Читать книгу The Peranakan Chinese Home - Ronald G. Knapp - Страница 5

Who Are The Peranakan Chinese?

Few visitors to Malacca, Penang, and Singapore today leave without impressions of Peranakans, whether having eaten a Nyonya-style restaurant meal, visited one or more of the multiplying Peranakan museums, or marveled at the colorful yet softly polychromatic pastel façades of restored shophouses and terrace houses in what have become vibrant neighborhoods.

The thirty-four episode serial drama The Little Nyonya, which aired first in Singapore in 2008–9, put a spotlight on a Peranakan family beginning in the 1930s and following them over the next seventy years. After high ratings and unprecedented viewership in Singapore, the series was subsequently broadcast in Malaysia, Cambodia, France, the Philippines, Myanmar, the United States, Vietnam, China, Thailand, and Hong Kong, before being rebroadcast in Singapore in 2011. International recognition of Peranakan culture came in October 2010 with an exhibition called Baba Bling, Signes intérieures de richesse à Singapour, a sumptuous showcase of objects that was launched at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris in cooperation with Singapore’s Peranakan Museum. In 2011, Joo Chiat, a bustling Peranakan conservation area and trendy hotspot, was named Singapore’s first Heritage Town, with the expectation that it would lead to a boom in cultural tourism. Moreover, Peranakan cuisine has gained prominence globally as Nyonya-style restaurants have opened in London, New York, Sydney, Copenhagen, and Tokyo, among other world cities, and even in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai in China. These expressions of Peranakan identity, among many others, are not merely nostalgic impulses but speak to the efforts of many people to revive a culture to its proper position after having languished in the shadows over a period of three decades following the Second World War.

Wearing silver amulets, beaded slippers, tunics, and caps, these four Peranakan children pose for a portrait in a studio late in the nineteenth century, Singapore.

Attired in their custom-made wedding finery, the bride, groom, and young attendants pose in the ornate Reception Hall of a Jonker Street residence in Malacca on October 24, 1939. Photograph courtesy of Chee Jin Siew family, Malacca, Malaysia.

Who are these Peranakans, Nyonyas, and Babas?

These questions cannot be answered easily since the descriptors have been characterized by a remarkable mutability over time and across space. In the Malay language, the word peranakan, which has several meanings that derive from the word anak or child, means those who are the offspring and descendants of intermarriage between a local person and a foreigner, someone from an outside ethnic group (Tan Chee-Beng, 2010: 32). As an adjective, peranakan is applied as a descriptor of those who are thus locally born to distinguish them from immigrants born elsewhere. In Southeast Asia, there are Peranakan Indians who are Hindu and called Chitty Melaka as well as Peranakan Indian Muslims called Jawi Pekan, in addition to Eurasian Peranakans and Peranakan Chinese, just some of the more notable, named blended families who emerged over the centuries. Beyond the Malay-speaking world, other terms are used for similar mixing. In Thailand, Luk-jin (Sino-Thai) is employed, while in the Philippines, mestizo de sangley (Chinese mestizo) expresses those of mixed ancestry involving Chinese and the indigenous population, but neither of these can be called peranakan. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that all of these groups are incredibly varied in terms of their origins and current forms in spite of what appears to be single words describing them. Perhaps because Peranakan Chinese exceed in numbers all others who are peranakan, it is common for many people to use the single word Peranakan as a substitute for the more accurate two-word phrase Peranakan Chinese. These terms continue to be used ambiguously and inconsistently in scholarly as well as popular writings due to the striking diversity of the region’s mixed ethnic heritage.

While Baba and Nyonya are gender-specific terms that refer respectively to male and female Peranakan Chinese, the term Baba is sometimes employed alone to describe Peranakan Chinese in general, “and in this sense is gender free” (Suryadinata, 2010: 4). Baba is also an honorific term for grandfather and elderly men generally, although its use in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore differs. Its origin is unclear—some say the word is derived from Hindi, others that it is a Persian loan word, or even has a Turkic origin. Nyonya, likewise, is a loan word, from Javanese, meaning grandmother or adult woman, a word that may have originated with Portuguese or Dutch colonialists. While Babas and Nyonyas are Peranakan Chinese, not all Peranakan Chinese are Baba-Nyonya.

