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Gifts to the Sad
Country
Essays on the Chinese Diaspora
Souchou Yao
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Gifts to the Sad Country
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Souchou Yao
Gifts to the Sad
Country
Essays on the Chinese Diaspora
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Author’s Note
A few years back I went to the Eighth Route Army Museum in Xi’an,
a grey mansion of interconnecting courtyards and roofs of jutting eaves,
and soaked in the grandeur of the revolution. Since 2018 onwards, it is no
longer there. The reception area is gone, and the wooden door is replaced
by an iron gate. The building is still there, and the renamed Eighth
Route Army Office Block announces its alternative fate. It seems nothing
in China escapes the rapaciousness of commercialism. In a stationer in
Chengdu, books are sold by weight. You take the six volumes of Dream
of the Red Chamber and front up to the counter, a sour-faced man piles
them on a scale and declares, ‘Fifteen renminbi!’. They are cheap because
you are competing with the paper recyclers and their sorry trade. Only
money, it seems, would be savoured with reverence. For the anthropologist, the familiar landmarks and customary social values are like shifting
sand. A Malaysian Chinese, he knows China and its ways. But things
rapidly change and each trip is an attempt to catch up with the latest
phrasings, to regauge the new twists given to familiar words. Xiaojie,
Miss, a term of polite address, grants dignity to a sex worker; xi jiao mei,
‘Feet-washing sister,’ euphemizes young women of the massage parlour.
There are other usages that can lead to innocent faux pas. It is a sharp
realization: you can’t migrate a word or a concept from one context to
another context, from one usage to another usage.
To follow the fortune of a family of diaspora is to straddle two places,
two social and political systems. All the braggadocio and bathos of their
v
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vi
AUTHOR’S NOTE
longing are inscribed by the neat division of nations and social and political circumstances. In this sense, the first act of a migrant is to render what
they know and believe in another language and through another mode of
understanding. It is, in short, a feat of translation.1 Thinkers and migrants
alike catch on quickly: being too literal and too accurate in transcribing
a word or a phrase is not necessarily useful. For you want to keep some
of the passion and ethos in the fresh context; the meanings of words are
born of social usage.
The following pages deal with men and women in their seventies
and early eighties; their active years were spent during the Land Reform
(1948–1950) and the collectivization of the Great Leap Forward (1958–
1962). As old people do, their minds have stalled and their daily parlance
sounds quaint and out of place in present-day China. Communism and
revolution still connote violence and state oppression. And in interpersonal affairs, they continue to use airen, lover, for husband or wife, and
tongzhi, comrade, to suggest a person of intimacy and friendship. These
are words that take the speaker to a time when such expressions were
meaningful and telling. And the elderly still bring up Nanyang when they
mean Southeast Asia, and Malaya, the name of the British colony, when
they refer to contemporary Malaysia. In their letters, so I note, my parents
had used Nanyang and Malaya right towards the end of their lives. To use
the correct Southeast Asia and Malaysia would nullify their yen for the
ancestral home under communist rule. Thus, I have kept these charming,
old-fashioned expressions in the text. Translation or updating would be
an outrage to scholarship, not to say to filial loyalty.
Fieldwork in Zhang Chun village was carried out over several visits
since 2016; my longest stay was six months in 2018. With the Covid
pandemic, communication between Sydney and Zhang Chun continued
on WeChat and WhatsApp. It is engrossing to examine the old state
measures through the eyes of diaspora—at various times alarming and
joyful, fearful and a relief. The Cultural Revolution has been abundantly
written about, and the generation that lived through the Land Reform
and the Great Leap Forward is ageing, which gave the book a poignant
urgency. The anthropologist is grateful for their persistence and good
sense, and for opening up to a painful period in their youth.
1 Steiner.
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Contents
1
Moving Story
1
2
Revolution Comes to Zhang Chun Village
19
3
The Postman
35
4
Grandfather’s Two Households
51
5
Things That Bind
71
6
My Sister’s Grave
89
7
Homebound
109
8
Revolutionary Romance
125
9
Soft Trauma
141
Index
159
vii
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CHAPTER 1
Moving Story
Here I ain’t been travelling but a month, and I am already in Tennessee.
My, my, a body does get around.
—William Faulkner, Light in August (1932)
My mother, with her years in Maoist China, refused to set foot again on
Chinese soil. On an autumn day in 2016, I was heading to China for
an academic gig at Peking University. At the airport she held my hands
and said, ‘Don’t forget to go back to the village; half of your family are
still there.’ It was a plea, a reminder. Listening to her, I felt as though
my whole life had been in preparation for this moment—to return to the
village and to reconnect with my kinfolk there. I said I would, then she
slipped a hand into her blouse and retrieved a thick bundle of money:
‘This is for you. Your grandparents’ grave in the far hills needs to be
attended to. Distribute the rest among the relatives.’ The money felt as
heavy as my self-consciousness. The deal was sealed; there would be no
way to avoid the mission, even if I wanted to.
