Dispatch from Penang, Malaysia

The last time I visited Penang was more than a decade ago. While we intended to explore the city of Georgetown with plenty of zeal on that trip, the weather was so incredibly hot that we gave up after one fairly weak foray to a kopitiam and a sweltering meander past some of the city’s iconic street art, and spent the rest of our time cooling off in the sea.

I grew up in Mumbai and now live in Hong Kong (with several other places in between), two amazing cities whose modern histories and cultures were shaped by trade because of their locations, so Penang’s history as a bustling entrepôt on the Straits of Malacca has always been interesting to me. When the opportunity popped up to head back after ages, I gave myself no excuses to skip exploring Georgetown this time, and booked a stay at Cheong Fatt Tze, or The Blue Mansion, a restored mansion from the late 19th century, which has been converted into a boutique hotel in the midst of the city.

Serving as a heritage landmark, The Blue Mansion is a deep Majorelle blue, set off beautifully with pink bougainvilleas spilling over the entrance and great fringes of palms in its courtyards. The architecture is a masterclass in mixing styles, and very telling of all the interactions Penang’s history brought with it: it is a blend of Art Nouveau stained glass windows, traditional Chinese courtyards, and spiralling Scottish iron bannisters, among other things. My favourite elements here, and indeed, across Georgetown’s Peranakan* architectural landscape, were the butterfly shaped—or perhaps just a rectangle with rounded corners if you’re feeling less poetic—air vents lined up in formation under the roof. I love examples of architecture that takes its local context into account so clearly, in a way that fuses some sense of beauty with functionality and need, and these air vents are exactly that. The hotel conducts tours twice a day for guests as well as visitors, is stuffed with old objects (refurbished rattan furniture, lanterns, servingware, mirrors, beautiful glass-fronted cabinets, and so on), and hosts charming little opera performances in the courtyard. It’s all very atmospheric, and worth spending time in the hotel for; I passed a pleasant afternoon watching the rain and sketching from a cream settee alongside one of the courtyards, with the hotel cat warily eyeing me from a distance.

While I did try the hotel’s restaurant, Indigo, and enjoyed its very contemporary blend of menu items like a Laksa foam topped noodle dish, one simply can’t be in Malaysia which is home to so much amazing food, and stick just to hotels. My husband and I made a list of hawker centres and night markets around Georgetown, and took ourselves to Sri Weld Food Court for lunch one day, and to Kimberly Street Night Market for dinner on another. Sri Weld yielded an absolutely perfect bowl of freshly made char kway teow for all of 8 ringgit; I can honestly tell you that I can’t remember a better bowl of noodles in recent years. Kimberly Street Night Market led us on a dessert adventure, taste-testing and trying to pinpoint the differences between ice/ais kacang and cendol, which I confess, I still couldn’t fully articulate despite several visits to this part of the world over the years. I am now a little less ignorant, and know that cendol contains pandan noodles, which I quite like. On another day, we went in search of kaya toast, which I am a big fan of, and found ourselves at a restaurant called Toh Soon, with multiple variations of kaya toast (peanut butter with kaya—coconut jam—anyone?), and egg coffee, which is perfect to dip it in. Toh Soon is on a well-frequented street with rows of old shophouses, many of which also have the lovely little air vents under their roofs. We also popped into an antiques shop next door, which still very much functions as a shophouse (the owner lives upstairs), a dusty trove of everything from century-old silver tea-sets with old family names engraved into them, to vintage clip-on earrings. On another evening, we ate at Jawi House Cafe Gallery, which belongs to a family of Punjabi-Peranakan ancestry (“dating back six generations” the restaurant states), once again, highlighting the rather amazing blend of culture in this part of the world. I am now a fan of pandan leaves being used to lightly flavor water, as this restaurant was serving, and intend to find some in Hong Kong to do just that!

On a particularly warm afternoon, I took myself to the Eastern & Oriental Hotel (E&O) on the Georgetown waterfront to get a massage (it’s not a bad spa, but nothing worth detailing); friends were staying there and we also spent a bit of time by its pretty pool before beating a retreat from the sun. The hotel building is a repository of British colonial artifacts and boasts a starry line-up of guests over time (Chaplin! Kipling!). It was founded by the same fraternal entrepreneurial Armenian duo, the Sarkies, who also set up The Strand hotel in Yangon, Myanmar (beautiful, from my own visit there years ago), and the legendary Raffles in Singapore (which remains very charming). I do always think colonial heritage of this kind needs to be treated contextually and with care instead of simply fixating on the remaining glamour that creates such steadfast appeal; it’s lovely to admire architecture, style, and one can’t help feeling the pull of beautiful objects and art, sometimes even absurdly unquestioningly, but perhaps things like the awkward throwback pith helmets that some of the E&O staff are made to wear are long past a reconsideration.

On the Saturday before we left, I wanted to check out Hin Bus Depot, an arts space on Jalan Gurdwara, steps from one of Georgetown’s Sikh gurdwaras. As I walked past the gurdwara, I was kindly invited in to lunch there for langar, at the community kitchen, which was such a welcoming gesture! From what I gather, the old bus depot-turned-art venue hosted the prolific artist Ernest Zacharevic’s first solo and then picked up steam some years ago; Zacharevic is a Lithuanian artist who works out of Georgetown, whose murals are very visibly present around the city. The day I went, the space happened to be hosting a weekend market. We spent a pleasant while browsing through old clocks, 1970s racket presses, stamps, and contemporary local stalls selling handmade earrings and ceramics. It was good to take a step out of the “old and historic,” and see what some young residents of Penang are up to on weekends, makers and small-scale local entrepreneurs amongst them. We bought some wild honey from a group that runs a mushroom farm in the hills, and sipped on some lovely fresh passionfruit juices.

I left Penang with a full, happy belly, tucking away butterfly air vents onto my list of favourite architectural elements, feeling like I would be back. To me, that’s always the mark of a good visit.

*Peranakan, for those unfamiliar with the term, refers to Straits-born descendents of Chinese migrants to the Malay archipelago, who adopted and adapted to local culture and created blended communities with local Malay people.