99% Invisible - 359- Life and Death in Singapore

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

When Singapore gained its independence they went on a mission to re-house the population from densely-packed thatched roof huts into giant concrete skyscrapers. In 1960, they formed the Housing and Development Board, or HDB, and just five years later they had already housed 400,000 people! In Singapore, where land is scarce, it’s not unlikely for apartment buildings to be built on top of land that was graveyards not too long ago. But building on top of a graveyard has its complications. Life and Death in Singapore

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1959, after nearly a century and a half of British colonial rule, the people of Singapore took the first step toward their independence. They voted to run their own internal government. The British colonial rule was restored after the Second World War. A series of colonial administrators have ruled and ordered our lives. Well, times have changed and will still change. We the people of Singapore have decided to run the affairs of Singapore. It was a joyous moment, but they inherited a difficult situation. All of us want a better and a fuller life. joyous moment, but they inherited a difficult situation.

Singapore was bombed heavily by Japan during the Second World War, and again by the allies after Singapore fell to the Japanese. A lot of its infrastructure was in ruins, including the port, which had brought foreign goods and a multi-ethnic, multilingual population of people to the island for centuries. No port meant no jobs. Party was rampant. Most of the island's residents were living

in unpermitted makeshift houses crammed into crowded villages throughout the island. If you don't know, the country of Singapore is tiny. Today the entire nation is really just one city. It takes less than 45 minutes to drive across the island, with traffic. But in the 1950s, there were villages. And those villages were known as Campong's, a local Malay word. That's producer Katie Thornton.

She's a full bright national geographic fellow and has spent the last four months in Singapore. Campong communities were strong and close knit. But the living wasn't easy. Multiple families might share one toilet or one kitchen. Many of the Campong's relied on gas for lighting and cooking. And most houses were made of superflammable palm leaves or wood with roofs made of sheet metal.

The government wanted to raise the quality of life for the people. They rebuilt the port and created factory jobs. They made all the kids learn English so that Singapore could feel united under one language, but the biggest undertaking of all was to get the people out of that roof huts and into modern housing. The biggest undertaking of all was to get the people out of thatch-druf huts and into modern housing. And one of the biggest challenges would be doing it with extremely limited land space. In 1960, they formed the Housing and Development Board, or HDB.

And just five years later, they had already housed 400,000 people. Well, over 400,000 people, a quarter of Singapore's population has been rehoused in the last five years in these bright modern area flats. No way out in the world, except in Russia and West Germany, is the rate of rehousing faster than in Singapore. The HDB achieved this pretty amazing feat by going vertical. When planning for a growing population, most urban planners expand their cities outward, but in land-limited Singapore, that is not an option.

Today, Singapore's tallest public housing buildings are 50 stories high, the tallest in the world. But from the very beginning, the Housing and Development Board went vertical. The people of Singapore demand high standards to their governments, and they are prepared to work hard and are capable of high skills. For them, the sky is the limit. Singapore is acquiring the one whole mark of a great civilized community, magnificent buildings, plus comparable workers housing.

Today, Singapore is the third richest nation in the world, and 80% of Singaporeans still live in these tall cement HDB flats. There's about 10,000 public housing buildings on the island, and new flats are going up all the time. It's not the glitzy, futuristic, Singapore skyline you see in movies like Crazy Rich Asians. The buildings are tall and cement with housing block numbers painted boldly down the sides, helping Singaporeans locate themselves in the monotonous sea of nearly identical buildings. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, HDB public housing developments sprung up all over the country. Kuh Ehun is a historian in Singapore.

