Second paragraph of third chapter:

“But what kind of Christian?” I asked.

I have not been to Penang, but my father was born there in 1928, and lived nearby with his parents until 1930. George Bilainkin, who went on to become a prominent English journalist and controversialist, was also there as editor of the Straits Echo in 1929 and 1930.

This 1932 book, republished in 2010 by a Penang-based publisher, is an informed view of Penang society from an outsider’s perspective, illustrated with copious photographs. It is of course the perspective of a white man who was there for only a short time, and covers Penang itself much more intensely than the mainland (where my grandparents and father were then living), but it helped me to fill out the unspoken gaps in my grandmother’s memoirs and gave me a sense of the part of the world that my father was born into 98 years ago.

Penang was actually the oldest British possession in the region, the local Malay king having been ‘persuaded’ to cede it in perpetuity in 1786. In 1929-30 it was part of the jointly administered Straits Settlements, including also Malacca and Dinding (now Majung) and more famously Singapore. As a free port, it had attracted immigrants from all over the region, and until the early 1920s was the largest Chinese city outside China (Singapore overtook it). It is on the Indian Ocean, which is a corridor not a barrier, and the population included not just Chinese and Malays but Indians, Arabs, white folks and other groups, with the British in political control but the Chinese (from the historic first wave of immigrants) dominating the business sector.

It’s worth reflecting for a moment that two other nearby cities with similar histories, Singapore and Hong Kong, had quite different fates. Singapore was briefly part of independent Malaysia, but became an independent state in 1963. Hong Kong was united with China in 1997, with special provisions for the independence of its legal system, which have been eroded but still exist. Penang, perhaps more dependent on the neighbouring mainland than Singapore, was included in Malaysia from the beginning with special provisions for free trade from its port; those were abolished in the late 1960s, but the provincial government successfully bet on becoming a tech centre – in the 1970s! – and it continues to thrive.

Bilainkin was there at a turning point in the city’s history, as it came to terms with the mainland and with being overshadowed by Singapore, but also remained an important transit point for Europeans exploring the region – there is a lengthy starstruck interview with Noel Coward, for instance. In his own way Bilainkin campaigned against racism; when local dignitaries demanded that they only be interviewed by white reporters from the Straits Echo, he responded that he himself was the only white reporter on the paper, so if they wanted timely news coverage they would need to accept whoever he assigned to the interview.

One cultural point which oddly enough resonates with an argument made by my friend Dave Keating in his book about EU-US relations, The Owned Continent, is that Hollywood’s dominance of the cinema was already a problem. American culture as depicted on the screen was shown as the default behaviour for Westerners, to Asian audiences who might never interact with Europeans in their day-to-day lives, and who had very different cultural expectations. Bilainkin vowed to campaign for better films as editor of the Straits Echo. I do not think that he had much success.

I hoped to find some direct reference to my grandparents, or if not them to their friends, in the book, especially since my grandmother had originally gone to Penang in 1927 to stay with Bilainkin’s predecessor as editor of the Straits Echo – but when she arrived in Penang, it turned out that her friend had been sacked and was leaving within weeks. Left to her own devices, she met a charming Irish army officer, and the rest is history. I had to wait until the second last chapter of Bilainkin’s book to find a link, but it was a good one. Strap yourself in.

The situation was this: George Francis Lenders (possibly Georges François Leenders), a Belgian who was the Far East representative of Carreras Tobacco (a leading cigarette company, now part of Rothmans), was accused of assaulting a Chinese woman, and the case went to court in Penang. The alleged victim was a remarkable character: Oon Beng Hong, the first woman barrister in Penang, later a parliamentarian and politician, and a future president of the International Federation of Women Lawyers. The Chinese population of Penang began a boycott of Carreras Tobacco and its products in protest. (Bilainkin does not give the full details in his book, but I found it easy enough to fill in the blanks.)

George Bilainkin was invited (it’s not clear by whom) to mediate between the parties to reach an out-of-court settlement. His co-mediator was a solicitor, Arthur de Buriatte, who three years earlier had been sharing a house with my grandfather at the time that he met and married my grandmother; I find this a very pleasing connection. In the end, the mediation failed, the case went to court, and the Belgian was fined fifty Straits pounds. The newspaper reporting (from the Pinang Gazette rather than the Straits Echo) is fascinating reading (here, here, here) and mentions Bilainkin’s attempt at mediation as well.

