Sportade, anyone?

Posted by ershadtjy under Uncategorised
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This picture struck me as interesting because it portrays the history of Singapore in a subtle way (where you have to infer deeply to find out more), and has a touch of daily life in it.

It depicts a laborer buying a drink from a Chinese drinks stall. This occurred during the 20th century and you can find the postcard with this picture on it among the NHB collections in the National Museum of Singapore.

In this picture, I can see a shirtless man standing in front of a Chinese Drinks stall. His ribs are poking out from under his skin yet he has an excellent physique. He does not have the telltale potbelly of the rich, therefore I can infer that he works as a laborer of some sort.
His long pants are rolled up to his knees, presumably to allow his body to cool of faster, so I can tell that he has been working for pretty long. This hints at the hard work that these laborers have to put in everyday, so I’m guessing that the period that this picture was taken was during the period after World War II, when Singapore had begun repairing damaged houses and building new roads and streets.
Since the laborer is buying a drink from this stall, I can infer that the drink sold here is “supposed” to have Chinese medicinal properties to make the body stronger or something like that. Knowing that the war had just ended, there is no way that the Chinese lady in the picture would have been able to buy ingredients such as bird’s nest for the drink. I think that most street hawkers, like her, are simply swindling the general population of their hard-earned money to recuperate losses sustained during the war.