90 years in Singapore is a memoir of Irene Lim, a Straits born and raised Chinese woman, from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present. It is an exceptional recounting of a personal life through a tumultuous period in Singapore's history in the region and in the world; and for this it is a valuable source of knowledge within an expanding repertoire of oral and personal histories of Singapore. For the historical sociologist, 90 years in Singapore provides a window into the lived experience of a specific milieu — the upper-middle-class Chinese diaspora — whose lives were made and unmade many times over through these unsettled times. This retelling is adorned with careful detail to colours, sights, sounds and flavours that provide sensory delight to the reader; and in these details lie the remarkable account of a woman's strength and resilience in making sense of place and community. Reflecting on two big themes, this memoir invites further work into two less examined areas of scholarship in the study of Singapore and Southeast Asia.

Well reflective of the diasporic disposition, one theme in the book is displacement and relocation. Growing up in the 1930s, Lim did not stay in one place for long since her father kept shifting houses as soon as he sensed trouble. Her father's restless vigilance meant that the family had to adjust to a new home environment every few years, but it also spoke of a steely aspiration to settle for no less than perfection — a comfortable life reflective of the family's upwardly mobile status. If moving houses was driven by preference, the family's relocation during the Japanese Occupation was driven by urgency. The family left for Bukit Mertajam in Penang following her mother's premonition and after her father received a warning from a friend — Yusof bin Ishak, then journalist and later first President of Singapore — that his anti-Japanese writings made him a likely target. This dark episode highlights acute mass displacement in the region as geopolitical struggles on the world stage left distinct imprints on the daily lives of common people. Life took a turn for the family during wartime as the children quickly assumed the role of caregivers. Lim learned to cook and perform other household chores, all the time worried for herself and siblings for missing school. This account of relocation opens up a productive area for further research. To my knowledge, interim regional migration during times of trouble is an underexamined topic in the study of Southeast Asia. In addition to Lim's family, I have since encountered similar anecdotes of regional migration during wartime and during the Konfrontasi (1963–66). Interestingly, migratory patterns were similar as families moved from Singapore to Penang and back again. These patterns of displacement and migration require systematic historical and sociological study so as to shed light on an important yet neglected area of scholarship that anchors Singapore to the region.

The reverse of moving — settling into community life — is another theme of the book. Lim cultivated a small but close community centred around her church and nurtured close friendships with other families who attended English-medium schools in Singapore. In 1957 the Chinese population was 74 per cent of the total population, and of this only 17.6 per cent read and wrote in English, compared to 35.6 per cent who read and wrote in Mandarin (Bao Zhiming, The making of vernacular Singapore English: System, transfer and filter, 2015). The English-speaking Chinese community in Singapore was a minority that belonged to a distinctive social class. Against the homophily of Lim's church and school community circles, it was in fact in the private space of the family home where readers encounter other ethnic and occupational classes, including the Malay drivers and helpers and the Chinese-speaking amah. Yet over time and across generations, these boundaries grew ever slightly more porous, as when Lim's brother married a Malay Muslim woman and raised his family in Kuala Lumpur. Interethnic and interfaith marriages were rare at this time, but in these personal accounts there is evidence that they did occur (see also Sharon Mengchee Lee, ‘Intermarriage and ethnic relations in Singapore’, Journal of Marriage and Family 50, 1 [1988]: 255–65). For lack of systematic and aggregate data collection, herein lies yet another missing but crucial datapoint in Singapore's history that would shed light on patterns of intergroup relations and social change over time. This lacuna within the scholarship could be supplemented by further archival work and interviews to make sense of changing historical patterns of community life among the different ethnic and religious groups, which would provide a better longitudinal analysis of nation-building.

To approach this book as a source of social history of Singapore, it should be read alongside contemporaneous memoirs from other communities, and in this area, there are several to recommend. Sanusi Yahaya and Hidayah Amin's Kampung Tempe: Voices from a Malay village (2017), about a Javanese settlement at Jalan Haji Alias in Bukit Timah Road, can be juxtaposed with this memoir for a sense of the diverse settlements along one of the historically longest residential roads in Singapore. On diasporic identity and community, this memoir can be read against John Solomon's A subaltern history of the Indian diaspora in Singapore: The gradual disappearance of untouchability, 1872–1965 (2016) for a comparative sense of how occupational and social status shape diasporic communities in different ways. Finally, this memoir can be complemented by the rather extensive series of commissioned publications commemorating Singapore's 50 years of independence. When read together, these sources provide a rich and complex account of our nation's collective history. 90 years in Singapore, remarkable for the ways in which one woman's personal account evokes further reflection of the many yet hidden spaces for historical research on Singapore, is truly an achievement to celebrate.