Dr Soon-Tzu Speechley

Sometimes, a piece of writing has trouble finding a home. I wrote this piece a few years ago for a publication which subsequently pulled it. I pitched the piece elsewhere, but am now archiving this on my website.

‘For sale. Suitable for café/gallery/boutique hotel’. The sign goes up on a house I pass on my walk to and from work, an art deco building with wooden shutters and a grey façade. There are many signs like it across the city; they have sprouted up everywhere in George Town recently, like mushrooms after the rains. Houses, and money, seem to be changing hands a lot in this city, the capital of the Malaysian island state of Penang. Over the past seven years, George Town has been reinventing itself. The former entrepôt, sleepwalking since the loss of its free port status in the 1960s, has been given a kick by its UNESCO World Heritage Listing – and the tourism that has come with it. The city recently made it into Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2016, lauded for its surprising juxtaposition of modern street art and historic buildings. What the travel guides do not usually mention are the evictions, which have become another familiar ritual in this city of temples.

Tourism and speculation have driven up the value of both rentals and real estate in George Town. Cafés, galleries and boutique hotels have proliferated in response to the surge in tourism, with property investors following close behind. For the first time in decades, money is pouring into the old port town. But people are also flowing out. The boom which has made some people wealthy has been devastating for a great many more. Where once a family might have rented a terrace house for RM500-700 (₤75.28-105.40 at 6.65 Malaysian Ringgit to one British Pound) a month, houses now regularly command rentals as high as RM3,000 (₤451.71). Within the George Town World Heritage Site, an area of roughly one square mile, some pre-war properties have commanded prices per square foot that outpace even the nation’s capital, Kuala Lumpur. For the largely working-class population of this former port town, many of whom live on the monthly minimum wage of RM900 (₤136.82), it is all getting a bit too expensive.

Trade made George Town what it is today. When it was good, the people built a city that announced its riches to the world. The city was an important stop along the Spice Route, and quickly became a centre for the production of nutmeg and patchouli. Traders built a city of shophouses, conducting business downstairs and family life upstairs. Briefly, Penang was made the fourth presidency of British India – not the jewel in the crown, but one of its glittering facets. People came to George Town from all corners of the world, bringing their traditions and ways of life with them. Armenian hoteliers, Jewish traders and Japanese merchants all left their mark on the city. So too did Burmese, Achehnese and German migrants. Makers of mah-jong tiles, joss-sticks, Indian flower garlands and Malay shadow puppets all call George Town home today because of trade. At the heart of the old city centre, a mosque, an Anglican church, a Hindu temple and a Buddhist one all have addresses at Pitt Street. Penang’s people revelled in their mercantile wealth, lavishing money on homes for themselves and their gods.

When it all came crashing down, as these things inevitably do, time seemed to stop in George Town. Singapore, with its strategic location and deeper port, became the centre of Southeast Asian shipping. George Town’s increasingly anaemic role in global trade was dealt a final blow when it was stripped of its free port status in 1969. Poverty is a kind of aspic, and George Town became too poor to change. As a rule, cash-strapped landlords do not renovate, let alone rebuild. And until the repeal of rent control in 2000, landlords in George Town were, as a rule, strapped for cash.

