THE COMMUNITY LIBRARY

In an ambitious social experiment, a dreamlike new literary space is taking root in a heartland Singaporean neighbourhood.

- CHANDREYEE RAY

When I was eight, my happiest place on Earth was a small, volunteer-run library in the void deck of an HDB block five minutes away from my house. I would make weekly visits after school, spending at least an hour each time while my mother, a stillnew immigrant to Singapore, chatted politely with the librarian and other adults who were also waiting around.

She would rush me along in practised whispershouts that I would coolly ignore as I rummaged through rows and boxes of books, looking for the hidden gem I knew I would likely uncover. And gems there certainly were, even if only because they had carelessly been thrown in by a parent donating their children’s hand-medowns. A thick anthology of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, I believe, had been my most treasured find.

The specific architecture of the space is now fuzzy in my mind, but one thing I remember clearly is the way it exuded pure warmth. It hardly felt like a real library, especially in contrast to the Tampines Regional Library—a nearby and vastly more formal building that felt too intimidating to enter until I got older, even if it held the bigger collection of more advanced books that I wanted to read.

My community library, meanwhile, had a modest offering. There were only a handful of shelves, mostly filled with picture books I quickly outgrew. But it did have one special feature: a carpeted kid’s corner where a few carefully positioned bean bags sat in various stages of deflation. Here, the library’s already-tenuous silence rule was lifted and children were allowed to read aloud or make conversation. As a slightly anxious child desperate to get lost in books, I felt content spending time here—even if all I did was pore over the same titles I already knew until I had committed them to memory.