She was born in 1966 and has lived in HDB flats for most of her life. She remembers watching this housing crop up everywhere on the island. They weren't all designed exactly the same, but pretty close. A design style is different, but what doesn't change is basically everything becomes like a matchbox. So you're living in a little hole inside a concrete structure. As people moved into these drab concrete towers, a lot of them missed the vibe of their old communities, what they called the Kompong spirit. But there was a lot to like about their new homes, like having their own bathrooms and kitchens with electricity and plumbing. A place where they can have their own privacy,

a place where they don't get flooded every time it rains, you know. And so people moved in and the government kept building. And the building just kept getting higher over the years. But despite the privacy the architecture afforded, Ihun didn't always feel alone. As a kid growing up in HDB flats, she remembers seeing shadowy figures floating above her bed. She asked her mom about it. So when I was very young, I told my mom,

I said, why is it that I see that image just above me? And then she say, Ciligol, this used to be a cemetery. Of the four apartments E-Hoon has lived in, two of them have been on old cemeteries. That might seem like bad luck. But in Singapore, where land is scarce, it's not unlikely for apartment buildings to be built on land

that was graveyard not too long ago. But building on top of a graveyard has its complications, and in one cemetery, called Peck Sandtang, the new housing development disrupted more than just the dead. It disrupted a way of life. Yeah, I'm a Juan, Juan Yu-King. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, Mr. Juan was a city boy. But his dad would bring him the eight miles from their home near Singapore's growing city center to the overgrown rainforest of Pec-Santhang cemetery,

to pray at the graves of their family and friends. When I was a kid, I was a young boy. I was wandering around the hillsides, walking through the grass, we say prayers, we make offerings. Mr. Quan's family was Chinese, and they believed that if the dead were well taken care of, it not only meant peace for the departed, it could also bring direct benefits to the descendants. So Mr. Quan kept going as he got older. In going to the cemetery, it wasn't just a family affair. It was a community function.

Chinese migrants to Singapore set up social service organizations to help take care of their community from the cradle to the grave and beyond. Mr. Quan and his friends would wander the untamed hillsides to the graves of their long dead community members. There they'd burn incense and fake paper money, things they thought that the dead might need in the afterlife. And then they'd just hang out at the grave. So after all the prayers are said and done,

we have a lovely meal of roast pork, roast duck, and so on, and it was a wonderful event. I mean, we kids look forward to that, actually. When you hear Mr. Kwan talk about going to the cemetery, you start to get why he enjoyed it. It was a nice change from the congestion and cement of the city. And it wasn't just a natural scenery that was impressive. The tombs were amazing. People would spend a fortune on big elaborate memorials with stone lions and meticulous carvings. Peck centang cemetery was sprawling

with these huge ornate tombs. At least 30 meters broad, if you, there's about 33 yards, you know? 30 meters wide. A tomb like that could easily be bigger than a three bedroom HDB apartment today. And Mr. Kwan is describing just a single family grave. On top of that, Peck Sandthing had a lot of shared graves.

One big tombstone would mark a huge area where members of a professional or social group were buried together. At Peck Sandthing, there were plots for all sorts of groups. We have like the Taylor's Association, the Pock Cellars Association, the Opera's Shingles Association,

the, I mean, you name it. An ideal Chinese tomb is supposed to be on a hill so that the fortunes of the deceased can run down to future generations. In China and in the Chinese diaspora, the words hill and cemetery were pretty much used interchangeably. San of Pexanthang means hill.

The name translates to pavilions on the Jade Hills, a reference to the Graveyard's 12 covered structures where visitors could rest and eat after making offerings at the graves. Mr. Quan remembers these pavilions well, but that doesn't mean he knew his way around the graveyard. With all those grand tombs, the cemetery was enormous, 324 acres.

That's about four times the size of Disneyland. In a country half the size of LA. Sometimes the driver of the bus or the lorry bringing us there will lose his way. Then you drive around in the circle. We have to get some of the villagers to come out and guide us. When Mr. Kwan says they would get villagers to come out and guide them, he doesn't mean people from a nearby village. He means people who lived in the graveyard.

