Ipoh World

We thank Rosebud (one of our readers) for this article. The picture shown is taken from said article - showing Edward Khoo in his living room, surrounded by his many knick-knacks and souvenirs.

The inside of the three-room Housing Board flat in Bedok North is a hypnotic riot of shapes, colours and textures.

Porcelain vases and lamps sit on rosewood tables and mantles, jostling for space with stone carvings, cloisonne boxes and figurines carved from teak, mahogany and jelutong.

Shelves with knick-knacks, paintings and spiritual quotes blanket almost every wall.

In the middle of the living room sits Mr Edward Khoo, a wizened man with a high forehead, neat moustache and crown of white hair. The 80-year-old spends hours each day polishing and dusting his prized possessions, which explains why the entire place is spick and span.

There is a placid gentleness about him which belies a very colourful past. He is the third of six children of a storekeeper and a housewife who lived in the Serangoon Road area.

"My mother died during the Japanese Occupation here," he says, referring to the period between 1941 and 1945.

His father was nearly killed, too, when he was rounded up, together with hundreds of Chinese folk, at Telok Kurau English School. "He and a few people had the foresight to dig through a fence and escaped," Mr Khoo says.

The Japanese soldiers took the others to a hill off Siglap and shot, beheaded or bayoneted them. The incident has been documented by war historians.

"My father didn't know what to do with six children, so we were pushed from relative to friend to relative," he recalls in impeccable English. To earn his keep, he had to work as, among other things, a labourer and an office boy delivering food to Japanese officers.

Life was tough. He remembers how some Indonesian labourers he worked with used to soak shoes left behind by British prisoners of war in ash water to soften the leather. "They would then cook it in coconut milk," he says. "To the Javanese, it was meat. I ate it."

He completed his secondary school education at St Patrick's School, before his father asked him to go to Pancur in the Lingga Islands of Indonesia. He was barely 17 then.

"We had a relative who died. He had a rubber estate which was so big that it took five days and nights to walk around it. My father told me to look after the place and make sure the rubber was not stolen," he says. The trip took almost two days from Singapore and involved rides in flimsy perahu (boats) over crocodile infested waters.

Mr Khoo, who had to manage more than 100 people in the plantation, says: "Maybe I grew up too fast. I learnt a lot." He earned a lot too, easily pulling in $20,000 each month by trading silver and other raw materials on the side.

It certainly afforded him a hedonistic lifestyle. Why, he could even afford to be the patron of the late Rose Chan for five years.

Chan, who died of cancer in 1982, was possibly the most famous stripper in Singapore and Malaysia in the 1950s and 1960s. One of her most famous acts was wrestling with live pythons on stage.

Mr Khoo met her before she achieved notoriety as the Queen of Strippers, when she was a taxi dancer at the now defunct New World Cabaret in Kitchener Road. "She had the personality, the looks and body," he says.

"One day I asked her: Why don't you be my constant companion? Marriage was never mentioned. She never brought it up, neither did I," he says, adding that he put her up in a house - 40F Lorong Melayu at Sims Avenue East - for five years.

Their paths crossed often in nightclubs after they broke up. "She would always refer to me as her first husband to her friends," he says, smiling fondly.

Mr Khoo returned to Singapore in the early 1950s when he was in his 20s. When a trading business he started with friends did not work out, he became a policeman.

He spent more than 23 years in the police and marine police.

The octogenarian has colourful tales to tell of raids on opium and smuggling dens in Chinatown, Geylang and Victoria Street. He fired twice at smugglers, including one who charged at him with a bow hook.

He also has vivid memories of the violence of May 1954, when hundreds of Chinese middle school students - who vigorously opposed compulsory conscription - clashed with riot police near the Istana. He was at the scene again a week later, when the protests gained momentum and students of Chung Cheng High School locked themselves in their school.

He was detective station inspector by the time he left the force at 45. He worked briefly as a manager in a paper mill before he became a purchasing officer for Jasons.

For more than a decade, he traversed the globe, sourcing food products and wines for the company. It was, he says, a wonderful gig and allowed him to see and experience much of the world.

His first marriage failed. His second wife died more than a decade ago. He has eight children, two of whom are adopted. They, in turn, have given him four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He sees some of his children regularly, but lives alone in his flat. He spends quiet time polishing the wood sculptures he loves, tending to his orchids and whipping up dishes from cookbooks given to him by one of his daughters.

In 1994, he was diagnosed with cancer of the rectum. It left him without a stomach and saddled him with a colostomy bag, but he has long conquered the funk which initially enveloped him.

"What has to be will be," he says philosophically, adding that many of his friends have died. He does not want to worry and wallow in self-pity.

"I've seen what I wanted to see, eaten what I wanted to eat and have done both good and bad. I just want to make the best of whatever time I have left."

To read more about Rose Chan, click here.