From the airline reception desk, behind a ribbon of passengers waiting
to check in, I saw her cordoned off in the waiting area with my sister.
In her wheelchair, she looked frail and unmemorable, as the aged tend
to look. My sister stepped away to answer her mobile, and mother was
left alone. From where I was, she appeared stranded and like no one was
going to save her. She was a woman forged by her difficult marriage into
a difficult family and by the hardship of living through the revolution.
She was a figure from the past, a past that I had heard so much about. At
1
Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024
S. Yao, Gifts to the Sad Country,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1598-5_1
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2
S. YAO
the boarding area, I turned my head, and she stared back, then began to
fiddle with her handbag and waved at my sister to take her home.
I was travelling to Beijing to give a lecture at Peking University and
after that I hoped to spend a few weeks reading at the university library.
The detour to Zhang Chun village had not been part of the plan. A week
after I arrived in Beijing, my sister phoned to tell me that my mother had
passed away in her sleep. The news shook me out of my complacency, and
the journey to the ancestral village became something urgent that I could
not avoid.
For years, I did not think much about China. There were for me
two Chinas. There was the China where my grandfather had, with the
money from Nanyang, invested in land and built a home in the ancestral village; Father took over the family estate, and brought up the eldest
son and daughter before he lost it to the Communists. It was China that
witnessed the family’s descent from landowners to emigrants, who eventually settled in Malaysia where my siblings and I were born. The other
China was the China of literature, ancient philosophy and dynastic history
that was drummed into my head at the Confucius Middle School in Kuala
Lumpur, where I finished secondary education. This was Cultural China,
full of wisdom and civilizational achievement; not quite the real thing. It
has taken me a long time to realize, when I stare at China’s long tumultuous history, the two versions are in fact one; they have come out of the
same cultural systems and the play of state power.
I settle in quickly at Zhang Chun village. Many of the informants
are my kin, and I am soon steeped in their recollections of the radical
reforms of the fifties and sixties. They are men and women in their
seventies, a handful in their early eighties. What they call up from the
recesses of memory is sharp and heartfelt and modifies my bookish view
of revolutionary China. There’s a lot in the interviews that my parents
did not—could not—tell me. Everyone was affected by the upheaval. My
parents, being of the landlord class, were made the target of revolutionary
struggle. They left during the height of the Great Leap Forward, which
saved them—unlike other ‘blood-sucking’ landlords.
Things That Bound
Broken by emigration and revolution, my parents were besotted by the
dream of returning to their ancestral home with the wealth acquired overseas. Separation, absence and foreign sojourn drove the way we thought
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MOVING STORY
3
about the homeland. For some years, my mother was stranded in the
village with her ailing mother-in-law. Her two adult children had left
home—the daughter married, and the son studying at university in Dairen
in China’s northeast. My father, travelling between Malaya, Hong Kong
and China, as his herbal wholesale business required, kept a house in the
British colony in Southeast Asia and returned to the village a couple of
times a year. In his mind it was a neat, elegant division of homes and countries.1 China was where the family lived and kept a house and farmed the
land with the help of tenant farmers and labourers, and Malaya was a place
of business and temporary sojourn. With this belief, he had not thought
about bringing his wife and two children to Malaya, and they maintained
a transnational marriage before the term was fashionable. In any case,
when Land Reform came to the village in 1951–1952, my grandmother
was sick and could not travel. By the time her son and daughter left home,
my mother had stayed on to look after her mother-in-law. After my grandmother died, separation and dispersal of the family became a pressing
reality. My mother was alone, save the maid, and our kinfolk were themselves being persecuted. With my father in Malaya, the wrath of the party
cadres fell on his wife. She was interrogated and threatened with a public
trial. The circumstances gave a new urgency to getting her out, but the
process was slow. After much rankling—my father had wisely stayed away
during the negotiation—the village committee imposed a heavy fine and
the family was ‘promoted’ from landlord to rich peasant, before giving
her permission to leave.
The family was thus divided. The two eldest children remained in
China, and my parents and their younger children born in Malaysia made
up the rest of the family. For my parents, the Great Leap Forward of
the early sixties had finally pressed home the message. They realized they
could not go back, and China was no longer home—there was a lot of
rethinking and hard-nosed adjustments. While China may not be home,
there was still Zhang Chun village where they were married and where
my father’s ancestors were buried. Right towards the end of their lives,
they would regard Zhang Chun as their original home—the Communists were not to cut off their connections with their kin and neighbours
there. Given our relative prosperity in Malaysia, it fell upon us to support
them when living through another of Mao’s revolutionary measures.
