My third-generation Hokkien Chinese-Malaysian mum was born in Malaya, three years before its independence from Britain. Having the onerous position of being the third-born child and oldest girl in a family of twelve siblings, she grew up waking at 4am every day, going to the yard, killing a chicken and preparing it for her brothers and sisters. Later, having failed her Malay O-level and thus barred from nursing training in Malaysia, her Commonwealth status allowed her to get her qualification in Britain. She packed her bags, prayed to her ancestors the night before she left that she wouldn’t “fall in love with a white man,” and prepared to spend the next few years studying nursing in South London, before returning with her degree to work in Malaysia.
Apart from holidays, she wouldn’t return for over 30 years, having met my white British dad who was also studying to be a nurse. Of course, considering her prayers, this caused a great deal of grief in my family. After dating my dad for a while, my mum was told to end the relationship immediately. She did so, telling him that her family was more important but that they could remain “cycling and ping-pong friends.”
One day, whilst freewheeling down a hill together, she lost control, fell off, and landed directly on her chin. My dad said that when he picked her up he could see that her jaw had disappeared up into the rest of her face. She had it wired shut for three months, but my dad made her soup and milkshakes every day.
Hearing that this white guy seemed okay, my granddad gave them permission to marry, but informed my mum that if they ever got divorced, the family would disown her. They both retired from the NHS a couple of years ago and live in Malaysia now, where my dad is part of the family and my mum is finally warm and can stop bloody complaining about the bloody cold.
It wasn’t until I saw my mum trying to chat to a Malay person when I was seven that I realised she couldn’t speak the language all that well. It seems odd, to people living in Western countries with ethnic minority groups, that a third-generation descendant of immigrants wouldn’t be fluent in the main language of the country. Growing up in the Chinese area of Butterworth, near the island of Penang, she only knew other Chinese-Malaysians, and society was a bit of a Hokkien bubble. There was pressure, though, to learn either Malay or English. When the British left Malaysia in 1957, they helped write the new constitution, which stated that citizens had to be fluent in either English or Malay, instantly cutting off much of the huge Chinese population from their rights.
Mum got an A in English, making her choice, and off to London she flew, her education there instantly stymied by not being able to understand a word her Scottish teacher said.
A note on the names of my Aunties and Uncles: I call them numbered names in Chinese. I have Big Uncle, Uncles 2-5, Little Uncle and Uncle With No Number (he is my mum’s brother, but he was adopted away by my granddad at birth to my granddad’s brother, who had no sons, because of course that’s a tragedy that must be remedied by giving away your own), plus Aunties 2-4 and Little Auntie. My mum gets called Big Auntie by my cousins.
Sometimes, visits to Malaysia resembled scenes from some kind of mad Chinese soap opera. At some point in the mid-90s, it transpired that Third Auntie was being beaten by her husband. The family convinced her to leave him and my mum flew us all back home to sort things out. Third Auntie, my mum and Second Uncle went round her house to pack her stuff. Second Uncle was also born into the British Empire, later joining the Malaysian Communist Party and the Communist Insurgency War, which started in 1967. At this stage of his life he was a hardcore Buddhist, though he was allowed back into the country from exile in Thailand once a year. Third Auntie’s husband was at home when they arrived and realised immediately what they were up to.
He punched my former-guerilla-lieutenant uncle in the face and knocked him out cold, then grabbed a machete, cut off his ring finger, threw his finger at my mum and ran out the house. My mum, nursing skills taking over, put the finger in the freezer in case he wanted it back.
Third Auntie eventually went back to him, as Malaysian law decreed that the nine-fingered man would get the children in the divorce.
This visit was only about the second time I’d ever met Second Uncle, living in Thailand as he did. My family didn’t see him once during the nine years he lived in the jungle with the MCP. My mum told me of seeing military helicopters flying overhead, off to fight her brother while she was in the school playground, and that one time he supposedly survived by eating a tiger. The mostly-Chinese MCP was illegal under British rule, but during WW2 were the main Malaysian resistance force against the Japanese, after the Brits scarpered (for a great novel that includes action involving the MCP and a half-Chinese-Malaysian protagonist [we never get those!], see Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain).
Post-war, the British came back after the Japanese left, reclaiming what was never theirs in the first place. The MCP continued to push for independence from Britain and began some serious guerilla warfare known as the Malayan Emergency. My uncle joined a second attempt to oust the government, fighting throughout the 1970s with his wife. They now live happily in Thailand with their daughters.
My grandparents weren’t wealthy but in 1952, two years before my mum was born, my granddad won the lottery. He used the money to buy businesses – rubber plantations and textile factories mostly, as well as a lot of land in their village, which finally got electricity when my mum was 15, in 1969. Their house got the first TV in 1970, having everyone in town over to watch the World Cup. During my mum’s teenage years, though, he lost everything except for one factory because of “bad friends,” I am told. He and his sons slowly built their empire back up again.
