The Pearl in the Crown

Eighty years ago, an ancestor of mine arrived in Penang on a P&O; liner. (Three weeks at sea; stops at Malta and Sri Lanka; price from London, 50 pounds.) My own arrival wasn’t quite that glamorous. But then, I was traveling by bus. (Seven hours by road; stops at Ipoh and Taiping; price from Kuala Lumpur, 30 ringgit--about $10.) Even worse, the bus was old, and not one of the seats stayed up. I entered Penang ignominiously--flat on my back.

In other respects, though, the Penang I visited last year and the one my forebear saw are very similar. Protected by jungle on one flank and water on the other, George Town, the island’s only settlement of any size, has all the compact comfort of a bird’s nest. The streets that climb from the waterfront are lined by splendidly dilapidated shop-houses, their shutters falling apart and their paint peeling like a sunburn. Much here is delightfully askew: Doors hang by a single hinge, and roofs sag. Penang looks as if someone--or something--took it by the shoulders and shook it hard.

But what I liked best about this place is its self-absorbed bustle. In George Town, no one is ever still. On the arcaded pavements of Chulia Street, people make cane chairs and tin pails, repair sewing machines and pick apart lawn mowers. So much industry! It put me in mind of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” “If you aren’t busy here,” a man told me, “people think there’s something wrong with you.”

As cluttered as the streets are, the shops are even more so. Every inch of counter space is filled, every inch of floor. The walls are covered, too. There’s even merchandise suspended from the ceiling.

Adding to the congestion are the trishaw drivers, always hovering, clamoring, ringing their bells. The trishaws, bicycles to which a semi-enclosed seat has been added, look like wheelbarrows. Maybe that’s the reason I could never ride in one. “Mister, mister. Where are you going?” These are not people who take no for an answer.

“You want a health club?” one of these drivers asked me.

“You mean, weights?” I said. “Squash?”

He shook his head. “Massage,” he answered. “Hanky-panky.”

Known as the pearl of Southeast Asia, Penang lies two miles off Malaysia’s west coast. But its separation from the mainland is more than physical. It’s racial, too. Most of the 500,000 people who live here are Chinese, and they comport themselves as if this enclave weren’t in Malaysia at all, but somewhere in southeast China. Malaysia makes much of being multi-ethnic and multicultural. Of its 19 million people, 53% are Malays and 35% are Chinese, with Indians and the indigenous tribes of Sarawak and Sabah making up the rest. Malaysia, a major supplier of tin and rubber and palm oil, is relatively prosperous, but tensions run deep. Talk to the Chinese and they’ll tell you--after making sure they can’t be overheard--that Malays are lazy and incompetent. Talk to the Malays and you’ll be told the Chinese are greedy and corrupt.

The conflict has its origins in the colonial era. After acquiring Penang in 1786, the British extended their rule until, in 1914, they controlled much of the Malay peninsula. But there was a problem--laborers were needed to mine the country’s tin deposits. Since the Malays didn’t care to, Britain imported workers from China, many of whom stayed when their contracts expired. The Chinese in Malaysia today are their descendants.

The British are long gone--the country gained its independence in 1957--but their monuments remain: the cenotaph honoring the dead of World War I; the memorial commemorating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee--60 feet high, one foot for each year of the monarch’s reign; the Penang Club, visited in 1922 by the-then Prince of Wales; the Eastern & Oriental Hotel (known as the E&O;), where the British held their tea dances; and the mansions along Macalister Road, occupied now by Penang’s Chinese elite.

They’re quite splendid, these homes. Set in large gardens and ringed by palms, they draw on the neoclassical tradition: lots of pediments and pilasters, columns and cornices, and friezes, too--urns and garlands in bas-relief. The houses themselves are usually painted white, but the shutters are brightly colored--blue and yellow, lime green and purple.

