Hawker Culture in Singapore

Ryan
Most people around the world conceive of hawkers as itinerant, transient, and they move from place to place. So, I think for example Mexico and Malaysia, or Thailand. Okay, when you go to the streets of Bangkok. People are flanking the streets selling… 

Jimmy
They have kiosks, they’re pushing them about. 

Ryan
Yeah. Sometimes they don’t even have a kiosk, they have a basket. They carry their basket around, or they sit on the streets. But I think for most Singaporeans, and especially the younger generations, “hawkers” means something completely different. When I think of hawker, I think of a hawker centre, something that’s very formalised, very institutionalised and very clean. 

And Singapore has made that journey from being itinerant, informal in some sense, to a hawking culture that is very formalised. And this is a very intentional move, informed by the circumstances of Singapore throughout our history. 

[Music playing] 

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past. Some familiar, others forgotten, all fascinating. 

Chicken rice, mee siam, roti prata. Hawker food is one of the best things about life in Singapore. Hawkers, hawker food and hawker centres are part of what makes Singapore so unique. Hawker culture is so important to us that we succeeded in having it inscribed on UNESCO’s list of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage. 

That’s all well and good, but have you ever stopped to think? What exactly is a hawker? When you say hawker in Singapore, you think of a person selling cooked food in a place called a hawker centre, where a lot of other people are selling cooked food. The food is tasty and perhaps, more importantly, it’s affordable. However, if you consult a dictionary, the definition you’ll find doesn’t really match what we see in Singapore. 

The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines a hawker as a person who goes from place-to-place selling goods. Wikipedia says a hawker is a vendor of merchandise that is easily transported. In both these definitions, mobility is a key concept. However, hawker centres are the opposite of mobile, and that’s perhaps the first clue that the word hawker is used differently in Singapore compared to other places where at least today, it is used differently compared to other places. 

Here to tell us all about hawker and hawker culture is the aptly named Ryan Kueh. Ryan is the author of From Streets to Stalls, which traces the evolution of hawkers in Singapore, starting all the way back in the 14th century. He has a bachelor’s degree from Yale-NUS, and a master’s degree from Tsinghua University under the Schwarzman Scholars programme. Research is a particular passion of his. 

Welcome to the show, Ryan. How have you been? 

Ryan
Hi Jimmy, thank you for welcoming me to the show. I’ve been well. Looking forward to sharing my thoughts on hawker culture. And as you’ve introduced, I think Singaporeans conceive of hawkers quite differently to most people around the world and I’m very glad to share more about that. 

Jimmy
Okay, I’d like you to perhaps tell me then, how is it that in Singapore we have this concept of hawker and hawker centres, but that’s different from everywhere else. 

Ryan
I think that’s a great question. I think as you rightly pointed out, most people around the world conceive of hawkers as itinerant, transient, and they move from place-to-place. So I think for example Mexico and Malaysia, or Thailand. Okay, when you go to the streets of Bangkok. People are flanking the streets selling – 

Jimmy
They have kiosks, they’re pushing them about. 

Ryan
Yeah. Sometimes they don’t even have a kiosk, they have a basket. They carry their basket around, or they sit on the streets. But I think for most Singaporeans, and especially the younger generations, “hawkers” means something completely different. When I think of hawker, I think of a hawker centre, something that’s very formalised, very institutionalised and very clean. 

And Singapore has made that journey from being itinerant, informal in some sense, to a hawking culture that is very formalised. And this is a very intentional move, informed by the circumstances of Singapore throughout our history. 

And I think that was what the book was trying to elucidate. I think the most unique thing is how these different hawker evolution has come to let Singaporeans conceive of it as a culture? It’s something that is uniquely Singaporean, and I think especially for a small country like ourselves, that’s extremely important. 

Jimmy
Okay. I want to get back to that evolution in a bit, but what I was really fascinated to find is that you start off your history of hawker culture or hawkers in Singapore by going back to the 14th century. And I didn’t know where the fossils of char kway teow were found on Fort Canning. How did you do that? 

