Talking Ipoh
11 April 2016(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 11 April 2016 issue)
Dear Kam,
Have you been to Ipoh recently?
Ipoh Mali
Before the North-South Expressway, the long drive from Kuala Lumpur to Ipoh involved dodging logging trucks and trying to outpace goats (young people can still live that experience by driving on the East Coast). I remember driving through an anonymous one-horse town somewhere in Perak in the late 1980s and seeing a doleful bar that boasted “Karaoke All Night Long”. It remains the saddest thing I have ever seen. And then Ipoh would arrive, heralded by the massive Mercedes insignia atop a limestone hill, much like New York’s Statue of Liberty. In Ipoh, my cousins would take me to an A&W, jumping from bus to bus. I was growing up in a small town in England at the time, which had one restaurant that nobody ever went to because people did not eat out in England back then, but Ipoh was a bustling city. Perhaps it was just that I was young and easily impressed by anywhere that didn’t have scary skinheads loitering in street corners, as did so many of the English towns I had visited from London to Brighton. But by the 1990s, the life seemed to leave Ipoh. It was still a big town but it was not what I would call a city.
We rarely get a chance to see a city rise and fall in our own times but perhaps Ipoh is such a place. I have never been able to find a good reason why KL became the capital of Malaya/Malaysia except that it is halfway between Penang and Singapore. It could have been Ipoh, why not? The Kinta Valley tin fields were probably more lucrative and Ipoh was surrounded by well-developed rubber plantations. Growing up, all the rich people seemed to come from Ipoh, everybody went back there during the holidays and its taxis were Mercedes-Benz. And then tin suddenly disappeared from our lives and so too did Ipoh’s reason for being. Tin also disappeared from KL but KL was the capital city, drawing in thousands of Malaysia’s newest commodity — people. I had a lot of family who once lived in Ipoh but virtually all of them are now in KL as Ipoh slipped into a slumber. As with many towns in Malaysia, I can’t help asking myself, what do people do here? There appear to be some cement factories steadily eating the once-beautiful limestone hills but otherwise, I don’t know.
But on my most recent visit to Ipoh, I saw an encouraging sign of a renewal. A stylish coffee bar/art space had appeared and its presence contrasted with and suddenly highlighted Ipoh’s architectural beauty. In all the times I had been to Ipoh, I had never realised that it is actually a beautiful town with fine colonial buildings and a delightful old downtown. Young people were mingling in this new hip space, drawn to it and yet not entirely knowing what to do with it, and several youngish KL people I know (who have no family connection with Ipoh) are talking about Ipoh as an alternative base. Outsiders seem to be discovering Ipoh and I am reminded of another place I know that has undergone a renewal in recent times — Brighton.
Brighton sits on the southern coast of England and I grew up nearby. When we used to visit in the 1970s, it was very rundown and still living the notoriety it had inherited from Graham Greene’s novel Brighton Rock about petty gangsters and their pointless violent lives amid the decaying splendour of a once-fashionable seaside resort town. Apart from a small touristy area, all life, hope and future had abandoned Brighton for London. Today, Brighton is much heralded as a vibrant space for youngish people who have escaped the expense of London for something arty, hopeful and, well, alternative. London has always been only an hour or so away by train but this forgotten town began to be rediscovered by outsiders in the early 1990s. It is now southern England’s reply to the upstart hipness of Manchester (Brighton’s most famous export must be Fat Boy Slim). I wouldn’t choose to live in Brighton because it is far too smug but when I visited it recently, I could hardly recognise the place. Its sense of menace had gone, replaced by seafood restaurants and vinyl record shops. It felt alive and viably self-sustaining. I don’t know what the locals think of it. They are probably annoyed that they can’t afford the new property prices.
Despite all its travails, Britain is still a major economy and London is one of the richest cities in the world. Brighton’s renaissance is a reflection of the British economy and I don’t know if Malaysia and Ipoh can ever hope for similar growth. But when I saw Ipoh recently, I thought that perhaps I might be witnessing the beginning of a new stage in the life of this big, small town.
Reprinted with the kind permission of