So people were kind of living among the tombstones, is that correct? Yes, yes, yes. Peck Sandthing was in, a cemetery full of life. It was a self-sufficient village that began almost a hundred years before Mr. Quon started visiting. When members of Singapore's growing Cantonese community realized they needed more space to bury their dead, they purchased land on what was then the edge of town. And as the cemetery grew, so did the village. An active graveyard meant there were jobs to be had. Graves had to be dug, tombstones carved,

refreshments sold to mourners, so people built thatched roof homes right there among the graves. This actually happened in a lot of big cemeteries that sprawled across the tiny island. The living just kind of lived alongside the dead. By the 1970s, Pexan Tang Village had almost 2,000 residents. There was a large Chinese-style gate

at the entrance to the village. The village had its own clinic, convenient stores with thatched in 10 roofs. There was a popular coffee shop and a dim sum eatery, and an open-air movie theater where people sat under their umbrellas to watch films in the rain. Many of the residents worked at a soy sauce factory in the village.

Livestock was reared, kids were born and families raised, all among graves. I used to hang around a coffee shop, run around, go play, play with mobiles, gamble. That's Mr. Lee. He just goes by Lee, and he grew up in Peckstanthang Village. Like kids anywhere else on the island, he climbed fruit trees and played hopscotch with his neighbors. His house was just a few houses over from the nearest gravestones.

Lee wasn't afraid to be living so close to the dead, but he did hear ghost stories. The old people said, everyone of them said, go stay, everywhere you go. There was a shallow well at Pavilion 3, where it was rumored many people died, pulled under by what Lee calls water ghosts. A tomb at Pavilion 5 boasted two large stone lions, and villagers would always complain that they came to life after dark and ate their chickens. But to Lee and other villagers,

Peck's entang was home. However, life in the cemetery was about to change. As the HDB built more and more housing forcing a poor's growing population, they realized they needed more land. The Prime Minister explained that, well, we don't have enough land for the living, or the dead must keep way to the living.

In 1973, the government said there'd be no more ground burial at over 70 cemeteries, including Pec's enthing. By 1974, those who died could only be buried at the single, more sterile government-run cemetery, 16 miles from the city center. Or for a fraction of the price, they could be cremated, their ashes scattered or stored in a small urn. These were huge cultural changes, not everyone was happy. But after the war and the nation's independence, a lot of Singaporeans were willing to make

sacrifices for the country's development. They acknowledged that burying people in big graves just wasn't sustainable on a tiny island. Also, they kind of had to go along with the changes. Singapore has really limited freedom of speech, so when the government tells you to do something, you don't have much choice. In 1978, it happened.

The Pecsanthang Cemetery Association received a letter from the government saying a new, high-rise public housing development was going to be built on the cemetery. Their land was being reclaimed. Now remember, there are basically two groups of people at Peckson thing, the dead and the living. And both were told they had four years to clear out. The people living in Peckson thing

were mostly relocated into new government housing nearby. But it took a while. A lot of the villagers weren't happy to leave, and they stayed as long as they possibly could. Sometimes years passed the deadline, the government gave them to move. As for the dead and the association of family members who represented them, they weren't eager to move either. The association wanted to find a way to keep a piece of their land.

But no, the law was pretty strict. No more land burial means no more land burial. So that was that. So they hired a lawyer and pleaded with the government to let them keep just 30 acres of their original 324, enough to have a temple and some administrative buildings and to cremate the dead and build a columnbarium, a building made to hold earns. That all of a sudden one fine day we received a letter. We wanted 30 acres and they wrote back to us and said, oh, we can only spare you 8 acres. So the committee met and decided 8 acres better than no acres.

8 acres was more than most cemeteries got. At least there would be room for a columbarium and a couple of other buildings. Still, a hundred thousand bodies would have to be dug up from the cemetery. It was a huge daunting task. We put advertisements in the newspaper, telling owners of common clear-out, so to speak. I mean, I hate to use a word,

but basically, they have to assume that swear. I might do use of it, but basically, they have to exume their grace. They wrote letters to the families, asking them to remove their dead loved ones from what was about to be a construction site. But as the deadline approached, only about half of Peck's sand things, 100,000 graves, had been unearthed. The association members were at a loss as to what to do with nearly 50,000 bodies still in the ground.

Who would pay to dig up the graves, cremate the bodies, and give them another resting place? The association explained their predicament to the housing and development board, who agreed to help them deal with the lingering dead, which is a fadding off the road. They told me 324 acres of our land. You see? The HDB and the Cemetery Association hired people from the village to dig up the bodies. People like Mr. Lee, the guy who grew up in the village at Peckson thing. Lee's mom, dad, and brother all dug up graves.

