Look behind the tackiness and Chinatown has something to offer

Sandwiched in between my Chinatown eating was some walking and some exploration of the area. At first, I was surrounded by crap. All the same junk that you can find in Chinatowns in major cities all around the world, all available for sale in nameless stores. Boo. But, scratching a little bit deeper, I found some neat things.

The first was the Chinatown Heritage Centre. The front is confusing because it looks like a crappy store and has the same awning as a crappy store, but actually contains a interesting three-story museum detailing what life was like for poor Chinese in the early part of the 20th century. The first two thirds of the museum walked through various aspects of Chinese life in those times, presenting artifacts and sharing first-person perspectives. Fairly well done, and I particularly liked the food wall where they showed local dishes.

The last third, however, was impressive. As shown in the map above, they have recreated, to full scale, two floors of a typical Chinese tenement house. Oh boy, was it tight living. On one floor, there would be 8 cubicles (one room each) for 8 different tenants, most of whom were whole families. This would lead to about 40 people on one floor. They would share one kitchen and one bathroom. Moreover, the bathroom was simply a hole and a bucket, with the bucket exchanged for a fresh one each morning via the soil truck. Wow. Hopefully these photos can convey some sense of the cramped quarters.

The second was the new Buddha Tooth Relic Temple. This large temple was not hard to find, it practically glowed with red, gold, and newness. It even has a two story carpark underneath! The first two floors contained the temple hall, with some large golden Buddhas at the end of the sanctuary.

The top floor had the actual tooth relic. It was housed in a very shiny golden room (no photos allowed). Below that was a museum of the story of Buddha's transcendence. Interesting and also given new life as the story was told in the first-person on a series of storyboards. Finally, throughout there were two to three foot statues, many of which had been adopted for fairly large sums of money. My guess is this was the funding mechanism for building this very large and very new temple.

The final stop on my Chinatown walk was over the hill to the Thian Hock Keng temple. Check out this backstory. A girl named Ma Zu Po had a father and a brother who were fisherman. One time when they were out on the sea, she sensed trouble and concentrated her efforts to bring them home safely. But her mother distracted her, and she lost some concentration, and her brother ended up drowning, but her father made it home miraculously. After this event, more fisherman started coming to her asking for protection on the seas. Eventually, the house where she lived was built into a temple and she is now the Protector of Sojourners. Fisherman and immigrants alike come to pray to her here for safe travels. In addition to this cool story, the temple had architecture and characters to boot.

So, it turned out that Chinatown was more than a schlock-fest, with discoveries of culture hidden amongst the stores.