1As John Berger writes ‘it is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world.’1 Peoples’ interaction with the colonial environment cannot only be understood through what they wrote but also by looking at what they saw. This is no more a reconstructive act than poring over the archives for fragments of texts out of which we also build a picture of the time. In seeking to understand the politics of a place (and of place), intellectual and political histories could benefit from a greater attention to the actual social and cultural worlds that their subjects of study inhabited. Again, John Berger: ‘Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.’2 To account for the spatial dimension of the Straits Chinese and their positioning between worlds, I therefore want to highlight the social world they inhabited and its material cultures to demonstrate how these enabled and encouraged a certain kind of cosmopolitan posturing relative to Britain, China and the Straits. In the socio-cultural realm the Straits Chinese also began to differentiate themselves and carve out a unique space in the colonial environment, albeit one that was also contested on all sides.

2Like Judith Butler’s idea of gender, being Straits Chinese was also ‘an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.’3 This included things like dress, speech, hairstyling, and decoration as well as many other behaviours under scrutiny by the dominant colonial class who controlled the gates to acceptance as British. While abstract legal definitions were of course important, performativity defined the reality of their application on the ground. The ability to ‘act’ as British or Chinese or Straits Chinese when it suited them was threatening to imperial categories and nationalist logics. Understandings of the Straits Chinese, by themselves and others, were filtered through lenses of race and gender and their performative aspects. Thus, how they were seen and how they presented themselves reflected important aspects of their identity and its constraints. Since this was intimately connected to the increasing links between nation and state, contestations over Straits Chinese subjectivities reflected wider negotiations between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. I am therefore interested in the social and cultural background that made a city into a ‘cosmopolitan thought zone’, a space where conversations could take place ‘across lines of difference’.4 This was especially so for the elite classes who shared a ‘symbolic environment’, which, to some extent, superseded their different backgrounds.5 At the same time, the point to emphasise here is that neither Anglicisation nor Sinification were the obvious outcomes of the social world of the Straits and rather that the Straits Chinese sought to form their own community by navigating through and building on both.

3.1 Quotidian Cosmopolitanism

3 Everyday life in the Straits Settlements was far less segregated than top-down urban plans would have us believe. Compared to Hong Kong and Shanghai, visitors were surprised by the relative degree of freedom with which the Chinese went about the city, going to tiffin at the same hotels or chatting with Europeans at the museum.6 Travelogues and novels well attest to this fact and often consist of lengthy descriptions of one race jostling another in the busy streets of the port cities.7 More so than jostling, however, the inhabitants of these cities recorded various times and spaces of interaction that allowed for what I call a quotidian cosmopolitanism. In different aspects of everyday life, the Straits Chinese embodied a cosmopolitanism in customs and habits that fits with how we most commonly use the word in everyday speech. As one article described the cosmopolitan, ‘determined to have the best of the good things of the world, he encourages their culture by adopting from each and every nation whatever in art, literature, music is most pleasing, adding thereto the delights of luxurious living and good cooking.’8 The hospitality that small-scale spaces of interaction like cities allowed for, if embraced, was significant in the development of a cosmopolitan habitus which pervaded Straits Chinese society perhaps more than any other community of the Settlements. It is this social-cultural background which is somewhat missing in Leela Gandhi’s idea of ‘affective communities’ that disrupt the ‘barren space of colonial division’.9 The Manicheanism embodied both in the colonial difference and the world of nation-states was unwoven by cosmopolitan cities such as Singapore which offered, on the initiative of its populace more than the state, possibilities for identities that could be overlapping rather than mutually exclusive. In this world, one could more easily be British and Chinese and Straits-born. Instead of the ‘categorical kinship between the political economy of nationhood and nativist cultural projects’ which nationalism later in the century tended towards, asserting a collective identity fixed in place, the nationalisms of the Straits’ diverse diasporic peoples were moderated by its quotidian cosmopolitanism, encouraging nationalism and cosmopolitanism to exist side by side, even within the same individual.10