The sending and receiving of goods and remittances helped to maintain the kin relationship, and people benefited from the donors’ evident
generosity. In my mind’s eye an arc of water breaches the two lands, and
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4
S. YAO
across the divide a traffic of goods and remittances people desperately
needed. A whole story can be told of these transactions. I remember how,
as a young boy, I would lend a hand in laying out the parcels in the sitting
room, tightening the ropes and checking the names and addresses against
the list of recipients. It was joyful work, but there were worries. Would the
parcels survive the journey? Have we sent enough? What about the relatives who didn’t ask? Then the occasional thought: Can we really afford
all this? Kin sentiment costs money—and effort.
An ocean away, the situation was harder to imagine. Visitors went and
came back with news and rumour and gossip. The collectivization was
being carried out. Every family was made to join a commune, which gave
decision-making power about planting and harvesting over to the village
committee. Life was getting harder; people ate at the communal kitchen,
which turned out army-style dishes, tasteless and with scant pieces of
meat. People got up at four in the morning, and things were rationed.
Then they remembered their relatives in Nanyang and wrote to ask for
help. When the goods arrived, they said, it’s a blessing that the Uncle
in Nanyang was sensible and generous. And I am to hear this again
and again: The dry boiled rice and pork lard were heaven-sent, without
which the family would not have survived. The South Seas had always felt
far away, almost mythical; now it became real through the parcels they
received and the donor who sent them.
Journeying
The narrative of diaspora is wont to bring up separation, and a sense of
longing and regret. This is true, but not quite the whole story. For the
diaspora, separation and longing are an expression of something more
fundamental. Whether they hanker after expatriation or not, they must
give in to the need for journeying. We speak of the social and political
actualities that force people to leave their homeland, and yes, emigration
is life-changing. However, with these there is also the desire to move and
to move on. That they have followed the ‘push factors’ of economic geography—the poverty, the want of opportunities—and migrated to another
land is saying a lot, yet not much. The economic explanation tends to
dominate. In Malaysia, among the ethnic Chinese, what they tell are
universally good stories about their ancestors: heroic pioneers for whom
economic improvement was the drive—and obsession. You may question
if the economic drive would make them singularly acquisitive and greedy,
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1
MOVING STORY
5
but their descendants rarely think so and turn it into the core of their
cultural practices. Speaking as one myself, what do emigrants want besides
economic improvement, besides getting the best mortgage deal to buy
a house, to save for a trip to Disneyland for the family? It is not only
academic specialization that turns me to ruminate on the emotions and
sentiments, the regret and longing that affect a family of diaspora. The
lyricism and the poetics of longing are themselves worthy of treatment.
Indeed, they lead us to the central issue of social and cultural displacement. If migration is a search for a place of settlement, it also scripts the
confrontation of different cultural standpoints, of contrasting social and
political systems. This, in plainer terms, all migrants know and experience.
Migration is, above all else, a journey of philosophic attitudes.
Migration as Translation
‘Any model of communication is at the same time a model of translation
of a vertical or horizontal transfer of significance,’ George Steiner writes.
He elaborates,
No two historical epochs, no two social classes, no two localities use words
and syntax to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals of
valuation and inference. Neither do two human beings. Each living person
draws, deliberately or in immediate habit, on two sources of linguistic
supply: the current vulgate corresponding to his level of literacy, and a
private thesaurus. The latter is inextricably a part of his subconscious, of his
memories so far as they may be verbalized, and of the singular, irreducibly
specific ensemble of his somatic and psychological identity.2
Steiner has in mind the apparent contradiction involving all modes of
translation. Earlier, he insists on the particularity of language that makes
onerous words to be rendered in another tongue, to hew it with other
‘figures of syntax.’3
Each human language maps the world differently. There is life-giving
compensation in the extreme grammatical complication of those languages
(for example, among Australian Aboriginals or in the Kalahari) whose
speakers dwell in material and social contexts of deprivation and barrenness. Each tongue—and there are no ‘small’ or lesser languages—construes
a set of possible worlds and geographies of remembrance.4
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This does not suggest the futility of translation, however, only its challenges. The remaking of words and sentences into parallel signs and
meaning in another language: the process takes up the other world, the
other set of circumstances imbedded in their linguistic form. Translation propels the movement of words and meanings as well as their social
roots—so does any act of communication. Steiner is surely right. To
communicate is not only to convey a set of words and their meanings;
it is also to set in train the social customs that make up what Steiner
calls ‘the somatic and psychological identity’ of the speaker.5 This gives
communication a considerable sense of mobility. It is a shifting ground
that a person stands on, and they must be lucid with their message and
intent, and grasp the social circumstances that define how such a message
and intention would be received. In communication, there is a reciprocity
of meanings and a reciprocity of social-cultural norms.
