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
