If you’ve moved from the house that you grew up in, you might have experienced a feeling of nostalgia every time you pass by your old house. Whether the building is still standing or not, you’d make comparisons with the surrounding landscape and try to understand what has changed – trails that you used to walk, people who were associated with street corners, stores that used to be there… It’s almost like a specific kind of nostalgia that should have its own word for it. yg experiences this kind of nostalgia when talking about his old house in Upper Dickson Road.
yg writes:
when it came to housing, most people would upgrade but we actually down-graded. that is, if you consider moving from an urban area to a rural one as some kind of retrogression. when i was born, we lived in a brick house at upper dickson road. a few years later, we moved to an attap house in the now defunct kampong chia heng. the above picture shows the 2-storey house in which we stayed for a few years.
today, the area has not changed much but the ownership and occupancy have changed hands. in the 60s, there were more chinese households in this area. quite a number of them were stall-holders at the nearby old tekka market. today, most of the owners and occupants of the houses are indians. back in those days, we did have indian neighbours but they were in the minority.
You can read more about yg’s first abode here.
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