WP2: Lost Narratives in Colonial Penang

I started this project wanting to:

1. Archive my grandparents’ stories and experiences growing up in a time and place that is sparsely documented, especially not in English, and
2. Understand how my hometown has changed over the past 70 years, from my grandparents’ perspectives.

I thought I knew my grandparents well; I’d seen them almost every day for the first 20 years of my life, after all. I knew, for instance, that my grandfather was from China, and that he had immigrated here at a young age. I knew that his ID card wasn’t truly his, that there was another name on it, that the birth date was wrong. We’d always celebrate his birthday around the same time as my grandmother’s, tacked on in the middle of July.

But I was surprised to learn just how much had been hidden away, how much would have been lost to history, had I not invited them for this interview. It was also horrifying: the realization that what exists as “fact” may not necessarily be true: if someone from the future, for whatever reason, decided to look through government archives to find information about my grandfather, they would “learn” that he was an orphan, born and raised in Penang, and later adopted by my great-grandfather when he turned 12.

This isn’t new, nor is it endemic to Malaysia, or any -sia, really; as Tim Hernandez details in All They Will Call You, the victims of the 1948 Los Gatos plane crash had their names mutilated in official press releases, their histories obfuscated through negligence for over 70 years. “History” has its priorities, but who and what is worth accurately remembering has unfortunately been left to the (dis)interests of our colonizer gods.

And thus, inspired by Tim’s work, I wish to re-tell my grandparents’ lives, these generational stories, while I still can.

My grandfather has no memories of Fujian, China. All he knows, courtesy of his parents, was that he was born there in 1946, sometime in the summer. Possibly July, though neither him nor his parents remember the date. His family lived in a quiet village, amidst a region torn by years of civil war followed by the Japanese invasion during the Second World War.

He doesn’t remember what his family did for a living back in Fujian. Perhaps they had never told him anything about it. After all, he explains, his father had left the village for work opportunities in Penang, Malaysia long before he was born. His father worked for cheap labor, though details on that are sparse, too. Gaggles of young men would be recruited from the village and brought over to those foreign shores by boat, down the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, rounding the bend at the southern tip of Peninsular Malaya (perhaps taking a stop at the other British Crown Colony of Singapore), before finally making their way back up the Malacca Strait and onto the ports of Penang.

By then, Penang had developed into a bustling port town, acting as a major maritime trading port for the British-controlled parts of Southeast Asia. Had his father ever expected to find himself on this island for the rest of his life? He certainly wouldn’t have thought so when, in 1938, he found himself retracing his steps, en route back to Fujian, upon hearing mutters of the Second Sino-Japanese War knocking on his village’s doorstep. Fujian’s main port of Amoy would have been under Japanese occupation by the time he returned, and thus his ship docked at the safe havens of Hong Kong instead; he would walk the 300 miles back to Fujian.

My grandfather’s parents would marry in 1945, and after the war concluded (the Japanese war, not the internal Chinese civil war that would rage on for another 5 years), his father embarked once again to Penang. In later years he would hear stories of how Penang was ravaged during the Pacific theater too, as Japanese forces swept across the Malaysian peninsular and brutally occupied Penang. My grandfather knew this with far more clarity than he knew anything about Fujian, though he experienced neither; at his high school, he couldn’t help but notice the memorials dedicated to martyrs — students and teachers — who were massacred during the war. The campus is haunted, as the local student ghost story goes: if you were to enter the auditorium at midnight, the school bell would be replaced by a gunshot, and you’d be greeted by a headless, bloodied man in a Japanese military uniform.

A year after my grandfather was born, he and his mother made the journey to join his father in Penang too. At the Xiamen port, they were handed a slip of paper serving as their exit permit, the only piece of evidence there will ever be of the voyage. My grandfather’s arrival in Malaysia was never officially documented, however; immigration policies were at once lax and complicated, rigorous but full of loopholes. All they did was send them to the quarantine center on Jerejak Island for a couple of days of health inspections, and when they were satisfied that they wouldn’t introduce contagious illnesses into their island, they were allowed to enter Penang Island proper.

The rest of my grandfather’s extended family would follow suit in the following years, though not without hiccups. His uncles came into Penang pretending to be his brothers. Their wives and children posed as the wives and children of locals and other immigrants. His paternal-side grandfather had to identify as his maternal-side grandfather instead; each resident, immigrant, could only bring in one other relative from abroad, but children were the exception. In the process, last names were faked, entire family trees distorted (in official records, at least). But in those days, as long as the money changed hands — and that it did — anything could be done, though the sum could be as exorbitant as almost a year’s worth of the regular wage at the time.

