Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following was published in the Sunday Times on 15 July 2007:

Sunday Times 15 July 2007
House Hunting Horrors
by Colin Goh

Between the mice, the constant flow of grocery trucks idling their engines outside our window as they trundled goods into the supermarket that had just opened below our apartment, our car having been broken into twice in the past three months, and the final straw, a handwritten notice pasted in our lift that read: “To fellow residents in the building: beware! I was violently mugged at 5 a.m. in the elevator on Sunday” – the Wife and I decided it was probably time to move out of our apartment.

But like Singapore, New York City is undergoing a bit of a real estate boom at the moment, and like many Singaporeans, we found ourselves either priced out of the desirable areas, or forced to downsize for the same price.

The apartments we saw in the vicinity of our existing apartment were either horribly expensive (thanks to the influx of yuppies moving to our ‘hood due to rising rents in Manhattan and the more genteel parts of Brooklyn) or just plain horrible – fifth floor walkups in dilapidated townhouses, apartments the size of matchboxes never mind shoeboxes, floors that sloped so badly you felt you were on the keel of the Black Pearl in her climactic battle against the Flying Dutchman, yadda yadda yadda.

Of course we expected to be appalled. Apartment hunting in New York City is always an adventure, and a rite of passage for all New Yorkers.  And frankly, no matter how crappy the places we viewed were, everything was an anti-climax compared to our last neighbourhood, where we lived alongside artists with plenty of talent but poor personal hygiene, an illicit late night brothel for the rapper crowd, and packs of stray pitbulls. Hey, it was all we could afford then.

But chalk it up to old age or whatever, we were getting a bit sian of the ghetto lifestyle, no matter how much street cred it conferred, especially since rents were rising faster than Foxy Brown’s arrest record.

So this time, we thought we’d check out the Asian neighbourhoods. Being “kaki lang”, we thought, we might get a preferential bargain on the rent. As it turned out, this was naïve.

One of the first places we saw, in Elmhurst, Queens, was advertised in the Chinese newspapers as a “basement apartment”. “Basement my foot,” muttered the Wife as we were ushered into a cellar with no windows, and a generator humming away sinisterly in the corner. “Only two of you?” asked the landlady from China. “Here can sleep eight. Bring more people. No problem.”

The next place we viewed seemed pleasant – decent-sized bedroom, plenty of light, tree-lined street. But…

“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked the owner.

He grinned and brandished a key. “In hallway, outside apartment,” he replied. “Is locked. No problem! Only you have key! Is private!”

“We must leave the apartment to get to the bathroom?” I blinked.

“No worry! No one see you!” he continued chirpily. “Neighbour, he work late night at sushi restaurant! Come back only in morning! No problem!”

It seemed like everywhere we went, the landlord’s recurrent phrase was “No problem!” The problem, of course, was that there was usually a problem.

“Oh, you from Singapore?” said the Taiwanese landlady as she bade us sit down on the grimy plastic Hello Kitty stools on the ramshackle porch of her ramshackle house in Flushing. “You like it here! Upstair stay nine Malaysian! Just like home! No problem!”

The Wife then called a Chinese real estate agent. “How many people?” asked the agent in Mandarin. When the Wife replied “two”, she immediately shot back, “Four hundred fifty dollars!”

“But I haven’t even told you the kind of apartment I’m looking for yet!” gasped the Wife.  The agent paused, then said, “Orh… you the thousand dollar type, ah?”  She had assumed we just wanted a single room in an apartment, probably to be shared with, oh, nine Malaysians.

It felt like we’d entered some parallel universe. The rents per square foot in the Asian neighbourhoods were comparable to the rest of New York City, but what made them seem more affordable was the willingness to pack more people into the same space. The Asians in NYC, it seemed, were a close-knit community in more ways than one.

We eventually did find a place… and we did kind of wind up sharing with others, though not with nine Malaysians, you might be disappointed to note.

But exactly how and with whom… well, you’ll have to find out in a fortnight. Because like many homes in New York’s Asian neighbourhoods, I’ve run out of space.

Colin and the Wife’s film, Singapore Dreaming, premieres in New York next Sunday, 22 July.

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