Wanderlust: Expat Life & Style in Thailand Oct / Nov 2017: The Travel Issue | Page 6

Cover Story
The Lost
Photographs
of Penang
Sometimes the mystery is more interesting than solving it.
by Ted Anthony
PENANG, MALAYSIA
Years ago, just a few months after 9/11, I found myself in
Kabul, Afghanistan, talking with a soft-spoken Hazara man
who had lived through the worst decades of his country’s
conflicts. I asked him about his family.
“I never saw the face of my father,” he told me. “He died
when I was 2.”
“Don’t you have a photograph?” I asked him.
He gazed at me with the patient, affable smile of some-
one contemplating a pleasant idiot from a far-off land.
Which, of course, I was.
“We were too poor to afford photographs,” he told me.
Then he was quiet for a moment.
6 WANDERLUST
“I wonder if somewhere, out there, a photograph of him
exists,” he said softly. “That way, even if no one knows who’s
in the photo, it would mean that he is not completely gone.”

Tucked along a Chinatown street in Penang’s sun-
worn George Town quarter, it shouted to us immediately  —  a
cool, dark refuge from a blistering Southeast Asian afternoon.
It was one of those overflowing curiosity shops that,
much as I hate such comparisons, seemed straight out
of a movie set. It was called Ban Hin, a word that, in the
Hokkien dialect spoken by so many Penang Chinese,