His family rented rooms in George Town, the city center, close to where the work is. Kimberly Street, Perak Road, Pahang Road, American Road…each time, his parents and his younger siblings would all be cramped into a single room, and most of them had to sleep on the hard wooden floors. Money was tight back then; my grandfather recalled how he would sneak out to the local Buddhist association every Sunday and listen to their sermons just so he could enjoy their complimentary cup of coffee and two measly salt crackers.

But my grandfather’s apparently-unauthorized entry into Penang would come back to bite him when he tried to register for his Grade 6 national standardized examinations. He would be informed by his elementary school officers that there existed no record of his name in the government ledgers; not only would he not be able to sit for his examinations and proceed to high school, he would also more crucially be unable to apply for an ID card, passport, any form of identification. Nearly 12 years after settling into his new home, my grandfather found out that he was an illegal alien, perennially at risk of deportation if anyone found out.

To obtain personhood, my grandfather ended up impersonating a dead orphan whose death had not been reported to the authorities for one reason or another, taking his name and birthday, all for my grandfather’s dad to later sign his adoption papers and “officially” induct him into the family. In the process, he would “imbue” my grandfather with a new name (that is actually his original name); on his ID card this would later show up as an alias to the orphan’s name, and both would follow him for the rest of his life.

“Funnily enough, even after I had done all that, they still wouldn’t let me take the standardized examinations,” my grandfather added, though he couldn’t remember why. In the end, his school allowed him to take the exam under the name of another student who had dropped out earlier that year, and when he applied to high school the following year, the admissions officer, understanding of his circumstances, turned a blind eye to the name mismatches and admitted him. “I could never forget the names of the children I’d inherited.”

My grandmother spent her early years in a rural fishing village on the coast of mainland Penang, right on the edge of the province’s border with the neighboring state of Kedah. Her family worked as a kind of intermediary between the fishermen and the marketplace; almost all of the day’s catch in the village would be handed over to them, and they’d supply the fish to many different sellers.

Mainland Penang was much less sparsely populated in those days. Then still known by its colonial name Province Wellesley, it was primarily an agricultural economy. Rubber plantations and wheat fields, much of which still exists in the outskirts of the urban centers today. My grandmother went to the only elementary school in her village — with merely 3 classrooms to accommodate the meager amount of schoolchildren, they’d merge two grades into the same classroom and have their teachers rotate between the two groups of students, lecturing one while the other is busy scribbling away on their worksheets.

My grandmother would leave home shortly after that for high school, hopping on the ferry to cross the Penang strait, living with her aunt’s family in the suburb of Jelutong, just outside the city center. Never having particularly excelled at her academics, she went to one of the only schools which would have taken her: the Chinese private school that used to be notorious for its failing students.

It’d only be a short first stint on the island, however. Her aunt’s husband worked initially as a truck driver, transporting goods around the island; later on, they would all move to a more rural part of the island, where they started a small ranch, raising pigs and other livestock. My grandmother still recalls how, going to her new high school, she’d snake through the winding lanes on her bicycle. And how she had to draw water up from the village well. But her aunt’s husband would unfortunately pass away shortly after, and when the family moved out from that village house, believing it to be cursed with spirits, my grandmother decided it was time to return home.

My grandmother’s family had moved further inland to Kepala Batas by the time she returned. They’d started rearing fish on a fish farm, and she spent most days watching her brothers and uncles prepare the fish feed, or making preserved salted fish. By then, the central parts of the province had been undergoing industrialization efforts as the mainland began to see the spillover effects of George Town’s economic advancement. There were rumors that Penang’s free port would be designated on the mainland to bring in further development, and that an automotive bridge would be built to connect the two halves to the state.

Like many women in those not-so-long-ago days, my grandmother was waiting to marry. It was never a choice for her to make, really; her aunt had frequented a textile store in George Town and, in passing conversation, learned about the owner’s son, who happened to have started his own textile wholesale company after graduating from high school, and proposed a union between the two. They would first meet in 1971 and marry within a year.

Archiving these stories gave me insight into a different kind of George Town, one from a bygone era where the city felt connected to the multi-ethnic people that lived, worked, breathed in it. Of course, George Town as I know it is still bustling each and every day, an almost-dizzying intersection of tourists and businesses, but the city feels more of a commercial product than a place to be inhabited. The heritage buildings that exist have become souvenir shops or restaurants or boutique inns, devoid of any of their past. The mansions and temples are set pieces to be ogled at. It’s difficult to imagine living there in my grandparents’ heyday. Our current Chief Minister had years ago, ironically, described our Chinatown and Little India as an “inner city ghost town.”