4 The Straits Chinese arguably had privileged access to European society which resulted from their racial differentiation from China-born Chinese, argued above, of which their class was a significant part. Furthermore, their embrace of various aspects of what was considered British culture, while simultaneously retaining and adjusting to influences from China and Malaya, allowed the Straits Chinese to move more smoothly between worlds and craft a space of their own in the region. As one colonial newspaper wrote, ‘they are educated, they go into everything that is European, such as sports, balls, social gatherings etc.’11 As early as 1852, Baba Tan Kim Seng held an extravagant but quintessentially Straits reception that was recorded in Household Words, a London paper edited by Charles Dickens, in which the Straits Chinese were recognised for bringing together Chinese, Indians, Europeans, Muslims, Jews, Parsis and Eurasians together at social events.12 Their interactions extended to the emulation of the social club, an institution that is typically seen as emblematic of colonial segregation on racial (and gendered) lines.13 This racial exclusivity was challenged by the rise of a local elite who held British citizenship, went to English schools and often adopted the Christian faith. Social organisations such as the Straits Chinese Recreation Club founded in 1884, mirrored the European Tanglin Club and competed frequently with it in sports.14 More significantly, the Straits Chinese went to English-medium schools with Europeans. At the first annual dinner of Old Raffles Boys in June 1911, A.W. Still gave a toast praising Raffles School for representing the blend of ‘East and West’ of Singapore and having sent numerous ‘pupils of Asiatic parentage’ to the West ‘where they had proved themselves the equals of the best that the West could produce.’15 Given the diversity of the student population and the reformist push for greater instruction on China in and out of school, we should not assume this resulted in the creation of zealous John Bulls. Rather, here we see how, as Tim Harper argues, ‘there existed a world of sociability between the colonial élite and local society, a sphere in which the strict racial hierarchies became more ambivalent.’16

5 Formal colonial social events enforced a greater racial division than daily life. For example, in 1886 a major celebration was held for the centenary of Penang’s foundation by Sir Francis Light which, at least from the newspaper descriptions, seemed to enthral the whole population. Different communities organised their own events, such as the Chinese who conducted their own regattas and firework shows.17 The British reported that the Chinese also excluded Malays, who ended up holding their own race of fishing boats and sampans, as did Indians who had their own ‘Kling’ race.18 Later, when the city gathered to watch the fireworks, the Chinese, mistakenly it would seem, occupied the Esplanade leaving the Europeans to find somewhere else to watch.19 Nevertheless, the lines between communities were still somewhat blurred, not least because many of these physical spaces were shared, as evidenced by the confusion on the open Esplanade. While ‘natives’ peered into the Cricket Club Pavilion to watch the European sports, at other occasions Europeans, Chinese, Malays and Indians seem to have mingled quite freely, especially those of high status. At the centenary fancy dress ball, for example, the Sultan of Johore was present along with a long list of leading Babas and China-born Chinese.20 At another ball, the main speeches were given by Babas such as Koh Cheng Sean whose family had been resident on the island since before the Union Jack was raised.21 The horse races and other sporting events were likewise attended by important non-European locals such as Seah Song Seah from a famous Straits Chinese family, and one race was presented by the local Anglo-Chinese Reading Club.22 Thus, descriptions of colonial society which split life into European and native suggested a divide that was more imagined than real.

6The construction of Victoria Memorial Hall and its commemoration in 1905 serves as another valuable example. After Queen Victoria’s death, a committee was formed for a public hall memorial which included not only some of the most prominent British names but also several non-Europeans such as Lim Boon Keng, Seah Liang Seah, Tan Jiak Kim, Tungku Ali, Syed Mohomed Alsagoff, B.P. de Silva, Alagappa Chitty and others.23 The Settlements created a large public fund which, according to the Governor John Anderson, was truly ‘international’ and was ‘contributed to by every section of the community comprising all the nationalities, denominations and creeds, of which our somewhat cosmopolitan population is constituted.’24 This, and the celebration of its unveiling, was taken as a sign of unity in the colony and a shared sense of duty to Empire exemplified by the Queen. The idealist cosmopolitan vision of Empire was thus embodied in the Memorial itself, situated at ‘a site so central and conspicuous that every one in the Settlement must pass or see it.’25 As events in the Straits would soon show, this unity was fragile and as yet little tested by the growing forces of anti-imperialism, but nevertheless, we should not disregard the symbolism of such events and the genuine potential for combining across lines of difference in specific urban contexts. These events were central to the cultivation of British subjecthood out of the diversity of the urban environment and unsettled the division between nationalism and cosmopolitanism under the framework of empire. While the cosmopolitan possibilities available at this turning point were evidently constrained by the formation of nation-states and the realities of racial hierarchies, the social world of the Straits still offered glimpses of a more fluid society that was emblematic of a global bourgeoisie in formation not solely along European lines.26

