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The Straits Chinese Between Empires

 | 
Christian Jones

5. Conclusion

Texte intégral

Sou o intervalo entre o que desejo ser e os outros me fizeram,
Ou metade desse intervalo, porque também há vida...
Sou isso, enfim…

  • 1 Fernando Pessoa, Poesia de Álvaro de Campos (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2002), 433. It translates rou (...)

Fernando Pessoa (1944)1

1In this poem, Fernando Pessoa’s alter-ego Álvaro de Campos captures the spirit of a liminal existence. We only have a limited ability to define ourselves, the rest is filled in for us. As identity was bound to race and nation, occupying a liminal position became increasingly difficult. The Straits Chinese existed at the interval between empire and nation and between Britain, China and Malaya. Their in-betweenness emerged precisely in this moment and this space of transition, where East met West and empires became nation-states. Out of this position, the Straits Chinese articulated a cosmopolitanism that embraced multiple, layered identities while simultaneously negotiating a place for themselves in a potentially egalitarian British Empire and a deterritorialised Chinese nation. These processes were interlocked and grew out of each other. To underline this point one final time, I want to highlight three connected epilogues of this story for the Straits Chinese:

  • 2 “Excellent introduction to the Babas but…,” New Nation, July 22, 1979.
  • 3 “What’s different about the Babas,” New Nation, September 1, 1978, “Not all Straits-born Chinese ar (...)
  • 4 Karen M. Teoh, “Domesticating Hybridity: Straits Chinese Cultural Heritage Projects in Malaysia and (...)

2After the war and into the post-colonial period, the Babas suffered from an ‘ambiguity of identity’ that only began to be resolved by the rejuvenation of interest in Straits Chinese history and heritage, especially under the Singaporean state.2 Of particular interest was the material and cultural history of the Straits Chinese rather than their connections to Empire suggested by their nickname the ‘King’s Chinese’. Thus, by the late 1970s, most discussion of Straits Chinese revolved around performative aspects such as dress, cooking, and design and less so their politics.3 Indeed, the process of recovering Straits Chinese heritage highlights a notable absence in this study, the Nyonya. By focusing on the domestic sphere, the heritage industry has brought to life the world of the Nyonya much more so than the Baba who are often represented as they were seen at the time, British men in Chinese dress. As guardians of the private sphere and tradition, the focus on Nyonyas mirrored the Babas own interest in Nyonyas during the reform movement when they were targeted for improvement as wives, mothers and homemakers.4

  • 5 “Gambling Among Nyonias,” Straits Times, October 11, 1907.
  • 6 “Gambling Among the Nyonyas,” Straits Times, October 15, 1907, “Gambling Among Nyonyas,” Straits Ti (...)
  • 7 “Gambling Among Nyonyas,” Straits Times, October 23, 1907.
  • 8 Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University (...)
  • 9 “Bomb Mystery: Protector of the Chinese Seriously Injured,” Straits Times, January 26, 1925, “The B (...)

3This, however, ignores the role of women as active participants in the reform movement. For example, the fact that women were frequently blamed for gambling was the cause of consternation for one Nyonya who wrote to the Straits Times in 1907 saying that the success of Babas in business had derived from their wives’ careful maintenance of the household purse.5 Furthermore, she said, ‘If the Babas want their wives to renounce gambling let them abjure it first, and keep clear of houses of ill-fame.’ Those who replied to her avoided blaming Babas and emphasised that proper education was the ideal vector for improving Nyonyas.6 Unhappy with this response, she resolved to ‘come forward in defence of [her] sex’ and noted that while education would be helpful, ‘education is not a panacea for all ills.’7 Rather, if gambling was to be stopped, ‘any reformation on this line should commence with the young men themselves.’ Reflecting their increasing politicisation, by the 1920s, some Chinese women in the Straits began to adopt the dress of the ‘modern girl’ and engage in transnational political activity.8 In 1925, for example a young woman from Penang dressed in the ‘new style’ with ‘bobbed hair’ and a ‘mannish demeanour’ who spoke English and Malay, travelled from Hong Kong with ‘anarchistic ideas’ and set off a bomb at the office of the Chinese Protector in Kuala Lumpur.9 Wong Sung was sentenced to a 10-year imprisonment for an act that seemed to signal the beginning of a new cosmopolitan anti-colonial politics in Malaya and which drew on communism and anarchism rather than British liberalism or Confucianism. This story, however, has been avoided in the heritage industry around the Nyonya. This serves as a reminder that the transition from empire to nation-state was a fragmented and incomplete process. A narrative of the Straits Chinese being squeezed out of the space they had carved for themselves misses out on the gendered nature of decolonisation and its failings for women.

  • 10 Ong Soon Keong, “Rebuilding Corridor, Preserving Prestige,” 144

4Furthermore, and this is the second epilogue, as the Straits Chinese sought to make a home for themselves in a nationalising Malaya, they also emphasised the Malay side of their background, drawing on the Nyonya half and acknowledging this part of their culture more than before. This had always been there but was often seen negatively in line with the racial theories of the day. Lim Boon Keng, for example, despite his concerns about Malay blood, still spoke Malay with his family, had his sisters wear Nyonya dress, and could not have a meal without sambal belacan at the table.10 In this sense, Straits Chinese positioning was always relational, emphasising and deemphasising certain aspects just as they did with their language. While I have focused mainly on the Chinese and British sides of this story, as we move further into the present, the Malay dimension took on greater importance for the Straits Chinese, especially in what became Malaysia. Through their emphasis on their Malay heritage rather than their more cosmopolitan background, many Peranakans tried to slot themselves into the logics of indigeneity and nationalism in post-colonial Malaya. As a result, their culture has been able to survive to this day in its reduced, gendered, and consumable form now considered national heritage.

