Second paragraph of third chapter:

I was the youngest child of one of the oldest families in Penang. My great-grandfather, Graham Hutton, had been a clerk in the East India Company before sailing out to the East Indies to make his fortune in 1780. He had sailed around the Spice Islands trading in pepper and spices, and came to befriend Captain Francis Light who was searching for a suitable port. He found it on an island in the Straits of Malacca, on the north-western side of the Malay Peninsula and within comfortable reach of India. The island was sparsely inhabited, thick with trees, humped with rolling hills and surrounded by long white stretches of beach. The local Malays named it after the tall areca palm trees — pinang — which grew abundantly on it.

I've always been fascinated by Penang, where my father was born in 1928 but I have never been. This was the first novel by Tan, whose second novel The Garden of Evening Mists I enjoyed a few years back. The narrator, son of a marriage between an Englishman and a Chinese woman, finds himself playing a key role in the Japanese administration of occupied Penang during the second world war, and many years later encounters the lover of his Japanese best friend and tells her his story. The cityscape is vividly realised, as are the interaction of cultures and the brutality of the Japanese regime. It gets a bit sanguinary towards the end, but this was true of that period of history in reality. I felt the prose was not as smooth as in the later book; one can feel that this is a first novel. However, well worth reading to deepen my own appreciation of my father's birthplace. You can get it here.