Ryan
Unfortunately, there were no fossils of char kway teow or chicken rice in the 14th century. But I think what I really wanted to challenge was the idea that currently, in common parlance, we conceive of hawkers as starting during the colonial era. And I wanted to see whether that could be challenged and whether we could go further back. 

And the way I did this was to relook the pre-conditions of hawking. What were the conditions that encouraged hawkers to be present in a polity. And I think I found three conditions. The first condition was transient travelers and merchants looking to trade. 

Two was a local market that facilitated trade and three is some currency. So I think looking back at Singapore’s history, Temasek, that empire that existed in Singapore during the 13th, 14th century, seems to fit those pre-conditions. It was very intertwined regional trade. It routinely hosted Arab and Chinese visitors. And literary sources from Sejarah Melayu, Wang Dayuan points to how there was indeed a marketplace in Temasek and that’s fascinating. How they used currencies to trade in Singapore. It could be Sri Lankan coins. We also found cowries, which is a form of seashell. 

Jimmy
Okay, so there was money. There was a kind of market and I think there were transient travelers or traders but the transient element, why is that important? 

Ryan
I think a transient element is tremendously important because if you think about an empire, if they [were] hosting dignitaries or ambassadors, they usually would go out to the market and buy their food but what you really needed was, I would say, a class of individuals who would not be hosted and who had to go out and buy food in inns or restaurants, that might happen. In that formalisation, they could have been hawkers themselves. So I think the transient element is very important. 

Jimmy
Okay, you’re really extrapolating from environmental conditions to say, well, makes sense, and I agree with you. I mean, a bunch of people, they come on their ships. They need to eat something. They don’t have a lot of money, maybe. Restaurants are full because they check their Google Maps and they say, “Oh, this is like a really good restaurant, but everybody goes, I don’t want to go there”. And so, an economy springs up around providing food for these people. But down into the 19th century, we actually have colonial records of people recording this in action. People springing up, the ones paying them. They see a gap in the market and they go and fill it. It wasn’t necessarily welcomed during the colonial period. You want to talk about that? 

Ryan
I think hawking during the colonial times wasn’t really welcomed for two main reasons. I think first is because they provided a lot of administrative challenges. For example, they would challenge public health. I think hawkers back then weren’t the cleanest. They would improperly dispose of waste, they would use one water source to cook your bak chor mee and wash it and use the same water source to wash your dishes and then cook your bak chor mee again. 

Jimmy
That’s why it tasted so good. 

Ryan
Perhaps that’s why the food used to taste better. No, I’m joking but yes, I think it was linked to cholera, typhoid and varying degrees of public health issues and this was even exacerbated by the fact that people weren’t inoculated back then. 

I think the second issue was urban discipline. They would flank the streets. There weren’t really any licensing or hawker centres back then and they would go where the crowd was, and this was usually at the docks. This really caused a lot of administrative challenges. It caused congestion for both people and motor vehicles. And from the administration’s perspective, those were a few headaches for them. But I think it is also important to understand the drivers of why people went into hawking. At the end of the day, there were a lot of immigrants, especially when they came to Singapore looking for a job or vocation. 

There were a lot of males of working age, and when they couldn’t find a job, I think hawking was usually one of the easiest transitory vocations to go into. For example, [if] I were a bricklayer and the jobs closed or it was a contract job, I could buy a wok and sell some stuff on the streets and when I found a job, I could move on again. So, it’s a very low barrier of entry vocation and that’s what made it so appealing. 

Jimmy
Not much capex required. 

Ryan
Not much capex required and at that time, not much tax. 

Jimmy
The thing is, however, even though they were obviously a nuisance and clearly you were describing how the hawker was using the same water, cholera would spread wildly but at the same time, these hawkers were meeting a need, weren’t they? 

