(This is a monthly letter from Baba Colin Chee to members and friends of the Association.)
Dear Babas and Nyonyas
Peranakan Identity: Who am I?
5 June 2019: On this blazing hot day at the Istana’s Bicentennial Open House, a gentleman came by The Peranakan Association Singapore’s (TPAS) stall. He asked one of our volunteers: How can I tell someone is a Peranakan?
It would not have been lost on the enquiring gentleman that he was standing in front of our joint stall with the Peranakan Indian (Chitty Melaka) Association Singapore.
He could have been bemused. It was manned by Chinese- and Indian-looking nyonyas garbed in multi-hued sarong kebayas, speaking fluent Baba Malay and English. Neither would he have missed the men, too. They wore splendidly hand-drawn and block printed batik shirts.
Indeed, the Peranakan identity has defied definition for over 70 years, since the Japanese Occupation. Not least because attempts to define it often stir up deep emotions, biases and confusion that wise men have not rushed in where angels fear to tread.
Pre-war and Post-war Peranakans
Why the Japanese Occupation as my marker?
Because the Peranakan Chinese were accorded a high status by their British rulers before World War Two. The colonial masters looked to them as community leaders to help govern the migrant “China-born” Chinese masses and as adroit planters, traders, financiers and businessmen.
These Peranakan Chinese – Babas (for the men) and Nyonyas (for the women) – were categorised as Straits Chinese as they were born in the British-controlled Straits Settlements of Singapore, Melaka and Penang to families which have lived in these port towns for many generations.
After the Straits Settlements became British Crown colonies in 1867, the Straits Chinese positioned themselves as the King’s Chinese, faithful subjects of the British Empire.
This re-positioning was perhaps no coincidence because, during this same period, the migrant China-born Chinese started to grow in number. These sinkeks (or newcomers in the Hokkien dialect) were also becoming a serious source of economic competition.
The King’s Chinese, setting themselves apart, were easily recognisable.
They spoke mostly Baba Malay at home (Peranakan Chinese are recorded to have mixed Chinese-Malay parentage generations back), Chinese dialects in business, and were equally at home in English in official and social circles.
By the late 1800s and early 1900s, they were well-schooled in English and formed the cream of local society. They were likely the dominant “local elites” partying away in Victorian society. Their families became extremely wealthy from business and nursed their wealth and influence through endogamous marriages.
After the war, however, the Babas and Nyonyas declined in number and social standing as a community. The wealth of many leading Peranakan Chinese families was mostly destroyed by a pernicious war. Many of their male scions “disappeared” too. As the King’s Chinese, they were a default target for the Japanese military occupiers.
What Defines A Peranakan?
When I asked our General Committee members, who hold very strong views on the subject, “What defines a Peranakan Chinese?”, some replied by posing these questions to help flesh out the issue:
- If I don’t speak Baba Malay, am I Peranakan?
- I am not Taoist or Buddhist and do not observe the festivals and rites of ancestral worship among others, am I really Peranakan?
- I did not own any Peranakan jewellery or kebayas or porcelain or kueh moulds – does this make me less Peranakan?
- If I have been eating Nyonya food at home but know nothing else of Peranakan culture, am I Peranakan?
- Only one of my grandparents or parents is Peranakan. Am I Peranakan?
- If I am Peranakan, can I compose new pantons, create new recipes, experiment with new kebaya designs, create new homeware designs and applications, and evolve established adat (custom) into new customs?
- If I don’t enjoy or embrace Peranakan values and culture even though I am born into a Peranakan family, does this make me less of a Peranakan?
- What If I am passionately in love with Peranakan things and practise their customs but am not born into such a family, am I Peranakan?
- Must I have Chinese and Malay DNA to be a Peranakan?
- If my genetic DNA tests tell me I have wholly Chinese DNA, am I a Peranakan?
(Please feel free to write in if you have similar questions about Peranakan identity. We would like to hear from you.)
The last question on the list came about in 2019 when TPAS organised the Peranakan Identity Forum, partnering the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS). At the forum, the institute revealed its aggregated findings of 177 blood samples received from mostly TPAS’s Peranakan members for GIS’s genetic DNA profiling.
GIS’s tests determined that 90 per cent of the blood samples from the volunteer donors had averaged 90 per cent Chinese DNA and 10 per cent Malay DNA. This average data point is not a surprise.
The Peranakan Chinese have, historically, a well-documented mixed bloodline in Southeast Asia especially on the female side. Since the 15th century, Chinese traders came to Southeast Asia and many settled down with Malay women (Balinese, Batak, Bugis, Orang Asli and others) from the region.
The remaining 10 percent of the blood samples, a significant segment, showed 100 per cent Chinese DNA.
This raises interesting questions that require extended study. It also corroborates declarations of some Peranakan families that they have only Chinese names in their respective generational family trees.
Peranakan Identity – National, Ethnic or Cultural?
Let us deal with the easy one first. The national identity of Peranakan Chinese born in Singapore or who have adopted Singapore as their home is not in doubt. They are all Singaporeans.
However, any discussion about the ethnic and cultural identities of a Peranakan Chinese has always been contentious and fraught with divisiveness!
