The Peranakans are the Straits Chinese. I have now lived over a year of my days among the Peranakans, first in George Town on Prince of Wales Island and then in Old Town further down the coast. The Chinese have been in this part of the world – the Dutch Maritime – for many hundreds of years. Mostly they were from the provinces of southern China and came here for trade and for tin mining. They brought with them a rich cultural blend of Taoist, Boodhist, and Confucian traditions which have in time been modified and further enriched by local customs and the social adjustments necessary to survive and thrive in a new land. Old Town, indeed, is a late medieval Chinese colony in South East Asia, an entreport and advance outpost for Chinese maritime trade. It was brought into the Chinese orbit by the great eunuch Cheng Ho, who remains a hero of the Peranakans. In many ways the Peranakans are more authentically Chinese than the Chinese. Chinese culture in mainland China was devastated by the Maoist revolution. The traditions, the clans, the lineages, the food: these are better preserved among the Peranakans than they are in mainland China. I saw this for myself. The cultural poverty of post-revolution China is striking. This is why I am so fond of the Peranakans: they’re genuine and haven’t (yet) been worked over by the communists. (The Party is working on it, just as they are infiltrating and bullying communities throughout the Chinese diaspora.)
On a personal note, my mentor – that great defender of the Western Tradition - the late Dr Roger Sworder, married a Chinese woman, and thus married into the Chinese world, and I spent the 25+ years of our acquaintance hearing of his love of Chinese culture and family life and being chided for not knowing Chinese culture myself first hand, an inadequacy in his opinion. So I do like to think he would approve of my decision to dally in these Chinese-majority cities along the Malacca Straits and to live among the Peranakans.
They are also known - loosely synonymous - as the Baba Nyonya. It’s a funny name. Baba means father and Nyonya means mother. So Baba Nyonya means something like “the mums and dads”. Hardworking, astute, valuing education, the Baba Nyonya became very prosperous and built a beautiful high culture of distinctive architecture, attire, elaborate manners and cuisine. As readers will see from previous posts to this blog, I am especially fond of the architecture, the so-called Sino-Portuguese. The wealthy Baba Nyonya took diverse architectural influences – especially from the Portuguese, since they live side-by-side with descendants of the Portuguese colonialists, the so-called Kristangs – and built beautiful homes. Many are well-preserved in the Straits cities and towns, all the way up into Siam, while many more are in various states of decay or renovation. Below, some pictures of Baba Nyonya buildings:
And Baba Nyonya in traditional attire:
But there is another feature of the Peranakans, pertinent to this blog, that appeals very much to me (and a point on which Roger Sworder - that British-hating Englishman – would surely disagree.) Namely that the Peranakans, the Straits Chinese, the Baba Nyonya, did business with the British, supported the British, and what’s more, liked the British, and are an advertisement for the benign manifestations of the much-maligned British Empire. They regarded the British – of all the peoples that came and went in this busy part of the world – as civilized like themselves. They felt a kinship to British manners, and customs, and etiquette and formality. Their bond with the British was much deeper than merely economic opportunity. Much more than the Malays and other ethnic groups in British Malaya the Chinese engaged with and absorbed the culture of the British Empire and were more deeply Anglocized. They acquired the English language and took British customs.
It is my observation that Chinamen make good Englishmen. In fact, I’m often of the opinion that they make better Englishmen than the English. This might be true of Indians as well, but it is certainly true of the Peranakans. My predicament, rehearsed in these pages in many posts, is that I live in a sort of neo-orientalist quandary, because rather than volarizing the post-colonial identitarian authenticity that is all the rage today, I love these East-West hybrids, noble children of a benign British imperialism. To exaggerate: I don’t much care for the English English, or for the Chinese Chinese, but in those places where those cultures have cross-fertilized the result has been greater than its component parts. This flies in the face of the post-colonial angst we are all supposed to feel. The Peranakans, in fact, are not poor victims of colonialist oppression: they sided with the British against Malay nationalists and resisted Malay independence. They were very happy with the British Empire and to this day have a positive view of the British as colonialists (let’s not compare them to the far less benign Dutch and Portuguese!) When you put aside your post-colonial orthodoxy, it is never very hard to find people on the ground, in Asia and in India too, who speak well of the British period. In India it was the Sihks who sided with the British, amongst others – and I believe Sihk culture is richer for those British affinities. In the Dutch maritime, the Straits Chinese found affinity with the British and think of the British period as one of peace, progress and prosperity. The post-colonialists – not least the Maoists from Peking – have shouted these perspectives down.
There is no avoiding the fact that the Peranakans are past their prime, though. They backed the wrong side in post-war history. They made good investments, and once their wealth was prodigious, but increasingly they get by on the tourist trade. Malays go to Old Town to see the quaint Baba Nyonya traditions in the quaint Baba Nyonya museums. Museums, of course, are always a bad sign. They are places where you preserve dead things. In post-Independence Malaya the Peranakans increasingly occupy a museum culture. On the other hand, bus loads of middle class mainland Chinese travel to these old Chinese maritime outposts these days, many of them on a thoroughly healthy quest for the cultural roots destroyed by the Party in the Chinese homeland. In particular, the clan houses here preserve family trees that have been otherwise lost (vandalized) during the Cultural Revolution. Chinese Chinese come here in their identitarian search for authentic roots. The same is true of the Temples, which are living institutions with unbroken traditions. Religious Chinese come here on pilgrimages to venerable shrines and to observe the festivals in the traditional (or at least more traditional) way.