7 The availability of shared social events made it possible to push political matters. For example, at one fancy dress party hosted by the Chinese Weekly Entertainment Club with several European guests, Lim Boon Keng, who came dressed as a Huntsman, ‘waived aside’ all distinctions of the Empire’s component parts and argued that Asiatic British subjects in the colony should be allowed to form a volunteer corps, ‘for, he argued, if they could not be trusted, they should be excluded from the British Empire.’27 In 1901, after much negotiation, a company of Straits-born Chinese was formed in Singapore serving alongside but formed separately from the European corps.28 Through hospitality and friendship as the basis of cosmopolitanism in Kantian fashion, the Straits Chinese could make claims to equality as citizens of the same empire, an equality that was evidenced, even if only partially, by the very fact of their shared social spaces, even as tensions clearly remained. Lim turned this point into a jokey remark at the end of his speech: ‘In the name of the Club, he asked the European guests to overlook all shortcomings in the programme of the evening. It was the desire of the Club to do their best: if they failed, it was the duty of the Europeans to show them how to do better.’29 By shifting the terms of debate away from top-down studies of residential patterns and government serialities, or even high-level political treatises, we are better able to see the social environments that were productive of cosmopolitanism as a ‘way of being in the world’.

8While these examples should not be taken prima facie as evidence of racial harmony, they do point to colonial urban environments in particular as places where a shared social environment and a mutual interest in each other’s cultures (especially among the elite), however superficial this may have been, engendered a cosmopolitan lifestyle. As Lynn Hollen Lees has argued, this urban-rural divide in colonial Malaya was crucial in making different subjectivities available to people.30 Compared to the plantation and mining dominated interior, or the white settler colonies for that matter, the port city space of Southeast Asia appeared to offer a less segregated social world in which those of the right social class could move quite freely. As Su Lin Lewis writes, cities were ‘sites where emerging citizens contest and slip through hierarchies and disciplinary categories’, and consequently ‘interactions between the city’s diverse inhabitants stimulated the evolution of shared and complex notions of identity, solidifying both communal and inter-communal ties.’31 It is notable that the Straits Chinese enjoyed a privileged position in this world. Partly the result of British racial prejudice and partly the result of the Straits Chinese own posturing, Babas were able to enter and engage with European high society in a way that we more typically associate with the early days of colonialism when arriving Europeans relied on local grandees.32 In our case, the relationship appeared to be more mutualistic and encouraged the bifurcation of the Straits Chinese from their Chinese roots, although, as we have seen, they would continue to be labelled as such. If citizenship was marked by race as I have argued above, then this social world in which the Straits Chinese held a great deal of currency enabled a kind of whitening that brought them into the British fold. At the same time, we should not forget that the Straits Chinese continued, in large part, to maintain their own social world that was more closely attached to the Malay (especially on the women’s side) and Chinese cultures with which they were associated.

3.2 Language

9A superficial understanding of nationalism might have us believe that without a shared language there can be no nation, and therefore a nationalism of the Straits Settlements or Malaya would always be fragmented on linguistic lines. However, as John Edwards has written, ‘the visible “content” of both ethnicity and nationalism is eminently mutable; what is immutable is the feeling of groupness.’33 Language is one of those things which has been historically mutable. In a multilingual city such as Singapore, language could be both a line of difference and a point of communality. Inhabitants of port cities in Southeast Asia had long been accustomed to the use of lingua francas and the Straits Settlements were no different. In this sense, the use of English and Malay as lingua francas between Malaya’s different communities was and still is an obvious example of their cosmopolitanism.

10Historiographically speaking, there has been a tendency to associate vernacular languages with nationalism, and lingua francas (including shared imperial languages and pidgins) with cosmopolitanism. For example, Nile Green pushes back against recent literature on Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism which focuses heavily on travelling elites writing and communicating with each other in a shared colonial language and argues instead for a ‘heterotopic’ account that looks to vernacular sources to better understand the fragmentation, discord and division that also characterises the period.34 While this is a useful corrective, Green’s article remains problematic for its assumption that non-elites could not share in this cosmopolitanism through their own use of lingua francas, pidgins and creoles. And, more importantly, he and those he writes against ignore the possibilities of multilingualism. By describing vernacular and lingua franca as an either/or, just like nationality, Green and others miss out on the contextual and contingent nature of language use and its consequences for identity.