When you think about it, an immigrant’s experience is a lot like
translation—as they deal with two places and two social-political systems.
I am trying to get a handle on my father’s effort to keep in touch
with the homeland. It was an effort valiant, almost romantic. It was like
swimming against the current, and circumstances were against him at each
move. Separation and disconnection featured prominently in his earlier
life, when he settled his family in the village while he kept, to his mind,
a temporary home overseas. Life was made bearable—and his marriage
kept viable—when he was able to travel to-and-fro a couple of times a
year. Things radically changed after the Communist victory. For those
in Malaya, China became Red China that lay behind the bamboo curtain,
unreachable and hostile to the ‘free West’ to which Malaya belonged. The
British colony became independent in 1957 and six years later, in 1963,
formed the Federation of Malaysia by including the crown colonies of
North Borneo, Sarawak and Singapore. These years were the height of
the Cold War and Malaysia was fighting an anti-communist insurgency
that started in 1948, and Beijing was alleged to be aiding the guerrillas.
Travel to China was disallowed except for the elderly and business people.
The situation was confusing for people like my father. The bamboo
curtain had indeed come down, yet China was open in many ways.
Because of the status of Hong Kong, Britain was among the first countries to recognize the People’s Republic of China when it came into being
in 1949. Malaya and later Malaysia kept a moderate diplomatic contact,
largely in the area of trade. The reality is the two countries were connected
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MOVING STORY
7
in all kinds of ways. All this time, the Bank of China stayed open for business in Kuala Lumpur and in Singapore. When letters and news were
short in coming, the Bank of China was a saviour by transmitting what
we could to the village. I recall as a child how I had held on to my mother’s hand on another expedition to the Bank of China building near the
city market. The queue before each counter was long and sweaty. The line
slowly edged forward, when we reached the counter and handed over the
soiled notes, we felt as if we had accomplished a great mission, an intimation of care and longing that was to reach another land, another political
system.
Apart from the Bank of China and the letters, there were the shuike,
enterprising postmen who plied their trade between the South Seas and
the towns and villages in southern China. To the whimsical-minded, the
itinerant courier was an angel of mercy, goods and letters and yearning
travelled with him to reach the loved ones. As with translation, the modes
of connection were like standing on an open channel across which words
and meanings travel and instal their systems of significance. Gifts and
remittances, too, made their way over the distance, but the expedient and
material calculations do not describe the process. Often, one gives over to
the lyricism and poetics of these transactions, transactions of the heart and
emotional hankering. Hampered by the prevailing conditions, my parents
never successfully managed their twin loyalties and national attachments.
If what they did was ingenious and dramatic, it just as often failed. And
the sense of tragedy began, you might say, with the position of the
community in a Malay-dominated nation, where the notion of Chinese
identity and of the Chinese diaspora itself are open to questioning.
Overseas Chinese, Chinese Overseas
Not only in Malaysia does one detect a strong anti-China feel, a fierce
disparagement of the notion of the middle kingdom as a sign of identification of its people overseas. Many want to lay to rest the ghost
of a homogenized, culturally unified national community. The way out
of the prison house is diversity, such that ‘Chinese ethnic identity’ can
claim a root beyond the Chinese nation and its culture. Ien Ang in On
Not Speaking Chinese cheers for diversity, and sees Chinese diaspora as a
kind of ‘transnational nationalism’ that would give rise to ‘post-Chinese
identities.’6 Allen Chun’s Fuck Chineseness is brilliantly postmodern in
dismantling the foundations—China’s geography, long dynastic history
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8
S. YAO
and civilization achievements—that hold up the notion of huaqiao, the
Overseas Chinese.7 Equally astringent is Shu-mei Shih, for whom huaquio
are ‘complicit with China’s nationalist call to the overseas Chinese’, since
‘when the (im)migrants settle and become localized, many choose to end
their state of diaspora by the second or third generation.’8
The authors have a point. With an eye on the globalized world, any
form of China-centred ethnic identity would not do, it cannot but be
restrictive and parochial. If nothing else, such an identity risks the reincarnation of the Chinaman of old, all buckteeth and Charlie Chan-speak,
who holds on to their feudal instincts while blind to the realities of
the contemporary world. The trouble is, in their rush to judgement,
the China that causes so much critical rage turns out to be a figure of
polemics, a phantom of a certain ideological posturing. China is here
a sign, shimmering with unresolved desires and conflicting geopolitical
loyalties, not to say personal partisanship from which even academics are
not immune. To these pundits, the ethnographer may well reply: there
are plenty of ethnic Chinese who, for their own perverse reasoning, still
find China a meaningful place of cultural attachment. What with the rise
of post-Deng China, these ‘parochial Chinese’ actually hold a great deal
that is modern and cosmopolitan. In Malaysia and Singapore where I
came from, these Chinese are easy enough to find. You can scour the
elegant boutiques on the island republic where the Hong Kong-based
Shanghai Tang brand is the latest in China chic. Better still, if you happen
to be in Kuala Lumpur, visit one of the independent Chinese schools
which, supported by community funding, teach the government syllabus
as well as Chinese history, language and literature. Or you can call on a
private university, one that is a part of the Chinese Education Movement:
Marxism and postcolonial studies are absent from the curriculum, and
in their place are graphic design, business management, media studies,
engineering and Chinese language and literature.