Up until the Second World War, the expression Straits Chinese was often used synonymously for the Babas in the Straits Settlements of Malacca, Penang, and Singapore when they were under direct British rule. As a term made popular by those who were English-educated, the term Straits Chinese today is considered old-fashioned, partially because the Straits Settlements no longer exist, having been dissolved in 1946, but also because those who call themselves Peranakan Chinese are found in great numbers in Indonesia and elsewhere. Substantial enclaves of Peranakan Chinese historically have been found especially in Medan (Indonesia), Yangon (Myanmar), and Phuket (Thailand), each a node in the far-flung trading network that linked them to Malacca, Penang, and Singapore. Tan Chee-Beng has shown cultural linkages, including the widespread distribution of Baba Malay magazines, beyond these places (1993). Moreover, throughout Indonesia, Peranakan Chinese are found in even greater numbers than in Singapore and Malaysia. Those who speak Chinese in Singapore refer to Peranakan Chinese as tusheng Huaren 土生华人 (“locally born Chinese”). While peranakan -type Chinese are found even beyond the broader Malay world of peninsular and insular Southeast Asia, Leo Suryadinata reminds us that “the offspring of such intermarriages should not be called peranakan ” (2010: 2). Be that as it may, we have included short discussions and a few contrasting illustrations in this book of Sino-Thai homes in Bangkok and some textual references to Chinese mestizos in the Philippines.

Tan Chee-Beng describes the Peranakan Chinese in Malacca and Singapore as “a different kind of Chinese,” “a sub-ethnic category of Chinese” (2004: 113) who, according to Peter Lee, had “a non-Chinese ancestress somewhere in the family tree” (2008: 6). There were and are many variants of Peranakan Chinese. Variations are pronounced from country to country as well as within countries partially because of the different origins of the father in China. Thus differences from family to family are frequently quite distinct. In Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand, and southern Myanmar, most Peranakan Chinese claim Hokkien ancestry, that is, the progenitor father migrated from one of the counties in central or southern Fujian province. Other fathers hailed from the Meixian (Hakka), Chaozhou (Teochew), or Guangzhou (Cantonese) regions of Guangdong province, as well as Hainan Island, each of which has distinct cultural characteristics. The same holds true throughout the Indonesian archipelago, underscoring the heterogeneity of local origins of migrants from southeastern China to Southeast Asia. Moreover, few families have records that are sufficiently detailed to allow tracing lineages back into the eighteenth century and earlier.

The fact that trading and social networks of the Peranakan Chinese ranged across an expansive and dynamic labyrinth of business interests as well as social relationships, temple bonds, and family alliances has meant that Peranakan as a label has had different meanings over time. Alternatives materialized in different periods to the degree that it is not possible to speak of a singular type of Peranakan Chinese. While it is rare to refer to Peranakan Chinese in the Philippines, as mentioned above, a mestizo culture emerged there also out of the intermarriage of Chinese immigrant men with indigenous women. While one can point to similarities with the Baba cultures of Malaysia and Indonesia, the Hispanicization of the mestizo in the Philippines led to the formation of a distinctive and dominant Filipino identity. While Peranakans created syncretic cultures that combined local customs with those brought from their homelands, the extent of the differences from community to community has not yet been fully studied and is not well understood.

In this studio portrait of the progenitor of the Tjiong family in Parakan in central Java, the elderly Chinese immigrant is seated among furnishings common in upper-class homes.

Tour guides and websites often hyperbolically state a single origin for those who identify as Peranakan Chinese today in Malaysia and Singapore: all are descendants of the Chinese princess Hang Li Poh and her entourage of 500 young women and several hundred young men who were dispatched by the Ming emperor in the mid-fifteenth century to marry Sultan Mansur Shah of Malacca. To some visitors from England, who are aware of well-documented lineages that reach back many centuries, this explanation seems plausible. This is especially true regarding the Arthurian legend and whether the British Royal Family is descended from King Arthur. Similarly, some Americans who know of the strict membership requirements of The Mayflower Society, which honors the memory of the 102 Pilgrim passengers who arrived in what came to be known as Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, are also fascinated by this tale of the reputed legacy of a Chinese princess and her retinue. The search for “roots” is an increasingly trendy topic for many. Alas, this romantic legend, although often repeated, cannot be substantiated by Chinese imperial records. Moreover, there are no living Peranakan Chinese who have records that link them to such a glorious origin.

An alternative, but incomplete explanation that is often repeated is that Peranakan Chinese are all descendants of male immigrants who came from China as traders or laborers from the seventeenth century onward who married only local Malay women. Most of the immigrant laborers saw themselves as sojourners, expecting to save money before returning to China. Yet, according to Siah U Chin [Seah Eu Chin], who reported on the Chinese in Singapore in the late 1840s, only 10–20 percent were able to realize their dreams of returning home (1848: 285). Most, it is usually claimed, either settled down with a local woman of indeterminate ethnicity or in some cases became addicted to opium and gambling, frustrating their return to China. Only a small minority of these struck it rich as landed immigrants and established a verifiable genealogy.

