In the last few hours of Thye Moh Chan’s life, there was a long queue waiting to see her, to get a piece of what’s left of her. Lying in an alley way of a forgotten corner at Geylang, she smelled stale and dank. For many years, her only connection to the outside world is the window above her.

Thye Moh Chan is not a person, but a 68-year-old traditional Teochew cake shop, one of the very few surviving ones.Their fates tend to follow the same storyline as great kingdoms – business opens, business thrives, and then it fails, for there’s no next in the line. Thye Moh Chan has met its inevitable tragic fate.
I was there to document her last breath– that’s when I saw the Kiasuism of Singaporeans, yet again.

On the surface it looked like these people cherished the old traditions, and they wanted to hold on to what was about to become history. But this was what I overheard after the mooncakes were sold out: “No more? What else do you have? Just give me whatever that’s left.”

There is a Hokkien phrase that aptly describes this: “Bo her hae mah ho”, which literally translates into “if there’s no fish, we will settle for prawns.” These people couldn’t get what they wanted, so they demanded for something to bring home, not giving a toot what that something was, to make their wait worthwhile.

Not all of them had that same outlook, but there were enough to make them stand out.

The crowd outside stood in contrast to the somber mood in the kitchen. The bakers, many in their 60s and 70s, were silently, almost religiously performing each step. As I took pictures of them, I saw the tremendous amount of effort put into every pastry.

At one corner, one was engrossed in steaming, grinding, frying, sieving, and then frying and sieving again, just to complete the first step of the bean paste making process. Even when most people are buying their factory-made mooncakes fillings, they were still making theirs from scratch.

At the other end of the kitchen, another man was making the last batch of sesame candy. It’s not just the last from Thye Moh Chan, but also from the man himself, after doing this day after day for almost 60 years.

He offered me one piece and eating it made me a little teary-eyed . For one, it was really good. Two, this could well be my last time eating such wonderful sesame candy. Three, I felt sorry that his final creations were to be mindlessly consumed by those vultures out there.

But then, on the flipside, is it such a big deal that Thye Moh Chan is closing? If we look at the number of old bakery shops that have closed, maybe it’s not an issue to get sentimental over. According to a local news report, there were at least 10 of such bakeries that have closed in the last ten years, and Thye Moh Chan being just one of the many that fell into the natural course of life and death.

One of the main reasons why they encountered difficulties was due to changing palates of the ‘now’ generation. People prefer Japanese milk pan to char siew bao and spaghetti to Mee Pok Tar. However, it is not to the extent that we become allergic to even a dash of old flavours. There are still many people who appreciate Kuey Lapis and Beef Ball Noodles. The catch is, the surviving shops are those that have modernised themselves. They change their packaging and go to shopping centres where the young people are.

Then the next question is, do we want all the old establishments to follow suit? When machines replace handcraft, which is likely the case when the business expands, some of the old culinary techniques will be lost. Also, any form of expansion is likely to involve the big companies, since the mom and pop do not have the financial ability to compete in a bigger market. Big companies monopolising the food industry, surely, is not what many people would like to see.

Sadly, the above seem to be the only way to revive local food traditions from their deathbed. It may be better to watch them revamp then to watch them fade into history.