Wanderlust: Expat Life & Style in Thailand Oct / Nov 2017: The Travel Issue | Page 9

Cover Story
of the ephemera that has occupied
them for many decades.
“Come back,” he says. “I know I’ll
have a lot more.”
More lost souls of chemical
and paper and light, each a sliv-
er of a moment of a life, each
awaiting rediscovery.

…AND FOUND
I felt vaguely predatory, but I had to
have some of these images, to take
them home with me. I have occa-
sionally been told that I overthink
things  —  a fair accusation, I sup-
pose  —  but I was wrestling with the
ethics of two competing notions.
The first was this: Would remov-
ing these images from their natural
habitat be the best thing for them?
They are of Penang, from Penang,
by Penang  — shouldn’t they stay in
Penang?
The second was this: Shouldn’t
they be with someone who’d appre-
ciate them and gaze upon them daily
and think of them  — i.e., me?
Overlaying this was the sense that
our little curio shop had a bit of that
sci-fi, out-of-sync-with-the-universe
feel to it, like the Zoltar machine in
“Big,” as if it might be gone the next
time I came to Penang and tried to
go back. Indeed, my attempts to find
it a couple months later on Google
Maps  —  in English, Mandarin and
Hokkien —  proved fruitless.
So from the big piles, I selected
25 images that jumped out at me
(with a bit of input from the boy). I
handed over some Malaysian ring-
git, and we were on our way.
This is what I did next: I returned
to my home in Bangkok. I bought an
enormous wooden clipboard and
some decoupage paste, and I made
a collage. In it are the lost souls of
Penang, unmoored from their con-
texts, deconstructed, then recom-
bined into a piece of  —  no getting
around this one —  hipster art sit-
ting on a shelf in a high-rise Bangkok
apartment. Ugh, right?
And yet something about this
seems exactly right. Instead of buy-
ing a duty-free trinket to symbolize
our trip to Penang, instead of pro-
curing a fragment of antique that
was harvested from someplace it
shouldn’t have been, I have brought
home something that will make me
think about the town, the society,
its history. It is something that will
perhaps make my children watch
and wonder and be curious about
this culture.
I thought fleetingly, when I
bought these photos, that I would try
to track some of the subjects down,
to reunite them with their long-ago
images. I abandoned that notion.
First, sadly, I didn’t have the time. But
there was something more to it.
The historian Will Durant ex-
plained history like this, in one
of my favorite thoughts I’ve
ever encountered:
“Civilization is a stream with banks.
The stream is sometimes filled with
blood from people killing, stealing,
shouting and doing things historians
usually record; while on the banks, un-
noticed, people build homes, make
love, raise children, sing songs, write
poetry and even whittle statues. The
story of civilization is the story of what
happened on the banks.”
I want to know who these people
of Penang are. Of course I do. What
writer wouldn’t? But I realize some-
thing  — something that violates my
As they inched through
time in slow motion, they
became untethered from
the sentiments that produced
them, the events that motivated
someone to capture a moment
and hold onto it. Significant,
but now unsorted.
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