Set beneath the two characters zhui yuan, which together mean “to recall the distant past” and are a prompt to remember the ancestors, is a painting of the Tan family progenitor, Tan Swee Sin (1804–58), Tranquerah Road, Malacca.

Sojourning traders who regularly returned to China, while waiting in port for monsoonal winds to change, sometimes took local women as wives at a time during which polygamy was an accepted practice and available Chinese women in the ports were rare. Indeed, a great many maintained multiple families, one in China and at least a second one in the Nanyang or Southern Seas port that produced “mixed blood,” creole children, all the while creating “bilateral kinship structures” of significant complexity in following generations (Frost, 2005: 35). While these patterns also are unverifiable for most of those who arrived, some Peranakan Chinese family narratives continue to tell of forbears who arrived penniless aboard junks from China, then “suffered hardship and endured hard work,” chiku nailao, as the common phrase ruefully states it, then married locally before gaining substantial wealth and high status.

Such tales, of course, are only told by the successful. Most immigrants, including those who started Peranakan families, merely maintained their families with modest incomes from small shops that retailed whatever was needed, or used their hands and simple tools to work tin, wood, leather, and iron, among other materials, into useful and marketable objects. Significant numbers of arrivals and their descendants, moreover, never broke the debilitating chains of poverty, living on as an underprivileged underclass, the hardworking but powerless who dreamed of a better future that was never realized. Coolies, peasant laborers, rickshaw pullers, trishaw pedalers, pirates, fisherfolk, even prostitutes and slaves, lived in the back alleys, on the upper floors of commercial establishments, and on sampans along the banks of streams throughout Southeast Asia for generations. Voiceless in life and generally invisible as they acculturated, they have left illegible traces of their subsistence lives and families for their descendants to probe.

Although a Chinese immigrant from Meixian in northeastern Guangdong province, Tjong A Fie began a Peranakan family in Medan, Sumatra, through marriage. In this portrait at the entry of his new home at the beginning of the twentieth century, the family sits beneath a European chandelier and amongst a panoply of Chinese ceremonial accouterments. Photograph courtesy of the family of Tjong A Fie.

“Sadly,” Peter Lee moreover tells us, “the real origins of the Peranakans are probably far from romantic” since documents clearly show that immigrant Chinese often purchased non-Muslim slaves from the Celebes, Bali, Java, Sumatra, even Burma and Siam as “wives” in far-flung ports such as Singapore and Batavia during the early period. “It did not take many unions between the Chinese immigrants and slave girls from all over the region to produce the first generation of Chinese Peranakans, who would marry other local Chinese Peranakans, or the next wave of Chinese immigrants. In this way, the Chinese Peranakan community was able to maintain its identity” (2008: 3–4). It is thus impossible to determine with any level of certainty the many paths that led to the establishment of Peranakan families centuries ago.

Some local wives and their local-born Peranakan sons no doubt managed the trading business while the husband/father was away, while others worked side by side in small shops. In the early years, as Peranakan progeny were raised by their local mothers in the company of the immigrant father, they often came to speak a Malay patois with some vocabulary and syntax related to Chinese language. This distinct language, which varied from place to place, continued well into the twentieth century, and is seen by some community members in these areas as the essential marker of Peranakan identify. The Babas in Penang and Phuket traditionally spoke Hokkien that contained a number of Malay loan words. In Malacca and Singapore, the Babas who identified themselves as Peranakan, spoke a form of Malay, which scholars describe as Baba Malay, a Malay dialect with certain Chinese loanwords, especially those dealing with kinship and the Chinese symbolic world. In the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia, a range of different local languages was adopted, further defying generalization.

Besides language, another significant Peranakan cultural marker, continuing even to the present, involved a fusion of culinary traditions that generated unique flavors. These dishes, which are usually referred to as Nyonya style and vary regionally, are basically Chinese in cooking technique and ingredients with piquant condiments and aromatic spices derived from Malay foodways and practices. Moreover, a distinct Peranakan aesthetic developed over time in the realm of women that can be seen in clothing, embroidery, beading, jewelry, and porcelain, examples of which will be seen in the chapters that follow and which are widely celebrated today. Men early on often wore Chinese garments for formal occasions, but later Western suits became common even as they sometimes wore a sarong for leisure. From the father’s side, Chinese names were adopted, ancestors were venerated, specific festivals were observed, life cycle rituals were followed, and temples were built to worship Daoist and Buddhist deities. Of particular significance to this book is the eclectic nature of Peranakan Chinese residences in terms of façades, plans, and furnishings, which combined Western and Chinese elements, as well as a richly symbolic vocabulary that is infused throughout the residences as ornamental motifs.

