Why I Wrote Kaya Toast for the Soul

6 hours ago
3 min read

A book about music, memory, grief, and the people we used to be

Most of us have at least one song that can take us somewhere very quickly.

A few notes begin, and suddenly we remember a room, a person, an old version of ourselves. We remember what the air felt like. What we were worried about. What had not happened yet.

That was where Kaya Toast for the Soul began.

The book is set in a second-hand CD shop beneath a staircase in Bishan (actually based on where I run my current social enterprise iash.sg). The shop sells old albums, used books, kaya toast, half-boiled eggs and iced Milo. Behind the counter is an old Sony Discman that does something strange.

It plays the song a person needs more than the one they ask for.

The player does not simply take people back to their happiest memories. It takes them to the part of the past that still has something unfinished in it.

A woman arrives wanting to return to the night she agreed to marry someone. The song brings her somewhere else: an old HDB corridor, a rented flat and a child sitting outside with a slice of bread.

A dying man brings in a bag of cassette tapes and a list of songs for his wake. He asks to see his late wife. Instead, he is taken back to the last person who heard him sing.

Other people arrive carrying grief, regret, homesickness, old decisions and versions of themselves they thought they had already left behind.

The memories do not allow them to repair what happened. Nobody gets to go back with better judgement and say the perfect thing.

They return with a different understanding of what they carried away.

Although the book contains a magical Discman, I think of it mainly as a book about ordinary people.

It is about the ways we organise our lives around things that happened a long time ago. It is about the children we once were, the adults we became, and the parts of ourselves we quietly stopped bringing with us.

Much of the book is carried through ordinary objects.

Cassette tapes.

A map on a passenger seat.

A wet school bag.

A folded piece of paper.

A plate of kaya toast left beside an empty chair.

Memory often returns through things like this. A smell. A song playing through old earphones. The hum of an air-conditioner. Rain outside a shop. Butter that has not melted properly yet.

I also wanted the book to feel recognisably Singaporean.

The stories move through HDB corridors, old restaurant ballrooms, tuition centres, Bishan Park, buses, shoe racks and neighbourhood shops. People wait for their children. They carry groceries home. They complain about wedding food. They remove their shoes at the entrance.

The setting is part of the emotional life of the book. These are the places where people wait, avoid going home, remember something, or finally understand what home meant to them.

The shop itself is not grand.

The shelves lean slightly. The carpet is second-hand. The food menu is very small. Mr Lim reads his newspaper while paying attention to everybody. Akemi cuts butter with the seriousness of someone performing surgery.

People enter for different reasons. Some come for music. Some come because it is raining. Some need somewhere to sit before going home.

A few of them use the Discman.

Kaya Toast for the Soul is a book about unfinished things.

A goodbye that was said but did not finish the grief.

A child who learnt to become easier.

A father whose children knew what he did, but not who he had once been.

A person who became very good at surviving and forgot that survival had cost them something.

The stories are not really about closure. They are about recognition.

Sometimes we return to the past because we are trying to change it.

Sometimes we return because there is something there we finally need to understand.

The excerpt below includes the prologue, “The Shop Beneath the Stairs,” and the first and second chapter of the book.

They introduce the shop, the Discman and the first customer who asks for the longest song.