Ryan
Yes, they were meeting a huge need. I think largely to provide affordable food to many people. A lot of the immigrants were single males. They didn’t have family in Singapore. 

They wouldn’t have agriculture, they wouldn’t be fishing. And they would need to meet their sustenance needs outside. When you're working at the docks, hawkers congregate around the breakfast, lunchtime period. And they really sold cheap food for most of these labourers. In some sense, hawkers were really fundamental in incentivising and encouraging that economy to go along. 

Jimmy
Because if you don’t have food, you’re not going to be able to work. 

Ryan
Yeah. So, they were selling to the labourers, the clerks, the coolies and they stood as a very important part of society back then. 

Jimmy
Okay. And maybe can you tell us a little bit about why the colonial government struggled to control them? I mean you couldn’t give them licences and get the police to chase them? 

Ryan
That’s what they did. A large part of it was getting the police to chase hawkers around and outside of the areas that were very congested. I think the administration had issues because they were not large enough, that’s one. I think running the colonial ports and hawkers was not on their minds. There wasn’t any legislation, actually. Hawkers were not registered, given that they were informal. There was likely also a transient problem to some extent. 

The municipal government outsourced the issue to the police. The first legislation really only came about in 1907 and back then it only covered night hawkers. Day hawkers would be running around and it wasn’t technically illegal. That law only extended to day hawkers in 1919. There might not have been a ton of colonial policemen running around. There’s estimated about maybe around 20 to 30,000 hawkers back then. I don’t think they would be efficient enough to administer any legislation. 

Jimmy
Things changed after independence? 

Ryan
This hawker issue ran about for quite some time, even throughout World War II and after post-World War II as well. But I think post-independence, there was a huge push to reform Singapore. And alongside that reform came hawkers as well. 

I think, economically, hawkers were very important because they represented individuals that could be upskilled. The one hawker, one licence policy exemplifies that you actually could not get a hawker licence if you were below 40 years old. And so in the 1970s, if you went to the Ministry of Environment then and said, “I want to be a hawker”, they would actually turn you away and say, “Oh, let me refer you to MOM instead”. And you could be upskilled and go into a productive industry. 

Jimmy
And what was the reason for that? 

Ryan
I think the reason was that they wanted to keep hawking as a social need only. So only perhaps if you could not be upskilled, only if you had some social circumstance, then you could continue being a hawker. But I think the government line was that there’s a lot of people in hawking and perhaps they could be “repurposed” in some ways that could contribute to Singapore’s economic boom then. 

Jimmy
But what enabled the government post-independence to succeed when the colonial government could not? 

Ryan
One was really bureaucratic strength and sophistication. I think the Lee Kuan Yew government really saw the importance of having a strong bureaucracy. And this came in the form of specific legislations that governed hawking operations. 

You have, for example, the Environmental Protection Health Act 1969, or the Sale of Food Act 1973, and that really set the guardrails and frameworks of how hawking should have been conducted. Second is bureaucratic size. The Hawkers Department was a department within the Ministry of Environment. They grew the Hawkers Department by almost two to three times in enforcement size. It was huge. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

Ryan
I think within four to five years. 

Jimmy
That’s a sign that they were serious about enforcement. 

Ryan
Yes. They were serious on enforcement and they were very serious about policy and planning as well. You had specific divisions within the hawker department looking at hawker centre policy and hawker policy, relocation policy and it really showed the intentionality in trying to solve the hawker problem. 

Jimmy
So there’s a focus in a way that perhaps there wasn’t there before to solve this problem. 

Ryan
Yes, there was a focus and there was will. And I think that was the changing factor between pre-independence and post-independence. 

Jimmy
Okay. Now I want to talk about hawker centres – and this goes back to what you were saying from the beginning. So, hawker centres are actually pretty unique to Singapore. You can go to a hawker centre and you can eat in a relatively clean environment. It’s got a wide variety of food and it’s not expensive. It’s pretty affordable and this is pretty unique. 

