Melaka As I Remember It

Published by simon on July 17, 2007

We just came back from a 3-day holiday from that esotoric historical city to the south - Melaka.

Yeah i know everybody has been to Melaka a gazillion times, eaten everything that worth eating and seen everything worth snapping your brand new Sony Cybershot at… i get it.

But we needed a holiday, and Melaka seemed a good place enough.

For those who do not know - Melaka is the hometown of my forefathers. My father was born there, went to school there. I didn’t grow up there, but spent almost all my childhood holidays there. So there, now you know.

Melaka has really grown up that much over the last 20 years, traffic is still not as bad as Penang or KL.

When we were young, there weren’t any shopping centres. When Chinese New Year, all my rich cousins got their clothes at Madam King’s and Lian Fatt in Bunga Raya. I remember when i was a teenager, one of my cousins set up a stall selling CNY cards along the road. Don’t think she made much money.

Me and my cousins used to walk along the beach in Ujong Pasir towards the Portuguese Settlement, behind all those terraced houses cramped for space. The beach was as dirty then as it is now - when low tide came, we would chase all the mudskippers away. Sometimes we walked the other direction towards Umbai, near the jetty to Pulau Besar. In the mangrove, my cousin told me there was a shrine where if you went at the stroke of midnight, and brought the right offering to the unseen guardian there, it would show you anything you wanted to see in and out of this world. I never tried to do it, maybe i should have… Anyway the mangrove is now gone and there are hundreds of houses built there now.

Two of my relatives still live in those long old houses along Heeren Street (Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock), one of the few ones not torn down or converted into some Singaporean-owned backpacker hotel. Or some Nyonya restaurant.

Melaka, or as i call it - Malacca, will always have a special place in my heart.

• No Related Post