Last week, I wrote about growing up in the best kampung in Malaysia, the village of Permatang Damar Laut in southeast Penang island, surrounded by hills, jungle, padi fields, mangroves, snakes and the sea.
Apart from snakes, my mother also warned me against playing by the sea. She would often call my name out so loudly the whole village could hear. I’d run as close to home as I could before replying “I’m here!” My mother never knew about the trick I pulled.
Or so I thought. I found out later she knew about it, and a lot of other things I didn’t know she knew, such as the time when I was in Standard 2 and had bad exam results and forged my father’s signature on the report card, or the real reason why I had a hole in my foot poked by the spear-like coconut picker.
Years later, I fished for a living in the shallow waters between Penang and the mainland. We used drift nets to catch prawns swept by the strong currents during the spring tides. When the current waned during the neap tides, “air mati” or dead water as we called it, we caught fish using long lines that carried hundreds of baited hooks.
My brother was a crew in a fishing trawler. In those days such deep-sea trawlers often encroached into inshore fishing grounds, and the occasional one would get attacked and even burnt by inshore fishermen. My mother worried about that a lot, but at least we got to eat fresh fish all the time.
Poor people then ate fish. Meat was only on Hari Raya or weddings. The rich would slaughter cows, or even buffaloes, for their children’s wedding. Poorer folks just buy as many katis of meat as they could afford to feed their guests. It was poor form to serve fish on such occasions.
Project management, village style
Weddings were fun. They’d start with a project management meeting to assign tasks to the village folks. I loved to follow the crew that cut bamboo in the jungle to erect pavilions for guests. The kampung social strata dictated who does what, from greeting guests to serving them food to washing the dishes.
Across the padi fields was Penang airport. I witnessed the first jet passenger aircraft, the de Havilland Comet IV, land there. It belonged to the Malayan Airways, which has since split into Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines. I was there, too, when the Shah of Iran visited.
The deafening sound of jet engines punctured our daily life, and became annoying only when we had electricity and hence radio and later television.
We dug wells for water, and fetched drinking water from public water pipes by the roadside until running water came to the village. We obviously had no flushing toilet of any sort for a long while, and what we had … you don’t want to know what we had.
George Town – Tanjong to locals – was minutes away on the Penang Yellow Bus. Rides on the electric trams to the occasional cheap matinees at the cinemas on Sunday mornings were treats. A return ticket on bus number 69 cost 60 cents. From the bus I’d look at cars with envy and swore I’d never ride a bus again when I grew up.
Catching a ride on bus 69
Years later while driving home one day my kids asked me to overtake the number 69 bus. They then flagged it down, boarded and paid the fare and excitedly waved at me and my wife as we followed them in our car all the way back to the kampung. There they got off and we picked them up again. I never knew anybody could get that excited riding a bus.
We were a multiracial village. Most of the Malays and Chinese were farmers or fishermen. We had some Indians, too, who lived in the hills. We had our kampung drunks too, a very entertaining and muhibbah bunch. During Chinese New Year people gambled in the bushes, and ran helter-skelter when the police came.
Some kampung folks, including some of my relatives, joined the merchant navy and travelled all over the world working on ships. A few never returned. Some did it to earn a living, some probably to heal a broken heart and I bet some were on the run from the law.
Everybody in the kampung was dirt poor. I had the same school bag for the six years of primary schooling. I tried to hide the patches on the seats of my school pants when, as head boy in Standard 6, I had to turn to face the flag during Negaraku and show my backside to the entire school assembly.
Olden-day fake news
In reality I doubt anybody noticed, because their own school clothes had as many patches as mine did. Some of my school clothes were hand-me-downs from my brother and had patches on their patches.
Oh, we had fake news even then! Word would spread like wildfire that “head cutters” were on the prowl, looking to cut children’s heads to put into the foundation of various new construction sites. We never knew of anybody who actually lost his head, but it was enough to keep us kids indoors for a few days.
My kampung today is vastly different from how it used to be. Half of it became part of the Penang airport, while the rest has been turned into resettlement areas. The swamps and padi fields have been filled up and the tall trees were cut down – airport rules. There are probably 10 times more people living in a smaller area in the kampung now.
Unfortunately my lovely kampung, ravaged as it is with overcrowding, pollution, overfishing and the death of agriculture, may now suffer a fatal blow.
Homes for the others
The Penang Transport Master Plan proposes the creation of three reclaimed islands that will cut off my kampung from the open sea. The new islands will contain housing for tens of thousands of people who can afford what are clearly unaffordable prices for the locals.
My kampung will then just disappear. Ironically its cemetery, where my parents lay buried, will likely be untouched as it’s within the airport perimeter, and may be the only original component of the kampung that’ll survive.
Is the massive project justified? Not according to my friend Rosli Khan, a transport expert who, while he’s actually a Terengganu boy, had been to my kampung when we were schoolmates in the 1970s.
He feels Penang is mistaken in this huge, and very political, development agenda.
The love of mega projects felt by Malaysian leaders leads us to create unrealistic projections to justify investments we can hardly afford and worse, diminish Penang’s character forever.
Laid-back lifestyle
The charm of Penang is its gentle life. We’re not efficient-but-stressed Singapore, neither are we the fleshpots of Thailand. Sandwiched between these two countries, we offer tourists a more nuanced culture, nature and the best street food in the world.
There have been some legal setbacks to the plans lately, for which I’m thankful.
The hills now are busier with hikers and even quad bikes on weekends. The beach of Pantai Ah Sen – Ah Sen’s Beach, named after the guy who planted the nutmegs – is still beautiful even if it smells a bit of sewage.
I left the kampung years ago, and much of the old kampung now only exists in my head. But even today it’s still a lovely place to visit and to live in. It will die if walled in by towers and roads and artificial islands. And with it, will go much of the charms of Penang too.
Check out Permatang Damar Laut – you’re cordially invited to come to my kampung and enjoy its charms. Don’t steal the nutmegs, though.
Read Part 1 – Those were the days…
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.