Much of the acculturation was informal, a kind of “localization,” according to Tan Chee-Beng, in which, “after three generations, one becomes a Baba” (2004: 49). Yet, “localization” was neither a linear process nor one that was homogeneous in its results. Indeed, what it meant to be Peranakan Chinese came to differ from family to family and from region to region as time passed since circumstances varied and different choices were made. While the earliest Chinese males married local women, they nonetheless preferred their daughters to marry sons from other Peranakan families or able immigrants from China, especially from the late nineteenth century onward. In time, intermarriage within the Peranakan community became the norm in a way that was self-perpetuating in that Peranakan Chinese families looked inward rather than outward in terms of their social networks. Peranakan Chinese sons were sometimes sent back to China, where they were exposed intensively to the culture of their forbears, while Peranakan Chinese daughters were prepared by their mothers in the domestic life of their locality. If marriage partners came from beyond the region, they were usually successful Chinese immigrant men or those newly arrived who showed great promise. This not only provided a foundation for future entrepreneurial success but also infused Chinese blood into lineages and bolstered Chinese cultural practices. For old Peranakan Chinese families, Malay and other blood clearly diminished within lineages as time passed. Thus, it is all the more remarkable that many Peranakan Chinese families continued to honor those aspects of their mixed culture that came from the Malay side—food, clothing, and language—even as many of the external markers were strikingly Chinese.

For many Peranakan Chinese, perhaps even most, economic opportunities were limited, and wealth and status did not increase. This was especially true of those living in rural areas and those struggling in towns. Ong Tae Hae (Wang Dahai), a traveler from China to Java in the late eighteenth century, indeed noted the assimilation of the descendants of Chinese immigrants: “When the Chinese remain abroad for several generations, without returning to their native land, they frequently cut themselves off from the instructions of the sages; in language, food and dress, they imitate the natives, and studying foreign books, they do not scruple to become Javanese, when they call themselves Islam. They then refuse to eat pork, and adopt altogether native customs” (1849: 33).

Thus, for many Peranakan Chinese, as generations passed and contact with the Chinese homeland decreased, the need to speak a Chinese dialect decreased and facility diminished. Yet, for those who were educated, motivated, and had sufficient wealth, Chinese tutors were engaged for their children in order to sustain high levels of Chinese literacy well into the nineteenth century. It is interesting that even for those who lost their ability to read Chinese, they were able to benefit from the efforts to translate Chinese classics into Baba Malay, which made Chinese culture accessible to them. Moreover, English and Dutch education became an option for some Peranakan Chinese as British and Dutch control of the region strengthened during the late nineteenth century. This led some Peranakan Chinese to a higher level of multilingual ability, participation as élites in the colonial governments, and prominence as businessmen. The extent of this successful rise in economic and social status of the Peranakan Chinese living in the Straits Settlements is attested to by the family and business accounts chronicled in Song Ong Siang’s One Hundred Years History of the Chinese in Singapore (1923). Moreover, as rooted settlers, rather than as sojourners, some Peranakan Chinese in the late nineteenth century began to rediscover aspects of Chinese culture that had weakened over the decades.

The Peranakan Golden Age, which was a time of political prominence, economic ascendancy, and materially elegant lifestyles, ranged between the 1870s and 1920s. During this period, many Peranakan Chinese enjoyed a higher social status than either the indigenous peoples or new Chinese immigrants while playing prominent roles in both the Dutch and British colonial ventures. It was also during this half-century of cultural efflorescence that most of the Peranakan Chinese homes shown in this book were constructed, furnished, and ornamented. Wedding and other photographs of the period often show the husband wearing Western-influenced formal wear or even Chinese-style jackets and pants, while his demure wife wore a traditional baju panjang, a precursor of the fashionable sarong kebaya, which is a complex blend of sartorial influences from several cultures that has become a Peranakan Chinese icon.

A sweeping wooden spiral staircase, here in a restored century-old shophouse and now a B&B, is typical of Peranakan residences. The Snail House, Jalan Tun Tan Cheng Lock (formerly Heeren Street), Malacca, Malaysia.

