The Tan family, written down
A coffee shop with the family upstairs, red tortoise cakes, and a reunion dinner for twenty-three.
This is what a Famvaults wiki looks like once a family has been at it for a while. Read any article — the links, the contents lists and the family tree all work. Every family here is invented, and the pictures are illustrations.
6 articles
Tan Chee Keong
Tan Chee Keong (1929–2009) came south with his mother in 1937, aged eight, and spent his whole working life in one coffee shop: on the ground floor of the shophouse on Joo Chiat Road, which he took…
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The Shophouse on Joo Chiat Road
Two storeys, mint green, with the coffee shop below and the family above, from 1958 until Ah Kong sold it in 1994 and the family moved out two years later. The pink one next door belonged to a tailor…
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Ah Ma's Ang Ku Kueh
Red tortoise cakes, made by Ah Ma for every baby's first month, every birthday over sixty, and Chinese New Year. The tortoise is for a long life. The red is for luck. The mould is the only one she…
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Reunion Dinner, 1988
Lunar New Year's Eve upstairs at Joo Chiat Road, the year the eldest son came home from Perth with a wife nobody had met. Twenty-three people around a table for ten, a steamboat in the middle, and the…
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Lim Bee Hoon
Lim Bee Hoon (1933–2018), Ah Ma, married Tan Chee Keong in 1953 and ran everything above the coffee shop that he did not run below it. She was Peranakan, cooked like it, and considered most other…
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The Marble Table
Why the table nearest the door at the coffee shop was never offered to anyone else before eight in the morning, for thirty-one years.
ReadAnd the family behind them
Every person can point at the articles written about them, so the tree doubles as a way into the wiki.
Family tree
- &Lim Bee Hoon1933–2018
- &Sarah Tanb. 1958
- &Goh Seng Huatb. 1956
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