About This Quote
Rats’ alley is a geographical region in Singapore. We might associate this region with something that is dirty and unpleasant. However, rats aren’t the only creatures that live in rats’ alley. There are also mosquitoes and cockroaches that live there.
Rats, however, are the ones we usually think about. In the phrase rats’ alley, rats is understood as an allusion to people who are desperate for money. When people are desperately looking for money so they can buy goods from other people, they might have to do things that aren’t very nice or seem unfair to others.
They go around asking others to borrow money and taking advantage of others who don’t have enough money to buy food. If a person has no choice but to borrow money from someone else, that person will have to do things he or she doesn’t want to do or that other people don’t like. In this sense, rats are not quite as awful as they seem at first glance.