The funny part about Ah Leng’s Canteen is that it wasn’t a name picked by my father, who started the canteen in the 1920s, or me. At that time, the hospital was called Sepoy Lines by the British and my father just ran the canteen… and it never had a name. Ah Leng’s Canteen was just the way all the medical students of that time referred to it and I guess it just stuck. And, in a way, it is apt since I was born there!
I took over the canteen in 1947 when my father went back to China – he had to shut it during the war (World War II). I was 19 years old and had just got married, so my wife helped me at the canteen.
Many of our customers were students who returned to medical school after the war. At the time, there was no Singapore or Malaysia, so there was no difference. It was just hostelites at King Edward VII College of Medicine and non-hostelites. And because we lived on the premises, we opened the canteen at 6am and closed only around 7pm. At that time, we served toast with half-boiled eggs, coffee, tea, Milo, Horlicks, curry puffs and ham and cheese sandwiches. One piece of toast at the time cost 10 cents.
Later, we started serving kway teow, chicken rice, bee hoon and eventually even hamburgers for lunch and dinner. I remember Dr Mahathir (former Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Class of 1947) liked my bee hoon soup.
After I closed my canteen at 7pm, I ran a small stall on the roof of KE Hall, serving snacks and hot drinks to the hostelites until midnight. Then I would go home. It was like that seven days a week.
I don’t know why the students liked my canteen. It was a cosy corner where they all sat and chatted. But I can still recall the smell of the chemicals wafting into the canteen from the anatomy department (now a carpark near Harrower Hall). Or was it the smell of the dead bodies? I was not sure.
Some of the students were hiding from lecturers, others were waiting for boyfriends or girlfriends. I don’t want to say who they are but most of them are successful doctors now. And because we were near the sports field, students would pop in after playing football, cricket or hockey. There were a few fights after the games, but not at my canteen.
My wife and I lived at the back of the canteen with our four children until we bought our flat at Tiong Poh Road in 1966. We could walk across the road from the canteen. There was no expressway (AYE) then and we walked through the field using a torch because it was so dark.
It is true some of the students borrowed money from me to pay their fees or for food. Some of them also gambled. I kept records of what people owed me in the tiga lima buku (555 books). Most of them paid me back once they started working. Some forgot, but it is okay. The names are still in some of the 555 books which are in a locked box. I won’t let anyone see them.
Ah Leng and his wife at their canteen for the last time before it was shut down on 2 June 1983
I collect all the newspaper articles about the canteen. I also received a copy of a special book (the Centenary of Tertiary Education by the Medical Alumni) where the doctors printed my name on the cover. Dr Ngiam Tong Lan also wrote a poem about me. In 2005, Professor Tan Ser Kiat asked me to make tea at the opening of Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) grounds. I was so happy to go back to SGH to make the same tea I made for all of them when they were students.
I am 86 years old now. I still remember everything; I remember everyone. They are always in my head and in my heart.
This story first appeared in the MOHH book “Caring for our people” and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.