Georgetown, Penang: Trade Winds and Empire

Below our window at Hutton Lodge grows a hibiscus bush as tall as a tree, its red flowers orbited by little nectar seeking birds. Beyond, the other guests are eating breakfast under the porch roof. Shade would became a compulsion for me in Georgetown. I head for it like a retriever on a scent, yet am foiled by the motorbikes parked on the colonnaded footpaths, the displays of goods spilling out from shopfronts, forcing pedestrians on to scorching, traffic filled roads: it is a foretaste of India. The intense heat here is a constant companion, a very tiresome one when my clothes cling damply and my head streams perspiration – but we are the fortunate ones, who can be immersed in air conditioned chill for bouts of recovery. Perhaps we will adapt to the heat before we reach Delhi, where the temperatures will be even higher.

Georgetown, and Penang more generally, is famous for its wonderful food, but that first day is the only time we breakfast at Hutton Lodge. The one choice of limp white toast with strawberry jam and powdered milk teabag tea is just not a good beginning. Quickly we find a local café a few doors down and from then on have spicy, ricey breakfasts (with eggs) and sweet but delicious tea, with a hint of perfume – could it be rosewater, a Middle Eastern tradition?

For evenings, we walk to the Teksen Restaurant, a bustling Chinese eatery, ever full of customers, where under the whirling fans we eat unfailingly delicious meals (the garlicky eggplant and ginger duck dishes were my favourites). The efficiency of its waiters is a pleasure to watch. Some of these are elderly women; others young and refreshingly uncaring of appearance or of glamour: cheery and alert, the sort of people you’d love to have beside you in an emergency – or as waiters in frantic restaurants. They also serve restorative chrysanthemum tea, hot or cold, and beer too!

Other nights, we find hawker food courts, and select dishes quite novel to me. “Fried oysters” are delicious round marbles of flavour cooked in a type of soft omelette – an unlikely combination, I’d have thought!  And there is creamy spiced fish, steamed in banana leaf parcels. This delight is produced by a tiny woman, bent double with age, who offers her dish from table to table, with a smile like sunshine. Conservatively, (though there is nothing conservative about Michael’s food adventures) I do not try the “glass lettuce”, “sweet and sour ostrich” and “Thai dried fish stomach soup”. But I’m sure they are just the ticket, to those in the know.

Almost miraculously, considering the pace of development, the old district of Georgetown has been saved from destruction in the name of high-rise by some brave and visionary souls, who realised its historical importance and its tourist potential. The old opium dens that Michael noted during his travels more than thirty years ago may no longer be there, but Chinatown and its people remain, along with several of the glorious clan houses and temples. Close by, beautiful mosques mark the Islamic presence with dignity and simplicity, the domes and minarets bringing a sense of their origins in lands far away. Little India clamours along with the irrepressible style of Indians anywhere, filmy music filling the air, sari shops spilling colour, the Sri Maha Mariamman temple at its heart – she who is the great mother protector, goddess of rain and disease (smallpox).

Not least of all these cultural pleasures, the colonial district stands elegantly on the waterfront, the Eastern and Oriental Hotel its icon, and surely the desire of every traveller. Though do I really want to be so privileged above the majority of my fellow humans? Not really, no. Already I have more than my share. And those dreams never quite meet the expected reality.

That first day of discovery we caught sight of a most beautiful, graciously aged gateway, and in the greenery behind it, a temple, with an air of having been forgotten . As we stood, wondering about this place, which felt almost secretive in its ornate yet subtle quietness, an Indian man of our age (as he revealed) came to speak with Michael. He had lived here his whole life – 60 years – and had never noticed this building until he saw us regarding it. How strange! It felt almost fateful. As we walked further, along a similarly beautiful arcade, painted pale green, with exquisite windows and doorway, we found that this temple is part of a now famous complex, the Pinang Peranakan Mansion, which serves as a museum of objects, architecture, and a way of life from long ago. Watching from a poster at the entrance is the elegant lady, the nyonya, of the mansion, preserved by photography for this future in which we now find our time.

The Straits Chinese became known as Peranakan, a people who had assimilated aspects of other cultures – the Malaysians, the British, Southern Indian, Thai – and fused these influences into the food, attire, household goods and architecture of their opulent lifestyle. As a child of the mid twentieth century, much of the colonial era is remnant of my own memory, familiar and precious from early childhood: our grandmother’s house, with its treasures of oriental or 1920s and ‘30s furniture and china, some gifted by a seafaring great uncle, evoking an imagined inheritance of security and peace along with their beauty – an intimation of how-things-should-be, a dream to refind, as time went by and as that era disappeared. This is right and good – as the Buddhists say, life is change, and the only happiness comes when that truth is accepted – but to my mind the world seems less gracious now, though our knowledge and attitudes are so expanded.

Peranakan Mansion is a showcase of its time, and fascinating for that, yet after the initial pleasure and wonder, its excesses palled, for me. Glass fronted cabinets are packed with collections of china, Victorian glass domes, decorative coloured glassware, which also stand on table tops and sideboards of heavy, carved timber, on floors of patterned tiles or parquet. Etched mirrors reflect tureens of flowers, beside enormous framed portraits of baba and nyonya at their wedding, or of more formal and forbidding ancestors. Elaborate gilded doorways lead to reception rooms filled with more riches, mother of pearl encrusted chairs, great Chinese screens patterned with birds and flowers, or idyllic rustic scenes. The complete kitchen is set apart below, perfectly preserved in its 1930s style, with rows of storage pots or baskets and banks of enamel cookware. The family had not heard the expression “less is more”, it seems. Beautiful objects are lost in the crowded space, even made tiresome to the satiated beholder. But still I wished my mother and aunt, and Marjorie and Noni too, could be with us to see all this. They’d have loved it. It made us smile to think of bringing them with us to Georgetown – but then we had done so, in spirit.

In Pinang Peranakan Mansion, and in Georgetown generally, so replete with historical threads, I found myself drawn to my own ancestors, my own remembered past, and stories told or imagined that paint my memory in shades of love, wonder, fear or mystery. A visit to Penang Hill the following day was to draw out other poignant associations, but of a different nature entirely.

Pinang Peranakan Mansion mirror

Pinang Peranakan Mansion inlaid furniture.

Pinang Peranakan Mansion street door

Pinang Peranakan Mansion room detail

Pinang Peranakan Mansion kitchen

Pinang Peranakan Mansion screen

Pinang Peranakan Mansion wash basin

Pinang Peranakan Mansion wall painting

Pinang Peranakan Mansion window

Pinang Peranakan Mansion ancestor

Pinang Peranakan Mansion Victorian dome

Pinang Peranakan Mansion room

Pinang Peranakan Mansion central inner courtyard

Pinang Peranakan Mansion front door window

Pinang Peranakan Mansion kitchen

Pinang Peranakan Mansion room