By Lucy Friedland.

Culture hits the traveller in the face when she dares to brave the heat and the dust to roam the streets of Penang. What is perplexing is how both locals and visitors succeed in not responding to that culture. The Penang Brand does indeed need promoting, but with a deep recognition that the island’s heterogeneity is its soul.

THE first time Penang appeared on my radar wasn’t while I was watching a “Malaysia Truly Asia” commercial or a show on the Travel Channel. It wasn’t while I was reading a glossy brochure or guidebook, or surfing the Web. It was in the  city of Chengdu, China.

In 1999, I had ditched my plum job in the United States as an editor of travel guides and gone backpacking in Asia. My plan was to explore some of the major cities on the continent. I had checked into the no-frills Traffic Hotel in Chengdu, and there I met my first Penangnite, Ong Guat Choo.

I’ve been trying to recall when I first heard the name George Town – and how I became so smitten with the place – since attending the Penang International Conference on Sustainable Cultural Development last October. In his speech during the opening ceremony, Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng pitched Brand Penang to a capacity crowd of 500 delegates. He said that the World Heritage inscription has created an international buzz about the city that shouldn’t go to waste.

“Penang,” he said, must be “branded with integrity, and money can’t buy that.” He exhorted us “to protect, care for and promote our Penang brand” and guide investment so as not to “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

When I met Guat Choo in China, she was on a mission. She was looking for a Peking  duck restaurant in Chengdu, a city known for its red-hot chilli dishes – and not at all famed for Peking duck. But, she had a craving, so what to do? We ate passable Peking duck together and compared notes on our China travels. She was traveling around the country after a stint of teaching English in Beijing. Actually, This was her sixth trip to China. Her first was in 1991, the year, she said, that the country officially opened up travel to Malaysians.

Originally, she had gone to the motherland in search of “pure” Chinese culture, purer than the hybridised one that has evolved on the Straits Settlement. She was lamenting the fact that much of “Old China” had given way to new China, especially in the major cities. She was heading to more rural areas to find her Old China – places with pre-Maoist values and aesthetics where older, traditional ways of doing things had been preserved.

“Go to George Town. It’s on the island of Penang, in Malaysia,” Guat Choo told me.

“What’s so great about George Town?”

“You will find Old China there.”

With her travel experience, I had no doubt Guat Choo would know Old China when she saw it.

Months later, I found myself in George Town riding a trishaw from the ferry terminal to Chulia Street. At first sight, the town looked more typically “Chinese” than any other Chinese city I had seen so far. But, in George Town – unlike in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore or Taipei – you don't need to seek out a historic temple, a Ming-dynasty style garden, or a neglected neighbourhood to summon up nostalgia for Old China. The past is all over the place. With its clan houses and temples, wet markets and bazaars, trishaw peddlers and street-food hawkers, George Town appears little changed since the 1950s. The city centre isn't exactly frozen in time; it's more like a city-body moving forward at a fraction of real time – the worse for wear with each passing year – in the throes of a slow but comely degeneration.

But, there's more to George Town than an Old China ambience. George Town is an immigrant town where nearly everyone's ancestors are from somewhere else.  And, not just China. For more than 200 years, new arrivals have been coming from India, Burma, Sumatra, Java, Thailand, England, the Middle East, and elsewhere. The main ethnicity is Chinese but everyone belongs, and when I turned up, there was room for me as well.

The real beauty of George Town is that so many distinct cultures thrive here; at the same time you'll encounter the most glorious mash. Adjacent to the Chinese Goddess of Mercy temple, you'll spot the Hindu deity Ganesh sitting under a bodhi tree wrapped with sashes. You'll notice an unobtrusive Taoist house shrine devoted to Datuk Kong, a Malay guardian spirit of the land, who must not be offered any pork. Your Western-style deep-fried chicken chop will arrive at your table with Oriental sauce poured over it. The quintessential mash, though,  is peranakan culture itself, the product of intermarriages between traders from China and locals, resulting in communities of Baba and Nyonyas. In the end, what defines Penang is not its purity, but its impurity – its heterogeneity and its inherent rojak nature. I learned this soon after I arrived in George Town, just as the World Heritage committee did.