The loveliest of all the colonial monuments is the hill station the British built on the summit of Penang Hill. The hill is 2,700 feet high and towers over George Town like a giant wisdom tooth. When my ancestor visited Penang, he would have had to ride to the top on a pony. Ladies were carried in sedan chairs and complained long and loud afterward about how uncomfortable it had been. It was also hair-raising. In his book “Indiscreet Memories,” Edwin Brown, who ascended the hill in 1902, describes his terror when, rounding a sharp turn in his sedan chair, he found himself “suspended in mid-air over a sheer drop of up to 100 feet or more.”

Then, in 1923, a funicular railway was installed--it’s still in operation--making it possible to reach the top in less than 30 minutes. I chose to bypass the train and scale the hill on foot. A mad thing to do, since I got lost in the jungle several times, fell a lot, had to battle ants as big as blackberries and nearly died of thirst. In all, it took three hours to reach the top, by which time I was feeling completely deranged. When I finally reached the Bellevue Hotel with its stunning views of George Town and the Malaysian mainland, I collapsed in a chair and started to babble. The waiter took one look at me and returned with a pot of tea. I credit that man with saving my life.

Hill stations were the colonial version of health and recreation centers. Built at high altitudes, they were places to which the British could repair when the heat and humidity at sea level became intolerable. Here, they built bungalows and re-created the gardens they’d had at home: all lawns and sculpted yew trees and potted geraniums and creeper-covered bowers. Here, the British could ride and hunt and sketch and paint. Even more important, they were able to grow strawberries. Strawberries were a passion with the British and, at times, seem to have represented all that had been lost when they left their homeland.

The British seem not to have enjoyed Malaya, as Malaysia was called before independence. But the thing they liked least about it was undoubtedly the weather. The heat wasn’t just uncomfortable, they said; it enervated. It made people irritable. It made them sick. Spend enough time in it, and it would drive you mad. Malaysia lies just north of the equator and its climate is tropical. It’s hot and humid 12 months a year. Even at night, temperatures rarely dip below 70 degrees.

From my vantage point on the lawn of the Bellevue, I could gaze across a low valley to the Crag Hotel. Built on the side of a hill, the Crag has been closed for years but it’s still quite lovely. Painted yellow and two stories high, it has jutting Malay eaves, a sweeping veranda and an external stairway leading to the second floor.

The Crag looks remarkably self-possessed for a building that’s been largely forgotten. An elderly Malay I spoke to said it was haunted. By whom, he’d no idea, but there’s no shortage of candidates. W. Somerset Maugham was a guest here. And Noel Coward. And Douglas Fairbanks. And Mary Pickford. Good ghosts all, I would think. Especially the ever-arch, always-supercilious Maugham. He’d give anyone the willies.

“Are the English liked or disliked in Malaysia?” I asked the Malay.

“That’s hard to say,” he said after considering the question. “We rarely think of them.”

He couldn’t understand why I’d visit Penang. “It’s dull,” he said. “Nothing happens here.” So much the better, I told him--and described the horrors of life in the West. By the time I’d finished, his eyes were glowing. “It must be marvelous,” he said.

Another of Penang’s top attractions lies at the foot of Penang Hill: the Botanical Gardens. Opened in 1884, the park boasts of having 430 species of trees. That’s an awful lot to choose from, but the ones I liked best, I decided, were the angsana (its wood smells of roses); the cat’s eye, whose scarlet and black seeds are used to make necklaces; and the iron wood, its stamens so fragrant that older Malays still scatter them on the beds of young brides.

Wander the gardens and you’ll find kiosks with atap roofs, elegant stands of bamboo and greenswards strewn with pink and yellow petals. The gardens are also home to hundreds of friendly monkeys, and they’re thoroughly spoiled. Visitors feed them bananas and cakes, with the result that they’ve grown quite fat. I especially enjoyed the females, though. They saunter about, looking nonchalant, with their young clinging to their stomachs. There is a waterfall here, as well, which Rudyard Kipling much admired. Today, it’s a popular picnic spot.

