MY NEIGHBOUR ON THE 14TH FLOOR HAS LIVED THERE SINCE BEFORE THE BUILDING WAS BUILT

In Singapore, we don’t talk about where the land came from.

It isn’t because we are ashamed. We are an efficient people, and efficiency has no room for guilt because it would complicate things. The island we live on is partly landfill, partly reclaimed sea, partly the compressed memory of things that were demolished to make way for progress. Kampungs became estates. Old cemeteries became housing developments. The bones, when they were found, were handled discreetly and with the appropriate prayers, and then the concrete was poured.

I have lived in our block in the central region of the island for thirty-two years, the same block where I was born. It sits on what was once a Hokkien burial ground, this is documented in the National Archives if you know which filing system to navigate. The original survey maps from the 70s show rows of burial mounds where our void deck now stands. The developers consulted a geomancer before breaking ground. They made offerings. They relocated what remains could be identified and cremated what could not.

The rest, presumably, stayed.

I first became aware of Uncle Lim when I was perhaps seven years old. He was already old then in the way that certain people are always old, as though they arrived at an advanced age and simply remained there, neither ageing further nor showing any interest in doing so. My mother would nod to him in the corridor and occasionally leave a container of food outside his door during Chinese New Year, the way you do for elderly neighbours with no family. He would return the container washed and dry, sometimes with a small mandarin orange inside, never with a note.

He knew my family’s business without being told. When my father’s printing shop closed in 1998, Uncle Lim mentioned it the following week, not with pity, but with the mild acknowledgment of someone noting a change in weather. When my cousin passed his bar exams in 2005, Uncle Lim offered congratulations before anyone in the block could have known. My mother accepted this without comment. She had a category of person she called “the ones who have been here longer than us,” and Uncle Lim fit neatly into it. I did not understand this category as a child. I understand it better now.

He spoke in a Hokkien dialect that my grandmother used and my mother half-remembered and I cannot speak at all. The conversations they had were brief and apparently pleasant. My grandmother, who was not a woman who accepted strangers easily, would sometimes come home from the corridor with a look of quiet satisfaction, as though she had just finished a conversation she had been meaning to have for a very long time.

Uncle Lim is a small man, perhaps five feet five, with shoulders that slope gently inward and hands he keeps folded at his waist when he stands still. His eyes are very dark and lack any form of emotion, like someone who has stopped being startled by things. He smells faintly of joss sticks and of earth after rain, the latter being notable since he does not, as far as I know, garden. He wears the same style of clothing throughout the year: grey trousers, a white short-sleeved shirt, leather sandals of the kind my grandfather used to wear. I have never seen him carrying groceries. I have never seen him with a phone. I have never seen him with another person.

None of this seemed strange to me for twenty-five years. He was simply Uncle Lim of the 14th floor, a fixture of the block as familiar and unremarkable as the potted plants by the lift lobby.

The residents’ petition was about the lifts, specifically the maintenance schedule, which had been reduced from monthly to quarterly without notice, and which several residents felt was inadequate given the age of the block. I had volunteered to collect signatures because I work from home and because I felt vaguely guilty about not being more involved in estate matters.

I went floor by floor on a Tuesday morning. Most residents answered quickly; a few did not answer at all. I saved the 14th floor for last, partly because I had taken the stairs, and partly, if I am honest, because something made me want to.

I knocked on his unit at half past ten. The door was not latched. It swung inward at the pressure of my knuckle, smoothly and without sound, almost as if it has never been fitted with regular use. I stepped inside to place the form on the table.

There was no table.

There was nothing. Not the absence of furniture in a way that suggests moving or redecorating: not boxes, not outlines on the floor, not the small marks and nail holes that accumulate over decades of habitation. The unit was empty in a way that felt geological. The walls had the pale, slightly chalky look of surfaces that have never been repainted because they have never needed to be. The floor was clean like it was never stepped on. I placed the petition form on the floor, since there was nothing else to place it on, and I left.

The Housing Development Board (HDB in short) handled my query with the efficient politeness of someone who fields unusual requests regularly and has learned to show neither curiosity nor judgment. The officer checked her system twice.

The unit on the 14th floor: vacant since October 1987. Status: pending allocation. No previous tenants on record after the building’s initial occupancy period.

I asked whether this was common. She said that occasionally units were held back from allocation for administrative reasons, and that thirty-seven years was, she acknowledged, on the longer side. I asked whether anyone had reported unusual activity from the unit. She looked at me with the particular blankness of a person who has decided not to pursue a line of questioning, and told me she had no records of any such reports.

That evening, I returned to the National Archives with more specific search terms. The kampung that once occupied our block’s footprint was resettled in 1982 and demolished the following year to make way for the new estate. The burial ground adjacent, a Hokkien clan cemetery, was cleared in 1984. The remains were handled according to the procedures of the time: identification where possible, cremation, columbarium placement.

Thirty-seven households had lived in the kampung. I found a partial census from 1979. The names were listed by household. On the third page, near the bottom: a single-person household. One male, age recorded as sixty-seven, occupation listed as retired, surname Lim.
In 1979, the man called Lim would have been sixty-seven years old.

Uncle Lim does not look a day different from how he looked when I was seven.

I began to pay attention in a way I had not before. I asked my neighbour two floors below, a woman who has lived in the block since 1989, whether she knew Uncle Lim. She looked at me for a moment before answering.

“The old man upstairs,” she said. “He was already here when I moved in.”

I asked if she had spoken to him recently. She thought about it. “I see him sometimes in the corridor. He nods.” A pause. “I don’t think I’ve heard him speak.”

I spoke to three other long-term residents. All of them knew Uncle Lim in the same way: a nod in the corridor, a vague familiarity, a sense that he had always been there. None had had a real conversation with him. None had been to his unit. One woman, who has lived one floor below for twenty years and whom I would describe as pragmatic to the point of bluntness, said: “I don’t think about it.”

This is, I have come to understand, the correct approach.

My mother passed away in 2018, of complications following surgery. She was sixty-one. It was sudden in the way that deaths always feel sudden regardless of the warning given.

In the weeks before, while she was still lucid, she mentioned Uncle Lim once. We were sitting in the hospital room and she was tired and not fully tracking the conversation when she said, without preamble: “Uncle Lim says you’ll be fine, you know.”

I asked when she had spoken to him.

She seemed confused by the question. “He was just here,” she said. Then she fell asleep and we did not return to the subject. She had not left the hospital in eleven days.

I saw Uncle Lim in the corridor this morning. He was standing near the lift. As always, his hands were folded at his waist, in his grey trousers and white shirt and leather sandals. He nodded when he saw me, and asked after my mother in the Hokkien dialect I cannot speak but have come to understand.

I told him she was well.

She has been dead for six years. But Uncle Lim already knows this. I think, in some way, he has always known the things that matter about the people in this block: the things that were, the things that are, and perhaps the things that are to come.

He nodded again, with the mild satisfaction of someone confirming information they already held, and pressed the button for the 14th floor.

I watched the lift doors close.

In Singapore, we don’t talk about where the land came from. We make the necessary arrangements, we pour the concrete, and we live our lives in the space that remains.

Some of the original residents, it seems, do the same.