history project

this is where i stay when i was young until about 35 years old this shophouse was built around 1920 even before world war 2 this is why it is sometimes known as pre-war house it is located at jalan besar area which is also near the old victoria school at king george road i have many memory here some happy and of course some sad there is a sign on top of the front door on the ground floor as you can see 宝树 and 福三和 宝树means precious tree and is also a symbol of our surname 谢 then the 福三和 is actually my grandfather company name there are a few more shophouses also having the same name 福三和 outside the house, there is a 5 foot way which in chinese means 五角鸡 which means it just take 5 steps to reach the main road i remember i used to play hopscotch catching, hide and seek with my neighbours in the 5 foot way as you know last time, where got computer gameboy or iphone there are about 4 to 5 rooms in each level and uhhh all together i think there is about 15 rooms imagine if in one room there is about 4 person staying total there will about 60 person staying in the house wah its very scary right? when you enter the front door on the ground floor as you can see there is a very very steep staircase i think it is about 60 to 70 degrees in gradient we have to be very careful or we will tumble down normally we have to put our shoes at the side of the stairs the partition between each room is made of thin wood and it does not even reach the ceiling so we can hear what is happening in the other room once my neighbours were quarreling and i could hear them quarreling in the end the whole level was woken up in the middle of the night by their quarreling and the next day, life will go back as normal one level only has one toilet so every morning we have to queue up to use the toilet and in order to be the number one in the queue we have to wake up very very early and that was the reason why i was always late for school due to the low water pressure whenever the ground floor they are using the water it will affect the upper level so what we do is we use something to knock on the pipe to inform the lower level that there is no water on the upper floor sometimes there will be a bread seller will ride his bicycle around selling bread if we want to buy bread we just put the money in the basket and lower it down using a string then the bread seller will put the bread and the change back into the basket this is so much more convenient than now now you have to walk all the way to the shop and all the way home in fact it is even better than pizza delivery service there was so much more fun than hdb life i feel sad that such places are disappearing so quickly i really hope that the government can help to conserve such places