Searching for the Old Singapore In Kebun Baru

Singapore's modernity has a way of making you forget that only four decades ago one of the city-state's most-striking feature was its kampongs, not its glass and steel high rises. In the 1960s, Singapore was a very different place. Orchard Road was full of shophouses, not malls. The heartlands had actual wood and thatched roof villages, not modern condo communities.

It's this, the old Singapore of our parents and grandparents, that drew me to Kebun Baru, in the middle class residential neighborhood of Ang Mo Kio. The neighborhood, AMK by most Singaporeans, isn't home to the city's last remaining kampong—that's Lorong Buangkok, a mere five kilometers or so away. But Kebun Baru is home to a part of kampong culture that will probably outlive the modest homes of Lorong Buangkok—song birds.

Song birds, each of them in ornate wooden cages, sang out from their perches high atop more than 400 curved poles. Some of the cages were as high as six meters above the ground. Others, the ones housing younger song birds, were closer to the ground, hung half-way down the pole.

This is the Kebun Baru Birdsinging Club—a neighborhood institution that's helping keep Singapore's song bird culture alive. That's because keeping song birds is about more than just the birds themselves. There's a social aspect to the hobby. The birds need to spend time outside with other birds, a fact that makes parks like this something of a social club.

"If you just keep them at home and never take them out, if you don't put them on these kinds of poles, then they never sing," explained William Chua, 63. "Some birds only sing if there are other birds singing. They sing to each other."

Chua arrived at the park before sunrise, taking his 15 doves out for "training." He's been keeping birds for more than 20 years, taking the time to dote on them and keep them happy once he retired. Before birds, Chua was into the horse races, he said.

"This is sort of a culture, the culture of the Malays and Singaporeans from back when they were young and playing with birds," he told me from his perch on a bench near his birds. "Back in the kampong times, you could hang out a lot. Now, if you're living in an HBD flat, there's no place to hang so many birds."

Chua himself never lived in a kampong. He was raised in a detached home and continues to live in one today. But all around him, the city-state rose skyward as the government build massive apartment blocks and towers. Today, as much as 80 percent of Singaporeans live in government-owned public housing, or HBD flats. These apartments leave little room for song bird culture, a fact that makes the hobby of Chua and his fellow bird keepers something of a throwback to the older days.

"There's definitely a bit of nostalgia to it," said Terence Chong, a historian and the deputy director of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. "And that's a healthy sign. That helps the old people socialize."

Song bird clubs allow Singaporeans with similar backgrounds to hang out and bond over a shared interest, Dr. Chong told me. In Indonesia, my own homeland, song birds are a symbol of class and maturity. Most song bird enthusiasts are already retired, so they have the time to dote over their birds. The scene in Singapore is pretty much the same, Dr. Chong explained.

"I think it's a very Asian thing," he told me.

The Kebun Baru Birdsinging Club and its ilk also offer people a way to connect to their own pasts in a city-state that has a habit of changing at a rapid pace. These song bird clubs remind them of a simpler time when Singapore was an innocent and comfortable place. This nostalgia isn't exactly true. The `60s were a tumultuous time for the young nation, a time of race riots and tensions with its much bigger neighbors.

"In Singapore everything changes," Dr. Chong explained. "You are ensured to anticipate challenges. It's a very anxious style of living. So I think this nostalgia has its roots in modern-day anxieties."

I followed Chua back to his red brick home in a upper-middle class housing development. As I sipped on sweet drinks and ate some Chinese New Year cakes, I asked him if people my age would ever be interested in raising song birds themselves.

"The difference before and after independence is that now we have to pay a lot," Chua told me. "The cost of living is also very high in Singapore. That's why after my generation, the younger people have stopped playing with birds. They can just play their smartphones and they're OK."

We teamed up with Uber and Canon because we know that even when the desire for foreign adventure is strong, it's so hard to break from the familiar back home. Uber's passenger data showed that young urbanites revisit the same places over and over again.

So what happens when you break out of this rut and head out for a photowalk? That's exactly what we were interested in finding out. Check out our stories behind some of the best, but least visited, spots in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.