11My arguments here are threefold. First, we should consider English itself a language which became disconnected from its European and colonial roots as it was adopted proactively by colonial subjects and transformed as a result. This helped remove it from its Eurocentric origins. Second, people such as the Straits Chinese were able to actively move between different languages or use them simultaneously in communicating with others. In this sense, the Straits was a translanguaging society as much as a multilingual one, a term in linguistics that refers to the use of various languages in one unified and intelligible communication system.³⁵ Following François Grosjean, we ought to understand bi- or multilingualism and its translingual dimensions as a holistic ‘linguistic configuration’, a kind of language in its own right rather than two separate languages that arise dependant on the context.³⁶ Baba Malay, the language of many Straits Chinese, well reflects this. Third, the cosmopolitan possibilities these features allowed for were mitigated by the increasing congruency of nation, people and language which meant that creole communities such as the Straits Chinese found themselves an anomaly as the century wore on. Being labelled as Chinese without being able to speak the language was a contradiction that many Straits Chinese and others struggled with. In this sense, the language politics of the Straits Settlements corresponds to the larger historical trajectories I am tracing in this paper.

12First of all, we might want to think of English as less clearly linked to the territory and culture of England than anti-colonial writings (often written in English) would have us believe. Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, reflecting on the pervasiveness of English in her book Flights, notes that English speakers must feel lost in a world that is entirely expressed in their language: ‘They don’t have anything to fall back on… Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them - they are accessible to everyone and everything!’³⁷ This accessibility has been one of the main features behind the cosmopolitanism of the English language. However, by virtue of its accessibility, English is also increasingly divorced from its roots as it becomes a universal language. Thus, we should not attribute its rise in the Straits to the Empire alone, but local appropriation and adaptation as well. This may help us follow a decolonial approach advocated by Walter Mignolo which ‘delinks’ English from its standardised form and makes it more (but perhaps not entirely) culturally neutral as a result.³⁸ Similarly, the prevalence of translanguaging in cosmopolitan society, for instance as English was mixed with Malay and Hokkien in everyday speech, even by Europeans, can be read as a decolonial practice that helped dissociate English (and other languages) from its standardised, hegemonic variety.³⁹ Thus, as it was adopted and reshaped by others and alongside other languages, English could be considered as part of a cosmopolitan identity rather than a strictly national one.

13 English educated colonial elites at this time rarely saw a contradiction in using what was nominally a ‘colonial’ language that did not belong to them to write about their own countries and cultures. The Indo-Chinese Patriot, for example, a paper which appeared in 1895 in Penang and 1900 in Singapore and explicitly addressed itself at both the Indian and Chinese communities, made easy use of English, saying ‘English is eminently the speech of the Modern.’⁴⁰ Following the pan-Asianist logics of the time, the paper did not question using a language theoretically arising in the West to connect two of Asia’s ancient civilisations which had long been, as the paper insisted, interconnected.41 Indeed, the history of Indo-European languages demonstrates an even wider historical connectivity. This was made more obvious in the urban fabric of the Straits where the descendants of those peoples joined together again. For the Straits Chinese, this also matched up with a growing push to promote English in China for its modern, rational connotations more so than its Western origins.42

14The other main language of the Straits Chinese, Baba Malay, was a linguistic manifestation of their creole background and identity which combined several languages in one. This phenomenon has been less remarked upon in Southeast Asia than Latin America. Gloria E. Anzaldúa, for example, prods and probes the traditional boundaries of scholarly writing by weaving English and Spanish together in the same text mimicking a long-standing practice of code-switching found in Latin American society.43 The effect of this linguistic unorthodoxy on the monolingual reader is dramatic and serves to replicate the feeling of exteriority felt by many creole communities who are denied a place in a world that prioritises the binary. In contrast to Ezra Pound’s famous code-switching in Cantos, however, Anzaldúa performs this act of linguistic miscegenation to critique claims of linguistic purity which, in their assertion of an authentic philological origin, foreclose any possibility of creoles being recognised as equals.44 This is an important aspect of her idea of ‘Nepantla’ coming from Nahuatl, which describes an in-betweenness that best encapsulated her experience as a Chicana woman: ‘Nepantleras are threshold people; they move within and among multiple, often conflicting, worlds and refuse to align themselves exclusively with any single individual, group, or belief system.’45

