loyalty and nationality—are important and worthy of study, they will not be explored in this book.
Descendants of both Huashang and Huagong are found today throughout the countries of Southeast Asia where popular lore as well as the memories of descendant families trumpet tales of once penniless males who came to “settle down and bring up local families” (Wang Gungwu, 1991: 5). Through what is called chain or serial migration, pioneers arrived first, then sent information about new opportunities to those back home, which then spurred additional migration from their home villages. The ongoing arrival of related individuals helped maintain connections between the original homeland and new locations. Indeed, for many, their hearts remained back in China, and they saw themselves as Chinese in a foreign land. Yet, circumstances often meant that dreams of returning home were thwarted, and sojourners became settlers, forced to “bear hardship and endure hard work,” chiku nailao, as the common phrase ruefully states it, dashing their prospects of “a glorious homecoming in splendid robes,” yijin huanxiang, also yijin ronggui, as someone who had made off well and could have a proud homecoming. To do otherwise, according to Ta Chen, “his unrecognized distinctions might be compared with a gorgeous costume worn by its proud owner through the streets on a dark night” (1940: 109).
While this book highlights the homes of Chinese who had done reasonably well in the places they ventured to, it is important to keep in mind that most Chinese and their descendants lived and continue to live in much more modest homes in these places. Significant numbers of arrivals and their descendants, of course, 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 without ever “settling down” or dingju (cf Warren, 1981, 1986, 1993, 2008). Voiceless in life, they left illegible traces of their subsistence lives.
Old gravestones, such as these found along the sprawling slopes of Bukit Cina (Chinese Hill) in Malacca, Malaysia, which is the largest Chinese cemetery outside China, indicate the name of the ancestral village of the deceased.
Homelands in China
While it is common for outsiders to describe migrants from China in terms of the province of their origin, most migrants, in fact, traditionally identified home as a smaller subdivision, as a county or village. In southeastern China, river basins and coastal lowlands, circumscribed by surrounding hills, mountains, and the ocean, formed well-understood units of local culture and identity, shared cultural traits that were affirmed with the population speaking a common dialect. For Chinese, the awareness of origins in terms of a native place has traditionally been as significant as consciousness of the connections to forebears via their surname and lineage. Indeed, old gravestones and ancestral tablets memorialize place-based identity even when the deceased was many generations removed from the family’s homeland. Children and grandchildren born in an adopted homeland, moreover, inherit the native place of their immigrant parents and grandparents. Native-place associations, called tongxiang hui, and lineage or clan associations, tongxing hui, traditionally served as ready reminders of the two most meaningful relationships Chinese individuals had with their broader world. The place-name origins of migrants thus signify more than a link to an administrative division, more than a reference to a mere location. Rather, native places connote a shared cultural context that clearly separates one migrant group from another.
Until the end of the eighteenth century, a majority of the emigrants from China originated from Fujian, a province with a rugged coast-line and a tradition of building boats for fishing and seafaring. The encyclopedic Shan Hai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), an eclectic two-millennia-old compendium of the known world, states: “Fujian exists in the sea with mountains to the north and west”, Min zai haizhong, qi xibei you shan. With limited arable land to support a growing population, the Fujianese turned to the neighboring sea, using small boats for fishing and seagoing junks for distant trade to the Nanyang where they exchanged manufactured wares for food staples. “The fields are few but the sea is vast; so men have made fields from the sea” is how an 1839 gazetteer from Fujian’s port city of Xiamen viewed the maritime opportunities afforded its struggling population during the last century of the Qing dynasty (Cushman, 1993: iii).
Referred to collectively as Hokkien, the local pronunciation of the place-name Fujian, the homelands of migrants can be readily subdivided in terms of at least three main dialects found in areas to the south of the Min River in this complex and fragmented province. Called Minnan or “south of the Min River” dialects, each is a variant of the others and is centered on one of the area’s three major ports: Quanzhou, Xiamen, and Zhangzhou. Although the three dialects are mutually intelligible to some degree, and are spoken in geographic locations that are relatively near to one another, the speakers of these dialects traditionally have seen themselves as belonging to distinct local cultures with dissimilar mores. In neighboring Guangdong province, another source region for significant numbers of migrants to the Nanyang, are other dialect-based communities: Chaozhou (Teochew, also Teochiu) and Hainan hua (Hainanese), which are also in the family of Minnan dialects, as well as Kejia (Hakka) and, farther west, those who speak Guangdong hua (Cantonese). One characteristic shared by all of these groups is that they occupy areas either adjacent to or connected by short rivers reaching the Taiwan Strait that connects the East China Sea and the South China Sea.
These simple plans reveal the characteristic forms of residences found throughout Fujian. The white areas indicate the variety of tianjing, skywells that open up the buildings to air, light, and water.
Elongated two-storey urban residences in Guangdong include multiple skywells, narrow corridors, steep stairs, and stacked rooms.
Along the Fujian–Guangdong coast, there are countless areas that are known in the vernacular as qiaoxiang, literally “home township of persons living abroad.” The term qiaoxiang was used in the nineteenth century to apply not only to sojourners, temporary residents who were abroad, but also to those who had been away for generations. Those Chinese who left China were referred to as Huaqiao, a capacious term often translated as “overseas Chinese,” but essentially meaning “Chinese living abroad.” “Overseas Chinese” itself historically has been a descriptor of considerable elasticity, applying not only to those temporarily abroad but also to those who are Chinese by ethnicity but have no actual connection with China. Guiqiao, indicating those Chinese who returned from abroad, and qiaojuan, indicating the dependants of Chinese who are abroad, are expressions still heard today. Qiaoxiang, as “emigrant communities,” traditionally were bound by social, economic, and psychological bonds in which emigration became a fundamental and ongoing aspect of country life. While poverty and strife may have induced earlier out-migration, over time migration chains create a tradition of going abroad that propels outward movement. In some ways, overseas sites arose as outposts of the qiaoxiang itself, linked to it by back and forth movements of people and remittances of funds to sustain those left behind. Indeed, as Lynn Pan reminds us, “emigrant communities are not moribund. The men might be gone but, collectively and cumulatively, they send plenty of money back. Many home societies have a look of prosperity about them, with opulent modern houses paid for with remittances by emigrants who have made good abroad” (2006: 30).
As later chapters will reveal, individual qiaoxiang are linked with specific locations in Southeast Asia, indeed throughout the world. Emigrants from the Siyi or Four Districts of Guangdong province on the west side of the Pearl River, for example, favored migrating to the goldfields and railroad
