Building on collective memories to build a community

Since then, Li Yong has channelled his passion into his profession. As a heritage consultant and researcher, he is the Executive Director of My Community, a civic society he co-founded in 2010 to document social memories, celebrate civic life, and champion community arts and heritage (see box). Of the initiatives he spearheads, My Community’s guided tours of Queenstown have had an impact on the greatest number of people. Since 2010, more than 30,000 people — over 80 per cent of whom are locals — have gone for the tours. The popularity of the tours soared particularly in 2015, due to external factors. The death of Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and SG50 made people reflect about the past and its importance. Li Yong says: “It made Singaporeans realise that there are a lot of stories, sights and places in Singapore. These could be demolished overnight without the majority of us knowing, and it made people feel for the past.”

Building on the nostalgia for the past in Queenstown, he also started ‘Museum@My Queenstown’, what could well be Singapore’s first independent community museum in Queenstown in February this year. The museum is located on the site of a bakery and saloon that closed its doors after serving the community for over four decades, and it took My Community many years to plan and collect items for it. These include 30 artefacts, 1,500 photographs, 200 archival documents and 100 oral history records.

Li Yong and his team even painstakingly assembled some of these items, such as bowling pins and a neon “Queensway” sign from the once-popular Queenstown cinema and bowling centre that had been set to be demolished. Though the team started out without a ready pool of funds, it managed to raise more than S$250,000, mostly from residents, businesses and religious institutions located in Queenstown, including Tiong Ghee Temple, Sri Muneeswaran Temple and Faith Methodist Church.

REMEMBERING THE PAST BEFORE IT’S GONE

The work done by Li Yong and his team has brought the Queenstown community closer together via inter-generational bonding. Many of his volunteers are youths who have now been given the chance to listen to stories about the past from the elderly in Queenstown. Because about 7,000 residents are now moving out from the area as part of a Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme, he and a team of young volunteers have been busy with a cultural project. It aims to piece together an interactive map filled with stories from residents, their old photos and oral history interviews, of life in the area in the 1960s. For the past 18 months, these volunteers have been dropping in at the elderly residents’ homes once every fortnight to befriend them and capture their stories.

He says: “Befriending is the raw form of heritage, and it is tied up in the stories and meanings behind tangible things like places. This helps the youth to connect to the community and gives them a sense of place and identity.” It has also boosted business in the area. Since the guided tours were started in Queenstown, more people have been coming to the area, spending money at the hawker stalls and shops. He feels that youths are taking a pro-active stance in promoting culture and heritage: “More young Singaporeans have joined civic societies and non-profit organisations with the aim of contributing to the preservation of our cultural heritage. My Community has grown ten-fold since 2015.”

Li Yong has a five-year plan to grow the guided tours. “It takes a long time for heritage to be ingrained in people’s minds, it has to be sustained and continuous,” he says. He plans for My Community to involve more youths in its heritage efforts and to move the museum to a bigger space at Block 30A Margaret Drive. He is also working on setting up two more community museums in Bukit Merah. He says: “Young people are mobile, have access to technology and are familiar with different ways of documenting and presenting information. For a start, if you are a youth and you think your neighbourhood is important, start documenting stories and interacting with people now. All the places we see today might not be around in the next 20 to 30 years.”