Following the repeal of rent control, George Town real estate appreciated, but not drastically. A first wave of evictions made ripples in the press and was quickly forgotten. In the meantime, heritage advocates continued to lobby the government to protect the city’s historic streetscapes, among the best preserved in the region. Their wishes were eventually granted in 2008, when UNESCO inscribed the city – in a joint-listing with another Malaysian port town, Melaka – to its World Heritage List. In its notes on the city, UNESCO cites the ‘living testimony to the multi-cultural heritage and tradition of Asia, and European colonial influences… expressed in the great variety of… ethnic quarters, the many languages, worship and religious festivals, dances, costumes, art and music, food, and daily life.’
Quite ironically, this listing may be killing off the very daily life it seeks to protect. Since 2008, the pace of evictions has quickened. Overwhelmingly, those affected have been the city’s elderly – many of them custodians of the traditions celebrated by UNESCO. In 2014, I met the Har sisters, who lived down the road on Pitt Street. In a house occupied by their family for the better part of a century, they made votive paper flowers for the altars of temples and family homes alike; they were the last people in George Town to practice the art. Rising rents have pushed them out of the city centre. A café that blasts reggae music has since taken their place. On Beach Street, an elderly man who would nimbly weave rattan furniture and toys on his veranda was evicted. I am told his replacement is to be another café. The maker of mah-jong tiles has met a similar fate, as have key-cutters and wooden signboard-makers. These traditional trades may have had their day, perhaps, no longer relevant in the twenty-first century. But their demise has undoubtedly been accelerated by the aggressive gentrification of the city.
Evictions have not been confined to individual homes and families either. In George Town, entire rows of terrace houses sit on a single title. This is another by-product of the city’s history of trade and migration. Wealthy merchants became major landlords, as did migrant associations. As labour from China and the Indian subcontinent flowed into Malaya in the nineteenth century, clan and community groups became important social institutions for chain migrants. They quickly became significant landowners too. As these communities naturalised, however, and the free-flow of migration was halted following Malaya’s independence from Britain in 1957, many of these organisations lost their purpose and atrophied.
After decades of negligible returns on rentals, it is now tempting for institutional property owners – indeed, all property owners – in George Town to cash out. So six houses on Cheapside, the homes and warehouses of the lane’s traders, were put up for sale and the residents evicted. An entire block on Chulia Street was vacated: an antiques store, an old hotel, a noodle shop and a traditional chemist. The chemist, Mr Ong, was a local institution – still working at 90 years of age. In his place, plans for a boutique hotel. A row of art deco terraces on Chulia Lane was vacated in October 2015. These houses await a similar transformation. Nine shophouses on Jalan Kuala Kangsar remain empty after being cleared of their tenants a year ago. The catalogue of evictions quickly becomes a street directory.
Prompted by the spate of evictions, some friends of mine started a group called George Town Heritage Action. In the mornings, they wander the streets of George Town, speaking to residents. At night, they chronicle stories of evictions on their Facebook page. Through press conferences and lobbying, they have become foot soldiers in the battle to protect the city’s ‘intangible heritage’ – the people and traditions who brought the city to UNESCO’s attention in the first place.
Also dedicated to built heritage, they have become self-taught experts in lime plaster. When I visit them, they explain how lime is slaked by doing it. I watch them as – with aprons, gloves and goggles on – they stir the boiling mixture in an old bathtub. The process requires calcium oxide and water, but also patience, sweat and care; a touch of madness too, perhaps. Concrete is easier, so that is what most people use now, but it is bad for the soft, sandy bricks of George Town’s old shophouses. Saline groundwater is constantly rising up through the bricks of these old houses; as the salts crystallise, they expand, turning bricks and mortar into dust – a phenomenon known as ‘salt attack’. Where lime plaster breathes, and acts as a sacrificial mortar, cement is impermeable, trapping the salts within the bricks. Without realising it, many of the city’s would-be renovators are leaving George Town’s urban fabric increasingly brittle. George Town Heritage Action hopes to encourage the use of lime plaster in renovations, but like the evictions happening across the city, it is a battle.
I go with these friends to visit the latest victims of George Town’s gentrification, a Sikh family who live in the mews behind Lorong Ceti. The conditions are squalid – the house little more than a shanty – but it is home, and has been for three generations. They tell us stories of the neighbourhood. During the Second World War, Japanese soldiers commandeered some of the houses. ‘If you listen, you can hear the soldiers marching,’ says Gurmeet, who lives with his parents behind Lorong Ceti. War may not have displaced this neighbourhood, but development certainly has. In December 2014, the entire city block was sold to a developer from Singapore, and in February of this year, the tenants were served eviction notices.
‘I don’t want to go,’ says Dalier, Gurmeet’s mother. With her bad leg, she struggles with the short journey to the Gurdwara across the road. Each prayer becomes a pilgrimage. The journey will be harder when she finally moves to a low-cost flat on Perak Road. She has spent her life on the ground, she says, and does not understand why she now needs to live so high up. She leans on her cane as she speaks. Behind her, a canary chatters in its cage.
They are but one family, in a city where entire neighbourhoods have faced eviction. Between 2009 and 2013, when the last surveys were taken, the population of the George Town World Heritage Site dwindled from 10,159 to 9,425. With evictions quickening, there is little doubt that this figure is now lower. This number is all the more alarming when set against the population in the 1980s, or even the 1820s – 50,000 and 29,000 respectively. George Town now has a smaller population than it did within the first decades of its establishment in 1786. The city is being sold from under its residents’ feet.
