My One-Eyed Uncle

A typical kopitiam

As I sit down in a cafe on Penang Island, Malaysia, he saunters over at me. One-eyed, a mouth full of missing teeth and a curious shape to his lips, he seems somehow alien. Despite being in Malaysia, he speaks to me in what I can only assume is Chinese and yet, this is not what makes him seem alien. No, I understand clearly that he wants to take my order and I ordered the one drink that is understood everywhere... beer.

This is a cafe, but not in the Starbucks sense that a jaded urbanite might assume. No five dollar espressos will be found here, no patrons will be chatting on their cellphone in line, no fancy laptops will be proudly on display. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to realize that the main point of this establishment is drinking. It's not. This is a kopitiam - more food court than coffee shop and a mainstay of Malaysian and Singaporean food culture. If you want good food at a great price, you come here and being that Penang itself is known for its amazing street food, the Penang kopitiam is the mecca for all food lovers.

Waiting for my food to arrive, I let my eyes wander around the cafe. Around the edges are numerous small food carts each selling their own dish or specialty. These are the hawker stalls of legend. Earlier, I ordered what I only hope was a bowl of some type of noodle. On the wall are plastered a hodgepodge of various advertisements and posters. Dirty, yellowed and peeling, they remind me of just how old everything here really is. Not just the culture - an offshoot of Chinese society that branched off hundreds of years ago - not just the food - based on recipes handed down through countless generations - but also the people themselves.

It's rare to find young adults in Penang and everywhere you go, old Chinese people tend shops and go about their lives. An analytical mind might observe the abundance of closed storefronts and deduce that young Penganese go off to the mainland to find fortune, love and adventure when they come of age, but being of no such person, my thoughts simply drift back to my one-eyed uncle (in Chinese culture, all older men are uncles) and his curiously-shaped lips.

Between customers, he comes back over to make conversation. Where am I from? Where is my family? Am I married? Somewhere between the lines, I realize what makes his lips so curiously shaped. He's smiling. A Chinese man I never met before is smiling at me. To be fair, most of my experience with mainland Chinese is in the big cities - Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, etc. - and judging such Chinese would be like judging Americans on the actions of rude New Yorkers. Still, the fact remains that most of my experience with mainland Chinese involved people shoving me, cutting me in line, talking loudly on cellphones in theatres, being generally rude and never, ever smiling at me. I suppose that's why it took me so long to realize that, actually, Penang was full of smiling, pleasant Chinese people. Maybe it was the island culture affecting their temperament, as islands are wont to do.  Whatever the reason, it's made Penang one of my favorite places.