Have you ever witnessed how a place close to your heart deteriorate slowly over the years into something you feel disappointed to come back to?

This place is Melaka (or Malacca). It’s a small town in Malaysia, about six hours north of Singapore. Usually my wife and I would take a coach bus up and spend a long weekend there. We fell in love with the Melaka on our first trip back in 2014. The narrow but deep Peranakan shophouses and their intricate, colourful facades, the spicy Nonya laksa, the nice cold bowl of aromatic, sweet chendol on a hot day, and the bustling weekend night market on Jonker Street. Food, architecture and vibes, but we were there for the nostalgia mostly. Because Melaka was like a time capsule. It looked like how Singapore looked like in the 60s and 70s, when we were growing up. Those streetscapes were already lost to the fast and furious urban development in Singapore, so Melaka felt like walking down memory lane for us. We loved it enough to visit almost once every year, and we just spent the weekend there.

Only to feel heart-broken. Again. 

And as I talked about it with my wife, we noticed the same pattern year on year… Each time we returned, something that we really loved previously would have changed, usually deteriorated for the worse. Often, it’s the food. At first, it was the chendol and Nonya cuisine that we really enjoyed at a tiny nondescript restaurant. The standards had since slipped significantly the past five years. Next, it’s the laksa. Then the night market. One by one, the shops, restaurants and street stalls we loved either closed, or metamorphosed into something we no longer recognise, or enjoy. Food quality and standard kept dropping, while things got increasingly commercialised. All this as more and more tourists kept showing up.   

It’s heart-breaking to witness this, all the more on front row seats since we return every year. 

Why does this degradation happen? It seems to happen especially when a town gets really popular with tourists and gets increasingly commercialised. Is it because of dilution, where the more customers you have to serve, the harder it is to keep up standards on staff, food quality, ingredients? Or is it due to lack of a closed feedback loop? If your customers are no longer locals who come regularly and only the tourists who don’t know better, it gets easier to get by with lower standards? Or could it be due to fatigue and disillusionment - what used to be a manageable work-life serving a small number of locals became a huge business sucking up time and effort to serve tourists multiple times the local population?

Granted, it might be selfish to expect that things stay the same just for us tourists, that things should stagnate and stay locked in the past just for the whims and fancies of people who don’t live there. The locals too, should have the privilege of seeing their home town develop and grow. Which is why this makes it a difficult discussion and a conflicted experience. On one hand, I sincerely wish that the locals can enjoy the economical fruits of their hard work by opening up their home town to us. But on the other hand, I deeply miss the nostalgic parts that we fell in love with when we first came.

At the end of our trip, my wife and I mused that we might not return for some years. I think we had drunk the well dry after five years, on top of the disappointments upon disappointments. 

It’s not that Melaka is now bad. It’s just…I’m not sure if I can take the heartbreak of seeing my childhood memories being demolished a second time.