On my first day of secondary school, I met Michelle. Our classmates laughed, saying we looked like identical twins. Her mum was Chinese-Malaysian, her parents both worked in the NHS and her granddad also came into a large sum of money only to lose it all again a few years later.
A few years ago, I met Leo, whose dad is Chinese-Malaysian from Penang. We swapped notes and his granddad had also won the lottery, bought businesses and then lost it all again a few years later. It isn’t a conversation that you expect to have three times in your life. I’ve met more half-Chinese-Malaysian people whose granddads won the lottery than those whose didn’t. I just wonder: are there any other half-Chinese-Malaysian descendants of lottery winners/losers out there? Get in touch. What did your granddads do with their money and did any of them manage to hang on to it?
A lot of economic power in Malaysia has been concentrated in the Chinese population (and of course the British). When the British left, they helped draft the controversial Article 153 of the Constitution, which gives “privileges” to the Malay population, ostensibly to help redress some of this economic imbalance. It says that business and educational interests of the bumiputra will be safeguarded. There has been so much debate about the Article, what it has achieved and whether it should now be scrapped.
Apart from retelling these stories, fiercely supporting the Malaysian Men’s Doubles Badminton team, and feeling obliged to “be more Chinese” because of guilt-tripping by my mum, I don’t know what I have to contribute to the whole mess. Growing up in my own bubble – a liberal, socialist British one – it’s difficult to judge what happens in Malaysia now (specifically when my family members do or say something eye-poppingly racist) without knowing everything the British did to meddle in that country’s affairs. I wish my auntie hadn’t told me she had to wait with me at a coach stop because it was a Malay area. I wish my mum hadn’t been told by a smiling estate agent last year that she couldn’t buy a flat in a new condo building because they were reserved for the bumiputra. My family is privileged because of their economic status. They aren’t, because of their political one. The legacies of the Empire are many.
Tags: biracial identity, colonialism, commonwealth day, domestic violence, malaysia, tan twan eng, winning the lottery
What a fantastic piece! For some reason, the part about running into more half-Chinese-Malaysians whose grandfathers won the lottery and lost the proceeds made me chuckle. There’s gotta be a back story on those lotteries.
ETA: I would be really curious to know if other diasporic Chinese communities are also as seemingly insular as the one your mother grew up in! From what I’ve read and heard from my own family, the Chinese communities in Viet Nam occupied a similar place of being separate from the rest of VN, but being relatively successful economically prior to community takeover. On the other hand, I’ve met folks who are ethnic Chinese from VN (or multiethnic, which would’ve been a scandal when my mom was growing up) and they seem comfortably multilingual.
With the disclaimer that I am neither Vietnamese nor an expert in the area, I’m not certain that the population is insular so much as it was segregated formally and informally by government policy and cultural forces. At one time, the Chinese Vietnamese controlled a large proportion of the Vietnamese economy, far out of proportion to their relative population. This is no longer true today, in part because the government eventually seized wealth, property and businesses and redistributed it to the “pure” Vietnamese people. Although I’m sure the mechanism and timing were different, this is also true in Indonesia as well. Having talked with Chinese Vientamese and Chinese Indonesians, I have to say that I find a lot of superficial similarities with the stereotyping and treatment of Jews in a lot of western countries.
No, that’s really helpful! I have not done much talking or research into this topic as a whole, and definitely not in an academic/policy sense. I do want to clarify that the insularity I mention is the picture I’ve cobbled together from very cursory sources who are probably thinking of VN pre-1975. My family, as an example, is not particularly great about thinking or recalling policy or structural attempts to reshape society or acknowledging the role and treatment of ethnic minorities, so that’s totally a flaw in and of itself. (For example, my questions about ethnic Chams and Hmong are generally met with confusion.)
I do know that the Communist governments after 1975 were pretty heavy handed on the redistribution side of things, and to my knowledge, that’s why there are relatively high numbers of Chinese Vietnamese in VN diasporic communities in the world, much like the presence of Vietnamese Catholics. Neither communities were a large percentage of the overall population, it’s just that the Communists came down more harshly on them, they saw the writing on the wall and decided it was best to leave.
I would be curious about the cultural side of things and how that played a role in everything. From what I can tell, Vietnamese people see (Han) Chinese as aggressive foreigners, but kind of “like us”–half of our family names are related to Chinese surnames, etc. On the flipside, the past two millenia have seen a lot of conflict between the two over territory, so it’s all really complicated and this American is probably missing a lot of nuance. I only mention it though because I suspect that the perspective of, say, Malays towards ethnic Chinese isn’t the same.
Yeah, my wife’s godmother is Chinese-Vietnamese and her father was at one time quite wealthy. The family was basically forced to flee the Vietnam (most came to Canada) with almost nothing when the government cracked down. It just goes to show how dumb of a construct race is. Americans generally see all of these people as homegeneous Asians, but they consider themselves to be completely distinct races, as many Indians do as it relates to castes.