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Not far from the Botanical Gardens is Kek Lok Si Temple. Built on a hill in the suburb of Ayer Itam, it is the largest Buddhist temple in Malaysia. In 1885, a monk fell asleep here and dreamed of a crane with its wings extended. It was a sign, he concluded, and five years later work on the temple began. It was completed around 1910. Its central element is a pagoda 100 feet high. A pastiche of styles, it borrows from the Burmese, the Chinese and the Thai, which sounds like a prescription for disaster. But, remarkably, it works. With its giant Buddha and its sacred turtles, the temple is quite delightful.

The only irritants are the hucksters. While I was there, a man tried to sell me a caged bird. It had green plumage, an orange bill, a red tail and was no bigger than a starling. He looked startled when I declined. “It’s very valuable,” he said. “It will bring you luck.”

Penang island--17 miles long and 10 miles wide--is best explored by motorcycle. (Be warned: Malaysians drive on the left.) I borrowed one from a friend--they can also be rented--and set out to find the Temple of the Azure Cloud. On the way, I passed a kampong, a traditional Malay village of wooden houses raised on stilts, with verandas and tin roofs. Wash fluttered from clotheslines, geese strutted on wooden walkways and geraniums bloomed in terra cotta pots. In the window of one house, I saw an old Victrola, its trumpet fluted like a flower and, above the door of another, a picture of the current king, Tuanku Jaafar. (Malaysia has a rotating monarchy: Each of the country’s nine sultans take turns to serve a five-year term as Yang di-Pertuan Agung, or paramount ruler.)

The Temple of the Azure Cloud, which is Taoist, was built in 1850. Locals refer to it as the Snake Temple. For good reason: It’s full of deadly pit vipers. The snakes represent Chor Soo Tong, the temple’s presiding deity, and there are dozens of them. They coil themselves everywhere: over altars, statues, tables, chairs, screens. Said the clerk in my hotel: “They’ll even coil over you.” Fat chance of that, I thought. Snakes give me the creeps. But I decided to pop by, anyway. Where was the danger? The snakes inhaled incense all day long. They were, I was assured, blissed out.

But I didn’t ever reach the Temple of the Azure Cloud. Halfway there, a monkey ran across the road, causing me to swerve and hit a rock, bursting a tire. A Tamil man drove me back into town. His car was filled with cushions and antimacassars that made me think of a Victorian parlor. He drove like a manic. He had no choice, he said. It was expected in Penang. If you didn’t, you called attention to yourself.

My rescuer had a cellular phone that made occasional bleating noises like a distressed goat. I asked what he did for a living. “I’m in business,” he said. He was descended, he told me, from Tamil laborers who, like many others, emigrated from southern India to Malaya in the early part of this century to work on the rubber plantations. Like the Chinese, they held short-term contracts. And they stayed on as well. But they’ve not been as successful. Many of Malaysia’s Tamils still live in poverty.

He took me to lunch in Little India, an area near the waterfront where old men wear dhotis and ride ancient bicycles. It’s a colorful place. You can buy cashews here, and raisins and spices: nutmeg, cloves, turmeric and aniseed.

My companion didn’t eat Indian food as a rule, he told me. It gave him indigestion. But today, on my account, he’d make an exception. We repaired to a restaurant adorned with a picture of the Marlboro man and pink makeshift booths, where he ordered for both of us: coffee and roti chanai, a bread made of flour and water and cooked in oil on a hot griddle. He and the waiter conversed in Tamil and, truthfully, it didn’t fall soft on the ear. (An English official once described it as the language spoken in hell.) When the waiter called our order to the kitchen, it didn’t sound like roti chanai and coffee at all. It sounded awful; more like coddled brains or cocks’ combs. I needn’t have worried--the chanai arrived and was delicious. But the coffee disappointed. It was full of condensed milk and sickly sweet. I didn’t know then it would grow on me. By the time I left Penang, I was drinking it six, sometimes seven, times a day.

