Born in Joo Chiat.
Raised by Katong.
A true-blue Katong Boy - then, now, always
The beginning
My story begins at a shophouse in Joo Chiat - not just any shophouse, but the kind that smelled of camphor balls, dried herbs, and the faint sweetness of preserved plums. My father ran a provision shop there. As a child, I watched him weigh out cooking ingredients on worn brass scales, extend credit to neighbours he'd known for decades, and keep going even as the world changed around him. Down the road, my great-uncle's TCM shop filled the air with the slow perfume of boiled roots and dried bark - medicine that came in paper packets twisted by hand, prescribed with the quiet authority of a man who had memorised ten thousand remedies.
"Joo Chiat wasn't just a neighbourhood to me. It was a living thing - a community that breathed together, ate together, and looked out for one another."
A childhood painted in colour
I grew up on streets that were themselves works of art. Koon Seng Road's candy-coloured Peranakan terrace houses. The elaborate ceramic tiles of Joo Chiat. The faded elegance of Amber Road. On either side of our shophouse lived a patchwork of lives: the aunty at the salon who knew everyone's business, the laundry uncle whose pole of hanging shirts became a kind of neighbourhood flag, the textile shop that smelled of new cotton, the furniture shop where you'd argue over rosewood dining sets, the kopitiam downstairs where kopi-o came in iconic, thick-walled porcelain cups with saucer and the uncles read Lianhe Zaobao cover-to-cover.
I walked to the now-defunct Mountbatten Primary School in blue shorts and canvas shoes. On the weekends, the whole world was East Coast - bicycle tyres humming on the underpasses, the squeak of badminton rackets and the thwack of table tennis at the backyard of our Tembeling Road shophouse, where I lived for ten good years before coming home to Joo Chiat again.
Food is memory
If you want to know who I am, start with what I eat. Nyonya kueh in the morning - pandan-scented, coconut-sweet, wrapped in banana leaf. A bowl of Katong laksa so good you forget to talk. Char kway teow from a hawker whose wok hei could wake the dead. Nyonya chang during the festival season, each dumpling a labour of love. Rojak tossed in a dark, sweet, pungent sauce that somehow made everything better. And then - the curry puffs from the food truck that materialised like clockwork, and wanton mee from a peddler who wheeled his cart down Joo Chiat Road just as school let out. These were not meals. They were rituals. They were Katong.
"Before my GCE O-Level and A-Level exam results were released, I would walk to the Church of the Holy Family and pray. Some things you don't leave to chance alone."
Why I do what I do
I have watched Katong change in ways that thrill me and, honestly, sometimes break my heart a little. The demolitions. The new developments rising where old friends used to stand. Families moving in, families moving out. I have seen the bars give way to brunch cafes, the hostels become boutique hotels, and the textile shops become co-working spaces. Change is not the enemy - I understand that. But someone needs to remember what came before, and someone needs to care about what comes next.
That someone is me. All my life - from the boy reading SuperHero comics at Katong Shopping Centre, to the young man sweating through O-levels, to the person I am today - I have called this corner of Singapore home. Which means when I help you find a home here, or anywhere in Singapore, I am not just doing a transaction. I am extending the only thing I know how to do: take care of my neighbourhood, and the people in it.
You don't just get an agent. You get a Katong Boy who knows every tile, every lane, every story - and who will give yours the attention it deserves.