Ryan
Yes. It is tremendously unique. I think nowhere else in the world you have such, I think highly engineered infrastructure meant for hawkers and I think Singapore did it at scale as well. I think the initial idea was to move hawkers off the streets, to formalise them to some extent. 

I think they knew that hawkers were very important to society. They provided cheap food. It was also a vocation to undertake if they couldn’t fit into productive society for different reasons. And hawker centres really help to channel that and set guard rules for how hawkers could have been conducted. 

And I think that was the original intention. And then, as public housing came along, the hawker centre was built to serve public housing estates as well. And now we’ve seen hawker centres become a culture as well. A culture, but also an instrument of redistribution to some extent. 

Jimmy
Really, what do you mean? 

Ryan
For example, in Singapore, it is still quite astounding to get street food at 2 to 3 Singapore dollars or maybe even like 1 to 2 US dollars. And that is not a phenomenon that you can see in other developed countries. 

This is precisely [why] I think hawkers are very unique, because they’re built on government land. It’s built by the government, run by the government, and this allows them to annex some kind of rent control, and they pass on to the customers eventually. For example, a lot of the legacy hawkers that were relocated in the 1970s, they’re still paying the same rent, actually. So some of the hawkers, now – 

Jimmy
Oh my goodness. 

Ryan
– they’re paying maybe S$150, $200 per month. And that’s why some hawkers can still sell the food at S$3 even in 2025, which is amazing and astounding. I remember reading a report by the Ministry of Trade and Industry that said that rent constitutes anywhere from 2 percent to 12 percent of a hawker’s operation. 

At the high end, rent is only 12 percent and in a land-scarce place like Singapore, I think that is quite amazing. They’re trying to incentivise the conditions for affordable food. And we see that happening quite effectively. And that’s why, especially for the lower income in Singapore, these are still very important circumstances and happenings and I think for most Singaporeans. 

National University of Singapore did a study on hawker prices across Singapore, different hawker centres, and they did find that actually in areas where there are more rental estates, the price of hawker food is cheaper. 

Jimmy
Oh, okay. 

Ryan
What are the exact mechanisms? I think they didn’t really lay out but it does seem to show that there is some dynamism with regards to the food pricing. And it is a very important mechanism of ensuring, depressing the cost of living in Singapore. 

Jimmy
What was the first hawker centre in Singapore? 

Ryan
If I’m not wrong, it’s Newton Centre. If I’m not wrong, but you have to factcheck me on that. 

Jimmy
The hawkers in Newton actually came from town. Like from the Centre Point area, Cuppage. 

Ryan
Cuppage. Yes. I think it is worthwhile to distinguish between hawker centres and hawker shelters. 

Jimmy
Okay, that’s interesting. Talk about that. 

Ryan
So, in the past, in the colonial government you had hawker shelters and those were like  more informal, and less tightly regulated hawker centres. The difference is the hawker shelters could have been privately run, some of them government run. But in terms of the operationalisation of the shelter, it was mostly run by the hawkers themselves. Think about, for example, the markets that you have in Penang or in Malacca. The area outside the hawkers. I’d say the hawker stall is their territory. Because it’s the hawkers’ table. So on and so forth. 

Jimmy
Yeah. 

Ryan
But hawker centres are very different because they have public tables like the tables and chairs that are screwed in, and this really changes the way people experience hawking both from the hawker’s point-of-view and from the customer’s point-of-view. Now for hawker centres, I could go in and I could sit on a public chair and I wouldn’t be touted at. 

Jimmy
I still remember seeing signs on tables that you can sit anywhere you like or something like that. And I didn’t realise why that was significant. 

Ryan
I think the government reclaimed a lot of the control, spatial control at least. For example, in coffee shops in Malaysia, a lot of public spaces that are actually owned by the government are used by the coffee shop owner. Reclaiming that space was quite important. Reclaiming that control was quite important as well. Both from a hygiene point-of-view and from an urban discipline point-of-view as previously mentioned, but I think the second unique thing about hawker centres is that they were intentionally planned. 

