Singapore’s boisterous little street
Posted by noelbynature under Heritage Sites and Trails, Lifestyle
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If you were looking for a wild and fun time in the 60s and 70s, where would you go? Ask any British serviceman working in Singapore at the time, and the unanimous answer would be Bugis Street.
Peter Chan shares with us what was the drag queen central of Singapore:
How did I get to know Bugis Street? Back in the early 1960s, occasional Saturday night outings were a prevailing family practice - my father and my Tai Pak (eldest paternal uncle) took our grandparents out, each person taking turns to pick up the tab. Bugis Street was one of the places we went. There were street food stalls and in some places there were Chinese restaurants with open-air dining at the roof-top terraces. To get a feel of the ambience, you take a walk down the alleys of Lockhart Road in Hong Kong and look up those three-storey buildings. If you are lucky you might catch a glimpse of roof-top terraces in old black & white Hong Kong movies.
As we made our way through the crowd, we kept looking at those tall heavily made-up ladies, some standing and some seated on the laps of Royal Navy sailors. My auntie cautioned us to stay close to the adults otherwise we would be kidnapped by those “aunties”. Whilst the adults enjoyed the sumptuous Cantonese meals of suckling piglet, shark’s fin soup and Hor Yip Fan (lotus leaf rice), my cousins and I had better ideas. Here we were up on some “skyscraper” looking at the skyline and the streets below.
A generation ago, Bugis Street was synonymous with nightlife, street food and ladyboys. Today, there is little to hint about the raunchiness and revelry that took place in the streets, but we have Peter’s recollection Peep! Peep! Bugis Street to remind us.
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Posted by: malcolmyoung91
Posted on: July 2nd, 2010
Some great video footage of Bugus Street - both unfortunatey very bried - were incorporated into 2 movies that were filmed entirely in Singapore in the 1970s. The first is GI Executioner (1971), and the other, the more well known Saint Jack in 1978. I regret not being boen 20 years earlier so I could have experienced what it was actually like. Even my father's cousin, who used to visit Singapore regularly in the 1960s and 1970s, used to love telling me stories of Bugis Street. She used to rave about eating at a place known as "Fatties" - I even found quite a good photo of this restaurant (although it may have not been in Bugis Street, perhaps it was in Victoria Street) in a 1970s book written about SE Asia. This restaurant (I can't recall the proper name) is still around today, although it has moved location (can't quite remember where, but in that vicinity).
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