In time, however, fortunes changed and both the prominence and wealth of many successful Peranakan Chinese waned. By the end of the nineteenth century, more and more Chinese men, women, and families—“pure” Chinese—were arriving in Southeast Asia, which made more obvious and clear the sharp distinctions between them and the several manifestations of Peranakan Chinese. The fluidity of these identities was highlighted in a recent exhibition titled “Chinese-More-or-Less” at the Chinese Heritage Centre, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Called sin-kheh (“new guests [immigrants]”) in Malaya and totok (“full-blooded”) in the Dutch East Indies, these new arrivals were oriented to China whereas Peranakan “locally born” Chinese were rooted in their adopted homelands while displaying a remarkably fluid hybridity. “The rather free immigration of Chinese until 1930 changed the demographic structure of Malaya. The ‘immigrant Chinese’ became the second largest community displacing the Baba. The Baba had to adjust to the dominant ‘pure Chinese’ environment. The ‘pure Chinese’ commercial class had emerged and became more prominent than the Baba” since Peranakans were shifting into more professional spheres (Tan Chee-Beng, 1993: 25–6). For some Peranakan families, the decimation of tin, rubber, and other commodity prices following the First World War signaled the major shift in their status. A second shot came during the period 1942 to 1945 with the Japanese occupation of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, colonies in which many Peranakans had once thrived but who then lost both a special status and their wealth under the Japanese. In the case of Peranakans in Singapore, change was dramatic: “… it came almost with a vengeance upon the hapless Babas whose soft and pampered living for several generations had left them unprepared for this sudden disastrous reversal of fortune. A high percentage of the 50,000 or so victims of the horrendous massacre of male Chinese slaughtered by the Japanese military during the early days of their Singapore conquest were heads of Baba households and young Babas in the flower of their manhood” (Gwee, 1998: x–xi).

Moreover, as the post-colonial establishment of Malaysia and Indonesia as sovereign countries occurred, new national identities were being forged that generally marginalized Peranakan Chinese. Nonetheless, it is important to note that prominent Peranakan Chinese played key roles in, first, the formation of Malaysia and then Singapore. In Malaysia, Tan Cheng Lock, whose ancestral home in Malacca was featured in Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia, and others committed their lives to Malaya’s Chinese population, both Peranakan and immigrant, and then played crucial roles in the formation of modern Malaysia. Similarly, well-known Peranakan Chinese such as Lee Kuan Yew, Wee Kim Wee, and Goh Keng Swee were key players and important public servants in the creation of independent Singapore in 1965.

When Tan Chee-Beng completed his Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell University in 1979, he wrote, “[M]any people in Malaysia, as well as students of Chinese society, know little about the Babas” and “more and more young Chinese of Baba families are reluctant to categorize themselves and be categorized as ‘Baba’” (iii, 1). A Baba himself, Felix Chia wrote in 1980, “[T]here is hardly a Baba youngster today who is aware of his heritage and culture” (viii). During those years, when thought of at all, Peranakan Chinese communities were perceived as declining and disinte-grating, losing attachments with their roots and adrift in terms of their relationship with other Peranakan communities across the broader region.

Tan Cheng Lock, venerable statesman in the then Malaya, is pictured here wearing a comfortable sarong, with his son Siew Sin and daughters Lily, Alice, and Agnes in his Malacca villa, c. 1925. Photograph courtesy of the family of Tun Tan Siew Sin.

While there had been periodic hand wringing about the decline of Peranakan Chinese in terms of influence and wealth during this transitional period, there was nonetheless a revival of sorts in the decade or so between the middle of the 1970s and the late 1980s as both academics and the public increased their interest. This attention, however, was less on the historical narrative of Peranakan Chinese than on their material culture, especially the material culture connected with Nyonyas—cooking, ceramics, clothing, beaded slippers, silverware, jewelry, and home furnishings.

As the twenty-first century began, however, there increasingly was less talk of Peranakan decline and more of its resilience as a vibrant culture with a proud history as some began to probe what it means to be Peranakan. In Malacca, Penang, and Singapore initially and in Phuket and in Indonesia more recently, a renaissance of things Peranakan arose, some well grounded in history while others were reformulated to meet the contemporary needs of tourists. The formal associations of Peranakan Chinese in Singapore and Malacca, which both have a history of more than a hundred years, having begun as exclusive organizations for Straits Chinese, began to reach out to the general population—and younger Chinese Peranakans who have less connection with their heritage—to generate interest, understanding, and appreciation. The website of the Peranakan Association Singapore today bills itself as “your one-stop resource site for everything Baba!” and unlike decades ago, Peranakan Chinese culture today is highly visible.

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.