They are meant to be a part of the wider public housing, the amenities and estates. And that was not something the hawker shelters were; I think hawker shelters were temporary shelters to co-locate hawkers. When you’re planning a public housing estate they cater for hawker centres. The new HDB estates, there’s always still a hawker centre there and it is very intentional that we have cheap and affordable food in these public housing areas. 

Jimmy
I think Singaporeans expect that. What’s actually interesting, however, is that we have all these hawker stalls in Singapore where people travel all over the world, not over the world, but sometimes from one end of Singapore to queue up to buy that particular dish. 

And certain hawkers become famous, and you even have hawkers that get Michelin stars and Michelin bibs or something like that. And so, on one hand we have hawker stars, but on the other hand, we also have other phenomena at work. So, hawkers, like your grandmother you said, were hawkers. And then your dad helped out in a hawker stall but you’re not helping out at your grandmother’s hawker stall selling Teochew fish porridge at the moment, are you? 

Ryan
No, no. Not anymore. I think they actually stopped selling hawker food very early on, maybe when my dad was still in his mid-20s. But I, it speaks to the idea of how hawking was a very attractive vocation to many people, and I think for a lot of the older generation especially, they have seen that transition. 

And for my dad [it] is still a core memory for him, when he was still chasing my mom. Helping out at the hawker stall was very important to show like, okay, I am very filial to this. To the ladies I’m very hardworking. Yes, I will work for no pay as well. 

I think the way we experience hawkers is very different, obviously right? I grew up in a place where there were mostly hawker centres. There weren’t a lot of street hawkers. Well, there were still a few street hawkers back then. Those that sold roasted chestnuts in the streets. Sometimes I still see them, one or two. 

Jimmy
Not very often, but you still see them around. 

Ryan
But yes, I think people in Singapore do travel a lot. I mean, people all over the world do travel to Singapore to experience street food. And that idea of tourism is a very interesting and recent phenomenon actually, because if you think about the principle of building the hawker centre, it was meant to service the neighborhood it was in. 

But now with this idea, maybe Singapore is a little bit smaller as well. It’s almost like a hobby that people [do]. Actually, it’s an industry in general. You have the CEO Good Food Books award, and people go around giving a recognition to hawkers. You give reviews online, you get social media coverage and I think this contributes to the idea of culture and that is something uniquely Singaporean. And I think it is fascinating. It’s amazing. 

Jimmy
A bunch of things are happening, though. You have the hawkers with them, the old-timey hawkers who have this amazing dish. But then their kids don’t want to take over because they’ve seen their parents work 16 hours a day and they don’t want to do the same thing. Or their parents tell them, no, please don’t work so hard. 

Go be a doctor or a lawyer? And then but at the same time, you have younger people coming in. Also some of these old hawker stalls are really dying. But at the same time, what’s really interesting to me is that in some hawker centres, you can see gentrification. 

Ryan
Yes. 

Jimmy
So, you can see people selling baked goods that would not look out of place in a patisserie, for example, or espresso coffee like the Beach Road hawker centre. Bedok marketplace, which used to be a hawker centre above a market. But it was taken over by a private company, and the whole place has been turned around so that what looks ostensibly like a hawker centre, but it’s much more upmarket. You can get foie gras, you can get handmade pizzas. To me, that’s that ferment of the change that we’re seeing in Singapore. 

Ryan
That is a very astute observation and it’s completely true. Fundamentally, the way I see it is that the food of individuals is a representation of their identities. And this can be generational and fully an expression of perhaps a polity at a particular time, and as Singaporean[s] grew more cosmopolitan, a little bit more modern, a little bit less attached to the traditional roots. I think it is quite natural to see them sell different stuff in hawker centres. I think one good example is this place called Black Goat. 

