Chances are, if you’re residing in Singapore, your family would have migrated here within the last three or four generations of your family’s history. Have you had a chance to learn how your family came to make Singapore home? Try asking your parents and grandparents for their story; or take a page from Herryanto Siatono, who wrote about his grandparent’s migration from China to Indonesia.
My grandparents migrated from China on a boat in the late 1930s. Grandma said they were still a kid, and they were running away from war.They landed on a small village, southern east-coast of Sumatra. They got married in their teen, she has 11 children, 9 daughters and 2 sons. I always find it amusing whenever I told anyone about how many children they have, well, enough to form a soccer team.
You can read the rest of Herryanto’s story here, but here’s a challenge for you over the coming holiday season – how about sharing your own family migration stories; about how your parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents came to Singapore? If your families didn’t migrate here that recently, how was life here back then?
Tags: Migration stories



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