Field Notes from Chew Jetty

Field notes are rich written descriptions of places, people, and cultures, produced by anthropologists and sociologists as part of their fieldwork. Yet, field notes are rarely regarded as a form of travel writing. Travel stories in mainstream media are likewise seldom narrated through the lenses of sociology and anthropology. This is hardly surprising, for such pieces would be deemed too serious for newspaper readers, too risky for the business of curating travel tales as dreams. Travel writing as informed by these disciplines therefore takes place at the margins; it looks beneath the glitzy veneer of cities for the often ignored, unintended consequences of tourism, from the gentrification of neighbourhoods to the tension between locals and tourists over the use of spaces. It also questions the assumed benefits of tourism, be it uplifting locals from poverty or the preservation of cultures. Travel field notes are not meant to be postcard-perfect but illustrate a less reflected reality of our actions as tourists.

Chew Jetty
GEORGE TOWN

July 2012

Facing a treacherously busy thoroughfare, the unassuming sign at the village’s entrance listed numerous vital facts and figures: Chew Jetty was established in the mid-19th century by immigrants from the “Xinglinshe Village, Tong An District, Quanzhou Prefecture, Fujian Province, China”. The village’s bridge consisted of two parts – the first measured 182 metres in length and the second, 122 metres. The number of houses in the village totalled 75. The most important piece of information proudly volunteered was that Chew Jetty is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, just like the rest of the historical centre in Penang’s capital city.

The houses in the village were assembled from wood or zinc, painted mostly in red, brown, or charcoal. Many of these structures recalled the rural Malay houses still found in the Southeast Asian countryside, except that they stood on stilts deeply embedded in the seabed. Unlike the ornate Peranakan shophouses that gave George Town its photogenic old-world charm, these modest abodes were more about function than form. 

From certain angles, parts of Chew Jetty looked rather unkempt. Water pipes glided along the edge of the wooden bridges, like a gigantic, shiny eel. Heaps of timber planks, plastic sheets, and trash bags littered the wooden pavement while well-worn clothes hung on wires tied to poles and pillars of houses. Also left unattended were white plastic chairs, ropes – thick and white, or else blue and thin – and a pair of adult-size slippers whose owner was nowhere to be seen.

Elsewhere, scooters and bicycles were parked beside trolleys, one of them transporting several tiny tyres. Sacks containing possibly cement powder and bundled bricks also lined parts of the village’s main corridor leading to a Chinese temple and the open sea. Clearly, Chew Jetty was home to industrial workshops but what exactly were the trades and crafts in which the residents were engaging?

Some of the residents were apparently running a business from their homes too. Long inked on the wooden walls of one of the houses were the words “hair saloon”, complete with the picture of a pair of scissors above. But it was not opened and awaiting customers.

Life in the village appeared to be unvarnished and unpretentious. Someone had left trays of dried salted fish on the pavement, under the scorching sun, unsupervised. Staying outdoors on a more permanent basis were the satellite dishes and antennas affixed to rooftops; television viewing was probably the residents’ main source of entertainment. Gardening was another popular recreation; many of the households had potted plants, leafy but unflowering, at their doorstep. Religion, Taoism to be exact, seemed to be an integral aspect of the local culture – the entrances of several houses were decorated with red round lanterns and altars holding offerings to deities were nailed to the wooden and zinc walls.

The village, however, has not been spared from the street art phenomenon that has pervaded almost every street and alley in historical George Town. And for most of the visitors who had come trampling on the sturdy planks of Chew Jetty, it was to spot and take photographs with the mural painting of two Chinese boys and a cat, all looking too scared to enjoy an adventurous ride in a sampan. The mural graced the walls of a wooden house with two unoccupied rocking chairs on its tiny porch. Anchored in the waters, in a row, near the house were several boats, painted blue and bobbing idly.

Standing several metres away, at the end of the wooden walkway, were three local Chinese men. The one with grey hair was sitting astride on his bicycle. Another was topless, with his arms folded and concealing his potbelly. The third, slightly younger, was standing behind the duo. They were talking to but not looking at one another. Behind them, ominously dark clouds had gathered, and waves ebbed and flowed towards the neighbouring water villages, taller apartment buildings, and a clock tower constructed in 1897 to commemorate the 60th year of the reign of Queen Victoria. Sighted too was the fin-like silhouette of a cruise ship, where tourists would disembark by the hundreds for a quick tour of the city, with some shopping and feasting squeezed in. 

So far, Chew Jetty had yet to acquire the trappings of a tourist trap. Visitors usually arrived in groups of three to five, and there was hardly a queue to take photos with the mural. One or two houses had started to provide home-stay services to tourists and there was a stall selling souvenirs but the residents were largely cocooned in their own worlds of domesticity.

Grandmothers watched Cantonese drama serials while cradling babies, if not chatting in the Hokkien dialect with their neighbours. Another granny was napping on the floor with white powder plastered on her face, unbothered by the stares and sniggers that her unglamorous beauty regime might attract. 

Impressed by the display of authenticity that was no doubt accentuated by fleeting aromatic whiffs of coffee beans being roasted nearby, a first-time visitor was overwhelmed by a comforting sense of home. 

The inviting feeling felt superficial at the same time; he was a bystander, always observing and never privy to the communal gossip.


Chew Jetty
GEORGE TOWN

September 2016

The two boys and the cat in the sampan had vanished without a trace. But the wooden house they once inhabited was very much intact.