Lee would walk behind them carrying their spades and tools. He studied how they removed the heavy soil from the grave and carefully broke the coffin lid. Then he was ready to do it himself. The bones have sunken into the earth and you have to scrape, scrape, scrape with the spades to find the bones. Sometimes when the work is easy,

we may spend about an hour working on a tomb. When it is a hard job, you may take us three to four hours. At first, Lee was scared to dig. Any of the bodies were only just starting to decompose. This disease of guilty job, I'm not ashamed to say it. 73 criteria to be in this job. First, you have to have the guts, second, the strength, and third, the skill. So if you have no guts, there's no way you can do this job.

After going to work on the hill day in and day out, he got the guts. Lucy, those are things I can't even open it. When you are on the hill alone, it's futile to be frightened. You need to fulfill your application. Even if I'm frightened and alone, I still need to complete the job. And he did. After years of digging, the 100,000 bodies were all removed. The half that were unclaimed were cremated together and scattered at sea in a solemn ceremony. Like many other living members of Pexanthang, Lee and his family were re-housed in a nearby

HDBS state. For most of the villagers, the transition wasn't easy. Sure their housing was taken care of, but you couldn't have a farm in a high rise or a tombstone carving business without burial. Lee was lucky. He found work digging up other nearby cemeteries that were also getting repossessed. Peck's sand thing had been able to hold on to eight acres. It was more than most people got, but wasn't much. Going from a 324-acre cemetery to an 8-acre complex, with

a temple, an administration building, and a columbarium for urns, meant space had to be maximized. There was also the issue of design aesthetics. For most Chinese, the tradition was to bury in grand tombs like the ones at Pexanthang. When it came to building the columbarium to house the urns, there was no real model to harken back to. Columbariums were novel structures because the whole practice of cremation was pretty new to a lot of Chinese Singaporeans. Just 20 years earlier, only 10% of the country's Chinese population was cremated. But by the time Pexanthang wanted to build their Columbarium, that number was almost 70%.

Without much by way of architectural precedent for the columbarium, the Pexanthang Association took a gamble. They chose a somewhat controversial architect who cut his teeth designing brutalist superstructures, a modernist named Tay Kang soon. That project was an interesting moment for me because I've been thinking about the problem of how do you modernize and yet respect the traditions and the history and the aesthetics of the past. Mr. Tai didn't want to build a warehouse for the dead. That, he said, would be antithetical to the quote, nature loving and Feng Shui oriented ethos of Chinese burial. But there is a problem of how to accommodate the number of urns that had to be entered within the Columbia.

And so just like the housing and development board did when faced with the issue of overcrowding, Mr. Ta built up. From the outside, it almost looked like any other new multi-story construction for the living. Before the Colomberium opened in 1986, one newspaper said it could easily be mistaken for a flashy new condominium, but the inside was different. Mr. Tays' Colomberium stretches up over about nine different staggered levels. The building rises gently,

in a series of cascading stories and half-stories, forming cement hills, like traditional Chinese tombs. The large windows and skylit corridors made it sunny and airy. Earns line the walls, from floor to ceiling. There was a waiting list of over 20,000 earns from the cemetery ready to move into Pexantang, Colombarium. But nearby housing units for the living weren't so quick to get sold. As promised, those HDB flats were going up all over the grounds that were filled with that body just a couple years earlier.

They called the development Bishon, a Mandarin version of the Cantonese pecsan, or Jade Hills. The new Bishon development had everything the HDB imagined people needed. They opened a train stop, what Singapore calls, mass rapid transit or MRT. There were schools, malls, entertainment, and easy access to the city. In other words, it was an ideal place to live, except for one thing. The Ghosts. Newspapers wrote about ghost sightings in Bishan. The new MRT station there was known to be haunted by ghosts from the cemetery.

