Lee Tzu Pheng has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the Cultural Medallion (1985) and the SEA Write Award (1987). Other awards include the Gabriela Mistral Award from the Republic of Chile and the Montblanc-NUS Centre for the Arts Literary Award. Three of her poetry collections won the NBDCS Book Award for English poetry and her poems have been read over the BBC and set to music for choral performance. She published three new books in 2012: _Catching Connections_, _Short Circuits_ and _Sing a Song of Mankind_. Intro: Whenever I am on the street in Chinatown and pass by the old shophouses, they evoke a very strong sense of the history of the place because of their distinct architectural style and decorative features. Looking up at the façade and the windows with their old wooden shutters and bars, not grills; I used to imagine what life was like for the people living in them. I had a classmate who lived in one of these houses in the heart of the city, and when I visited her I was amazed at the depth of the house, something we cannot guess from the narrow frontage. There was an air well allowing light to flood the middle of the house and many rooms. Many of these houses have been cleared in the urban renewal of Singapore. Some have been preserved and refurbished but I shall always associate the mercantile life of early Singapore in the area around the Singapore River with the shophouses that were home to the migrants and those who made their living with the river as their artery of life. What struggles, hopes and memories of people and the houses there. This poem explores a bit of this. Amoy Street Houses by Lee Tzu Pheng How they huddle together in the shadow of the giant bank tower, as in the old days, a sodality pressed to its own ways about the community of life and work. Sooner now, rather than late, they will take with them the secrets of generations, heartaches and joys, mementoes and maladies kept without fuss in the spaces where years inscribe their own niche. Intense, these small privacies behind facades of near-Corinthian cool; profit or loss, births and deaths resist the intrusion of heritage hunters. What ledgers could hold those lives spent and given? Yet everything has its place. Museums at best are cabinets of curios, studios where we remake stories to scripts of selective sympathies. No matter that lingering dialects are drowned by the wrecking team’s leveling din two streets away. Now that the gaps are everywhere widening, paragraphs dropped or rearranged, the jumble of time makes precious those letters from China yellowing in the tea-chest under the ancestral altar; the photographs gathering nostalgic bloom in the Huntley and Palmer’s Assorted* Variety* tin. How far can history look into the deep recesses of lives that seem simple outside? From where we stand, on this street, the windows are open yet keep quite aloof, beyond reach. And who would endeavour to read the lines on that weathered face pressed against the window bars looking out on us? * This word is in italic