Perhaps the elderly woman and the middle-aged man sitting by a table of notebooks, steps away from the house, could unravel the mystery.

“Hello, auntie. There used to be a painting on the wall of this house. What happened?” asked the curious tourist in Chinese.

“Oh, it had been washed away by the rain,” offered the man instantly as the elderly woman listened to the brief exchange.

The disappeared mural was not the only change that has taken place in Chew Jetty since 2012. The notebook stall was likely to have popped up in recent years. So were the stalls and shops jostling for space with the ubiquitous motorcycles, red lanterns, and metal mailboxes. And human traffic had increased significantly.

Within the cramped walkway, goods and advertisements vied for tourists’ attention. In these shops could be found foldable fans, cloth hats, umbrellas (all useful for dealing with the heatwave), Hard Rock Café Penang bags, prosperity cat figurines, I love Penang caps and tee-shirts, batik print dresses, slippers, key chains, mugs, toys and handmade cookies (with “no additional coloring, no preservative, no additive” declared an advertising banner).

Competition for the tourist dollar appeared to be stiff; the handwritten signs of a juice bar promised “air-conditioned” and “free WiFi”. Close to a vending machine stocked with bottled mineral water and A&W canned root beer was a stall, helmed by a man of South Indian descent and cooking ramen. The shops and stalls were selling many things and more or less the same things.

A portion of Chew Jetty too had been converted into an open-air museum of sorts, although there was all but one artefact on display. An actual dragon boat, normally used for races during the Dumpling Festival celebrated by Chinese communities in the region, occupied pride of place the stretch of the wooden corridor nearer to the open sea.

A large billboard had been installed behind the dragon boat, obscuring the empty boats that were still moored close to the house with the erstwhile mural. The billboard featured a painting of a boatful of men wearing what looked suspiciously like old-fashioned shower caps, paddling ferociously in waters of shades bluer than the actual waters surrounding Chew Jetty.

The painting was accompanied by information extolling the prowess of the Chew Jetty dragon boaters. In the 1980s and the 1990s, they were a force to be reckoned with, having won numerous local races and having represented Penang in overseas competitions. Their stories of glory, almost consigned to the footnotes of the community’s history, had now been documented and presented in a visitor-friendly manner.

The tourist needed a breather from the other tourists. On the way back to the village’s entrance, he walked by the notebook stall again. The table was filled with colourful covers of the street art that had camouflaged many a weathered wall in the city. Not surprisingly, the famous image of Armenian Street kids riding on a bicycle was reproduced on a number of notebooks of varying sizes but more or less the same thinness.

Another instantly recognisable mural – depicting two children stretching out their skinny hands through window grilles and reaching out in vain for a dim sum steamer – was spotted too. Less familiar but no less captivating was the cover of an Indian man rowing a boat in standing position. Sitting on the corner of the table laid with a floral plastic sheet were notebooks with the vanished kids and cat in the sampan.

Realising that he needed to get gifts for friends and deciding that the notebooks were probably the least touristy commodity available, the tourist picked up a handful of copies, including the mural that was no longer a fixture in Chew Jetty.

As the elderly woman and the middle-aged man slipped the notebooks into a plastic bag, the tourist asked if they were residents of the village.

They nodded in agreement.

A nostalgia-tinged mural had ushered the crowds to Chew Jetty and, indirectly, the small businesses seeking to cash in on its popularity. A quiet water village had been transformed into a bustling bazaar, at least during the day. Its napping and gossipy grandmothers had retreated behind closed doors. The village’s corridors had been cleared of bricks, sacks, and ropes. The industrial workshops and their tools had been relocated elsewhere.

Tourism had without a doubt altered the character and diluted the local flavour of Chew Jetty. Yet it was not alone in experiencing this predicament.

At the star-shaped Cornwallis Fort in George Town, tourists could use as photo props life-size cut-outs of European people dressed in traditional finery. These cut-outs stood beside the statue of Captain Francis Light, whose arrival in Penang in 1786 led to the colonization of the city. Inside the fort’s humble chapel, built in 1799, its once-empty interiors had been filled with convenient benches and quaint models of old houses. Flickering images projected on the white-washed wall promoted the city as an attractive tourist destination.

And speaking of the city, many of the shophouses in George Town had been conserved and converted into hotels, restaurants, museums, lifestyle shops, galleries, and cafes. It was harder for the visitor to chance upon a Peranakan shoe-embroidery maker or a rattan-chair maker, toiling away silently at their craft.

More conspicuous were the guitar-strumming and fire-playing buskers in the public squares and streets. Hand-written notes with pleas such as “No photography” were pasted on the doors and gates of harassed residents. (None of such notes could be found in Chew Jetty though.)

At the same time, tourism had provided another source of income to the people of George Town, including the residents of Chew Jetty. If only the tourist had probed further and asked the notebook sellers if their lives had indeed improved with more visitors setting foot in their village. And if they had experienced any inconvenience or had their privacy invaded.

Tourism may be the prize of being recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is a prize that may not be divided evenly among its recipients. Moreover, the prize might come at a price.

And like the vanished children and their cat, an easy answer or compromise is not in sight.


Text and images are copyrighted by the author and used with the author’s permission.

A travel writer from Singapore, Sim Jui Liang is interested in applying his training in sociology to his self-published zine projects. Central to his writing and research practice is the use of fieldwork to better understand the impact of tourism on societies, cultures, and heritage. He is working on a collection of field notes on undertourism in Asia.