Photo courtesy of Cynthia Muak.
(This talk is open to the public.)
Known for their independence, loyalty and devotion, majies (or amahs) were domestic servants who raised several generations of Singaporeans, including former president Ong Teng Cheong as well as the present prime minister and his siblings.
Join us at this talk where historian, Ang Chin Siew will explore the connection between Confucian ideals of “female,” Cantonese patriarchy, the majies links to silk production in the Canton Delta, their resistance to marriage, their roles as female sons, and arrival in Singapore, Penang, and Hong Kong as domestic servants. The speaker will conclude by tracing these links to the death houses that once lined Sago Lane in Chinatown.
Date: Saturday, 13 July 2019
Time: 2-4pm
Venue: Mary’s Kafe, 20 Bendemeer Road, Singapore 339914
Fees: TPAS Members: $15 / Non-Members: $25
Includes tea/coffee and snacks by Madam Mary Gomes, author of The Eurasian Cookbook (2003).
REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED TO ATTEND THIS TALK.
To register, please email: events@peranakan.org.sg
Closing date: 28 June 2019
NOTE: A minimum of 25 participants is required for this talk to proceed.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Ang Chin Siew recently completed her PhD in History at Nanyang Technological University. She did her undergraduate work at the University of Missouri, USA, where she studied film history.
Her postgraduate work changed to Museum Studies at the University of Queensland. Since then, museum theory is her absorbing interest. Her doctoral dissertation is an interdisciplinary reappraisal of the institutional history of the Raffles Museum, Singapore.
It examines the museum’s founding, spaces, methods, and function against a backdrop of British colonial politics and military fiscalism, its establishment under a program initiated by Thomas Stamford Raffles, his agenda, eighteenth/nineteenth-century ideas of race and racial differences, and British colonial thought and collecting.