In another fashion, the ghost of eternal, unchanging China is brought
to life for critical probing. In Southeast Asia—Nanyang to my parent’s
generation—the ethnic Chinese face in various degrees and with different
political heat, discrimination and resentment. There is nothing more
dangerous, more inviting of ethnic hostility, than to call China—or any
foreign nation—home. In Malaysia, more than six decades after independence, indigenous-migrant antagonism drives the national politics still.
At its most coherent, the ethnic relationship takes on the grim elegance
of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Each community sees itself as the injured
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MOVING STORY
9
party, with the Other race as the cause of our deprivation. The self looks
anxiously to the Other side and finds all the things—economic wealth,
political power—we deserve but are denied. And since we are talking
about the workings of desire, everything is a wavering reality: self and
Other are entangled, the attraction and repulsion are in constant traffic.
Diaspora is an unhappy word to use in Malaysia; the academics shun
it, the journalists and commentators avoid it—if they have ever heard of
it. For the term establishes one’s connection to the original homeland,
a perilous move in a nation of febrile ethnic resentment. A community of diaspora has two homelands—remember Steiner?—which makes
them a group of persons of questionable loyalty. The concept invites
ethnic malevolence. In Malaysia, the ethnic Chinese and Indians are often
referred to as ‘immigrants’ by Malay politicians wanting to fire up their
base. In such a context, the diaspora would give the non-Malays a source
of identification beyond the nation. While the concept may be in vogue
in the university circles elsewhere, it is poisonous when used locally.
If ‘diaspora’ is controversial, so is the more familiar Overseas Chinese.
No matter that the governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait had,
since the fifties, renounced their jurisdiction over the ‘sons and daughters’ living abroad. Change of policy is one thing; the other is diplomatic
realism—the need to assure the countries with a substantial Chinese population of the allegiance of their ethnic-Chinese citizens. It is an attempt at
appeasement, a smoothening of a rough discourse of resentment by the
parties concerned.
Wang Gungwu’s article ‘Greater China and the Chinese Overseas,’
published nearly three decades ago, remains influential today.9 Wang gives
an elegant typology that breaks up the ethnic Chinese into three groups.
Group A Chinese, a relatively small group that had become smaller;
they maintained links with the politics of China, either directly or
indirectly, and were concerned always to identify with the destiny of
China.
Group B Chinese formed the majority group everywhere; they were
hard-headed and realistic and concentrated on making a living in
occupations which allowed them to behave openly as ethnic Chinese.
In the political sphere, they tended to limit their activities to the low
posture and indirect politics of trade, professional and community
associations.
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10
S. YAO
Group C Chinese were generally committed to the new nationbuilding politics, even though they remained uncertain of their
future as ethnic Chinese and were never sure whether they would
ever be fully accepted as loyal citizens.10
Also mentioned are the minorities outside these groups: those who
‘had accepted assimilation and no longer insisted on being known as
Chinese.’11
These groups all hold—in varying degrees and with different emotional
intensity—a sense of identification with China. What is of concern,
though, is Group B Chinese, the most numerous of the three. They are
local-based, hard-nosed and pragmatic; their attitude to China is uncertain. They work hard, and they are politically docile. The wealthy among
them would invest in China, but their hearts and loyalties are with the
countries where they are citizens. In Malaysia, this is the alleged position of the ethnic Chinese. In this context, it is not surprising that Wang
should reject the term diaspora, for its use is likely ‘to bring tragedy to the
Chinese overseas’—he has in mind reprisal by the State or anti-Chinese
rioters.12 The professor’s preferred term is Chinese overseas, which does
away with China as a place of attachment and emphasizes local loyalty so
as to allay the fear and resentment of the State and the non-Chinese.