There are among us Babas and Nyonyas who are proudly Peranakan. Award-winning Singapore author, Nyonya Josephine Chia, a dear friend, is one of them. She has written persuasively, “Unfortunately, for me, my identity card (IC) says I am Chinese. But I personally would rejoice if my IC says Peranakan, not Chinese.”
With good reasons: “Peranakans fall in between the cracks of our traditional notions of race. Many of us in Singapore dress and talk like the Malays, and we struggle to identify with the Chinese. But we eat pork and celebrate the Lunar New Year so we don’t belong to the Malay or Muslim camp either.”
Then there is this unspoken but-always-there unhelpful debate that has been going on between the Peranakan “jati” and Peranakan “chelop”.
The Peranakan “jati” take pride in their true-blue “purity”. Pure because they can trace their unbroken Peranakan roots several generations back on both sides of their parents. Some of them use the term Peranakan “chelop” dismissively to describe those who are partly Peranakan, because one parent is non-Peranakan.
To the “chelop”, Peranakan “jati” is an oxymoron. How can mixed bloodlines be “pure”?
Now, suddenly, we have new rempah – Peranakans with 100 per cent Chinese DNA – thrown into the kuali!!!
I hope you now understand how the subject of Peranakan Chinese identity can be so dissonant, so fluid, so perplexing, and how it seriously drives at the core of the questions I posed earlier in this letter.
An Ethnocultural Approach
TPAS takes an open and inclusive ethnocultural approach to Peranakan identity.
The vast majority of Peranakan Chinese have always identified themselves as racially Chinese.
Because, for the longest time, they have stayed close to their Chinese patriarchal-centred norms and mores – their names, reliance on the zupu to trace their lineage, traditions, festivals and rites, ceramics, motifs and symbolisms.
Their sartorial preferences as well, until they transitioned into the baju panjang, sarong kebaya and batik preferred by the region’s Malay women and men, Shanghainese cheongsams for the nyonyas, and European gowns and suits for the nyonyas and babas.
Peranakan Chinese were mainly Taoists and Buddhists. But many have cast away their traditional religious beliefs and converted to Christianity. Many others have also become secular and open to global modernity.
Never mind that Peranakans (especially the elders) do not speak Mandarin. They feel very Chinese. Yet, they also know they are not as Chinese as they feel they are – proverbially, orang Cina bukan Cina (Chinese but not Chinese).
They speak an incredibly musical and unique creole mother-tongue, Baba Malay. It has been in decline since the war but some members of their community are bravely trying to revive it. They deserve encouragement!
Their furniture and jewellery embrace a fabulously extravagant melange of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Arab and European design elements. Their extraordinary food culture is born of a mixed and rich Malay-Chinese heritage which seems at first implausible but invariably whets one’s appetite.
The Peranakan Chinese Identity
In other words, even though Babas and Nyonyas consider themselves ethnically Chinese, we are lucky inheritors of a dynamic, truly multi-dimensional and eclectic heritage which has steadily and constantly evolved over 600 years to what it is today. It must continue to adapt and stay relevant to the times.
Our heritage manifests the collective memory of who and what we are, and, looking to the future, who and what we will be.
In the end, our approach to identity must be inclusive and open.
If our Chinese forefathers had a closed mindset, were arrogant, and were not mutually respectful of the other communities around them, there would not be any Babas and Nyonyas or Peranakan culture as we know it. (Please read my letter of 30 October 2020 on Peranakan culture).
And if we do not stop this navel-gazing about our identity, one day we will fall flat on our faces. Imagine still reading your mobile phone while crossing the road!
In knowing who and what we are, we can now look ahead, keep moving forward, have fun – as our ancestors did and as we do, and keep our culture alive and flourishing by becoming active, curious, creative and courageous practitioners of it.
We must stop setting rules and standards dictating what our culture must be. We should let experiments and ideas bloom. They will eventually find their own flowering strength and place in the sun, or wither by the wayside. What bears fruit will eventually embellish our heritage.
I close my musings by quoting an insightful new acquaintance, Nyonya Lim Swee Kim, who has obviously been reflecting on the subject: “Humbly, our identity is what we know and where we feel we belong. My view is that we have many different shades to being a Peranakan and it is a strength. This diversity gives our culture much richness, thus we have been able to bring abundance to our sarong prints, kebaya embroideries, pantons, our delicious food dishes, all of which demonstrate our inclusiveness and also mutual respect for others around us.”
Kamsiah, Nyonya Kim.
It has been a very challenging 2020. I have never felt so trapped in a dark tunnel in my seventy-one years of life until our Prime Minister’s confidence-restoring address to the nation on 14 December 2020.
That said, Covid-19 has also unexpectedly shone a peculiar light on certain aspects of our lives that we should care about and nurture – our relationships with God, family and friends. Even our neighbours. Thankfully, I have rediscovered these things that really matter above all.
Thank you for your patience and endurance if you are still with me!!
May the New Year of the Ox (my sign!), bearing patience, calm and strength, be a tremendous blessing to all of you and your loved ones! God bless!
Colin Chee
Keeping the Culture Alive
31 December 2020
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