That Penang, a city touting its rich cultural heritage, would turn out to have buried away so much of its own history, is perhaps unsurprising given its context. Pre-independence Malaysian history is, even today, beholden to what its British occupiers had decided to archive; clearly, its Chinese labor force wasn’t deemed important enough. It is telling, therefore, when my grandfather used the term “卖猪仔” (lit. selling pigs) to refer to his father’s early work in Penang — the term usually referred to someone being sold to indentured servitude — though he clarified that it wasn’t truly indentured servitude by the definition, as they were free agents who earned a wage, the saying reflected the harsh conditions faced by immigrants who were by and large seen as cheap labor.

Jerejak Island, where my grandfather first landed on his voyage to Penang, has a storied past; in addition to serving as a health inspection slash quarantine station for any and all incoming persons to Penang, whether it be immigrants, travelers, or even locals returning from their pilgrimage to Mecca, it was also a leper colony (Nambiar, 2017). According to Researcher Michael Gibby, the island once housed over 7000 leprosy patients. In the latter half of the 20th century, the island would serve as a maximum security prison and became dubbed “the Alcatraz of Malaysia.” These days, only ruins remain of all of the former structures, and a resort town has been developed in its place. In the process, the island’s history had been buried away to make it more palatable for tourists to visit the island.

There are artifacts that survived in Penang, of course. The entirety of the George Town historic core. Military forts from the colonial era. But my conversations with my grandparents have shed light on just how sanitized our history has become. All the parts that have been deemed unsavory — the quarantine stations, so much of our immigrant past, my grandfather’s shuttered shoplot — have been erased, perhaps unconsciously. What’s left is a city that gives off the illusion of heritage, empty, dilapidated, or repurposed structures but only a prime cut of the people and culture have been engraved in stone.

The Komtar “urban revitalization” project wasn’t the state’s only attempt at driving “lower class” residents out of the city center. The way my grandfather put it, there used to be special policies in place that allowed them to effectively own the property they were renting after a contracted number of years, providing residents at the time a convenient path to home ownership. While my grandfather and his extended family would move out to the surrounding suburbs in later years as their spending power increased, a reported 16 thousand households still called the city center their home by the time the government repealed rent control laws in order to displace these residents through upcharging rent, motivated by heritage tourism (Teo, 2003).

But by the time the urbanization program was underway in the city center, Penang was experiencing rapid growth, and it showed: in the way motorcycles and cars began outnumbering their counterparts of bicycles and trishaws, in the way my grandfather’s business, situated at the city center, saw increasing foot traffic and consequently more revenue. My grandfather would attribute the relative success of his storefronts to the rapid development of the city center at the time, and said it likely wouldn’t have been possible had it not occurred.

“Life is easier now,” says my grandfather. “I wouldn’t say it’s…very luxurious or anything like that but we’re living comfortably…No longer do we have to worry about not having rice on our plates the next day, or having to count our dollar bills to make sure we had enough to pay for a few month’s rent.” And to them, that is what ultimately matters. I can’t deny it either: Penang is better today, economically, socially, in almost all aspects (though we might be slowly destroying the ecology of the island instead).

Before I conducted these interviews, I’d been angling to conclude that the heritage preservation efforts that have been carried out in Penang is, by and large, good enough. It could be so much worse. But the flattening of the lives of those who once lived in our city into a neatly-printed brochure to be handed out on guided tours just doesn’t sit right with me anymore. Because this is the kind of erasure that perpetuates ethnophobic myths in this country, such as the idea of Chinese- and Indian-Malaysians as necessarily “foreign” and “unwelcome”, in part motivated by the uprooting of their former lived spaces which erases their generational histories. Because this downplays and thus reinforces hierarchies and structures of oppression from that era that may still exist today. Because there’s a certain idolization of the West that seeps through the way colonial-era British artifacts are preserved, romanticized, in Penang, somehow.

To concede to this elision of our culture and history is to discredit the lives of those who came before us. It is to give in to dominant cultural narratives, shaped by years of quiet, subtle oppression. It is to “[remove] alternative heritages from collective memory…erasing particularly contested or inconvenient aspects of history from collective cultural memory” (Dearborn & Stallmeyer, 2010). It is the same mechanism by which our world turns a blind eye to the ongoing oppressive processes occurring even today.

“I’ll tell you this because you deserve to know, but all of this…you can’t write it down,” my grandfather said before he told me the story about his convoluted identity. My grandmother would assure him that I wouldn’t. Forgive me; perhaps one day your past will not have to exist only in the cracks between your clothesdrawers.

Works Cited

Dearborn, L. M., & Stallmeyer, J. C. (2010). Inconvenient Heritage: Erasure and Global Tourism in Luang Prabang. (Heritage, Tourism, and Community). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315426891

Nambiar, P. (2017, April 5). Jerejak steeped in Malaysia’s migrant history, says researcher. Free Malaysia Today. https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2017/04/05/jerejak-steeped-in-malaysias-migrant-history-says-researcher/

Teo, P. (2003), Limits of imagineering: a case study of Penang. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27: 545–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.00466