I normally look at backpackers with a combination of fascination and revulsion, imagining the divide between us to be much greater than it actually is. Still, I find myself seeking confirmation of Penang's virtues from other foreigners. Compulsively, I'll conduct a brief “tourism survey” with the backpackers, ending with the same question, in the hope that I'll be rewarded with the right answer. First I break the ice by asking if they have just arrived, if they will be here long, and whether they have walked around town yet. Then I pop the big one – the question I'm asked by locals who think I'm a new arrival – and I word the question in the very same way locals ask it of me: “So, how do you find Penang?”
Eight out of 10 of them will smile ruefully. They can tell from the tone in my voice, the heat with which I ask the question, that I set great store by the place, and they know their answer won't satisfy. They reply, “Well, you know, it's like, mmm, it's just another Asian city. It's hot, crowded, polluted. It's not nice to walk around. We've only come for one, maybe two days, on our way to Thailand… on our way to the Perhentian … on our way to …” Fill in the blank.

So I counter, “Did you know that Penang was recently listed by Unesco as a World Heritage Site?

They look at me, darling as bunnies, and ask, “Heritage? Like, what heritage?” The most recent English-language edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Malaysia, the backpackers’ bible, hasn't been updated yet with information about the heritage listing.

I'm thinking yet again that Tourism Penang should hire me as a booster. I launch into my spiel. “Well, for one, Penang has more pre-World Ware II shophouse buildings, clan associations and temples in a compact city centre than anywhere else in South-East Asia…”

But, I've lost them already. The backpackers say, ”Yes, yes, we have seen it. We have already walked around – for a whole day.”

Every once in a while, though, I'll come across a couple of travellers who get it – they've walked around George Town, and they appreciate her specialness. They'll wax lyrical to me about the multiculturalism, the architecture, the variety and abundance of good food. Nodding and grinning I'll say, “Yes, that's it. That's it!” and my contempt for backpackers will be lessened for a spell. And, I'll feel only slightly less peculiar about my love affair with Penang, where surrounded by so much heritage, I have temporary reprieve from the exigencies of this millennium.

In George Town, the 21st century hasn't been fully embraced. “Change or die” is not a maxim Penangites live by. They have their time-honoured ways of doing things. You can see this tenacity in the hawker making char koay teow, Penang's signature dish. The hawker believes char koay teow is made in a particular way; it has always been made this way, and not chin chai. Don't take short cuts. No need to change; just get it right. Innovation is not his concern.

Penangites still have to compete though. They can't afford to ignore present economic realities, and in their daily struggle to cari makan, they don't experience the pace of Penang as slow or relaxed in the way that KL-ites or Singaporeans do when they come to visit. In their eyes, Penang is a quaint place, where food is “cheap and good”, but it is a city painfully out of step with modernity, a has-been, even as Wireless@Penang permeates the air around them.

In his speeches, the Chief Minister calls for “brand integrity”. To this traveller, maintaining the integrity of the Penang brand means that the state must have the courage of its convictions – to insist that the heritage of George Town, both tangible and intangible, is enough of a tourist magnet. You don't need a water slide or a revolving tower to add value to this package. That being said, a cleaner and greener environment would be a great asset. The cover of a new Penang Development Corporation brochure boasts, “Penang Has It All”, when in fact, Penang island doesn't even have a clean beach. The sea is choked with jellyfish and polluted with industrial run-off.

Even though Penang hardly qualifies as a beach resort anymore, tourists still come. The 2008 World Heritage listing upped the ante to protect Penang, to better manage the inevitable change, especially now that the credit crunch is easing and development money is flowing back into the city. The Chief Minister understands, as do many Penangites, from waiters to bankers, that if the soul of Penang is preserved, the state and its people will prosper. Investors will come. Better jobs will come. Better quality of life will come, and then the Penangites will stay instead of migrating. Travellers – and entrepreneurs – follow their imaginations, and if Penang is managed and promoted properly, their imaginations will lead them to George Town, just as mine did. And, George Town will not disappoint.

A few days after the conference, I'm sitting in the courtyard of Hock Teik Cheng Sin Temple on a weather-beaten plastic chair, listening to Hokkien opera. I have no idea what the story is about, but I'm transfixed anyway. I'm caught up in the flirting, the wheedling, the arguing, the moaning and the sobbing. I love the intricate gesticulations of the actors and the sound of the clanging cymbals and the otherworldly, high-pitched singing. Tua Pek Kong is the Hokkien God of Prosperity, the patron deity of merchants, and it's his birthday. The temple's Poh Hock Seah society has hired an opera troupe from Johor to celebrate the occasion. I can only tell that much about the troupe because of the Johor telephone number appliquéd to the red curtain that drops down between scenes.

