The Aunties Are Still There: Growing Up in a Singapore HDB Laundromat

First, there was handwashing

Before the laundromat, there was my mother at the sink.

We did not always have a washing machine. For a stretch of my early childhood, my mother hand-washed our clothes — school uniforms, towels, the lot. She had a routine to it. Basin, soap, knuckles. I would watch her sometimes and think nothing of it because that was simply how clothes got clean. It was not a hardship she complained about. It was just Tuesday.

Eventually we got a top-load washing machine. Second-hand, not brand new, but it was ours. For a while, that machine was a kind of small victory in the flat — the sound of it spinning meant we had moved up a rung somehow. And then, as older appliances tend to do, it started breaking down.

When the machine broke, the laundromat opened

A broken washing machine in an HDB flat is a particular kind of inconvenience. You cannot exactly call for a technician and wait calmly. Clothes pile up. School bags need freshening. Life does not pause.

So we went to the laundromat in the block nearby. My mother would carry a laundry bag and I would tag along because I had nowhere better to be — and honestly, because I liked it there.

The machines were big, coin-operated, and loud in a satisfying way. You could feel them through the floor. The shop smelled of warm fabric and that specific Singapore detergent smell I still cannot name but would recognise anywhere. Clothes hung on every available surface — owner-placed items drying, bags waiting to be collected, stacks folded with the kind of precision that only comes from doing it ten thousand times.

It was not a quiet place. But it was a comfortable one.

The aunties and uncles

Every HDB laundromat I knew growing up was run by an auntie, an uncle, or both. Sometimes a pair. Sometimes one elderly woman who seemed to run everything through sheer institutional knowledge and a very specific way of organising the baskets.

They talked loudly. Not rudely — just loud in the way of people who have spent decades competing with the sound of industrial dryers. They called you lah, asked about your school, told your mother if the load would take another twenty minutes, and somehow always remembered which bag was yours even in a shop full of them.

I remember one auntie in particular. I never knew her name. I just knew her face, her voice, the way she would look at the machines the way a mechanic looks at an engine, with total familiarity. She had been there since before I could remember. Other things changed in the neighbourhood: shops opened and closed, families moved in and out. But the laundromat and its auntie remained.

There is a word I keep coming back to for that: institutional. Not in a cold, government-building sense, but in the sense of something that has earned its place in a community. Something that holds its shape even as everything around it shifts.

Singapore laundromats are not transactional

People assume Singapore is efficient and impersonal — and in many ways it is. But the HDB heartlands are different. The kopitiam is different. And the neighbourhood laundromat is very different.

What I knew of laundromats growing up was never just a commercial exchange. You came, you talked, you waited, you left with clean clothes and sometimes with information about the neighbour from Block B or which stall in the market was selling good chicken rice this week. The laundromat was a place where the neighbourhood maintained itself. Not just its clothes, but its connections.

That kind of warmth does not get built in a day. It gets built in years of showing up, of remembering faces, of keeping the machines running when others might have given up. The aunties and uncles who ran those shops were not just operators. They were, in their own quiet way, the thread holding a block together.

When I moved to the Philippines, I recognised something

I was thirteen when I moved to Laguna. Everything felt unfamiliar — the pace, the language I was still learning to feel comfortable in, the way people talked to each other across fences like they had all the time in the world.

And then I went to a neighbourhood laundry shop.

The machines were different. The setup was different. But the feeling was the same: the loud welcome when you walked in, the owner who seemed to know everyone, the pile of clothes from the whole barangay stacked with familiar confidence, the noise and warmth and the slight chaos.

I have thought about this a lot since. Why the Philippines and Singapore, two countries that seem so different from the outside, produce the exact same laundromat. I think it is because both are built on the same foundation: the idea that your neighbour matters, that a small shop is also a small community, and that someone who handles your clothes with care has earned a kind of trust that goes beyond the transaction.

The aunties are still there

Before we left Singapore in 2022, I went back to the old block. I had not been in that laundromat in a few years. I half-expected it to be gone, turned into a minimart or a nail salon, or simply closed.

It was still there. Different machines, maybe. Fresh paint on the wall. But the same setup, the same smell, and behind the counter, an auntie. I do not know if it was the same one from my childhood. She was older. Or I was older. I am not sure which makes more sense.

She looked at me the way laundromat aunties look at everyone, not with recognition exactly, but with the ease of someone who has never needed a reason to be friendly. I did not have any laundry to drop off. I just stood there for a moment, which probably looked strange.

But I needed to see it. I needed to know it was still there.