One of the joys of living among the Peranakans, therefore, is that I am not obliged to indulge in post-colonial intellectual masochism. I’II have to be a neo-orientalist and take the moral blackmail that prevails in Western intellectual discourse in my stride. I happen to like many of the products of colonialism, and I am drawn to the cases of hybrid vigour where East and West have met and flourished in synthesis. I love places of historic East-West engagement. The Peranakans themselves, let us recall, were colonialists and established their outposts on the land of Mahometan Sultanates, and they have lived – not always easily – side by side with Muselmen all these centuries. So there is also a fascinating Chinese/Islam tension abroad in such cities. In Goldsmith Street in Old Town the mosque is virtually side-by-side with the main Chinese temple. And a Hindoo Temple, as well. Actually, to give them credit, this was the idea of the Dutch. One of the early Dutch administrations made land grants on Goldsmith Street to the Hindoos, Peranakans and Mahometans, for places of worship and made them all live side-by-side. This flies in the face of the standard mad-Calvinist-fanatics narrative, but the Dutch here seem to have been generally tolerant of the non-Christian religions and gave active support to non-Christian religious communities. The whole thing is much more complex and nuanced than the post-colonial whine-fest allows.
Did I mention the furniture? There is the exquisite Baba Nyonya furniture featuring mother-of-pearl, but the antique stores are full of Chinese-British antiques, Chinese domestic furnishings crafted in British styles. The truly great thing about the Peranakans – it is true of the diaspora Chinese everywhere – is their extraordinary talent for integration while assiduously maintaining their own traditions and their Chinese identity. They are very, very good at it. The chain of transmission is the family. The Maoist’s one-child policy was designed to smash exactly that in the mainland. Contemporary identity politics is retarded. It consists of all sorts of people saying that they cannot possibly live among anybody except their own kind because to do so would destroy their traditions. Boo hoo. History is jam-packed with people who move somewhere other than the soil from which they were born. Indigeny is nothing if it is not portable. The trick is to be like the Chinese.. They make good citizens wherever though go, but they keep the vital aspects of their culture intact, and very often it thrives in new ways in new soil. They welcome compatible influences. That is what living traditions do. The alt-Right identitarians seem to be admitting that their beloved homeland traditions are like delicate orchids that can only survive in climate-controlled greenhouses. It’s a museum mentality writ large.
It’s not only the alt-Right, though. When I was in Australia recently I was talking to a homosexual man – an activist assuredly Left-wing in his politics. He was in an identitarian flap. He said he wanted to live among “his people” in “his culture” and this was simply impossible in the pervading homophobia of the West. He had some plan to join an exclusively gay utopian community somewhere. I was skeptical. I said, “Really? You cannot find a way to be a happy, well-adjusted and fulfilled gay man in contemporary Australian society?” Of course he could, but to say so is to belittle his carefully cultivated victimhood. The race, it seems to me, goes to those who don’t indulge in this sort of disabling self-pity. The race goes to cultures who can say, our culture is strong enough to live side-by-side and co-operatively with others without being essentially compromised. Identitarianism is just: “Everybody back to their bunkers!” The challenge, rather, is to have robust traditions that can remain intact while prospering in changing conditions. The Peranakans are a model of dogged tradition and free market pragmatism under all the various modes of colonial administration. Except the Japanese. The Straits Chinese fared badly under the Japanese occupation. There’s another post-colonial irony not lost on the Peranakans: their fellow Asians treated them much, much worse than the European white devils ever did.
These days a person of my interests and persuasions can only live comfortably – in exile – in places such as these where the intellectual environment is not comprehensively poisoned with post-colonial Marxist perspectives. So I am, in fact, as bad as any other identiatarian, including my homosexual friend mentioned above. The identitarian premise that birds of a feather flock together is not mistaken. The Chinese form enclaves. Old Town is a Chinese enclave. Human beings like to live among those with whom they share an identity. Granted. But a Chinese enclave is not a fortress hostile to the land it occupies. It is a hub for the conduct of commerce and engagement with the surrounding culture. I am interested in how it works. Masters of successful cultural negotiation. It is a great opportunity for me to live among the Straits Chinese for an extended period. (There are other rich cultures here too, notably the Tamils and Chetti.)
Of course, they are now negotiating with modernity. Like everybody. That is the main game. Probably, tourism is the greatest threat Peranakan culture has ever faced, all the more so because it is increasingly their main source of income. Already, parts of Old Town and thereabouts are taking on the atmosphere of a theme park. But there is still reason to be confident in their powers of adaptation, the Straits Chinese. They are inventive and resilient and smart and hardworking, and these virtues are fostered from generation to generation in the Chinese way. For my part I want to live in an intellectual and social environment that isn’t a cesspool seething with confected guilt and resentment. Which is to say nowhere near an Australian university. My crime is wanting to study East/West interaction through some lens other than the prevailing post-colonial critique. Try publishing that in an academic journal. There really are people in the world today who would bulldoze the pyramids of Gaza because they were built by slaves. I take it personally. There are some people who want to make my love of Dim Sum breakfast and Chinese tea politically problematic. To hell with them. The Dim Sum place near here, in fact, has been serving breakfast every morning since 1948, and so their connection to the British period is unbroken. White Anglo-Saxon imperialist running dogs like me are always welcome. You know the Chinese. They watch you carefully. Your Western manners, your Western clothes, your Western ways. They’ll take what they like and make good use of it and not be a single bit less Chinese for doing so.
Haper McAlpine Black
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