BEYOND BOOKS AND EXAMINATIONS PFS (est. 1816) is Southeast Asia’s oldest English-medium school. Its heritage makes it a particularly compelling place to study Literature today. Over 40,000 students sit for the STPM annually, but Literature attracts only a small number of candidates. Inside the classroom, students debate character motivations, annotate poems line by line and argue over interpretations that re-sist a single correct answer. When I asked a classmate taking Accounting (who ...
FOR WORKAHOLICS TO drop everything and go on a retreat is as crazy as asking a parent to stop worrying about their children for a while. Not really possible. Unless, of course the workaholic is suffering the symptoms typical of advanced alcoholism. When he begins doubting his very ability to work well or care well for his family, then he has to take some drastic action. Otherwise, he is at risk of burning out. Going “cold turkey” for a workaholic … what would that be like? This sounds way too d
BEFORE COUPONS PROLIFERATED, only to be replaced by digital parking applications, parking attendants were ubiquitous across Penang’s public parking facilities. Now largely vanished, these attendants were once part of a transformative state strategy to provide skilled labour for industrialisation in the 1970s, while combatting high unemployment rates. In an unlikely twist, a parking attendant scheme was central to interventions of the City In-Service Training Centre (CITC, est. 1 February 1970),
COMING HOME SHOULD be easy, or so I thought. After four years of living in the UK, I imagined that returning to Penang would feel like slipping back into a familiar rhythm: of the food, the languages, the old streets I grew up knowing and the people I once called my “community”. Instead, I found myself readjusting to and navigating changes—in Penang and within myself—before coming to the unsettling realisation that life back home had continued without me, while I was busy building a li...
As layers of paint were carefully removed from the gurdwara’s historic façade, conservators uncovered intricate...
THE FIRST THING that greeted me was silence. Not the uncomfortable kind; instead, it settled gently over the basketry workshop. There were no machines humming in the background, only the soft sound of rattan being shaped by experienced hands. The scent of natural plant fibre lingered around unfinished baskets, weaving tools and bundles of rattan waiting to be transformed. St. Nicholas’ Home has long supported the blind and visually impaired, and the art of basketry continues there not only as a
NIGHT: At the Hu Yew Seah school, a mural featuring the polymath Rabindranath Tag-ore, who laid its foundation stone, magisterially overlooks Lorong Madras. Often remembered as a global “Indian” intellectual, Tagore’s literary fame earned him a Nobel Prize for literature and a platform to articulate socio-political critique. Visiting George Town in 1927, he railed against the emergence of nationalism, which increasingly defined British India’s anticolonial movement. In Penang-based art...
ONE OF THE deepest legacies of colonisation worldwide is the nation-state. Having learned that every inch on earth has to be owned, sooner or later, by some political power, the emergent nation-states, which inherited the territories left behind by crumbling European powers—and Japan—in the 20th century, also cultivated the envy, desperation and fear that had characterised their European models. National borders became frontlines where flows of goods and peoples could be controlled, counted and
“MY MEMORY BEGINS, as always,” opens When Memory Dies, “with the rain.” A. Sivanandan’s 1997 novel follows Ceylon’s transition away from being an outpost of the British empire to the postcolonial state of Sri Lanka (where I was born). The novel is a rare charting of how centuries of exploiting Tamil workers on tea plantations paved the way for the state’s subsequent war on Tamil people. This first scene unfolds in the 1930s, deep in the central highlands. A small boy watches the monsoon, nursin
THE FRONT OF the Hor Kai Kong Temple in Pulau Tikus filled with young students and neighbourhood worshippers, as a performance by Ling Goh's Iron Gang Puppet Theatre (铁枝帮) began.[1] Onstage, her students and the musicians performed the Four Fortunes Set (四出连)[2] and reimagined the Malay folktale, Si Tanggang, facing the temple entrance so that the deities could enjoy the show. They were staging a contemporary Teochew iron rod puppet performance on temple grounds for the first time. But...
OPENING WITH AN enigmatic arrival in 1970s’ London, Amelié Skoda’s novel, Beth-nal Green, follows a young woman’s sojourn in the metropole to pursue a career in nursing. Suyin’s complicated act of leaving Penang offers a point of departure for questions about empire, family and self-hood. Skoda’s upcoming appearance at the George Town Literary Festival (GTLF) is a homecoming of sorts, given that her mother—a former National Health Service (NHS) nurse—hailed from Penang. We speak with h...