My companion was deeply religious, he told me. And I believed it. Penang is a religious place. There are shrines everywhere. From where I was sitting, I could see two: one a Buddhist altar at which a woman, resting on her haunches, was lighting joss sticks; and the other, a few feet away, honoring a portly Hindu deity who held a trident, on the tines of which someone had placed three lemons. Malaysia is diverse religiously: 53% Muslim, 17% Buddhist, 12% Confucian and 8% Hindu. Christians, Taoists and other groups make up the rest.

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George Town is a wonderful place in which to wander. On my last day here, I chanced on a Chinese funeral. The casket was borne on the bed of a truck belonging, a sign said, to a coffin shop. Preceding it were five men, four beating drums and banging cymbals, the fifth playing a saxophone much in need of polishing. Behind the coffin were relatives of the deceased--20 of them, staring straight ahead and looking expressionless. But most startling of all were the six men who brought up the rear. Hired mourners in their early 20s, they stumbled about, weeping copiously.

I think my mouth must have fallen open because a man addressed me. “You’re looking distressed,” he said. “Maybe I can help.” He was a psychic, he explained. Was there a question I’d like to ask him?

Yes, I said, there was. Was I likely to return to Penang?

“I see you returning to Penang a lot,” he said.

I do hope so. And maybe next time, I’ll arrive by boat.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Guidebook

The Way to Malaysia

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Malaysia is 60. City code for Penang is 4. Prices are computed at a rate of 2.97 ringgit to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night.

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Getting there: There are no direct flights between Los Angeles and Penang. However, Singapore Airlines offers daily flights connecting through Singapore. Malaysia Airlines has six flights a week connecting through Kuala Lumpur; Cathay Pacific Airways has four flights per week via Hong Kong; and Thai Airways International has three flights a week connecting through Bangkok.

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Where to stay: In George Town proper, the E&O; Hotel, 10 Lebuh Farquhar, 10200 Pulau Pinang; telephone 263-0630, fax 263-4833. Penang’s most historic hotel is being remodeled but should reopen by year’s end. Rate: $50. Also in George Town is the luxurious Shangri-La, Jalan Magazine, 10300 Pulau Pinang; tel. 262-2622, fax 262-6526. Located near the Komtar Tower, it’s close to some excellent shops. Rate: $125. A lot less expensive is the Cathay Hotel, 15 Lebuh Leith, 10200 Pulau Pinang; tel. 262-6271, fax 263-9300. Resembling one of those mansions on Macalister Road, it’s quite lovely. Rate: $20. On Penang Hill, the Bellevue Hotel, Penang Hill, 11300 Pulau Pinang; tel. 829-9500, fax 829-2052, with stunning views. Rate: $45. If you’d rather stay at the beach, your best bet is the Rasa Sayang Resort, Batu Ferringhi, 11100 Pulau Pinang; tel. 881-1811, fax 881-1984. Built in the Malay style, it has personality to spare. Rate: $135.

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Where to eat: In Penang, it’s not possible to eat badly. The island is teeming with restaurants in all price ranges featuring Indian, Malay, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Thai cuisine. For real action, hit the streets and find a food stall. They’re everywhere, but large concentrations are along the esplanade and Gurney Drive. Most food stalls feature a specialty: laksa assam, a fish soup flavored with tamarind and served with noodles; laksa lemak, the same with coconut milk and without the tamarind; murtabak, a kind of quesadilla filled with meat and vegetables; nasi kandar, rice served with pickles, prawns and cuttlefish, and char kway teow, broad noodles, eggs and clams all fried in black bean sauce. None of these dishes should cost you more than a couple dollars. For breakfast, try rice porridge or go to Little India and treat yourself to a roti chanai or two.

For more information: The Malaysia Tourism Promotion Board. 818 W. 7th St., Suite 806, Los Angeles 90017; (800) 336-6842 or (213) 689-9702, fax (213) 689-1530.