15 The Straits Chinese, like the ‘Nepantleras’ Anzaldúa describes, similarly mixed multiple languages to the point of forming a speech that was uniquely their own. In the main multiethnic paper, Baba writer Lee Liang gave one example of a possible sentence spoken in a Straits Chinese household which illustrates the commonplace practice of translanguaging conducted in the private sphere: ‘gua punya teacher banyak homia’ where ‘gua is Hokkien for ‘I’, punya is Malay for ‘ownership’, teacher is an English word; banyak is Malay for ‘quantity, much’; and homia is Hokkien for ‘fortunate’, the whole sentence being translated as ‘My teacher is very fortunate.’46 Their distinct language reflected (and possibly still reflects) the hybridity of their identity as a transnational community in Southeast Asia. Baba Malay, as it was and still is called, made use of Hokkien, Malay, English, Tamil, Dutch and Portuguese grammar and vocabulary and formed over several generations of Chinese settlement in the Nanyang (other varieties existed throughout the region).47 More so than English, Malay or Chinese (in its written form), all of which have served as lingua francas, Baba Malay was a product of global migration. Over the long run of human history, this is not unusual, however its relatively recent formation makes it stand out from its three main sources as a language that resulted specifically from the practice of translanguaging. Baba Malay as its own language was thus the direct result of this very practice, and perhaps its designation as a language distracts from its similarity to the creole varieties that members of all different Malayan communities must have spoken when interacting with one other, especially in centuries past. Consequently, although Baba Malay may have been the outcome of translanguaging, its creation also did not remove the need for the continuation of this practice in the Babel of the Straits. The trans aspect of this, like ‘passing’ in dress, speaks to the performative nature of Straits Chinese identity, and its transgressive possibilities for states that prefer fixity and homogeneity and even for historians who have tended to overemphasise monolingual subjectivities.

16 The complex language politics of Malaya continued to pose a problem later in the century as nationalist forces promoted the use of either one common language to join linguistic communities together, or their own vernacular at the expense of others.48 However, the colonial exigency of cosmopolitan language use in Singapore (to a greater extent than Malaysia) has since become an important part of its identity as a nation-state. Part of this is due to Lee Kuan Yew’s own experiences of language learning. Lee Kuan Yew’s personal life well attests to the role of language in the upbringing of many Straits Chinese and how this changed over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. As a fourth generation Peranakan, Lee’s first language was English, with both his parents having attended English-medium schools. His anglophile family members encouraged English not only because it provided better job opportunities (a rationale behind many Straits Chinese going to English-medium schools even after the greater promotion of Mandarin), but also because they felt a close attachment to the British Empire as a cosmopolitan construct.49 Indeed Lee Kuan Yew was given the English name ‘Harry’, as with many other elite Straits Chinese at the time. Like lots of colonial subjects however, Lee’s change of heart came as a direct result of his experience in the metropole where he was forced to come to terms with the fact of his less-than-Britishness. As he recalls it ‘people there saw me as a Chinese, and so I became a Chinese.’50 Despite being a British subject, his racial distinction from white Englishmen disrupted his claims to equality under the Empire. His wife went through the same experience. ‘We were like hundreds of Raffles College graduates, not well-tutored in their own Asian cultures, yet not part of British culture either.’51 As a result, Lee became a ‘born-again Chinese’ and set out to learn Mandarin as an adult, what Lee’s English compatriots believed was his true ‘own’ language, thereby attempting to move out of the liminal space between Britain and Chinese.52 Lee, his wife, and countless other colonial subjects thus realised the problems of subjecthood/citizenship in the British Empire. By contrast, Singapore has tried to reduce this sense of having to make a choice between languages and Lee’s experiences proved formative to the state policy of bilingualism and biculturalism.

3.3 Sartorial Politics

17Clothing is another aspect of material culture that came into special focus in the tumultuous period of the early twentieth century revealing the intimate connection between performativity and national belonging. The clothes we wear not only reflect our individual identities but also the social context in which we live. Since every act of clothing oneself involves a series of choices—expanded and limited by various factors such as the fabrics, styles and brands available, cost, sumptuary laws, and social custom, most notably in the form of religion—dress is thus deeply political. Clothing acts as an abbreviation of the individual, the outward visual impression of who a person is. Thanks to its complex set of signs and subtexts, Alison Lurie famously suggested we think of clothing as a language with its own grammar and vocabulary, dialects and expressions.53 Given its visual and textured nature, clothing is a unique language; one that leaves an impression on others without the need for words or speech. As Bayart writes, ‘practices of dress are rites of everyday life, both material and symbolic, through which the individual situates himself in society, and through which society is, ultimately, established.’54 In the fabric of the city, clothing, as much as architecture, gives colour to the image of the street and an instant representation of both the individuals and communities that inhabit it. Given this quality, past clothing still speaks to us. And we would do well to try and listen. In a world where choice of clothing is forever scrutinised, studying such choices and reactions to them therefore reveals a great deal about the politics of the time. The Straits Settlements were not absent from these debates, nor were they untouched by the debates taking place elsewhere. In this sense, the sartorial politics of the Straits Settlements were very much informed by its global predicament. Given the uncertainties around identity that the Straits Chinese were facing in this period, it is unsurprising that clothing became an important topic of discussion among them. At the same time, other groups put pressure on, and questioned the decisions Straits Chinese made regarding their clothing. Thus, debates about clothing mirrored the overarching narratives about the position of the Straits Chinese between cultures.

