Think, for a moment, of a hawker centre; the one you know. Perhaps you immediately know which stall to eat from. You wouldn't hesitate to recommend this to anyone who asks. Or maybe you need to evoke something from memory, because there's plenty to choose from, plenty to see. In your mind's eye you see the rows of stalls, tables and seats, the practical pillars and roofs, the warmth, smoke, clatter, colours of the signboards, stallholders perched around their cashiers listening and jabbering intently. This roast stall is here, that noodle shop is there, washbasins and toilets behind, malay food in their own little band. Oh, I'm not sure what's there now. Let's go take a look anyway. Maybe there's something new; maybe there's something with a queue. And so it goes. Sometimes all it takes is a sight of something glistening, or a look at what someone else is cheerily eating. Try something new, try the tau huey.
Your usual stall seems to last forever, doesn't it? The familiar faces with their furrowed brows, and yellow fisherman boots. But one day something gives and they're no longer there. The old man gives up the ghost, the family gives up the rented stall, somebody falls ill and can't continue, the son's gamboling becomes too much, the renovations take too long, the family argues over who continues to run the shop. Think back, and see again the face of the weathered stallholder smiling wanly back at you when you were ten or so, towel on his shoulder. He's dead now; but that char kway teow was black and grimy, the very best. The plump man and his wife running the long kee economical rice, always reliable for their chicken curry, tau yu bak, and stir fried cabbage. Chicken rice, just about everyone has a reliable go-to. But things change, don't they? The stall still stands, but someone else is at home; the taste just seems different. Some days we eat without relish, some days we make do with something else.
Hawker food is cheap in Singapore. I don't think it's arguable. Not counting those union-related stalls which are required to offer food at very low prices, the real increase in food prices sold, year by year, probably doesn't meet cost increases. That's my guess. It's simply not that expensive to eat at a hawker centre. It's always been cheaper than eating fast food, and I don't believe that we think those are expensive. Why is hawker food cheap? I think it's because the individual stallholder doesn't want to disaffect his existing, old time customers. Through hard times in the past, the stallholder is loyal to his silver-tinged customers. So prices remain low. He doesn't want to be criticised by them, some his old friends and neighbours, even if he doesn't make quite as much as he should. Kopi can't be more than 1.20, mee chiang kueh 80 cents.
It's hard to be a hawker. Oh, it's hard to be anything, of course, but it's hard to be a hawker. Cooking is tiring. Cooking the same things, every single day, well that's a hard life. All of us know a hawker from somewhere, most of us think about their trade, some of us talk to them. Perhaps a few of us have more than a passing word or two; listened to their jaded stories told with wry smirks, nursing a slowly perspiring bottle of Carlsberg, interspersed with brisk snaps back to taking orders and re-performing practiced skills.
There's not much more to say. I think most people accept as inevitable that hawkers will disappear, or decline. Most people talk about standards of old hawker food, reminisce about past, in part legendary, stalls. What is so inevitable about it? Well, the fact that it's no good being a hawker; good in the sense of modern education and being a respectable working man, and having a reliable trade. And making a good income (having went to school for so long). To me, it's sort of ribald, sort of obscene, that a typical meal in a shopping centre costs 30 bucks, and a hawker meal costs 5 or so. But that's how it is, and those that can't survive don't. There's just too much competition, too many other places (Dire Straits, Sultans of Swing). Individually everyone has a story, something that if lost, is lost forever, but collectively, that's the game, those are the rules, and sympathy doesn't go far. I guess there's pride at having lived so long, even finally, failing, on your own terms, by the deftness of your hands, the blaze of your wok, and the cleverness of your heart.
