The Peranakan Chinese Home

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Ronald G. Knapp. The Peranakan Chinese Home

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An American Victor Talking Machine (Victrola) displayed among traditional Chinese furnishings. Johnson Tan Collection, Singapore.

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However, some conservative voices now lament that it is now much too easy to make a claim of being Peranakan Chinese. The passing hazy recollection of a grandmother wearing a sarong kebaya or of her making a tasty Nyonya-style dish seem to be enough to reawaken memories that lead to the declaration, “I am a Peranakan.” The necessary markers often no longer include speaking a Malay or Hokkien patois, addressing elders with the proper term, or observing Chinese rituals, among others, as would have been the norm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, a great many Peranakan Chinese are Christians, have intermarried with non-Peranakans, and have been schooled in Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa Indonesia, Mandarin Chinese, or English. Few today doubt that Peranakan Chinese have shown themselves over centuries to be particularly adept at meeting changing circumstances, and thus are continuing to evidence an internal cultural dynamism that underscores that ethnic identity need not be static and is often multidimensional.

While an emphasis of this book is celebrating old homes as well as their furnishings and ornamentation, these are not presented as ossified phenomena salvaged from a dead or dying culture. Rather, in support of the heightened interest in things Peranakan, these inherited forms found in old Peranakan Chinese homes continue to serve as inspiration for life in the twenty-first century. It is somewhat ironic and significant that swelling numbers of Chinese tourists traveling to Southeast Asia discover rather quickly that aspects of their own material culture, which were obliterated over the past century within China, can be easily appreciated in old homes and temples where Peranakan Chinese continue to be the custodians of Chinese culture’s rich legacy.

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