Editor’s note: Through a sequence of transient homes across Singapore and Malaysia, Sia Ling Ee’s essay “To All the Homes I’d Known Before” traces a childhood shaped by precarity, familial strain, and longing for stability. Contrasted with her husband’s rooted upbringing, Ling Ee reflects on class, belonging, and memory, finding in an unremarkable flat a hard won, sufficient sense of home.

[ESSAY] “To All the Homes I’d Known Before” by Sia Ling Ee

^{Celebrating my third birthday in the rental flat above the pet shop, the backdrop of most of my childhood memories.}

When I was a child, my family moved frequently.

My earliest memories involve playing along the long, dark corridor of the one-room rental flat we lived in in Ang Mo Kio, a small town in the centre of Singapore, across the hall from some of my mother’s friends from the clothing factory where she worked. I can still close my eyes and vividly recall the bright spot at the end of the corridor where the staircase was, and, somehow, lying on a mattress beside my mother, stroking her pregnant belly.

Then my sister arrived, and my parents moved us a few streets away. This time, we rented a three-room flat above a pet shop. There was a locked door in the middle of the living room that led to a dark, narrow staircase providing access to the shop downstairs. The shop owner, who was also our landlord, would emerge from time to time, often holding large birdcages or sacks of feed, retrieving items from a bedroom that he kept locked. This was where I spent my kindergarten and primary school years, where I learned to cycle and played pretend with a neighbour girl a few units down.

When I was thirteen, my parents, financially devastated by the Asian Financial Crisis and by my mother’s work in the declining garment manufacturing industry, announced that they had purchased a low-cost house in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, and that we were moving there. I remember being excited by the promise of a two-storey house with a balcony and multiple bedrooms, and by the novelty of being among the select few who carried a passport every day to cross the Causeway for school.

_{The driveway of our house in Johor, Malaysia, a view I will forever associate with humid weekend afternoons when nothing ever happens.}

^{The space at the back of the house that served as our kitchen, laundry area and pantry among others. Here, one of our dogs is in the middle of her bath, standing in front of the large plastic bag into which we threw rubbish.}

It was in this room, while working on an art project, that I heard about the Twin Towers being attacked on the radio.

Then the reality of being so far from everything and everyone set in. I grew to resent the long commute, and so did my parents, who managed to secure one-bedroom rental flats for low-income families that stood where the current CIQ complex now stands. We had a dingy kitchen, an even dingier toilet in the corner of the balcony, and a tiny bedroom where the four of us slept, made more claustrophobic by the strain of my parents’ failing marriage and their refusal, on some days, even to acknowledge each other. It was in this room, while working on an art project, that I heard about the Twin Towers being attacked on the radio, and later watched, only half comprehending, footage of the collapse on the 10 pm news.

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These houses were always in a perpetual state of incompletion, as my mother devised small ways in which they might be improved. These plans took the form of do-it-yourself projects to be executed by my father, who was a contractor. Some floors were meant to be tiled, and glass bricks, which were all the rage in the nineties, appeared in piles, waiting to be built into some sort of partition. As a result, whenever anything fell apart, the fixes were temporary, because something better was always promised in the near future. But the pressures of raising two teenage daughters on an impossibly low income, long hours spent in traffic jams, and a never-ending list of chores wore my parents down, though they were not much older than I am now, and these plans never came to fruition. We continued to live in houses that never truly felt like home.

My husband, on the other hand, grew up in a semi-detached house off Holland Road, one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in one of the most expensive cities in Asia. This was the house he came home to from the hospital as a newborn, and the house he lived in his entire life, with the exception of the year his parents renovated it, when they lived in a condominium just down the road.

This is an incredibly self-assured neighbourhood, where towering three-storey new builds, complete with small swimming pools and modern glass façades, stand beside shorter, red-roofed houses with overgrown branches and quaint gates dating from the nineties. The condominium complexes down the road have none of the newer, more elaborate amenities, sleek clubhouses, or carefully curated landscaping found along Farrer Road. Instead, they have uneven pavements where the buttress roots of enormous rain trees have broken through, and a hodgepodge of plants that have not only survived but thrived under decades of intense sunlight and torrential downpours, brazen and unruly, in glistening shades of green that leave no doubt one is in the heat and humidity of the tropics. These are the plants and green wire fences that have been there since my husband and his peers were children, and will likely remain for some time, even as larger, more modern buildings rise around them.