The sale of George Town extends beyond real estate. Increasingly, local authorities are playing a new role as auctioneer. The city is aggressively marketing itself to tourists and commercial investors. ‘Heritage’ has become a key part of the way the city brands itself, but what this heritage means is open to interpretation. In the Special Area Plan for the George Town World Heritage Site, housing affordability is mentioned only in passing. While some neighbourhoods are marked with a ‘residential overlay’, these zones reflect current use, rather than plans for the future. There is next to no protection offered to the homes that do remain. While the purpose of the Special Area Plan – a document required by UNESCO as part of its listing process – is to safeguard the city’s heritage, the intangible elements of this heritage, the people and their traditions, seem to have been quietly dropped somewhere along the way.
According to a former Penang State Planner, provision of low-cost housing in George Town ‘remains overall a private-public collaboration’. While in theory this private-public model means there are more funding opportunities for low-cost and social housing, this has not eventuated in old George Town. In part, this is due to the restrictions imposed by the city’s World Heritage Listing, which limit the height and scale of new developments. Most redevelopment projects within the old city are simply too small for affordable housing requirements to kick in under current planning rules. As a result, almost none of the recent redevelopments within the historic centre have included affordable housing. With the exception of a pilot low-cost housing project undertaken by a temple association and Think City, a federal funding body, older housing stock has generally been turned into hotels, galleries, cafés or bars by private investors and developers.
The state’s focus has instead been on beautifying public spaces. The city has been active in inviting street artists to paint the city’s walls with nostalgic images of turbaned boatmen, rickshaw drivers, and children on bicycles. Quiet reminders of what is being lost, you can buy postcards with these images in packs of ten from vendors who set up plastic trestle tables by the roadside.
An annexure to the George Town Special Area Plan, dealing specifically with designing public realm upgrades, was developed by state heritage authorities in collaboration with Think City and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, a private philanthropic organisation. The draft document included proposals for numerous urban upgrades – from planting greenery to building new seaside esplanades. The document also included suggestions for creating new buildings for ‘income-generation’ within these public spaces. But who will spend money in the city if no one lives there? In this document, George Town’s transformation is made explicit: from a living city into a space for consumption – mostly by tourists.
During the public consultation period in early 2015, the Chew Jetty Residents’ Association lodged their objection to the annexure. These residents, members of a Chinese surname-clan, live in century-old wooden homes built above the water. Fishing remains their main source of income, though increasingly the residents make money on the side peddling trinkets to visitors. Tourist traffic has put great pressure on their fragile jetty, which is in much need of repair. What the residents objected to were proposals for new buildings that would have blocked their temple’s view of the strait – an arrangement of deep ritual significance to these seafaring people. Concerns were also raised over the suggested creation of mangroves around the jetties. These are potential breeding grounds for Aedes mosquitoes, carriers of deadly dengue fever – a perennial concern in George Town. After a flurry of articles in the vernacular press, the state government and its partners went back to the drawing board. It is unclear what the revised plans will look like, but the Special Area Plan is expected to be gazetted – along with its annexure – by the end of 2015. The document is likely to focus on buildings rather than people.
What would a George Town without its people look like? A trip to Singapore offers me one possible vision of the future. Exiting the Chinatown MRT Station, I am greeted by an endless procession of shops selling paper lanterns, Chinese calligraphy and – rather bafflingly – Tin Tin merchandise, in a street packaged under a green plastic roof. The shophouses are in good nick, certainly, but they are decidedly shops, not houses. You have to travel further out to find the places where Singaporeans actually live. What’s missing from the picture is the mess, noise and grit of George Town life: the smell of incense from morning prayers; the rattle of hawkers as they pack up their stalls for the night; windows that offer glimpses of cool, dark interiors lit by a single flickering altar-top candle; the suggestion of faces and movement behind mosquito nets; dainty cups of sweet, dark coffee served in traditional kopitiam where the waiters bark orders at the kitchen in the local Hokkien dialect; the sounds of industry, life, and laughter.
Across the road from where I live, the vendors at a nightly flea market would yell ‘Lelong! Lelong!’; ‘Sale! Sale!’ I walked through this market every day after work, surveying the dated electronic devices and ersatz antiques hawked by the traders. Sometimes, I would pick up an old book. It was a place where the city’s working class and foreign labourers mingled, speaking in Malay, Hokkien, Burmese and Indonesian. A few months ago, the dusty square was boarded up; another urban upgrade for George Town. The hoardings promise a new park, and boast about the number of residents consulted. But the traders who used the place daily, and their customers, were not a part of this consultation. They have been shifted out of the frame, their sweaty bodies and broken wares now out of sight. A reminder of rougher, poorer times, they do not fit in so easily with George Town’s new image as a slick creative destination. Just three doors down from me on Armenian Street, an Indian family of recyclers is evicted from their home. Workers cart out furniture and apply a lick of paint to the Victorian façade. The sign goes up: ‘For sale’.