I disagree with your analysis of lines 25-27.

I belive Kim Cheong’s mother and Ah

Beng’s mother are trying to compete with each other. KIm Cheong’s mom tells Ah
Beng’s mother that “money’s no problem”. When she tells Ah Beng’s mother that
Kim Cheong’s “father spends so much / rakes out the mosiac floor & wants to
make terrazzo or what”, her intention is to show Ah Beng’s mother that “money’s
no problem” and Ah Beng’s mother gets it and this that is why she gets the floor of
the conversation back and immediately tells Kim Cheong’s mother that “we also
got new furniture, bought from diethelm.”
(This is known as conversation implicature in pragmatics or conversation discourse
analysis.)

The conversation between the two mothers reminds me of the song “Anything You
Can Do, I Can Do Better” from the musical “Annie Get Your Gun”.
“Anything you can do, I can do better than You can do,
I can do, we can do, I can do, much much better than You.
Anything you can do, I can do better.
I can do anything better than you.
No you can’t.
Yes I can.
No you can’t.
Yes I can.
No you can’t.
Yes I can, yes I can.
Anything You can be I can be greater.
Sooner or later, I’m greater than you.
No, you’re not.
Yes I am.
No you’re not.
Yes I am.
No you’re not.
Yes I am, yes I am.”
Lines 36-37
If you play the fool or act the fool, you behave in a playful, childish, and foolish
way, usually in order to make other people laugh.

In Singapore, when we tell someone to “stop playing the fool”, we mean to tell the
person to stop horsing around or to chide him for fooling around / horsing around.

The mother tells the child to “stop playing the fool”. I think here, the mother is
telling the child to stop horsing around or stop playing as he has to get ready for his
tuition, because his “tuition teacher is coming”. I do not agree with your analysis
that the child is “actually foolish” because it is apparent in the poem that this
mother thinks very highly of her child – “ah beng is so smart / already he can
watch tv and know the whole story”.

A point of interest to consider is the title itself. It should have been “an HDB”
instead of “a HDB”. This is a common mistake made by Singaporeans. I believe
the late Arthur Yap deliberately used “a” instead of “an” to lend authenticity to
how the average Singaporeans speak / use English / Singlish. Code-switching is
also evident in the poem. This mirrors how Singaporeans often code-switch as
Singapore is a multi-racial society.

Your analysis of Line 32 is incorrect as you’ve misinterpreted “toa-soh”, which

means “the eldest brother’s wife” in Hokkien.

“Jamban” means toilet in Malay. “Throwing their money into the jamban” means
“throwing money down the drain”, i.e. wasting money. “toa-soh” means elder
sister-in-law, i.e. “an elder brother’s wife”. It is Hokkien, a Chinese dialect. “Your
tuition teacher is coming” – Students in Singapore attend lots of tuition classes
because parents do not want their children to lose out to their peers. It is the
“kiasu” mentality.