  • 11 Graham Greene, The Comedians (London: Penguin, 2005), 145.
  • 12 Josephine Chia, “Commentary: I am Peranakan not Chinese,” CNA, October 7, 2018, https://www.channel (...)
  • 13 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: (...)
  • 14 John R. Chávez, Beyond Nations: Evolving Homelands in the North Atlantic World, 1400-2000 (Cambridg (...)

5At the same time, and this is the third epilogue, the Straits Chinese, now more commonly called Peranakans, are still struggling to find a fulfilling position in a world of nation-states. They have felt the nihilistic sense of longing of cosmopolitans whose ‘roots would never go deep enough anywhere to make [themselves] a home.’11 Around the time of Singapore’s bicentennial, Singaporean author Josephine Chia wrote, ‘For many years, as a Peranakan growing up in Kampong Potong Pasir, I was caught in an identity crisis. I was taunted with the acronym, OCBC, Orang China Bukan China translated as Chinese person not Chinese.’12 Like Lee Kuan Yew, she was dislocated by the identifications of others. As she says, ‘Peranakans fall in between the cracks of our traditional notions of race.’ This condition of liminality suggests a sitting on the fence, an inability to find a space. Decolonisation, the rise of the nation-state, and the sorting of populations into citizen-subjects of those states, have prevented the existence of any kind of political repository into which one can pour a cosmopolitan identity. Thus, this kind of transnational habitus must be liminal; it can only exist on the borders because it is intolerable to the state on the inside. Liminality is constantly contested by a state that desires legibility and congruency. At its most extreme, this renders people into Giorgio Agamben’s ‘bare life’ who, lacking a state to call home, lack that very entity which grants supposedly universal human rights.13 This is what happened to many Straits Chinese in the late 1940s and 1950s and was experienced even more violently by Peranakans in Indonesia. It is in this regard that the stateless person might be considered the epitome of the cosmopolitan individual in the modern world, the direct outcome of the ‘opposing centripetal and centrifugal forces’ of globalisation.14 Thus, we should be careful not to privilege the comfortable autochthonous experience as the final outcome of a decolonisation telos and instead recognise the difficulties that a world of nation-states continues to pose for belonging today. While the Singaporean state has tried to incorporate Peranakans into their historical narrative, it remains the case that their racial and political focus on discrete identities (racial and national) push people like Josephine Chia back into the ‘cracks’. Again, Ee Tiang Hong sums up this sense of emptiness:

6They have succeeded
in changing the names
of things and places
as they pleased–
streets, bridges, monuments,
buildings, parks, playing fields,
whatever they deemed alien to our nationalism,
as they defined it.

7Tuan Munshi,
as when you saw with your own eyes
the destruction of our Fort,
the blasting of an unyielding stone,
the pious licence with word and meaning,
I, too, could only watch,
dumbfounded.

  • 15 Quoted in Mandy Chi Man Lo, “Critical Introduction,” poetry.sg, October 6, 2016, http://www.poetry. (...)

8Ee Tiang Hong, ‘New Order’15

Notes

1 Fernando Pessoa, Poesia de Álvaro de Campos (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2002), 433. It translates roughly as “I am the interval between what I want to be and what others have made of me, / Or half this interval, because there is also life . . . / That’s me, after all…”

2 “Excellent introduction to the Babas but…,” New Nation, July 22, 1979.

3 “What’s different about the Babas,” New Nation, September 1, 1978, “Not all Straits-born Chinese are Babas…,” New Nation, August 5, 1979.

4 Karen M. Teoh, “Domesticating Hybridity: Straits Chinese Cultural Heritage Projects in Malaysia and Singapore,” Cross-currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 17, no. 1 (2015): 58-85.

5 “Gambling Among Nyonias,” Straits Times, October 11, 1907.

6 “Gambling Among the Nyonyas,” Straits Times, October 15, 1907, “Gambling Among Nyonyas,” Straits Times, October 17, 1907.

7 “Gambling Among Nyonyas,” Straits Times, October 23, 1907.

8 Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) ch 5-6, Joo Ee Khoo, “Costumes and accessories,” in The Straits Chinese: A Cultural History, ed. Joo Ee Khoo (Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1998).

9 “Bomb Mystery: Protector of the Chinese Seriously Injured,” Straits Times, January 26, 1925, “The Bomb Outrage,” Straits Times, January 27, 1925, “Bomb Outrage: The Outcome of Anarchistic Ideas,” Straits Times, January 28, 1925, “Mysterious “Bobbed Haired” Woman,” Singapore Free Press, January 28, 1925, “The Bomb Outrage: Bobbed-Haired Woman Charged,” Malaya Tribune, February 2, 1925.

10 Ong Soon Keong, “Rebuilding Corridor, Preserving Prestige,” 144

11 Graham Greene, The Comedians (London: Penguin, 2005), 145.

12 Josephine Chia, “Commentary: I am Peranakan not Chinese,” CNA, October 7, 2018, https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/commentary/peranakan-chinese-malay-identity-singapore-bicentennial-10745232.

13 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

14 John R. Chávez, Beyond Nations: Evolving Homelands in the North Atlantic World, 1400-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2.

15 Quoted in Mandy Chi Man Lo, “Critical Introduction,” poetry.sg, October 6, 2016, http://www.poetry.sg/ee-tiang-hong-intro.

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