Ten beautiful days in Penang

The feeling of home, food as DNA and experiencing connection and love with my relatives

I just landed back in London this morning after an incredibly beautiful trip back to the place I was born and spent the first nine years of my life. It has been ten years since I went back to Penang, which is way too long. This was an immensely profound trip with a lot of emotions, love and connection. I am still taking time to process all I felt and experienced but want to share something of the trip with you.

Walking to the toilet after I disembarked the plane, I wondered how clean it was going to be. What I totally forgot to expect was that Malaysia still has squatting loos, which I way prefer over sitting ones in public setting by the way.

I texted my family a picture of the below with the tagline “Malaysia welcomes you”

And then it was straight into food, mum took my order before I boarded my flight so that she could have the infamous Penang char kuey teow (translating to fried noodles of a specific kind) followed by the next famous dish of Hokkien Mee when we arrived at my uncle’s house. This was followed by guavas, which are probably my favourite fruit.

This pic was taken at 9.48pm:

And this one at 10.52pm, mainly thanks to me

Food is our DNA
Every day I was there was filled with a lot of delicious Penang food. When I tell you, food in this city is unbeatable, I am not exaggerating. And it is impossible to be born Malaysian and not be a foodie because the variety and richness in flavours of food we have from Malays, Chinese, Indians is literally unbeatable. There is so much good food to choose from that we ordered many different dishes to share most meals. By the end of the ten days we’d covered most of my favourite ones.

These pictures are only some of what we ate! We’d have four or five meals a day because not only was the savoury stuff delicious, the desserts were wonderful too and so were the variety of fruits and biscuits. I parked my health consciousness and dedicated my diet to eating everything I loved, most of which had hardly any veg and were cooked in refried oil.

Experiencing love and connection with relatives

My parents both come from big families so seeing family was also a ten-day long affair, one in which I enjoyed a lot. Each visit to their house or to eat out was filled with the Malaysian act of love which is to either bring us out for dinner or to give lots of food (fruits, biscuits, delicacies) or a mix of both. And since my dad has eleven(!!) siblings, we were given a lot of food (and a lot of love). While I don’t know some of my uncles and aunties very well, I experienced connection to them in these moments and also felt a deep sense of appreciation for their care and love for us.

Connecting the dots backwards

My grandfather on my dad’s side comes from a fishing village. He started by selling fish then moved into selling meat and eventually to producing rice. I got to visit the manufacturing site that my dad’s elder brothers had taken over. It was such a full circle moment to learn about my grandfather and the work he did and then to getting a tour of it from my uncle. It was not only a dot connection moment from a family perspective, it was also a dot connection moment from an entrepreneurship perspective. Realising that entrepreneurial spirit runs in the family with my granddad and dad both being a business people. It helped me make sense of my entrepreneurial mind - why I always have ideas and why I like being around startup people. It was also a really awesome realisation that not all businesses are the glamorous venture capital tech ones we read about on front page news. There are a lot of less glamorous businesses that make money. Driving to and from the rice mill, we went through a manufacturing region and drove past other manufacturers of screws, oil, and other bits and bobs that are necessary for infrastructure but we are kind of invisible. People do make money from making those things too.

Sense of home in a society built for and by my people

One of the coolest things I experienced was the deep feeling of comfort, home and ease I had in a society that was built by my people and for my people. I was surrounded by Malaysians and it felt so comfortable, easy and homely despite my not having lived there for over twenty years! While I had lived in a predominantly Chinese society when I lived in Shanghai as an adult, it still wasn’t the same. Chinese Malaysians are very different culturally to Chinese from China. And so this feeling of ease took me by surprise. I did not realise I had been missing out on this feeling the whole time I’ve lived abroad nor did I know to miss it as I left to Australia when I was nine. In essence, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed hardly seeing any white people for nearly two weeks.

Being with my parents

It was so awesome to be with my parents 24/7. We went everywhere together and enjoyed all the things we did together. I had such lovely conversations reminiscing about life in Penang and got an opportunity to learn more about my dad’s childhood, and his life in Malaysia. I loved that our time there was easeful too. We enjoyed food together, while simultaneously talking about how we were eating way too much and unhealthy stuff too. We drove to sights together. We relaxed together.

Sadness

When I left I cried not because I felt the trip was too short or that I didn’t want to leave. I cried because I realise how deep my love is for my parents and I was sad to be leaving them. The trip taught me so much about me and my parent’s history and my dad’s family (my mum’s family lives in a different part of Malaysia that requires flying). It also allowed me to muse on the notion of community as a given in a big family, the notion of legacy as a thing that happens when one commits to something over a long period of time and of course, the meaning of a good life. I want to write more about these when I have processed and integrated them more. For now I am going to rest and eat the guavas I hauled back.