Real Hawkers don’t stay at one place

Posted by noelbynature under Food, Lifestyle
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One of the lasting nuggets of information that remain with me from secondary school English lessons was a lesson my teacher taught me about ‘Hawker Centres’ - The term is a misnomer because the word ‘hawker’ means someone who sells his or her wares while travelling from place to place; so the act of hawking really involves some sort of travelling. My English teacher would say that a hawker centre would be an area where street vendors would walk around selling all sorts of goods, and not just settlements of permanent food stalls. Our modern food courts and food centres certainly evolved from earlier hawker centres, which were just a collection of hawkers at one spot.

Street Hawker in Georgetown, Penang

Edward Williams remembers some of the street hawkers that roam the Sembawang Hills Estate in the 1960s:

Today many families buy their fresh food from supermarkets. In the 60’s we got our meat, fish and vegetables from Hum Min who lived in the village at the back of our estate. Each morning he’d push his 3-wheel cart along the estate selling not only fresh meat but also some preserved foodstuffs like tan chye or chye poh. Everything you purchased was wrapped in old newspaper. My mother loved to haggle with Hum Min over his prices. It was a friendly “battle” between vendor and customer each day. Hum Min also operated on a credit system – all transactions were noted in a small notebook and payments were made at the end of the month.

Singapore’s bid to clean up the streets in the 70s saw the eventual phasing out of street hawkers, although in Malaysia they are still widespread: think the Ramly Burger cart, or even high-tech versions such as the lorries that have the cargo area converted into a travelling steamboat, satay celup. For Singapore, alas, it seems like street hawkers are just a memory that you can revisit here.

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