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A Port of Call
Hanging out with travellers on visa runs and prostitutes in Penang
“You know what wan hai means?” told me Jimmy, the Taiwanese owner of the Love Lane Inn, the backpackers’ pit where I was staying. “If you find a Chinese woman and tell her that word she will slap you in the face.” The scene outside the Wan Hai Hotel fitted Jimmy’s euphemistic drama: the three Thai lady-boys, the sexiest in Georgetown, Penang’s old town, were prancing in theatrical solicitation.
The Wan Hai Hotel, as I learned more about it, illustrated the cyclical nature of Georgetown: it started as an atmospheric Chinese house, then morphed into a brothel, then reincarnated into a respectable hotel, and now it has become a part-brothel and part-hotel. It’s the only sex-establishment left in Love Lane, much tamer now than the time when Love Lane earned its name by the British: there were three other brothels then, as well as an opium den, a gambling hall, a mahjong factory where players could play on-site, and a Chinese clan house were gangsters vied for the control of the dark lucrative trades. Now Love Lane largely caters to a different kind of drifters and bums – the backpackers that fill Malaysia’s most popular tourist spot.
Mind you, Georgetown still teems with prostitutes, but most are freelancers found lurking in arcaded pavements, such as the group that assemble every night at one end of Love Lane. Five or six of them, all of South Indian descent, and the first time I walked past I missed them in the dark shadows until they started hissing and whistling. I allowed myself to be drawn into their fold, trying to find out more about them – what had struck me most on my first night in Georgetown is that all the prostitutes were lady-boys and there was no authentic girl in sight. All of them looked awkward made up as women, and I was thinking that a man had to be irredeemably lonely to find solace among such ugly men.
“Come with me to my room,” one of them said. “Just for 20 Ringit.”
US$6, very cheap. I asked him if he was from Georgetown. “Kuala Lumpur,” he said. “I moved over some months ago. Business is better here.”
Georgetown, capital of Penang, was founded by the British land-grabbing East India Company in 1786. It was an easy acquisition – an island inhabited by primitive fishermen – and the East India Company, the commercial entity acting at the behest of British imperialism, declared Penang as its fiefdom, and founded Georgetown – named after King George III – as a port and trade hub. The port attracted motleys of traders, drifters, and opportunists – Chinese, Bengalis, Tamils, Sikhs, Sinhalese, Burmese, Indonesians, and Europeans. And all these immigrants brought their varied customs, crafts, beliefs; and bit by bit the different ethnic groups created a diverse architectural tapestry that has made Georgetown one of the most culturally diverse cities on earth. It has an Indian quarter – South Indian restaurants, Hindu music; a reek of incense, a flurry of saris – and a more diffuse Chinese influence: Chinese architecture, ancestral shrines, red paper lamps. There’s a variety of shrines – Chinese, Thai, Hindu, Muslim, Christian – Georgetown’s juxtapositions are fantastic.
Even now immigrants continue to straggle into Georgetown. People like Jimmy, a Taiwanese who arrived nine years ago, and whose business is booming. He’s a friendly and helpful guy, yet utterly focused on raking money, and running a pit-hole that characterized the decadence of Georgetown – my bed was full of bed-bugs. The suckers didn’t let me sleep, and prolonged my nightly wanderings; one night I killed eight bed-bugs
I was in Georgetown to renew my Thai visa. During the day I prowled the streets, savouring the ethnic cuisines. The Indian restaurants served Indian meals on banana leaf – a quaint throwback that has largely disappeared in India. Typical immigrants, clinging tightly to tradition; it was the same with cycle rickshaws, very popular in Georgetown but largely superseded by motorized rickshaws in India. And the Chinese restaurant called Weld Quay Restoran was reminiscent of restaurants in Hong Kong a generation ago. The proprietor and cook, a man from Hong Kong, runs a dinghy place that is redeemed by deliciously authentic Chinese food. He is a middle-aged man with hair bundled in a pony-tail, and he cooks with acrobatic nimbleness – presiding over six woks, each hand hovering in a different wok, cooking three or four dishes simultaneously.
At other times I hung out at Jim’s Café. Jim is another middle-aged man with another pony-tail, a Malay of South Indian descent who had been a drifter in his younger days. Now he runs a café and bar for backpackers, and he chats up every single woman who chances into his café with something approaching urgent haste: within minutes he would know her purpose and status in Penang, and whether any sexual openings could be found.
I drank with the other Westerners on Thai visa runs. There was Steve, a former English soldier who quit the army after the excruciations of Iraq, and now was slowly depleting his savings by living frugally in Thailand and Cambodia. His jaw had been cracked in a fist-fight, and now it was clamped shut – he could only drink with a straw through a missing tooth, and he spoke with a slushy slur. There was Marthy, another English guy, and Orlando, a Filipino guy, applying to work as bogus Marketing Directors despite the fact that they were swimming instructors. There was a Dutch gay who made a living creating sideways cut-out profiles of tourists, then imprinting the profiles on T-shirts, at the popular Thai island of Koh Samui. There was a German couple who were waiting for their motorbike to arrive from Germany. And there was English girl who, on the face of it, seem proper and diligent, but was actually a sophisticated hustler in London – a tout who convinced gullible teenage girls to pay US$100 to be taken to a photo studio for a model photo-shoot.
Thai visas are handled by dozens of agents, and in this way Georgetown had found a new way to renew itself as a port of call – easy Thai visas for the long-term escapees in Thailand. This explained Penang’s character, and an importance utterly out of proportion to its size – where else would you find, in a tiny island, an international airport, an international port, many foreign embassies, one of the largest industrial centres in Malaysia? Also, the largest concentration of Western drop-outs – backpackers who squeeze many years of frugal living on tiny savings in Asia – in Southeast Asia; not travelers keen to stay put, but passers-by who would linger for a few days.
Only the prostitutes surpassed the backpackers in visibility. I had taken to buying drinks to the group who dawdled on Love Lane, and that way I could also dawdle among them. On my last night, the one who was friendliest to me, told me: “I’ll also be leaving soon.”
“Where are you moving to?” I asked.
“I don’t actually like this work,” he said. “I’m moving back to Kuala Lumpur. Maybe I’ll find a job as a waiter, and maybe I’ll manage to save some money and study something.”
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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