The choice of Joo Chiat for such an encounter to take place in the film is fitting, and does represent what it was really like in the past. Joo Chiat was indeed an area where trishaws were regularly used as public transportation (especially by housewives and students), from the immediate post-war period in the late 1940s until their eventual demise in the late 1980s, early ‘90s. The Japanese first introduced trishaws to Singapore during the Occupation, and the boom time was between 1945 and 1947. There were as many as 10,000 trishaws plying the streets in Singapore then. Contrary to what was depicted in Penarek Becha, trishaw-pullers were predominantly Chinese (Hokkien especially). In 1959, when the People’s Action Party was in government, trishaw-pullers even had to don “uniforms”, consisting of a light blue shirt with matching dark blue trousers. One of the last trishaw repair shops in the late 1980s, family-run Chop Hock Sin Hin 福新兴, which now focuses on selling bicycles, was also located in Joo Chiat (No. 414 Joo Chiat Road), just round the corner from where the above-mentioned scene in Penarek Becha was filmed.