Last Teabreak at the Railway Station

Took a tea break with the colleagues in the evening and we ended up at Tanjong Pagar Railway Station. By the end of the week, the station will formally close and there will be no more trains rolling onto its tracks. The coffeeshops will also be gone.

I strongly agree that the train station has to close down and the railway tracks have to go. The presence of an unchecked route that stretches from a foreign land, cutting across the entire country, ending at only a few kilometres away from its Central Business District proves to be a serious threat to a country's national security. This is not a siege mentality but reality. It took the Singapore government 2 decades of bilateral work to finally take back the land from our northern neighbours.

But to say that the railway station has no place in my heart will be erroneous. The station will always remind me of my paternal grandmother. My grandparents were straits-born Chinese but they left my father behind with my granduncle, when they were supposedly forced by the British to return back to China because of my grandfather's communist links. He however ended up dying as a political prisoner in a CCP jail. The romantic take is that perhaps, he has been a spy for the KMT all along. But that is another story.

My grandmother later returned to Singapore for a visit nearly 3 decades after she had left. Her younger brother, my granduncle, came down from Kuala Lumpur. They were reunited for a few days for the first time in decades, before he had to return back to KL via the train. They bid farewell along the platform at the Tanjong Pagar station with tears rolling in their eyes. I was probably 9 years old then but I understood the significance of those tears. It was probably the last time both brother and sister will ever meet each other again in this lifetime.

And it turned out to be so. A couple of years later, my grandmother passed away in China.