Like, apparently it was just common knowledge. Do you hear any stories? Yes, yes, yes. It was well known throughout the whole of the Bishan MRT station. Everybody tried to avoid getting off, they say, especially the last train at night. There were reports of a ghostly woman who boarded the last night train at Visan, and without fanfare, took off her head and put it on the seat next to her.

Some passengers were known to cast no reflection on the train windows. Many of the residents who did move in didn't want any additional reminders of their neighborhoods Macomb history. But one tangible piece of evidence remained. One of the cemetery's covered pavilions still stood near the new train station. Until the Peck-Santhing Association got a call from the Housing and Development Board about shadows. They say that the residents have been complaining that they see shadows and light around that

pavilion creepy ghostly shadows. What shadows are they talking about? I would like to stay one line there and see what are the shadows that come here. I mean, really, we were prepared to go there and bring a cup of coffee and stay one line there. I'm happy to meet these shadows. The HDB told them the pavilion would be demolished. The association knew they had no say. The government already owned the land.

They had to oblige, even if some of them weren't happy. They demolished it. To us in Picsanti was a setting. The last remaining structure of Pandia to be demolished. And with that, all the physical remnants from the graveyard were gone from the landscape. The cemetery was no longer a cemetery. It was a huge urban development, with a multi-story columnbarium that people could easily avoid if they wanted to. And people forgot, with time, Bishan became an appealing place to live.

Every Chinese are very pragmatic people. I think the economic demands overrised the spiritual demands. So to speak, I'm really less for that way. People just forget that this was a symmetry before. In fact, many of the younger generation didn't know of big something symmetry. Really, it was a still living on symmetry land. Many, many other Singaporeans live on old cemeteries, whether they know it or not. So many other cemeteries were cleared for development, and it's still going on right now.

Losing the cemeteries has forced a total 180 and how a lot of Singaporeans think about dying. When the first government crematorium opened in the early 60s, they did about four cremations a week. Now, more than 80% of Singaporeans get cremated when they die. Substantially more than in the US, where that number is just over 50%. And all of those traditions that people like Mr. Quanted, like burning offerings and having a feast at the grave, they've had to be way downsized to fit into the tight hallways of the Colombarians. Today Singapore has four government-run Colombariums, but Colombariums also don't meet everyone's needs because they only house cremated remains. Chinese are the ethnic majority in Singapore,

cremated remains. Chinese are the ethnic majority in Singapore, 75% of the population, and that country's Hindu community has long practiced cremation. But most of the country's large Malay community practices Islam, which doesn't permit cremation. So in 2007, the Singapore government implemented their new crypt burial system. It's a prefabricated series of interlocking concrete walls, like a deathly grid, assembled above ground, and then sunk into the earth. But you only get 15 years in your own grave, and then you have to be consolidated up to 16 bodies per grave. All this rearranging of the dead has been a painful change for a lot of Singaporeans. But there was also a widespread understanding that something had to give in order to get so many people their own homes on such a tiny island.

And let us be practical. I mean, symmetry do take a huge land space and then land space in my opinion must be sacrificed. And the Singaporean people did sacrifice, not just the land, but centuries of rituals and traditions for their dead, all to get homes for the living. This cultural shift happened without a lot of resistance from the Singaporean people, but that is changing. I will talk to Katie Thornton about that after the break. So I'm in the studio with Katie Thornton and I want to follow up on what things are like in Singapore today. Now that almost everyone has some form of housing, whether it be public or private.

Today there's a lot of infrastructure for the living, and there are only a few historic cemeteries left in the entire country, and all of them are slated to be developed. Oh, okay. So, like, it's still... They're still trying to take as much of that land as possible. Yeah, totally. So, like, there's one other cemetery that has actually been getting a lot of attention lately. It's called Bukit Brown Brown and it's another Chinese cemetery.

A lot of prominent early Chinese Singaporean business people and philanthropists are buried at Bukit Brown. There are a ton of those big ornate tombstones like the one Mr. Kwan described in Peck's sent thing at this site. And what are they going to do about those? Well, in 2011, the government announced that they're going to expand a highway right through the cemetery. And that highway opened earlier this year. They had to remove 4,000 graves and a lot of the tombstones were thrown away.

