Lucky Plaza, through the eyes of Filipinos who know it best.
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But that was over two decades ago, and the woman standing in front of me is a far cry from the nervous 22-year-old in hand-me-downs, waiting for a friend to come get her. In fact, this Saturday afternoon, our positions are reversed: I’m the newcomer, and she’s here to take me around Lucky Plaza.
Story continuesAt its opening, however, the mall was among the first of its kind here—multi-storey and fully air-conditioned. When the Foreign Maid Scheme was introduced in 1978, there were around 5,000 foreign domestic workers in Singapore; by 1988, this number had swelled to 40,000. $6 gets you rice with two dishes and a drink, so we order several plates to share. We get adobo, the vinegar-soy sauce concoction which is the Philippines’ unofficial national dish; menudo, a slightly sweet pork and tomato stew; monggo, a thick, savoury green bean soup that reminds me of porridge, and my personal favourite, kare-kare, a meat and vegetable stew that’s been richly flavoured with peanuts. None of it is Instagrammable, but all of it is warming and delicious.
The lower floors, which draw more tourist traffic, cater to this demographic. Most shops here sell souvenirs, clothes, and cheap electronics, and have a somewhat different feel from the rest of the mall. A corner of the first and second floors, however, is dominated by jewellers, selling mainly gold jewelry. I’ve always found this strange, considering domestic worker salaries aren’t exactly high, so I ask Bhing about it.
Even with the advent of mobile banking—ostensibly cheaper and more convenient—many women still prefer to come down to remit money at the agencies in person. Part of this is down to the latter’s large network of collection locations , though to many women, it’s merely part of their regular Sunday routine. Going to remit money is an excuse to visit Lucky Plaza, not the other way around.
I’m more interested in the mini-marts, which sell all kinds of Filipino snacks and sundries, from papaya soap to salted tamarind candy. The spontaneous non-purposeful supermarket shopper in me could spend all day looking at snacks, and the aisles are piled high with interesting foreign foods—from chicharones and corn puffs to caramelly turon and kutsinta . We even come across salted duck eggs, albeit dyed a deep fuschia.
As I fight my way over to the lifts, I narrowly miss stepping on somebody’s speakers several times. I’m on my way up to meet Gilda, Ellen, Maribel, and Rufie, who have kindly agreed to take me around the mall on a Sunday, so I can get a sense of the place on the one day a week it really comes alive.
How the ukay-ukay shops sprang up over the last few years, as though transplanted straight from the malls in Manila, and how the queue when Jollibee first opened snaked all along the corridor into the vacant unit next door. How the Internet cafes bloomed with the dot-com bubble and disappeared as the world discovered smartphones and Wi-Fi. How that shop in the corner used to be called Ilo Ilo. How that old cafe is now gone.
When I first pitched this story, I thought I’d be writing about the significance of Lucky Plaza to the local Filipino community. I realise now that that wasn’t quite right: Lucky Plaza is the local Filipino community. It’s woven into who they are and how they live here, in the way the spaces we inhabit make us, too.
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