Once again, much effort is made to send China on the road to exile.
Instead of pointing a finger at homogenization, the tactic here is expediency. The rejection of the term ‘diaspora’ and the adoption of ‘Chinese
Overseas’ has the practical intent of calming the nerves of the extremists.
However, so fervid is ethnic politics, that proscribing the use of Chinese
diaspora or Overseas Chinese is not likely to have much effect. And then:
how do you disentangle that phantom figure of desire that ‘China’ has
become in some people’s minds?
Diaspora and Mobility
Looking afar, other diaspora communities are not so hesitant in admitting
to their ‘foreign origin’ and are less worried about being so tainted. The
historian Tony Judt, during the months before he died, sat down with his
collaborator to put down his thoughts on a lifetime’s work. The result was
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.13 Fragmentary and trenchant, the essays make the point that, in Eastern Europe, the
‘issue of the Jews’ is a lot about the people’s migratory mobility, going
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back centuries and across the continent and beyond.14 Their positions
as sojourners and immigrants, and their specialization in certain trades
had earned the Jewish diaspora a certain reputation in relation to other
communities. No Zionist, he reminded the reader the story of Jewish
diaspora exists in ‘plenitude,’ not in a single strand of money-lending,
petty trade and cultural isolation.15 There is also the Austrian writer
Joseph Roth who depicts the Phoenicians, and other merchant-diaspora
in lyrical terms.
They were traders. But traders at a time when trade was heroic, and
every transaction served not just a material purpose but also a historical one, broadening the horizon, establishing communications between
people! What a time, in which merchants were considerably superior to
the nobility in terms of true culture, knowledge of the world, and farsightedness, and when it took more courage to make a deal than it did to go
to war!16
Merchants and traders of ‘true culture, knowledge of the world, and
farsighted,’ that is not the reputation of the ethnic Chinese we are familiar
with. On the ‘wandering Jews,’ it takes Roth, a member of the diaspora himself, to recognize the less discernible, almost mystical motives of
their departure from Eastern Europe to Germany. ‘Many are wanderers
by instinct, not really knowing why,’ he writes. ‘They follow a vague call
from elsewhere or a specific one from some relocated relative, the desire
to see something of the world and escape the supposed constraints of
home …’17
When you put the Chinese diaspora next to the Eastern European
Jews and the Phoenicians, the image is tragic and almost comical. In
Southeast Asia, the ethnic Chinese are still blamed for their unnatural
affinity with China. Added to that, from Thailand to Cambodia, Singapore to Malaysia, they are thought economically ambitious and financially
obsessed. And it is these qualities that have partly caused the birth of the
parochial, culturally homogenous ethnic Chinese that so enrage the critics
and the racialists.
It is not only filial loyalty that makes me want to redeem the uncertain image of people like my parents. For one thing, my parents may have
been besotted with the ancestral home, but their attitude towards China
was agile and expressive. They had lived through the end of the Nationalist government, and before leaving, years under the Maoist regime. If
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12
S. YAO
only for that, their approach to the Chinese homeland was anything but
staid and unchanging. Their lives, especially my father’s, had traversed
the ocean and countries that mattered to the family’s wholesale herbal
business—China, Malaya/Malaysia, Hong Kong, Vietnam. Growing up,
I have witnessed their emotional grace, their passion for relationships and
their habit of journeying—even though much of it they had been forced
into.
The ethnography registers a diaspora family’s attempt to keep close its
customary relationships under difficult circumstances. The Communist
revolution affected many aspects of its social life that stretched across the
ocean. Negotiation with local authorities, and consultation with kin on
their needs and demands called for boldness, dexterity, and what may be
called social and emotional competence. The tasks that faced my parents
were byzantine and complex, which betrayed their normal traits as petite
capitalists and shopkeepers. Merchants are not universally conservative, as
Joseph Roth believes; just as petite capitalism does not necessarily produce
inward-looking attitudes and parochialism. On a personal level, even a
landlocked village in Southern China could breed an emotional boldness
that led to the desire for travelling and migratory mobility.
