Image credits:
Jon Enoch
“I like that the money is immediate in this business, with every transaction. I don’t have to wait for payments and cheques. And I have the freedom to close shop if I want and rest.”
“This grass has power, come let me show you!” Jason said earnestly, his eyes twinkling. He opened a box that sparsely contained what looked like dried grass, blackened strands that look almost like insect feelers. Almost impulsively, he took two and wet them with his tongue, then placed them in front of me. True to what he claimed, the grass started twitching and moving like they were alive. They are called Buluh Perindu and just one of the many weird “magic items” that Jason sells.
Back in Sungei Road, the free market that hosted hundreds of secondhand goods and amulet vendors, he was well-known as the guy who sold the stones he claimed were made out of elephant sperm. His is a stall that would make the average non-believer recoil away, but his loyal clientele from varied backgrounds, which include lawyers and doctors, has kept him in the business for over 20 years.
He was about to go into the elephant sperm stones again, but I told him we had this conversation before, and I wanted to know more about how he got into the trade today. I was surprised that he opened up quite readily.
Born Peranakan to a staunch roman catholic family, he admits that he was not a good student in school, and perhaps the strict school environment gravitated him toward the band culture in swinging 60s and 70s. Starting out as a roadie, he eventually became stage manager at Neptune Theatre, one of only two venues in Singapore at the time that hosted topless burlesque shows.
“But look, I am just doing this because I enjoy it. I have been married to only one woman my whole life and my kids are all grown up and working good jobs.” He said this, perhaps to vindicate himself from any presumption I may have of him.
And it is fair to be concerned, Jason belongs to a group of men and women who are easily misunderstood. Setting up shops in seedy areas with the cheapest rent, with uncategorised wares piled to the ceilings, and amulets shaped in all kinds of ominous and scandaolous forms, it is easy to dismiss them as misfits, obstinate relics who refuse to get with the times.
But are they?
For Cindy, who has been selling secondhand goods for 7 years, she sees her work as something of value. She provides low-income clients, be it local or foreign workers, a place to purchase cheap preloved items. “The foreign workers like this (takes out a waist pouch) and backpacks! And they can get good quality things from me, sometimes the things people throw away can be valuable to someone else, I like the feeling of being able to recycle these items.”
Prior to this, she had worked a full-time job and helped her sister bring up her children. When the children grew up, she found herself at crossroads, what should she do with her life?
Sungei Road Market was a rent-free market that anyone could sign up and sell in. So she started collecting used items from her network of friends to resell there, and has not looked back since. Not even after the market was closed by the authorities and she had to start paying rent for a space.
“I like that the money is immediate in this business, with every transaction. I don’t have to wait for payments and cheques. And I have the freedom to close shop if I want and rest.”
“But this is not for everyone, you have to like the job.” she reminds me, as she busies herself with her goods, putting back a stack of trousers she had taken out to show a customer.
“FREEDOM.” Repeats Botak, the chief tenant at the Sungei Greenhub in Kelantan Lane. That’s the one word he uttered when I asked why he persisted in this trade.
His shop is teeming with old vintage goods – exquisite old gramophones, a harmonium, peranakan baskets and wild pieces of décor art, each with a story of their own no doubt. But he actually started in Sungei Road selling rare banknotes and coins which he collected as a hobby in his youth.
When Sungei Market closed down, he moved around with pasar malams and flea markets, looking for a good fit for his passion, and finally found a place he could settle in with the Greenhub project that was started by a group of volunteers. He started selling vintage items that he had kept at home, as he saw there was a market for it.
At Kelantan Lane, you will see the vendors in their various cliques, having a chat, exchanging goods and having a drink in the coffeeshop next door where many former vendors would still hang out at. It is more than a shop, if you hang around long enough and strike up an honest conversation with them, it is a refuge, a routine, a place where they hold their own against a fast paced nation quick to tell them to move on, or be left behind.
Some are rebels right from the start like Jason and Botak, others like Cindy saw the merit in a simpler life of buying and selling, and see nothing in the perceived hardships of the work. A trade-off perhaps, for the freedom she enjoys from running her own stall.
Mr Lee, an amulet vendor with a quiet and disarming disposition, describes the trade and the people as part of a lifestyle he cannot get in any other job. He too had suffered bad health in his life and needed something that was flexible. He now sells his wares more as a past-time. “Or else do what? Stay at home also boring.” He would say. He’d been outspoken in the campaign to save Sungei Road from closure, and a familiar face and voice in many interviews. Even in our conversation at the Greenhub, he continues to express his wish for the government to issue them a piece of low rent space in a central area, where their market can restore its former glory. A speech he has made so many times, it now rolls off his tongue with such eloquence, clarity and fire.
I could not help but smile at he and his fellow vendors devotion to their business and Sungei Road Market. But I also quietly lamented at how it is a story that is becoming harder and harder to tell.
Maybe some will find little relevance in the stories of wrinkled, gruff and weathered karang gunis (rag and bone men/women). But I beg to differ. These are entrepreneurs, mavericks, philosophers and independent thinkers who dare to go against the grain and consider not just what they wallet needs, but what their spirit needs. And by staying still in what they hold dear, they are making a bigger statement than moving on.
You can pay a visit to the vendors at a few locations:
