Stranger in a Familiar Land

Being a tourist in your native country is an experience best savoured when you've been living abroad for ten years. After a decade of forgetting, even things I took for granted about my hometown seem at once familiar and exotic, as if I am visiting somewhere I knew once upon a dream.

To most people, Penang is exotic. A turtle-shaped island off the west coast of Malaysia, nestling in the Straits of Malacca, this former British settlement wears its mishmash of cultural influences on its sleeve. Half the major public schools are named for convents or Catholic saints. Mosques and Hindu temples lie scattered across the island, separated by stretches of colonial shophouses and awkward new shopping malls.

This time my revisit to Penang is more than a homecoming. I am bringing an Australian classmate along to visit. I feel anxious about this. I am unsure how to put together a travel itinerary for my hometown. What do tourists do in Penang, anyhow?

“Just let's do what you and your family would usually do,” my friend suggests. I resist the urge to explain that what I usually do is loiter in the mall and spend money on Western designer clothing.

In the end I consult Lonely Planet. First up, the Temple of Supreme Bliss, a Buddhist place of worship I have walked past dozens of times in my childhood. The approach to the temple is a ten minute flight of steps set into the hillside, flanked on both sides by stalls selling joss sticks, Chinese medicine, and T-shirts. Tourists and faithful worshippers jostle their way up to a courtyard displaying a pond full of turtles. Further up, we see prayer halls and pagodas.

Much to my relief, my friend is not overly interested in traditional Chinese architecture. We proceed to what I think of as the quintessence of Penang culture: eating. The street food capital of Malaysia, Penang boasts a dizzying array of dining options, from roadside deep-fried sweets to chilli crab and wine in five-star hotels. We are on a budget; we opt soy sauce noodles in the sweltering open-air food court.

The afternoon features more guidebook material: Fort Cornwallis. Built using Indian convict labour in the nineteenth century and then used to house the British Royal artillery, the fort is one of many crumbling reminders of the island’s colonial history. We sit on the cannons and take photographs of the seafront. It is a typical Penang day. The air tastes of salt. The sun is merciless.

Later I am bemused to discover that the Kuan Yin Temple opposite my uncle’s coffee shop is something of a local attraction. We greet my cousins, drink boxed chrysanthemum tea, and look out at the curved roofs with their carved dragons, at the smoking braziers redolent with incense.

All of this is old. All of this is new. I see this island as I could not have seen it when I was a child. It is strange and wonderful.