Restlessness
Some inconvenient truths have been left out from the family legend. For
it had been something of an open secret that, as a young man, my father
could not settle down and hold on to the job in the family rice wholesale
business in Chayang township. The informant runs the tongue over his
lips, lights up a cigarette and begins to tell the story. ‘All of the older folk
know this about your father,’ he says. When told to take over the business,
the son did not say no, but was lavish with excuses. He had just finished
high school, and he wanted to find work in a town further away—to learn
the rice trade, to pick up the experience, in the way of preparing to run
the family shop. ‘Maybe because he was your grandmother’s favourite,
that’s why he could shrug off the family responsibility,’ the informant
says. For a few years he was free to knock about and enjoyed the pleasures
of the small towns. The wandering lust satiated, he eventually returned to
Chayang, took over the rice wholesaler and made it a success. In his midtwenties, he was on the move again, though more responsibly. He left the
business to his young brother and went to Malaya where he took over his
grandfather’s pawn shop and herbal business. What the informant tells, I
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MOVING STORY
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don’t know, seems a jumble of gossip, the fantasy about the South Seas
and the projection of youthful freedom denied to most people.
Actually I have heard this before from my mother, though she was
more careful with the words. As a boy, she told me, my father was often
‘moody’—the cover-all term that speaks of idleness, not listening to the
elders, bad temper, skipping classes and playing with the neighbour’s kids
till late in the afternoon. My grandmother, keen to say good things about
her favourite son, thought otherwise: these were an adolescent’s problems, he would come around and wait until he grew up. She was proved
right. Among his business associates in Malaysia, he was famous for his
independent streak, he liked to do things his own way and rarely took
advice from anyone. With this character, he often turned to bold adventure and made it a success. Among his many projects—the making of
a Tiger Balm imitation, the sale of the drug streptomycin across the
counter—his most profitable was the importing of herbal extracts from
China. Bottled and preserved in alcohol, it caused a scandal among the
traditionalists who thought the extract would diminish the healing power,
and the alcohol would disturb the qi in a patient. Still, the extract proved
a great success: it was modern and convenient, and retained its efficacy.
Confident of his investment, he made himself a major shareholder of the
import company he started and made a healthy return.
There are at least a couple of points to my mother’s story. Her husband
may have been reckless, but his true temperament was cautious with a
large dose of circumspection. The ‘moodiness,’ which he exhibited plenty
of in their marital life, had become a source of business innovation, and
the reason for his commercial success.
My mother came from a family of small landholders across the Sanhe
River from Zhang Chun village. She and my father had an arranged
marriage. Listening to her, you note the practical sense that had been
injected into the traditional institution of matrimony. A wife gave a man
stability and helped define his life’s purpose and responsibility. It had
worked—as far as a son could know his parents’ intimate relationship.
The marriage had helped realize his long-held plan. My father would stay
in Nanyang to run his businesses, while my mother, together with my
grandmother held down the fort in Zhang Chun village and farmed the
land and looked after an extended family. My parents’ marriage was a
transnational marriage of its time. The periodic separation brought difficulties. It was said that during his stay in Malaya my father had a liaison
with a young, modern woman, a primary school teacher. He had rented a
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14
S. YAO
small flat and the two had moved in and lived together. The affair ended
before my mother’s arrival, and with the reunion she eventually forgave
him. She took it as a dark spot in their otherwise happy marriage, and a
less forgivable element of her husband’s uneven temperament.
Bu an ding
When relating the family tale, my mother had used the phrase, bu an ding,
meaning unstable, unsettled and lack of calm. Bu is all negative, you add
it to a word or a phrase to denote a state of lack or absence. Bu an is the
dearth of stability or harmony. Jingshen is something between spirit and
morale, so that jingshen bu an suggests a person’s poor motivation, lack
of drive. Being fidgety, is, more colloquially, zuoli bu an ding, ‘cannot
sit or stand still.’ Note that the negative implication of ‘being unsettled,’
bu an ding, is all embracing; it concerns a certain deficiency in spirit and
personal attitude, as well as poor bodily posture. In a sense, the state of
being settled is a matter of inner virtue as much as of the manifestation
of the body.
In the Chinese tradition, the harmonious partnership of inner calm and
bodily movement was best found in travelling. Departures and wanderings
had been the stuff of classical poetry. Here is the Tang poet Du Fu (712–
770) and his lavish lyricism in the poem Hou I , To Travel Again.
I remember the temple, this route I’ve travelled before,
I recall the bridge as I cross it again.
It seems the hills and rivers have been waiting,
The flowers and willows all are selfless now.
The field is sleek and vivid, thin mist shines,
On soft sand, the sunlight’s colour shows it’s late.
All the traveller’s sorrow fades away,
What better place to rest than this?18
Journeys, even in recollection, are redemptive. They put you in touch
with nature (‘It seems the hills and rivers have been waiting’), and do
away with the anguish and the ambitions of one’s earthly life (‘All the
traveller’s sorrow fades away’). And each journey is taken for its own sake.