The judge found that Lenders (or Leenders) had not explained in any way how Mrs Oon came to be injured, and further regretted the “contemptuous” attitude of the defendant, and the failure of the attempted mediation. It’s clear that the defendant was a racist asshole, who also did not appreciate where the economic power in Penang really lay, and his lawyer, who was about to be appointed to the Supreme Court of Malaya, was unable to conjure up a coherent defence for a white chap who hit a Chinese woman lawyer and broke her glasses. (Though I wonder if it would have been different if Lenders had been British and not Belgian.)

I don’t find a George Francis Lenders (or Georges François Leenders) in the online Belgian state records, but I don’t think they are complete, and he may have changed his name at some point. The closest I have is a Georges Lenders who was a witness to two Brussels weddings in the 1890s and would have been born around 1852, far too old to have been the chap in Penang who was an active liaison between the Belgian and British armies during the war and punching barristers on the jetty in 1930.

Anyway, this is a fascinating book, from an unusual angle. You can get Hail, Penang! here.

Second paragraph of third story in The Casuarina Tree (“The Outstation”):

Now the prahu [boat] appeared in the broad reach. It was manned by prisoners, Dyaks under various sentences, and a couple of warders were waiting on the landing-stage to take them back to jail. They were sturdy fellows, used to the river, and they rowed with a powerful stroke. As the boat reached the side a man got out from under the attap awning and stepped on shore. The guard presented arms.

Second paragraph of third chapter of The House of Doors:

‘I have read your book, Mr Willie,’ said Ah Keng.

I enjoyed both of the previous books that I read by Tan Twan Eng – The Garden of Evening Mists and The Gift of Rain. Like The Gift of Rain, his latest, The House of Doors, is mainly set in Penang, which is a place of fascination for me as it is where my grandparents met and my father was born. As I started The House of Doors, I realised that it rather depends on knowledge of Somerset Maugham, one of many well-known writers whose works I had never read, so I got hold of The Casuarina Tree, his collection of short stories set in Malaysia, and finished it before I finished The House of Doors (it is slightly shorter).

The Casuarina Tree, published in 1926, is not one of Maugham’s best known books – it’s not in his top twenty according to Goodreads or even in his top forty, according to LibraryThing. But it is set in Malaya after Maugham’s visits there in 1921 and 1925, six short stories of between 34 and 45 pages each, with a prologue and afterword. They are all about expats with dreadful secrets, whose character flaws may become public or may remain hidden, with the moral depravity of the English brutally exposed as a result of contact with the human and physical geography of Malaysia.

The most successful of the stories is “The Letter”, based on the real case of Ethel Proudlock who shot and killed her English neighbour who, she claimed, was attempting to rape her. But they are all effective, brutal vignettes of colonial life.

Supposedly Maugham became persona non grata in Penang because too many of the episodes that the stories are based on were recognisable. That sounds like a marketing myth to me – they may just not have liked him very much. Anyway, you can buy The Casuarina Tree here, though it’s easy to find for free on the internets.

There is one person who pops up both in The House of Doors and in my grandmother’s memoirs of Penang a few years later, the lawyer Hastings Rhodes, who was the state prosecutor in Ethel Proudlock’s trial in 1911 and then hosted my grandmother for dinner just after she and my grandfather got engaged in 1927. She reports that “Hastings Rhodes drove me home and professed to be heart-broken at my engagement, but I took that with several grains of salt.” He was recently divorced, and the same age as my grandfather, and died unexpectedly in 1929.

The House of Doors is about Lesley Hamlyn, living in an unsatisfactory marriage with her husband in Penang in 1921, and hosting her husband’s old schoolfriend Willie Somerset Maugham and his secretary/lover Gerald Haxton, while also looking back on her own friendship with the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen ten years before, and coming to the realisation that both she and her husband are emotionally involved with Chinese men. There is a framing narrative set in South Africa, and Ethel Proudlock’s murder trial gets a look in too.

There is a lot here, and I didn’t think that Tan Twan Eng juggled the balls of plot and character as well as in his other books. When a story is based on real events, authors sometimes let their imagination get fettered by the historical record, and I felt that had happened here. Oddly enough Maugham, the person about whom most is known, comes across as the most well-rounded of the characters, while Lesley, the ostensible protagonist, felt a bit flat to me. But other people seem to like it, so perhaps I was just in the wrong mood. You can get The House of Doors here.