About seven years ago, Leslie Tay, a Singaporean food blogger, began to notice that the city’s older food vendors were retiring – and with them were disappearing some of his favorite dishes.

A perfect char kway teow, a stir-fried Malay noodle dish, was becoming difficult to find at Singapore’s famous open-air food courts. So too was handmade muah chee, the steamed rice-flour dumplings coated in peanuts and sugar originally from southern China.

A younger, more educated generation appeared uninterested in slaving over hot stoves. And newer cooks, some of them foreign, were simply not as good.

… Kwa Chong Guan, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, says it’s natural for the younger generation to reappraise history. With young people taking Singapore’s sovereignty and prosperity for granted, he argues in a recent editorial, the focus of the national narrative is shifting from political independence and economic progress to “the local and social dimensions of our past.”