(Regarding family: My wife is CBC and her family is nigh on useless regarding cultural and political issues of China. To fit in to the family, I had to research and try VERY HARD to learn by osmosis [I’m white]. I feel like part of it comes from a very conscious effort to assimilate to Canadian culture, but it was frustrating in the early going and, for example, when we were getting married and trying not to mess things up from a cultural standpoint. My Chinese MIL is also super-racist toward mainland Chinese people and recent immigrants, which leads to my wife laughing as I sit there and squirm or try to reason with her that she is also Chinese and an immigrant, although from Guangzhou and then Hong Kong, which explains some of the antipathy.)
I totally commiserate! I was the first one in my family to be born in the US, and I was brought up at arms length from the usual Viet-Am population centers (So Cal, Bay Area, Texas, Northern Virginia, etc.) so I totally tried (and am continuing to try) to research my way into my ethnic heritage. It’s been really scattershot though, because as I’m sure you’ve found as well, real people don’t follow traditions or see issues exactly the way as children’s books/wikipedia/encyclopedia describe a country or a people!
P.S. You’re a commenter from TNC’s blog, aren’t you? I’ve been thinking that your handle was really familiar to me, but this background on your wife’s family pulled everything together for me! I used to comment on there before Disqus troubles tripped me up.
Yep, I’m there off and on. Nice to see another member of the Horde here. Disqus sent more than a few people away, alas.
Wow this was fascinating! One of my mum’s best friends (an “auntie” to me) is Malaysian-Chinese.
When I was about six, in Australia, I was friends with a little boy who had lost a fingertip and broken his left arm and was left-handed and had an American mum just like me!
My eyes popped out of my head when I got to the machete-finger-amputation part. Your mom must have been terrified.
I’m curious if “winning the lottery” is a euphemism for something else, possibly a little seedy. But it’s what used to explain the influx of money to kids who shouldn’t know their grandpa is a pimp or meth kingpin.
OMG
After I met Leo, I asked my mum if she’d ever seen the winning ticket and she hasn’t (although he did “win” before she was born). There was actually a thing called the Social Welfare Lottery where there were frequent winners of not insanely huge amounts, eg $20,000, which could feasibly buy some land or something, so it is possible. But also, probably loan shark?
I wonder if it’s a mechanism (I forget the name, it’s common in many cultures) where you belong to a club, and every member of the club pays some amount of dues into a pot on a certain schedule, and every once in a while it is your turn to get the pot. It’s basically a form of savings that doesn’t rely on faith in a bank’s ability to pay interest–there was a Planet Money episode on it recently.
Tanda! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandas
That savings scheme you described is called tontine. It is still practiced by many in Malaysia. Very common among businessmen. They draw lot to see who gets the pot for the month. The Chinese would add an element of ” interest”, As an example, if it is a $ 1000.00 per month tontine,and there are 12 members,The first man to win the lot will get 11x $950.( $50 being interest gained by those who dont take the pot in the month.The second man will get $ 1000.00 + $ 950×10,In some places the $ 50 is not fixed. All members have to bid for it. The highest bidder wins.
I found the answer about the lottery mystery while reading a book written by Kua Kia Soong “May 13 – Declassified Documents on Malaysian Riots of 1969”. I quote a passage on page 12: The hallmark of the MCA was its use of patronage to create a social base in the Chinese society. During the 1950’s, the government allowed it to sponsor multi-million dollar “Social Welfare” lotteries whereby it could render financial assistance in order to increase its influence.
This was very interesting to read. The situation is somewhat similar in Indonesia; Chinese-Indonesians hold a lot of the economic power, but during various periods of Indonesian history have been brutally targeted by other citizens.
I know – there have been race riot type things on a smaller scale to what went on in Indonesia in Malaysia. There’s a particular road in Penang that when we drive down, my mum always comments on how all the shops were smashed up because they were owned by Chinese people. Did you see The Act of Killing? Most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen.
This was great!
I’m not Malay-Chinese, but I can identify with trying to keep all the titles, numbers, and ranks of the aunts, uncles, and great aunts and great uncles straight. (Not the mention all of the cousins.)
This is one of the best pieces I have ever read on The Toast – so evocative. I enjoyed it immensely. Thank you for sharing your mum’s (and your own) story with us!
Issues around immigrant/migrant identity are fascinating. I’m a second-generation immigrant but until moving to China had given relatively little thought to what it all meant in terms of cultural identity and cultural heritage. Something about how visible these issues are in China opened it up for me, I suppose. It is so incredibly diverse and nuanced. I live with a Taiwanese girl and a BBC, so that’s also taught me a lot – and there are a lot of ABCs/CBCs about here, not to mention mainland Chinese who have studied abroad, which also changes things. I also briefly dated a Chinese-Malaysian who went to uni in America when I arrived, and in between makeout sessions we occasionally discussed cultural heritage.
MORE posts like this one please! Cultural identity talk ftw!
Thank you!
Can I just say, I regret not making some kind of Kaya Toast joke for the title.