Purging Penang’s Peasants
SeaDemon Says
“You tengoklah sekarang. Kalau you tak ada duit you cuma boleh tengok bukit. Kalau you kaya you boleh tengok laut. Bukan Melayu sahaja yang tak mampu. Cina pun ramai tak mampu!” (You look at it now. If you don’t have money you’d be looking at the hills. If you are rich you can see the sea. It isn’t just the Malays who cannot afford, but many of the Chinese too!)
The above are words said to me by a Penang Chinese during my last visit to Penang.
If you live or have lived in Penang like I did, you would know what the statement above is all about. My earliest memory of Penang is of my trip there in 1974. Several more visits followed and I finally lived there from 1989 until the end of 1991 when I worked at Jalan Azyze.
Penang has always been a melting pot of cultures because unlike the mainland Peninsular Malaysia, Penang (together with Melaka and Singapore) were true crown colonies, ruled by Britain through the Colonial Office in India. The composition has always been majority Chinese, followed by Malays and people of the Indian diaspora.
When I got married there weren’t many quarters for armed forces officers back then and rent rates were just too high for me (I was earning a basic of RM750 per month with RM115 as service allowance). My monthly housing allowance was RM400 while a terrace-house would have cost me RM800 a month.
Initially I could only afford to live in a squatter house, which really was a shed attached to the back of a main house in what was Kampung Haji Mahmood in Tanjung Tokong and paid RM150 per month for that. It was literally a eat-where-you-sleep and shit-where-you-bathe house. I stayed there for half a year before moving to an apartment unit at the UDA apartments across the road.
What I liked most about Tanjung Tokong were the stalls that lined up the coastal road. I used to hang out at a stall operated by a man named Murad and would fish across the road for Groupers. Yes, you could see the sea then and the proof of that is when the South Asian Tsunami (aka Boxing Day Tsunami) hit Penang in 2004, Tanjung Tokong was one of the places affected.
