Funeral parlours

It's amazing the diverse topics that sometimes get discussed in Whatsapp. Just yesterday, my friends and I - and by "friends" I really mean my old friends that go back to our schooldays - were suddenly exchanging notes about funeral parlours in Penang.

It started with Swee Poh mentioning about his membership in the Siew Heng Foo Association in Transfer Road. Now, this is an association that I have no idea about at all. I don't know what it represents. Doesn't even know that it existed. But it does exist: a four-storey building at the corner of Transfer Road and Ariffin Road, with a coffee shop occupying the ground floor of the premises.

This must have stirred up the memory of Gordon who used to stay in Hutton Lane. He said that the balcony at the back of his home (called the pang peh in Hokkien) overlooked the funeral parlour of the Siew Heng Foo Association and he could see them preparing the dead and hearing all the tok tok cheang music through the night, which was supposedly to pave an easy journey for the dead to the afterworld. There were often wails of grief, especially when the priest or lam mor loh sang the departure signature chant, san far koh.

He even became more descriptive: the priest, for effect of grief work, would cry, sniffle and even manifest jerky hiccups as he lamented that the departed had to go and could no longer ever come back. He would purposely drag on to make it like a long goodbye. Sad or melancholy was the ambience deliberately created to end the night.

Now as I said earlier, I haven't heard of the Siew Heng Foo Association before. But I know about the Toi Shan convalescent Home before. So, a little confused initially, I jumped in to ask whether they were the same. Gordon replied that the Siew Heng Foo Association was in Transfer Road, opposite the Datok Koyah shrine, while the Toi Shan Convalescent Home was actually a funeral parlour in Hutton Lane opposite the Eden Restaurant. Two different entities.

Then I asked whether the Siew Heng Foo funeral parlour had closed down. Yes, he replied. The Siew Heng Foo funeral parlour closed down a very long time ago. It had wound up and gone with the times when there are now better funeral parlour services in Farlim and Paya Terubong, run by the United Hokkien Cemeteries and Funeral Parlour.

May I add too that two other parlours that have also closed in recent years were the Toi Shan Convalescent Home itself and the one in Bawasah Road behind the Penang Plaza. But two others still exist: one in Batu Gantong Road outside the Batu Gantong Cemetery and another in Mount Erskine Road behind the Phor Tay School.

And then our Whatsapp conversation turned suddenly to char koay teow, a more palatable and less morbid subject.