I dreamed of these fictional teenage girls who had rooms of their own, which they decorated as they pleased.

This was the sense of home I so desperately craved while growing up. When I was a teenager, it was the closest I could imagine life would be to the idyllic suburbs of Sweet Valley or Stoneybrook. I dreamed of these fictional teenage girls who had rooms of their own, which they decorated as they pleased, and who struggled with the same, or sometimes more sinister, problems that I did, except that theirs found resolution within a hundred pages, while mine continued to spiral, seemingly out of control.

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Now I realise it was stability that I envied, that families like my husband’s did not need to compete with their neighbours because they knew they had the means to build the same sort of modern monstrosities, but simply chose not to; that they never felt the need to belong because they had never felt like outsiders, never felt that they did not have a place where they belonged.

This was also the house my daughter came home to from the hospital, and, for a while, the only place she knew as home. She had little sense that few people in Singapore live in houses with staircases, with rooms large enough to accommodate a large bed, her cot, and multiple play areas. She was born, effortlessly, into the kind of life I had always craved. I realised this one muggy afternoon not long ago, when my husband and I took her for a walk around the neighbourhood. It was the sort of weekend afternoon that was too hot and too languid for doing anything or going anywhere, when the minutes seemed to crawl as the clock inched towards dinnertime. I was exhausted, bored of the weekend yet dreading the workweek. Then I looked around us, at the mottled pavement with weeds peeking through the cracks, at moss-covered iron gates and walls dotted with algae, tiled roofs with vines trailing down, and back gardens with laundry hung out to dry. This was the sort of neighbourhood I had always imagined myself living in as a child, a neighbourhood entirely at ease with itself.

I could see her growing up with the same self-assurance as the girls I had envied at school, secure in the knowledge that home was a safe place, that they would return to family dinners unmarked by tense silence, to a house with a room that was entirely their own, where they could simply be themselves. If only I had had that, I believed, life would have been perfect.

A few months ago, we moved into our own place, a modest HDB flat more in keeping with our income.

A few months ago, we moved into our own place, a modest HDB flat more in keeping with our income. I lie on my bed and look out at the illuminated windows of the blocks across the road; I listen to the neighbour’s daughter practising the piano each evening as we have dinner; I fall asleep to the sound of traffic from the expressway. On weekday afternoons, I sometimes hear the dreaded sound of drilling, followed by the buzz of my phone as the estate group chat comes to life with speculation and complaint. Every other day, I stop by the Sheng Siong beneath the neighbouring block for yet another box of strawberries that my toddler devours at an alarming rate, and, without fail, I end up taking the lift with my arms laden with unexpected purchases because I have once again convinced myself that bringing a reusable bag for a single box of fruit is not worth the effort.

For the first time in thirty-seven years, I am finally living out the quintessential, stereotypical Singaporean existence.

For the first time in thirty-seven years, I am finally living out the quintessential, stereotypical Singaporean existence. It is an experience I once craved as a child, then rejected as a cynical young adult. Now, however, it finally feels like home.

Still, on weekend afternoons when I drive the familiar route to drop my daughter off at the house she once called home, a small part of me feels a quiet, unexpected nostalgia for the version of my daughter that existed only in the daydreams of a teenager who so badly needed an escape. Another part of me remains in love with this neighbourhood that holds so much of our past, my husband’s childhood and my own longings, unaware then that the life I dreamed of would one day become my future.

^{The first Christmas at my current flat. The view is not spectacular, but it is all mine.}

^{How to cite, Sia, Ling Ee. “To All the Homes I’d Known Before.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 20 Apr. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/04/20/all-the-homes.}

Sia Ling Ee is a lover of reality television, coffee, and the ocean. She has spent more than half her life trying to understand history, and over a decade trying to teach it. The child of Chinese-speaking parents in an English-dominated society, she was once a diligent traveller, making the daily journey from Malaysia to attend school in Singapore. She learned to navigate the gap between the disparate worlds she inhabited, but never fully felt at home in any of them. She is currently pursuing an MA in Translation at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, working to bridge the divide between East and West, hope and memory, and between who she was and who she wants to be. She can be contacted at sia.ling.ee[at]gmail.com.