To Jurong With Love

To Jurong With Love is the story of several generations of hopeful young people who searched for justice, truth, and equality through the Young Christian Workers Movement in Singapore. It is about little people who are often forgotten in the grand history of institutions and nations. Girls becoming women and boys becoming men, trying to make sense of their lives in Singapore at every turn on the road to the promised future.

Instead of gold and glory, they found what it meant to be human, what it meant to be friends, and what it meant to be family, in the industrial wilderness of Jurong. They chose dignity and rights, to stand with one another and to side with workers, toiling at the heart of Singapore’s economic miracle. Those were the days before we became familiar with the terms, ‘advocacy’ and ‘civil society’.

The young people and their chaplains challenged themselves to change, to find alternatives to the given situations, beginning again and again.