And just like at Peck's Scenting, the government said that they had to come and clear out the graves or the remains would be scattered at sea. But people actually got pretty upset. Like at this point, this is one of the only remaining cemeteries in the entire country. A bunch of volunteer historians that are advocating for the preservation of the site. They're leading tours, some academics got involved

and documenting the space. And it really spoke to people like, Roman, do you remember E-Hoon? Yes, she was the person that was in the piece that was a historian, but she saw ghosts when she was a kid. Yeah, totally, which she just mentioned very casually. But she actually wasn't a historian when the highway was announced.

She had this job at the time, she was working for a theater company and she was doing a lot of traveling around. And sometimes when she was traveling, she'd go and visit big, like famous destination, type of cemeteries. And when when she was traveling, she'd go and visit big, like famous destination, type of cemeteries. And when the road was announced, she was like, Hey, I've never been to Boogit Brown. Maybe I'll check it out. I mean, it's my own backyard. And then she went and it was like cut, scene change. She totally changed her career. And why was this the thing that really

made her want to change everything? What does she care so much? For some reason, it just didn't really sit well with her that people who never planned on being cremated and thrown into the sea might end up there. So she just wanted families to know if they had ancestors buried at Bukit Brown, because a lot of people had lost track. Right. So she quit her job and she put together all these family trees and then she'd cold call the descendants and tell them that a grave of, say, their great grandmother was going to be dug up. Right.

And there were graves where she was like so sure that you could find the descendants that she would talk to the government and be like, please wait, wait, like don't dig up this tomb yet. I can find the family. And then she would, and she'd stay in touch with them and help them throughout the whole process. She'd stand alongside the families as they dug the bodies up and move them elsewhere.

And she's still doing it. Even after the road opened earlier this year, she's still working to document the space. She's been living off her savings for eight years to do the work because she's worried that off her savings for eight years to do the work because she's worried that the rest of the cemetery is going to be developed and all of the history will be lost. But she does think that there was a time where maybe it made sense to develop

over these spaces to get living people's needs met. But the times are a little bit different now. Like I asked her, I asked Ihuun about Peck's Santeng, and I'll play you a little bit of tape about what she said. Yeah, at that point, at that point, definitely, I mean, you would go for having high-rise building to house the people rather than to have symmetry for the dead. Yeah, so like at that time, she definitely saw it as an exchange, a director's change between the living and the dead.

But she feels like times are kind of different now, like it might be possible to preserve some of the few old spaces on the island. So again, like this is what she said about that. There was a need for it before. Is there still that need now? You know, so it's like, if this is gone and erased, it is not replaceable and irreversible. We are talking about retaining a part of our heritage. Did your opinion about the role of cemeteries in life change. I think that cemeteries are these interesting and complicated historic sites. They're kind of an opportunity for people to inscribe their history onto the landscape. They're certainly like rife with exclusions as well. People have been excluded from cemetery spaces based on their race, based on their religion,

based on their class and their inability to access like a large tombstone. But I think they also present kind of an interesting opportunity to complicate history because they're kind of more accessible archives than a lot of our historic archives. 99% Invisible was produced so sweet by Katie Thornton and edited by Katie Mingle. Two Katie's.

Mixing tech production by Shereef Yusuf Music by Sean Rial. Kurt Colfsted is the digital director of the rest of the team is senior editor to Laney Hall, Avery Trouffman, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. Katie Thornton is a full-bright national geographic, digital storytelling fellow who makes audio and writing about how and where we remember the dead in our changing world. Her project is called Death in the Digital Age and you can find it online at itscadythornton.com or on Instagram at itscadythornton. All this week on Instagram,

she'll be posting some images from in and around Pexanthang and sharing stories from Singapore's changing memorial landscape. Voice over by Mike Goe from Ageless Theatre, special thanks to Koo-Ee Hoon for historical guidance. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent

collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show in join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. But we have a calm burial full of design stories, both audio and visual at 99PI.org. Radio tapio. From PRX. From PRX.