Capturing Yuhua’s Community Stories

The Singapore Memory Project was hard at work over the weekend as the Yuhua Community Club embarked on their inaugural Yuhua Memory Project, a grassroots initiative to collect and document the memories of seniors living in the constituency. The first in a series of interview sessions with Yuhua residents took place on 28 April at Blk 211 Jurong East.

The interview session was held as a pre-activity to the RC Zone 2 and 3 block party cum Home Improvement Programme (HIP) polling day. About 31 students from Nanyang Girls’ High School were involved in conducting the interviews & they worked in pairs or groups of threes to interview residents and grassroot leaders who had volunteered to share their memories about Yuhua and Singapore. The interviews were conducted mostly in Mandarin with a few in the Hokkien dialect. By the end of the 3-hour session, 21 interviews were documented by the students. The next series of interviews will take place over the first two weekends of May and on 20 May at the Yuhua Open House.

In many ways such an endeavour is only possible with the confluence of a few factors. Firstly, the SMP has gained sufficient traction within what we call “heritage-vested” communities who are increasingly sensitized to the urgent need to document personal accounts of seniors as oral histories. A second important factor is the increased recognition by educators and students that a project like the SMP can constitute meaningful pedagogy and acculturation of what Singapore was once like.

We’d like to thank all particpants and partners for their support, especially Yuhua Community Club, Nanyang Girls’ High School and photographer Mr Bahari bin Haron, and we’re looking forward to take this commuity initiative beyond Yuhua. If you’re a community leader and would wish to have us visit your estate, do write to us at irememberSG@nlb.gov.sg to see how your neighbourhood could be our next stop

If you’re a resident of Yuhua, do also take part in our “Yuhua Through My Lens” photo contest for a chance at some cool prizes!

Yeong Chong
Editor, irememberSG
Singapore Memory Project