Jimmy
Okay. I’ve heard of it. 

Ryan
I think it’s at Jalan Batu hawker centre. And I think the chef previously worked in a few restaurants and he set up this hawker centre selling Western food, steak and different meat cuts, and he only opens on weekends and only for a few hours. 

So he really challenges the idea that you have to work 16-hour work days as a hawker. But he does find his value proposition. And I think people really enjoy that too. And I think that’s actually a great microcosm of how Singaporeans are evolving and how food, as an extension of that, is evolving as well. 

More traditional hawker recipes are retiring alongside the hawkers and I think that’s an unfortunate kind of phase. Singapore moves into a different generation. There are still some individuals who continue and they’ll pick up the reins from their parents. 

And that’s why it is actually so interesting when, let’s say a 30-year-old teacher quits and takes over his parents’ stall. I think in some sense the interesting thing is that the motivation for hawking has changed. In the past I would go into hawking because it is a vocation of necessity. But now I think a lot of Singaporeans are going to hawking because it’s a vocation of choice. I choose to work long hours to preserve my family’s heritage. For those that maybe don’t have such a long lineage of culinary expertise, they can sell something else. You have interesting things like the Golden Mile Espresso hawker who makes espresso using robusta beans. I think it’s quite unique and I would say almost, it’s very Singaporean. 

Jimmy
No, I mean one of the wonderful things about hawker centres, I think, is [that it’s] always surprising. And there’s always something interesting. And so when I retire, my wife and I plan to go around Singapore to every hawker centre, look online to see which foods we have to eat here and make our way through every hawker centre in Singapore. I think it may not be good for my heart, but it’ll be a useful way to spend my retirement years. Let me ask you, tell us how this book came about? 

Ryan
The book actually came about first as an independent research project. I think back then, I was quite amazed. I think it was shortly after we got the UNESCO awards in 2020. 

Jimmy
Oh, okay. 

Ryan
I think as an individual, I was quite amazed about why Singapore, I mean this hawker food would get this UNESCO nomination over let’s say the other street food heavyweights like Malaysia and Thailand. Because I think as a Singaporean, you do conceive of it quite similarly. I think they are all street food. Thai food is equally as good as Malaysian. 

Jimmy
Malaysian street food is better. 

Ryan
In some respect it is better, and I think I was very interested in finding out why Singaporean food, why only Singapore hawker culture got this UNESCO award. So I started researching. I spoke to the individual who nominated the UNESCO award, which was Mr Yeoh Kok Siang from the National Heritage Board. 

And he shared that it wasn’t really so much so about the food per se, but about the space that hosts his food at the hawker centre itself. And the hawker centre creates these conditions for these organic interactions. And after a while it became a culture and within the nomination form, it was all about the hawker centre and the culture that comes out of the hawker centre. 

Jimmy
So not the food, but the centre. 

Ryan
The centre, correct. I turned this into my final year capstone at Yale-NUS College and went down a deep rabbit hole. I think I did a way longer thesis than I should have. And at the end of it, my supervisor Professor Tan Tai Yong said that this was tremendous research and I should try and do something with it. And that’s what I did. And I’ve never looked back after that. 

Jimmy
Okay. I mean, it’s very interesting. The thing with hawker centres and hawker food is that it’s such a beloved institution that’s been studied before. So, what new things do you bring to that? 

Ryan
Dr Lai Chee Kian and Professor Lily Kong’s books were tremendous influences. As a politics, philosophy and history major, I really want to situate the development of hawking and hawker culture alongside Singapore’s own history. 

I think a lot of the previous books talked about hawker centres as an infrastructure itself and the infrastructure history behind it. But I wanted to understand the wider motivations or macroeconomic drivers that encouraged hawking in Singapore and more specifically, hawker centres. And why did the government think of creating this specifically highly engineered building? 