I was tipped off about this performance by a guy named Ang, who for years has made it his business, for reasons opaque to me, to bring small groups of foreigners to performances of Chinese opera. When I ran into him earlier in the week, he told me that he was going to turn up at this opera at 8pm with a Korean expat, a Slovenian backpacker and a couple of other people in tow. I arrive late, around 9pm, because I know that fight scenes usually take place later in the operas, and the fight scenes are the most exciting parts.

Besides me, there are only six old aunties and uncles in the audience. There is no sign of Ang and his group. Either I've missed them or they didn't make it. I'm thinking this is the living culture that earned Penang its reputation, it's World Heritage listing, but where is everyone? Where are the neighbours at least? But, you don't force tradition on people who aren't keen on it, and younger Penangites prefer hip-hop to opera.

About an hour later, a small influx of people arrives, some on motorbikes that zip through the courtyard in front of the stage. Promptly at 11pm the opera finishes, and the red curtain drops for a final time. Three temple committee members rush forward to place sheets of aluminium on the pavement in the courtyard. I hang around; there's going to be a fire. The members heap gold ingots made of folded paper, other paper offerings, and sugar cane stalks on the aluminium sheets and set the whole pile alight. A woman, who introduces herself to me as Pixie, is standing beside me with a toddler balanced on her hip. She points out her husband, who is a committee member. He's carrying fruit and other offerings from a table in the courtyard back into the temple. The fire is huge. She tells me, “This is for Tua Pek Kong, Grand Uncle.”
I say, “He will see it. The fire is so big, he will surely see it.”

When the fire dies down, Pixie with her daughter, her husband, and I walk towards Armenian Street. I pause at the signboard at the entrance to the seah  that gives some of the complicated history of the place. The temple is actually home to four different brotherhoods, only one of which is Poh Hock Seah, the one observing Tua Pek Kong's birthday. I sigh and wave my hand at the organisastional chart on the sign. “This is so…difficult,” I say.

Pixie says, “How can you know? We also don't know. We only know some of it.” She motions to her husband. “His father knew more. With every generation we know less and do less, but my husband is taking classes.”

“Classes?”

“Yes, the committee is giving classes. The seah will teach him and a few others.”

“Good, then he can teach your daughter, and your daughter will learn too. She can carry on the tradition.”

Pixie and her husband glance at each other and smile at me awkwardly. They must be thinking I'm a half-wit. Do women even serve on temple committees?

Suddenly, she says, “You are a foreigner, why do you care? Why do you come here?” I pause for a second; I can't think of an answer. “You are a foreigner,” she repeats, “why do you come here for Tua Pek Kong's birthday?”

How do I explain why I've been sitting at this temple for two hours, mesmerised by a performance when I can't understand a word of it? In honour of a deity I wasn't raised to worship? For that matter, why do I keep coming back to this tumbledown town, this 259-hectare swathe of concrete?

I glance at the daughter in Pixie's arms. She's looking at me with dark, suspicious eyes. Finally I answer, “This celebration of Tua Pek Kong's birthday, this opera, it is very special. You think you can easily find this in Singapore? No. All over Asia? No. This heritage, this tradition, is special to Penang. This is very special. This is Penang.”

“Ah, okay, okay,” Pixie says, nodding and grinning. She gets it now. She gets me now. When you're immersed in your own way of life, sometimes it takes a foreigner to point out the obvious.

** Reproduced with permission. This article first appeared in the January 2010 issue of the Penang Economic Monthly. This 11-year old magazine published by the Socio-economic and Environmental Research Institute (SERI) is being overhauled and commercialised. This endeavour is in response to the growing insight among Penangites and Penang lovers that the downward trend in the state's fortunes cannot be succesfully reversed unless they themselves get seriously involved. The goal is to inspire positive action among readers towards attaining a "Penang Renaissance".

For more information, please visit the Penang Economic Monthly site or contact the Socio-economic and Environmental Research Institute (SERI) at 604-2283306. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of iGeorgetown. 

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