The Amoy Incident

18 A particularly telling event in the history of Singapore’s sartorial politics was the so-called ‘Amoy incident’ of 1897 when a Straits Chinese man named Khun Yiong was arrested in China.55 As a British subject holding a passport signed by the Governor of the Straits Settlements, Khun Yiong was outraged when the British Minister refused to intervene on his behalf as was his due as a British subject in China. In response, he petitioned the government and the case became a lingering point of discussion in Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements where large numbers of British subjects of Chinese descent resided. While this case is interesting for demonstrating how British subject status was marked by race and held tenuously by non-Europeans, it also shows how without strong state enforcement, more open possibilities existed for people to play with the categories created for them, switching identities when moving between countries.

19What I want to focus on here is the fact that Khun’s choice of dress was one of the reasons behind the British Minister’s refusal to interfere. The press uncovered an 1868 notification issued by Sir Rutherford Alcock (the Minister to China at the time) which observed that ‘serious difficult exists in distinguishing such British subjects from natives amenable to Chinese laws only’, and therefore claimed that those ‘electing to sink their British nationality and reside or travel as Chinese among Chinese… cannot claim any exemption from the jurisdiction and laws of the country they adopt of their own free will and after due notice of the consequences.’⁵⁶ The regulation suggested that ethnic Chinese British subjects could not get protection in China unless ‘he discarded his Chinese dress.’ Since Khun had not done so and was allegedly presenting himself sartorially as a Chinese subject of the Emperor, the Minister had elected not to intervene.

20The public response in the Straits and Hong Kong to the Minister’s actions was hostile, with the European press pointing out that this regulation was highly impractical and not evenly enforced and had not been recently republished.⁵⁷ Referencing the contemporaneous Lüders affair wherein a German citizen born in Haiti of a local mother who was arrested by the Haitian government prompted the arrival of two German warships and an ultimatum, they also noted the British failure in not rushing to the defence of a British subject in a Chinese prison.⁵⁸ More importantly, the Chinese in Singapore were recorded as believing the Minister should have intervened once he was made aware of Khun Yiong’s British subject status regardless of his choice of clothing.⁵⁹

21 This incident revealed to many in the Straits Chinese community that passing as British was as important in terms of dress as it was language, loyalty, religion and so forth in order to carry the same rights as a white British subject. Indeed to ‘pass’ was the term used by many at the time.⁶⁰ In the American context, ‘passing’ was historically used to connote an act of transgression whereby Blacks posed as Whites to gain fraudulent advantages.⁶¹ We see a similar kind of hostility here, albeit going the opposite way, in the British response. Charles Walter Sneyd-Kynnersley, later the acting Colonial Secretary of the Straits Settlements, repeated a common trope found in British writings of the time when he replied to Khun Yiong’s petition saying ‘Her Majesty’s Government cannot allow persons of Chinese race born in this Colony to enjoy the benefits of a double nationality’, and that these privileges were reserved to British subjects who ‘have consistently from their birth conducted themselves and been registered as British subjects.’⁶² Referring to the requirement that British Chinese subjects dress in European costume and register at the Consulate, something the papers pointed out that few European British subjects did, Kynnersley gave British subjecthood a performative quality (‘conduct themselves’) that rejected more hybrid forms of identity which may have materialised in choice of clothing. Pickering was another firm believer in the idea that the Straits Chinese were ‘trying to make the best of both worlds’ and claimed they would not wear British dress or cut the queue for fear of being disadvantaged in China.⁶³ It was not enough for them to legally be British, the Straits Chinese had to alter one of the most common forms of personal identification: their dress. What exactly counted as British dress or whether Ming (instead of Qing) dress would be acceptable was never clearly stated, as some Chinese pointed out.⁶⁴ Furthermore, performativity could only go so far, as was the case in the Dutch East Indies where Straits Chinese who ‘had adopted anglicised names and the Western style of dress’ were still treated as Chinese under Dutch law.65 The limits of British subjecthood and abstract legal norms were consequently revealed by Straits Chinese’s choice of dress.

