Incense - covers the smell of dissent?
Some say it’s the heat that drives people bonkers here. Others the humidity. Or the strange mix of ex-pats who cross the border here from Thailand on visa runs, keeping themselves topped up with Chinese beer and Indian whisky while they while away the days doing little.
Bonkers it certainly is though. From the Japanese man in the ‘nuthouse’ (hotel Pin Seng) who has stared at the wall every day for nine months, with no rhyme or reason, to the sodden British and European drunks in middle-age who slur out pithy platitudes to accidentally captive audiences on the main drag.
From the start our second visit to Penang seemed dogged with a confused malevolence that none of us truly understood. There were rumours of violence as soon as we got back there. Whispers from other travellers about recent muggings: two girls had had everything stolen the night before. Chased on bikes down an alley, it was said. The stories were layered up with mystery, exaggeration and fear thickly like the smog that permanently hangs over Chinatown.
The racism of the place also seemed to be more blatant with a second glance. Chinese bar owners locked their toilets so ‘Indians not make mess’; Indians glared from behind grills in money changers, suspicious as the white tourists fingered their stained second-hand books.
It didn’t help that the thievery we’d read about in the Lonely Planet came home to us almost straight away – 200 Ringgit gone from our dodgy hotel room, 100 from our companion’s pocket down a back alley. We rallied against the insult anyway, taking advantage of the seedy Soho side of town and living it up at a karaoke bar. We had to show them we wouldn’t be beat I guess: by the heat, the disdain, the crime.
That would explain our beery renditions of the Bee Gees, two MCing English boys inciting the locals to throw shapes while the girls threw them like Saturday Night Fever was only yesterday and not 40 years out of fashion.
On our first visit to Penang I saw the synchronicity, the melding of cultures in close proximity. I saw the beauty of the Chinese, Malay and Indian architecture in a great melting pot of a city. But I guess you see what you want to see. A second glance shows the Chinese grimacing at the constant calls to prayer, a Malay passerby’s askance look at excessive incense smoke from a temple. The locals’ indifference to an English girl almost crying with frustration after being robbed.
And yet, there’s something about the place that saves it from being horrible. Despite all the crime and the dirt and the different factions, it’s still an exciting place to be. The temples are no less beautiful, the food no less delicious. In fact, from knowing the seedy darker side of Penang perhaps you can come to appreciate the cohesion despite division, and the hard-won moments of beauty, clarity and sanity are more precious for being just that little bit more rare?
