“Leave the sandwiches. Leave it lah!” A hissing swan was rapidly closing in on me, hostile and wings flapping frenziedly. My tour guide, Aadi, grabbed the food I was trying to cram into my bag, threw it in front of the irate fowl and pulled me away from the gazebo. The swan inspected our offerings, ignored Aadi’s tuna sandwich and gobbled down my egg salad. Satisfied with its recompense, it waddled back down to the bank of Swan Lake and swam off. They say humans are prone to either fight, flight or freeze in situations of great duress but I had overridden seven million years of human evolution in my instinct to rescue a few sandwiches. “I don’t remember the swans attacking people like this,” I said as Aadi led me to our next destination in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, the familiar flora stirring the surface of my memory. I grew up Malaysian but, having a Singaporean father, I spent countless school holidays across the old Causeway. The pages of my childhood are filled with half-remembered forays into the Science Centre and watching people inch their way across the ice at Fuji Ice Palace at the old Jurong Entertainment Centre. In the decade since I made Australia home, my memories of Singapore – hazy to begin with – have tarnished. As I left my twenties behind, the yearning to resurrect my childhood recollections grew, and I decided to play tourist in a city partially remembered. I took in the peaceful vista created by the viridescent vegetation encircling the lake, the iconic sculpture of swans taking flight, and even my new nemesis (who was now floating on the water with its partner, looking guileless and ethereal). Though it harked back to a different time for me, I was glad to venture forth in pursuit of other experiences. Aadi explained that mute white swans tended to go on the defensive if they thought someone was encroaching on their territory or threatening their cygnets. “Because they are such beautiful birds, people often try to feed or pat them, so they are not shy about approaching humans.” We toured the SBG Heritage Museum in Holttum Hall, an elegant cream-coloured, gable-roofed building that architecturally alludes to Singapore’s British colonial history. Built in 1920, Holttum Hall was once the office and laboratory of the eponymous Eric Holttum, Director of the Botanic Gardens, and celebrates its centennial this year. The ground floor features the achievements of past directors, while the first floor acknowledges the economic contributions of the Singapore Botanic Garden. I took pleasure in tracing the garden’s changes from its establishment to present day on an interactive map on the ground floor. Contiguous with the Heritage Museum is the CDL Green Gallery, a contemporary structure that features botanical exhibits and contains solar roof panels that generate enough electricity to power the gallery. This cheek-to-cheek layout of traditional and modern architecture is Singapore to a tee. We left the gardens for Maxwell Food Centre in pursuit of a hot meal. On our way, the juxtaposition of the historic Jinrikisha Station with the high-rise apartments in the distance served as a reminder of the old and the new existing affably side by side. First under my fork was Chinese carrot cake, a savoury dish made with Daikon radish, dried shrimp, lap cheong (Chinese sausage) and topped with spring onion. It is a personal childhood favourite, and I savoured the authentic flavours which brought back many a happy memory. With room for a little more, I sampled the tomato-infused wonton noodles recommended by Aadi. The sweet-tasting noodles are a nod to pasta, another example of the East-West fusion that Singapore is known for. As we left the hawker centre, it was night but not dark, the gloom kept at bay by the ranks of streetlights standing sentry along the major arteries of the city. Such was night-time in Singapore, a teeming ant colony of activity temporarily subsiding before another day of food gathering and nest construction. While Singapore’s appeal to tourists lies in its food, shopping and historical landmarks, for me, being there was like opening a time capsule from way back when and retracing faded mental maps in new ink.