means , roughly , “ ten thousand prosperities .”
As we approached , my curio-loving adolescent son and I , any number of aging rarities caught our eye . Ornate lamps with enough accumulated rust to dissuade anyone from trying to plug them in . Costume jewelry , worn long ago by women long forgotten . Rusty cigarette tins with World War II-era graphics that were made to be disposable but somehow survived the decades to end up as totems of a world not entirely unlike ours but also , in many respects , a distant mirror .
Smack in front of the store — just outside it , on what passed for its stoop — sat a basket made of mintgreen metal mesh . Each of its three levels brimmed with piles of old snapshots and portraits depicting members of Penang ’ s Chinese community — all taken , apparently , between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s .
Age and tropical heat had curled and cracked some of the images . Others featured the crimped corners that , a couple generations ago , were thought to add an element of class to common drug-store prints .
We had tapped into a vein of glorious miscellany — unsorted but significant , as my father used to say . But here , in this basket , the unsorted had overrun the significant and all but stomped it out .
None of the images contained any direct identification . Only a few bore the logos of the local portrait studios that had produced them . The snapshots had become unanchored from their context , and the moments — significant moments , many of them , from the looks of them — had been lost to time .
I realized : These were photographs of ghosts , of souls set to wander .
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LOST …
As I began to inspect the mostly palm-sized images , thumbing through them with instinctive hand motions I ’ d perfected by sorting thousands of Topps baseball cards during a 1970s American childhood , the distant echoes of nearby lives began to emerge . They were , largely , the lives of
middle-class Chinese Penangites of a certain age — a combination of the Eisenhower era and the 1960s , with just a hint of the early 1970s at the edges .
Some were clearly more formal — portraits from photo studios around town . In one shot , a young Chinese couple stands for their wedding , obscured by an enormous bouquet . They look happy but tentative , ready to begin their lives together . Did they last ? Did they have children ? How long were they married ? In another wedding shot , this one more snapshot-like , a couple is congratulated as they stand under an enormous “ double happiness ” Chinese character . Who is that Malaylooking man in the corner ?
One shot shows a man at a microphone , speaking to an auditorium partially full of people who are paying differing degrees of attention . What was he saying ? Was it momentous ? One — this one featuring crimped edges — showcases two young girls of Chinese origin in matching dresses . They look quite alike , but one is just a smidge taller than the other . Were they twins , growing at different rates ? Or sisters who simply appeared to be identical ? A young woman tilts her head and looks off camera as she sports a beehive hairdo larger than her head itself . What does her hair look like today ?
Later shots reflect societal changes and the creeping informality that the 1960s introduced to much of the world , including Malaya ( which was in the process of becoming independent Malaysia ). A woman in flared jeans and a fashionable early-70s haircut leans casually against
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