Blue Mansion, Penang

There is something about old heritage mansions that teaches you how to look before it tells you anything about who lived there.

You notice the walls first, an indigo so unique, so deep, it seems to absorb the afternoon rather than reflect it. Then the courtyard, open to the sky, frames the passing clouds, funneling light down through two floors in a column that shifts across the tiled floor as the day moves. The bonsai tree, with branches carved by light and time, speaks of a quiet gracefulness. Then the silence. Not an absence of sound, exactly. A particular quality of quiet that only old, well-built houses seem to hold, as though the thickness of the walls and the cast iron balustrades has slowed down time itself.

I went there to photograph, not really knowing what I was looking for. What I came away with was a lesson in patience I hadn't expected. The house does not reveal itself on a single pass. Old graceful houses are always like that. They don't reveal their secrets willingly. You have to sit in a room long enough for your eyes to adjust, long enough to notice the way the light and shadow sit in the room, the mother-of-pearl inlay on a chair back, the way a beam has been carved with a bird mid-flight, or the specific angle at which light falls through a shuttered window at four in the afternoon and not at any other hour.

Old houses are almost unforgiving, teachers of attention. Their qualities lay deeper beyond the facade. They do not perform for a passing glance the way new buildings, designed for photographs, so often do. You have to slow down to their pace, or you miss almost everything that makes them what they are. I think this is true of most things worth understanding, migration, memory, a family history assembled from fragments. You cannot rush toward comprehension. You have to sit in the room long enough for your eyes to adjust.

I don't know yet how this visit will find its way into the larger work. But I recognise the feeling it left me with. The same stillness I have been chasing in the ancestral halls of Hanjiang, in the wharf district of Batu Pahat, in every place I have gone looking for a version of my family that no longer exists except in the buildings that outlasted them.

I keep a small file now, unlabelled, of places that taught me something about looking before they taught me anything about their own history. This house is the first entry in it.