falling on the roof.

In my present house, we too have a guava tree in our backyard. But because we are too lazy to wrap plastic bags around the fruits (yes my kids did not inherit my tree climbing skills), they tended to be infested by insects. My neighbour also complained about the mealy bugs that made him itch. He liked to relax bare body in his backyard which faced ours.


Photo of our guava tree taken from my bedroom window. Just a few months ago, we trimmed it bare.

That of course is the problem with land-scarce Singapore today. Even if you are fortunate enough to own a landed property, your home is likely to have very small compound; and if you wanted to plant fruit trees, you would not have much space left for other gardening activities. That was exactly what happened in my case.

One of the things that attracted me to my present house was this mango tree in the front garden, with huge fruits dangling at face level. For a several years, we enjoyed the huge tasty mangoes, which were so abundant that we used to give the extras to our relatives and friends. But about 5 years ago we had to chop it down because it grew too big and became quite impossible to maintain. Let me explain.



You see, for mangos, you have to spray pesticide when the tree is flowering. Otherwise, the insects will lay their eggs on the flowers and the insects will grow inside the fruit. So by the time you harvest the fruit, it may look very nice outside, but when you cut up the fruit, you will be startled by the crawling insects (weevil bugs) that emerge. Thus when our tree became too big, every time we sprayed pesticide on it, the wind would carry the poison into our neighbours’ homes. After a few seasons of harvesting fruits that were nice to look at but impossible to eat, we decided to chop it down.



Our mango tree also attracted pests. I am not referring to the fruit bats, but the two legged kind. Often, we had taxi drivers who parked their vehicles outside our house and helped themselves to our fruits when my wife and I were at work. It’s very strange. Most of the fruits seemed to be found on the side facing the road. Maybe it’s the morning sun. We even had one filial man who came in his van one Sunday afternoon, equipped with poles and nets. I know he is filial because when I yelled at him from my balcony, he replied that his mother loved mangos. In the face of such unabashed filial piety, what could it do but desist. Anyway, I doubt he would believe me if I told him that, his mother was going to be treated to quite a sight when she cut open the fruits and see some crawling insects.




At first we planted these banana trees in our backyard. But as the kids got bigger and we ran out of space, we decided to plant them across the road from my house. The Bangladeshi workers from the nearby construction sites (all year round there are upgrading/renovation works in my neighbourhood) would certainly agree with our decision.

Kampong Fruit Trees (Part 1)

One reason why I enjoy driving in the countryside of Malaysia is that you can get to see a lot of fruit trees growing in the compounds of people’s homes. Recently, my family made a trip to Kukup, a fishing town on the South-Western tip of the state of Johor. It was rambutan season, and we saw many trees fruiting by the roadside. We also saw many roadside fruit stalls, and it reminded me of Singapore in the 50’s and 60’s.


A 1960's Photo of a roadside durian stall along Farrer Road, courtesy of Memories of Singapore

In our kampong, we used to have lots of fruit trees. Tree climbing was one of our favourite pastimes. Do you know which tree is best for climbing? The guava tree - because of it’s strong branches. We called the guava fruit ‘pak kia’ in Hokkien and ‘kai see kor’, (literally, chicken shit fruit) in Cantonese. We had 2 types of fruits; one with white and the other with pink flesh. The seeds of the guava fruit are extremely hard and indigestible. The result of eating them was that we tended to, as they put it so nicely in the army, ‘shit bricks’.


My naughty niece with a piece of toy shit

My favourite fruit from the kampong days was the soursop. Our tree was very fruitful and produced huge fruits which were much bigger and tastier that those you can buy in the market today. Soursops are quite costly these days, and many fruit vendors do not like to stock them because they ripened very quickly, and cannot be stored for long. Talking of the soursop tree always reminds me of the fat, green caterpillars that tended to breed on it. I think they are from some kind of moth.


Me (left, aged about 14 or 15) and my brother James and our dog Nappie sitting of a coconut tree trunk. Behind us is our soursop tree.

We too had a durian tree which I have already blogged about here.

Of course we also had a few rambutan trees. I remember my mum brought three saplings all the way back by train from a visit to her relatives in Kuala Lumpur on one occasion. Apparently these were special and did not grow to be very large. I had a godmother in the kampong. In her house, they had a tree which produced yellow colour rambutans. Besides that they also had star fruits.

Another fascinating tree was the coconut tree which I have also blogged about here. I recall climbing up a young coconut tree once. The young tree tended to be curved and quite easy to climb up. But climbing down was a totally different ball game; and I remember having a scary time doing that.

The coconut tree is also interesting because it had a huge root base. There was one occasion when we got people to chop down a full-grown coconut tree. To save money, we decided to dig up the tree stump ourselves. I remember what a tough job that was. All the 4 males in the family, except for my kid brother James, were involved, and I think it took us a whole day to complete the job. In the process, we saw many centipedes. Maybe that’s why the Hokkiens called the centipede ‘yar kang’. (yar as in coconut, kang – I don’t know what that means)

The husk of the coconut makes a very good fuel and can burn for a long time. My father taught me how to use it to produce burnt earth for our gardening purposes.

Apart from the above fruit trees, we also had pomeloes – small ones unlike those from Ipoh, Tambun. They had long, sharp, needle-like thorns. We also had water apples (in Cantonese we call sui yong) and of course, papayas.

…….. to be continued

Next Change: Kampong Fruit Trees

Older Singaporeans will be familiar with terms like Akan Datang and Next Change.

I have been busy with work lately so not much time to blog. But in order not to disappoint my regular readers, here's a preview of what's coming up next.


This photo of a rambutan tree was taken on 22 Jul 2006 at the MacRitchie Reservoir.



Here's a photo of the same tree about 2 weeks later on 07 Aug. when the fruits were beginning to ripen. Too bad, I have lost my tree climbing skills. Anyway, I don't want my picture to appear in the Straits Times for the wrong reasons.



But do you notice that the fruits looked a bit strange? Some of them appear to have been peeled. Maybe someone beat me to them.





And here's the culprit. I bet my friend John Harper envies this chap.





Click on the photos to go to my Flickr site for more photos of this monkey.