And why don’t other countries think of it? And secondly, to try and challenge the colonial narrative of hawker[s]. I think as Singapore grows a little bit more independent, actually 60 this year, I think we do have some space to grow that. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

Ryan
And last but not least, you look at its contemporary relevance. And specifically what are the economic drivers, what are the sociological nuggets that we can find from the hawker centre itself? I think one very brief example is how hawker centres are very important spaces for politics. 

Jimmy
Oh what do you mean? I did not know this. 

Ryan
For example, your MPs. Your MPs will go to hawker centres and they are very intentional in being seen because I think most people wouldn’t wear shirt [and] pants to hawker centres. So they’re there to be seen to hear the feedback on the ground, but also to challenge. 

Take a case, for example, like when the Progressive Party went to a new hawker centre, Taman Jurong. I think it was the first foray into a new GRC and I think the hawker centre was the first place that they went. And I was actually there. I didn’t know they were going there. 

I was having my meal and I saw a lot of people were over there and I asked and they said it’s actually their first time in this place, and I thought that’s fascinating. Another example is how President Tharman celebrated, I think his win at the Taman Jurong hawker centre, at the same hawker centre. So I think it points to how such a place of conviviality is such an important social space where everyone gathers and I think there is so much more left to be studied about hawker centres and the sociology of hawker centres. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

Ryan
And yeah, I hope to focus on that in the future. 

Jimmy
Okay, let’s talk about it. Now you are no longer an academic, tell us about what you’re doing now. 

Ryan
Now I’m actually a Strategic Consultant with Bain & Company. We work on management consulting and strategic consulting. I am still trying to find time to write. I think it is a bit challenging with the consultant life but I’m still writing a few pieces for the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre. 

Jimmy
Is it related to food? 

Ryan
It is related to food. Related to the evolution of Teochew food from China and how Singaporean Teochew food is different from Chinese Teochew food. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

Ryan
I’m also writing a few pieces for the National Heritage Board. There’s some engagement [for the] Singapore Heritage Festival in May, preparing for that as well. I think I try to balance my professional life and my foodie life. I do hope to read, research more and write more about food and hawker culture. 

Jimmy
You are the ideal person to do it because your surname is Kueh and actually, it’s not a very common name, is it? Last name, Kueh? 

Ryan
I think it’s not a common anglicised name. In Chinese it’s Guo and traditional[ly] anglicised as Quek, but I think Guo is usually from individuals who are of Hokkien descent, but I’m of Teochew descent. I think they pronounce it as Kueh and it got lost in translation along the way. 

Jimmy
Are there many Kuehs in Singapore? I mean, walking Kueh, not the one that we eat. 

Ryan
There are many Kuehs in Singapore that are walking Kuehs and I think I have come across a few online, but I haven’t seen others outside of my family. So, it’s almost like bird spotting. 

But I’ve been interested in this before and I’ve looked online and there are quite a few Kueh in Malaysia. What the relationship is, I’m not too sure, but hopefully I can pull that string sometime in the future. 

Jimmy
Okay, cool. So, having done all this research, what did the research involve? Do you speak to hawkers? Did you do research in the library? 

Ryan
I think most of it was primary and secondary research. I spoke to a few professors but I think the bulk of it was time at the National Library and National Archives. 

Jimmy
Okay. What were you looking at? There’s not a lot of food, I have to tell everyone, on the shelves of the National Library and the National Archives. 

Ryan
I was looking at primary sources of all the different hawker commission reports, how the colonial governments reported them. I think it’s very specifically a core memory for me actually, to go to the 11th floor of the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, and there’s a small little room in the middle of the 11th floor. 

Jimmy
Oh, that’s right, the glass room. 

Ryan
And you can read the different primary sources that are both public and non-public. For example, I was reading a 1950s Commission report. I never thought I would see it in person. 

I’ve seen it referenced and through my time with the National Archives, researching at National archives. It’s usually digitised but it was fascinating to see an actual manuscript in person and to see how people read and thought of it, and so a lot of that time was spent doing primary research. 

