Writing this newsletter over the last nine (!) months has been an exercise in discipline. I love the autonomy that this project brings, and the freedom that comes with writing without an editor—but alongside that is a certain amount of second-guessing too. Could that sentence have been tighter? Did that topic feel a bit random and bizarre? Have I forgotten to mention something crucially important this week?
I mention discipline because I have tried to stick to ‘writing in the moment’, that is to say, to not plan these letters too far in advance, and to not retroactively fiddle with posts (unless there is a glaringly egregious grammatical, spelling or factual error). I think this is important because it means my writing is more authentic, more real, than if I had spent weeks or months planning, tweaking, perfecting, and slowly going a bit mad. At least, that is the way it feels to me.
It’s in this spirit that I write to you not on a Tuesday as normal, but on a Friday morning, from Penang International Airport, 30 minutes before I board my flight to Hong Kong. That’s 30 minutes to go back and forth over whether this makes any sense before stepping into insulated offline bliss for nearly four hours.
Instead of the regular edition of Ginkgo Leaves, I am sending you a postcard from Penang, where my mother is from and where most of my maternal family live.
I have been fortunate enough to return to Penang almost every year since my childhood, bar the pandemic and university. In a way, it feels slightly odd to write in-depth about or post photographs of people, places and rituals that have been so familiar for the last near thirty years. I feel there’s a slight conflict between wanting to share these aspects of life in Malaysia with friends and readers, but also feeling protective over it; the idea that exposing these scenes is revealing a secret, and is over-romanticising what is commonplace and quotidian.
However, I want to lean into that a little in a way that makes sense for me: by writing a postcard this week from Penang, with a few vignettes that have left an impression on me. It’s an imperfect, incomplete snapshot, but is written in the moment, from myself to you.
Early morning at my uncle’s coffee shop in Sungai Petani. He pours Chinese tea from a heavy brown teapot into my cup. I shift in my seat, the back of my thighs sticking to the red plastic chair. Regulars arrive and settle at their usual tables; my uncle knows their orders. Later, I walk across the road to the local market, where durian season is in full swing. Strong gusts of wind shake the vendors’ awnings, a sign of impending rain. My uncle runs over to me, brandishing an umbrella.
Eating loh por beng, or ‘sweetheart cakes’, with my aunt. She has cut the two cakes into quarters, their flaky pastry scattering on the leather sofa as we bring them to our lips. The filling is sweet, soft, jam-like. She has high standards and says she’s tasted better. We eat them together quietly as the fan whirs above us, enjoying the simplicity of the silence.
Listening to Vietnamese rap with my cousin in her car. We stop and start down the highway, stuck in the familiar crawl of Penang traffic, a trail of red brake lights in front of us. It’s her favourite playlist, she tells me. Sometimes, if she arrives to work early, she will wait in her car and listen to this music before going into the office. Her morning alone time.
Paying respects to my grandparents, who are housed together in a joint case in a grand columbarium. My aunt brings chrysanthemums and gently releases their yellow heads from their white plastic netting. I look inside the case and realise my gung gung’s reading glasses are inside with him, next to his urn.
Eating wan tan mee with my cousin, aunt and uncle. We wait for ages in anticipation—the hawker stall we’ve gone to is the most popular one—and it is worth it. My uncle moves my glass of iced milk tea out of the way of my wayward chopsticks. Both my uncle and aunt spill sauce on their white shirts.
Drinking beer with my cousins on my last night. We catch up, gossip, laugh. Three hours pass before we’ve realised it. I leave wondering what it would have been like to grow up here with them, or what it would have been like to have siblings to grow up with.
Watching the airport runway from my uncle’s balcony, joining him in his regular routine. One plane takes off, and he points to another that is landing. It soars in from the right, disappears momentarily behind the hill before speeding down onto the runway. More passengers are returning home.