22Since passing is first of all an issue of visual appearance, clothing is an obvious way of aligning oneself with a certain image of who a national subject is. Not pursuing this image in China was an affront to white British subjects who felt the liberality of their legal code was being undermined by subjects that they were holding to higher standards than themselves. The ability of the state to see and recognise a British subject as their own was more important than abstract declarations of equality would have us believe. As Linda Schlossberg writes, ‘passing [or choosing not to pass] can be understood at the most basic level as an attempt to control the process of signification itself.’⁶⁶ If states need to see in order to know, then passing/not-passing was a significant, yet always unstable, act of resistance in itself.67 In China the act of not-passing was as much a political choice as passing was for Peranakans in the Straits and reflected the desire of the Straits Chinese to bestride Britishness and Chineseness simultaneously. By altering their dress, Straits Chinese British subjects were not only reconfiguring their identity but also playing with the imperial category of British subject and its legal application in China. On top of this, the Qing decree formally allowing Chinese emigrants to return specified that ‘they must not represent themselves to be of foreign nationality’.68 As a claim of sovereignty over all ethnic Chinese, it also suggested that performative aspects such as appearance could not distract from the permanence of their Chinese nationality and were dissuaded on the mainland under threat of punishment. Thus, the Amoy incident encapsulated the problems of sitting in-between two nationalising empires.

The Towchang Question

23This incident and events like it prompted a great deal of further discussion about appropriate dress for the Straits Chinese as part of their cultural reform movement. More specifically, the Straits Chinese community became embroiled in a debate about whether to keep the famous pigtail that was associated with subjecthood of the Qing. By the nineteenth century, this hairstyle had broadened into a cultural and ethnic marker of difference. Its removal was therefore not only a sign of rebellion against the Qing but also a significant break with Han Chinese, thus distinguishing anyone who did so from the masses of Chinese men who did not. The issue of whether the Straits Chinese should cut it was known as the towchang question, named so for the Hokkien reading of 辫子 meaning queue. Until 1898, few Straits Chinese had cut their queues; Song Ong Siang and Lee Ah Yan had both done so while in England but Lim Boon Keng had not or grew it back.⁶⁹ Although doubtlessly much discussed in private, the towchang question became the talk of the town from late January 1898 with the Straits Times conducting an interview with the major figures involved, both for and against.⁷⁰ By May, the Malay Mail could report that ‘a year or two ago the Babas would have scoffed at the idea. Now they are openly discussing the advisability or otherwise of doing so.’⁷¹ It would linger on until the 1911 Revolution which, on the global front, represented a unique moment in the history of hairstyling when hundreds of thousands of Chinese cut off their queues.72 As an important pillar of the overall Straits cultural reform programme that coincided with similar pressures in mainland China, the towchang question demonstrates how the Straits Chinese navigated competing civilisational claims to carve out a unique cosmopolitan identity for themselves that took elements from the two but was derivative of neither.

24Staunch supporters of the idea framed the question as one of Straits Chinese identity under threat. In February, a letter was sent to the Singapore Free Press by ‘Reformer’ which stated, ‘it is now high time for the Babas to reform themselves.’⁷³ Calling the towchang a ‘badge of slavery’, the ‘Reformer’ said it indicates that the wearer is ‘the basest of mankind’ and must be cut off. That the author remained anonymous and was likely the same anonymous interviewee in a later piece signals the unpopularity of queue cutting at this time.74 This anonymous leading Chinese called the queue ‘an impediment to physical progress’, a sign of inferiority not just in political terms of servicing the Qing, but also racial terms. Others concurred with this racialised understanding of the queue as a biological problem. For instance, several opponents of the queue pointed out it harboured filth and disease, thus giving the queue pathological significance.⁷⁵ Like the question of Chinese dress, these reformers wished to differentiate the Straits Chinese from the Chinese masses by more outwardly embracing British standards of clothing, hairstyling and consequently even hygiene.