And I think I always lose track of time when I’m doing that and I think it’s truly fascinating. 

Jimmy
Did the research involve going to very many hawker centres around Singapore? 

Ryan
Not too much, I think at the end of the day, this was still a book about the history of hawker centres. If I ever do publish a next book or research a next book, it’ll be more about the contemporary relevance and I think there will be a lot more primary research involving hawker centre visiting. 

Jimmy
Which is not too bad of a thing to do. 

Ryan
It’s a fantastic thing to do. 

Jimmy
Despite that, you must have a favourite hawker centre. What is your favourite hawker centre? 

Ryan
My favourite hawker centre is Taman Jurong. 

Jimmy
Okay. Which you were saying, you live nearby. 

Ryan
I live nearby. I actually didn’t use to live in Jurong. I used to live in Woodlands and my childhood favourite hawker centre is Chong Pang because that’s where my mum grew up. My grandmother, who grew up in the Yishun area in Chong Pang, has a lot of nostalgia for me. 

But I think now Taman Jurong, simply because it was, as I delve more into hawker culture, I realise Taman Jurong was actually one of the first few multi-storey hawker centres. It’s actually three storeys. It contains both very old traditional hawkers and also new hawkers and it’s always bustling, like I said, there’s always political activity. I think it’s fun to watch. And I think the design is very neat because there’s an alfresco area and it’s also like a sheltered area. 

Jimmy
Oh, there’s an alfresco area. 

Ryan
It’s a bit like the old umbrellas.

Jimmy
Yeah. Oh, they still have them? 

Ryan
They still have them, and it’s tremendously fantastic. 

Jimmy
Complete the sentence “Hawking is...?”

Ryan
Hawking is a representation of our past, present and future.

Jimmy
Really, our future, in what way? 

Ryan
Hawking is dynamic and as Singaporeans change, so will hawking. Given how much interesting stuff Singaporeans are coming up with now in hawker centres, I’m sure it’ll be a yummy, yummy future. 

Jimmy
Do you ever see yourself being a hawker? 

Ryan
Well, I’ve thought about it many times. Many times when I’m at work... 

Jimmy
I mean, that’s your grandmother’s fish, what fish soup? Teochew fish soup. 

Ryan
I myself do not cook a good enough fish soup as comparable. 

Jimmy
Okay. 

Ryan
But perhaps sometime in the future, I think being a hawker would be quite interesting. I mean, maybe a retirement job, maybe. 

Jimmy
Maybe a retirement job. Okay, Ryan, I want to thank you for coming on the show. If you want to read Ryan’s book From Streets to Stalls, you can find it in good bookshops everywhere or you can borrow it from a library near you, obviously, and if you’re interested to know more about the history of food and food culture in Singapore, check out the BiblioAsia website at BiblioAsia.nlb.gov.sg. 

Ryan, I want to thank you for coming today. It’s a real pleasure having you. I learned a lot, and I may give, is it Taman Jurong hawker centre? I’ll give it a visit and see what it’s like. 

Ryan
Yes. Thank you so much for having me. It’s my pleasure. 

Jimmy
Thank you for coming. 

If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to this podcast and the BiblioAsia newsletter. Thanks for joining us on BiblioAsia+.

Ryan Kueh, From Streets to Stalls: The History and Evolution of Hawking and Hawker Centres in Singapore (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., 2024). (From National Library Singapore, call no. RSING 381.18095957 KUE)

Lily Kong, Singapore Hawker Centres: People, Places, Food, 2nd ed. (Singapore : National Environment Agency; National Heritage Board, 2023) (From National Library Singapore, call no. RSING 381.18095957 KON)

Lim Tin Seng, "Hawkers: From Public Nuisance to National Icons," BiblioAsia 9, no. 3 (October–December 2013).

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Nookcha Films. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Ryan for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.