Mr Gao entered the rattan furniture industry only when he was 13 years old in 1953. He was not schooling and was tapping rubber in a Malaysian plantation and when he returned to Singapore with his father then, a neighbour introduced his family to a relative who has just opened a rattan furniture shop. It was not by choice that Mr Gao entered the industry at a young age but without education and skill set, that was the only route for him then.
Mr Gao emphasized that he went through a bona fide (正统) apprenticeship to be a true rattan furniture maker or shifu. To “graduate”, he has to put in 33 months. For the first 18 months, he was learning the art of weaving the rattan, the art of weaving was not as tedious as the art of constructing the frame of the furniture or what is called as frame making, however the money earned was not as much as a frame making shifu. After 18 months, he volunteered to learn the art of frame making and at the end of the apprenticeship, he could make a rattan furniture by himself from scratch. Some shifu can only weave rattan and some can only make the frames, but Mr Gao was proud to claim that he could do both. Life as an apprenticeship was hard, he earned around $15 a month and after one year $20 a month. Besides learning the craft, the three apprentices had to take turns to clean the toilets, close the shop, and cook meals for the employees and the boss. Before he could graduate, he also had to work for an extra month for his boss at $30 and that was an implicit industry guideline or what they call as “补师“. To me this is like the modern “bond”, for the effort the company put in to train him, the employee put in an extra month to return the favour. Mr Gao emphasised the importance of that last extra one month, as any apprentice who didn’t do that cannot be labelled as shifu.
Mr Gao went on to set up his own shop with another partner and he could make around three to four pieces a day and sell those furniture to his own mentor who had trained him. At the height of the rattan furniture industry, the roads of Victoria Street, Middle Road and Bras Brasah were filled with rattan furniture shops. There was keen competition and shop owners actively poached for the best shifu in the market, offering them higher salary and better conditions.
Mr Gao left the industry in the 1960s as he felt then that it was a sunset industry. Furniture making was getting more mechanized, replacing labour and skill. Furniture was increasing made using metals and wood, replacing rattan. Rattan has become just an accessory or art pieces but not the main material. Singapore at that time started to industrialise and there was nationwide call to assist in the national development of the country. The government set up the “nation building groups” (建国团队) in part to also reign in high unemployment among the youth who were dropping out of school and joining triads.
Mr Gao joined the then Public Works Department (PWD) as a worker on board the dredging vessel along the Kallang River. He didn’t look back since and went on to work in the transport industry, first on a vessel then as a school bus driver. In the 1990s, he at one point owned 6 school buses and rattan furniture making was but just a distant memory in his life since.
The art of hand-made rattan furniture is a dying trade and as Mr Gao showed me the tools of his trade, I could felt the displacement of these trades to modernity. It is inevitable as economy progresses up the value chain that machinery replaces labour. However good machinery is still conceptualized and made by humans who should have a good grounding of how a product should be made. I wonder as we replace traditional trades with modern technology, are we also inevitably losing something more than just the skill sets, perhaps also the ability to innovate and improvise on existing products and our way of life.
(Interviewed and written by Yiting)