There is no gawking at the mountains or the watery scene, but meditation: the silent ‘taking in’ of the transcendental, of what the eyes do not
see. In the search for stillness, what better way to grasp the quietude of
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MOVING STORY
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the mind and body than death itself, as the ending (‘What better place to
rest than this?’) insinuates.
My father was given to coasting—in his youth he had defied his
parents and wandered off on his own. While he may have been giving
over to his inner prompting, there were, in his adult life, other forces
and circumstances. Colonial Malaya encouraged immigration and allowed
entries of merchants, capitalists and indentured labourers. All manner
of people travelled between the colony and the ‘sources of migration.’
My parents’ circumstances were perhaps unique, what with the Communist revolution and the persecution. Viewed this way, my father’s inner
nature—his partiality for journeying—was at one with some solid realities
in Malaya and the People’s Republic. The story of his various undertakings is remarkable, yet common and unexceptional. All migrants have
faced social and political upheavals, and many have followed the footsteps of those in the past who made departures and journeys. Then there
was the petite capitalist existence of my parents. With the ubiquitous
shophouses in Southeast Asia, in Malaysia, each is a place of work and
a place of living. The culture of petite capitalists or petite bourgeoisie
prizes independence above other virtues. It is heartening to read James
Scott who praises their sense of autonomy and views them as ‘anarchist
heroes’ fighting for freedom against the state and its public bureaucracies.
As potential anarchists, as fellow travellers to the Phoenicians, the Arabs,
the Venetians, the Chinese petite capitalists showed plenty of the spirit of
self-reliance in running their shophouses. I know this of my parents: their
social and cultural horizon extended beyond the shop; their preoccupation was not with economic improvement alone. With their inner spirit
and social circumstances, it is not too much to think they had, like the
merchant-diaspora before them, contributed to the opening of the world.
Notes
1. On the use of Nanyang, Malaya, Malaysia, see Author’s Note.
2. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 45–46.
3. George Steiner, Preface, After Babel: Aspects of Language and
Translation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 edition, p.
xii.
4. Ibid.
5. George Steiner, After Babel, 1975, p. 46.
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S. YAO
6. Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese. London: Routledge, 2001,
p. 89.
7. Allen Chun, “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity
as Culture as Identity.” Boundary 2, 23 (2), 1996, pp. 111–38.
8. Shih, Shu-mei, “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of
Cultural Production.” In Sinophone Studies, edited by Shu-mei
Shih, 25–42. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 32.
9. Wang Gungwu, “Greater China and the Chinese Overseas.” The
China Quarterly, 136, 1993, pp. 926–48.
10. Ibid., p. 940.
11. Ibid.
12. Wang Gungwu, “A Single Chinese Diaspora? Some Historical
Reflection.” In Imagining the Chinese Diaspora: Two Australian
Perspectives, edited by Annette Shun-Wah and Gungwu Wang.
Canberra: Centre for the Study of the Chinese Diaspora, 1999,
p. 15.
13. Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten
Twentieth Century. New York: Random House, 2014.
14. Ibid., p. 25.
15. Ibid.
16. Joseph Roth, Report from a Parisian Paradise, translated by
Michael Hofmann. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004, p. 100.
17. Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, translated by Michael Hofmann.
New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 10–11.
18. Du Fu, The Selected Poems of Du Fu, translated by Burton Watson.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 93.
Bibliography
Ang, Ien. 2001. On Not Speaking Chinese. London: Routledge.
Chun, Allen. 1996. “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as
Culture as Identity.” Boundary 2 23 (2): 111–38.
Du Fu. 2002. The Selected Poems of Du Fu. Translated by Burton Watson. New
Work: Columbia University Press.
Gungwu, Wang. 1993. “Greater China and the Chinese Overseas.” The China
Quarterly 136: 926–48.
Judt, Tony. 2014. Reappraisals: Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. New York: Random House.
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1
MOVING STORY
17
Roth, Joseph. 2001. The Wandering Jews. Translated by Michael Hofmann. New
York and London: W.W. Norton.
———. 2004. Report from a Parisian Paradise. Translated by Michael Hofmann.
New York: W. W. Norton.
Shih, Shu-mei. 2012. “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural
Production.” In Sinophone Studies, edited by Shu-mei Shih, 25–42. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New
York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1992. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Wang, Gungwu. 1999. “A Single Chinese Diaspora? Some Historical Reflection.”
In Imagining the Chinese Diaspora: Two Australian Perspectives, edited by
Annette Shun-Wah and Gungwu Wang, 1–17. Canberra: Centre for the Study
of the Chinese Diaspora.
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