Kitchen · Jurong West

The Radio Station My Kitchen Keeps Drifting To

22 March 2026 · written by Aisha

My mother left me her old radio when she downsized — a cream plastic unit with a dial that sticks slightly at 88.5 and an antenna that remembers how to find signal only if you tilt it toward the window facing the corridor. It lives on the kitchen shelf between the rice tin and the jar of cloves I never use but like having anyway.

I don't listen to radio the way she did — hours of it while folding laundry or shelling peas, the presenters' voices becoming roommates. I turn it on in the morning while the kettle boils, mostly for company against the too-quiet flat. And every time, without aiming, my thumb stops at the same place: a Chinese-language talk segment with occasional old pop songs, the kind my mother hums without realising.

I've tried other stations. News on 93.8 for a week — too brisk, like eating standing up. A music channel that played the same three guitar bands — fine, but anonymous. I come back to 88.5 the way a bus route returns to a depot, not because it's the fastest path but because the turns are written into muscle memory.

The radio drifts to the same voice every morning — and I let it, the way you let a fan decide the direction.

One presenter laughs at his own jokes with a wheeze that sounds like my uncle's. Another reads listener messages about grandchildren and HDB renovations. I understand maybe sixty percent without trying for more. The rest is texture — rise and fall, the pause before a commercial for herbal soup, the way static creeps in when someone opens the lift door downstairs and the building swallows the signal for three seconds.

Last week I caught myself answering a question aloud — the host asking whether people still write letters, and me saying not really to an empty kitchen. Embarrassing, but also proof the radio still works as conversation proxy, which is probably why my mother loved it. She wasn't lonely so much as accompanied.

I thought about replacing the unit with a Bluetooth speaker and a playlist. Cheaper, cleaner sound. But the dial's stickiness is a kind of biography. 88.5 is where her mornings lived. When I stand there waiting for the kettle, I'm not performing nostalgia — I'm continuing a small ritual without needing to name it sacred.

On weekends I leave it on longer and wash dishes to voices I won't remember individually but will recognise as a type: patient, slightly rambling, willing to fill air without demanding full attention. That's the contract between kitchen radio and me. It talks. I move through water and plates. Neither of us requires the other to finish a thought.

When the kettle clicks off, I sometimes turn the volume down but rarely off. The voice keeps going while I pour and steep and sit at the small table by the window. Outside, the block is waking — shutters, a dog, someone else's radio faintly bleeding through concrete. Multiple frequencies, same hour, west side turning over in layers.

I don't know the presenter's name. I don't need to. The station my kitchen keeps drifting to is enough of a landmark for now.