25Building on the towchang question, Lim Boon Keng made the case for a more distinctive approach to dress that was neither solely Western nor Chinese. In this sense, modernisation of Straits Chinese dress, as it was framed, cannot be read as simply westernisation. In the March and June 1899 issues of the Straits Chinese Magazine he argued that ‘we must prove by the lives and conduct and works our people that we are deserving of the citizenship of the British Empire.’⁷⁶ This was a powerful claim on a citizenship that was not always readily forthcoming, demonstrating the tensions that arose from the fusion of nation and state in the imperial context. Working through the discourses of nationality provided by Britain and China, Lim was attempting to negotiate a place for the Straits Chinese between the two. This was made all the more evident in his second piece in the same series where Lim argued for a special kind of dress that was unique to the Straits Chinese, drawing on European, Chinese and Malay elements: ‘Let us have a genuine product of the Straits Chinese—a dress evolved out of our own ideas, making free use of all articles, European or Chinese, which are now in use.’77 While he recognised that European dress was on the rise, he said ‘we should not be in a hurry to exchange our present… dress for the better fitting European clothes.’78 His programme was not simply encouraging ‘hybridity’, in fact Lim Boon Keng rejected a hybrid dress as ugly, but rather something new and unique to the Straits Chinese arising out of, and thereby becoming separate from, their mixed roots. Cultural change among the Straits Chinese should therefore be understood as a political fashioning vis-à-vis the British and Chinese Empires.

26Opponents to the idea of cutting the queue were not necessarily opposed to reform either. Rather, they argued for a more expansive reform programme which maintained the queue and other aspects of Chinese culture as important traditions while prioritising modernisation in other areas. Tan Jiak Kim, for example, once a member of the Legislative Council and well embedded in British colonial society, thought cutting the queue was totally unnecessary. He argued, following a statement that was repeated various times by like-minded Straits Chinese of the older generation, ‘that a Straits-born Chinaman, with a towchang and a thorough understanding of the English language, would be a better man than a Straits-born Chinaman who cut his hair in the English fashion and understood but a little English and a little Chinese.’79 It was perhaps no coincidence that a pamphlet published by Tan Jiak Kim and others during World War I said ‘British subjects of all races to-day are in the enjoyment of manifold blessings under the Union Jack… without having had to shed a hair.’80 Indeed, Tan Jiak Kim kept the towchang until his death in 1917.

27It was perhaps due to the supposed superficiality of queue cutting that only a handful of Straits Chinese actually went through with it before 1911, despite most Babas recognising its many problems. Nonetheless, as we have seen in the case of Khun Yiong, superficial elements such as dress could make a big difference in the politics of empire. Denying its political significance as a symbol of fealty to the Manchu, opponents of queue cutting among the Straits Chinese such as Tan Jiak Kim, who was clearly committed to being a British subject, saw it as a cultural symbol to be maintained for the traditions it supposedly represented. Another reformer said it was ridiculous that the British distrusted queue-wearing Babas and said they ‘might as well tell us that a Straits-born Malay is a subject of Turkey, and a Straits-born Siamese a subject of Siam because the one wears the Stamboul cap and the other a miniature elephant in the shape of a button or any other thing.’81 Writing in 1906, after more Straits Chinese had cut their queues and the revolutionary movement was growing at home and abroad, one newspaper correspondent said those Chinese still wearing their queues were doing so mainly as a sign of distinction and ‘obedience to the wishes of their parents’ and ancestors.82 For them, it no longer stood for slavery, but rather could be kept and situated alongside other reforms within the community. As the slippage between ‘Chinese’, ‘Straits (born) Chinese’, and ‘Babas’, in all these writings suggests, however, their claims were always at risk of being destabilised by the conventional connection of race, nationality and loyalty.

28Just like clothing, hair styles ‘condense the political’.83 The towchang question contained within it the central issues of the cultural reform movement that it helped begin. In the decision to cut the queue and change their dress, the Straits Chinese built outwards from their Chinese, European and Malay roots in order to revitalise the community. In this process they asserted their belonging to the British Empire and China while remaining aloof to both. This was intimately linked to the racial politics of the time which connected performativity to citizenship. Lim Boon Keng even factored this into his own arguments for a reformed dress, worrying that without drawing on ‘all the best, truest, highest and noblest which the new nations can teach us’ the Straits Chinese would risk becoming ‘Europeanised’, ‘Malayanised’ or ‘degenerate’ as Chinese.84 Consequently, the cultural reform movement perpetuated the racial link to China while trying to reconcile this with continued allegiance to Britain and a recognition of their Malay heritage. The paradox of this movement was that by encouraging self-identification with certain aspects of Chineseness, they consequently became further latched to the Chinese state in both Britain and China’s eyes, despite what the Straits Chinese might have wished. This formed the backdrop for their interactions with Chinese reformers and revolutionaries in the same period.