April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
     -- T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (1922).

The poem was written after the First World War had devastated Europe. I first read these lines in 1947, two years after the Japanese had transformed the lives of the Chinese in British Malaya and fatally damaged Nationalist China. “The Waste Land” was introduced to me by a fellow undergraduate at the National Central University in Nanjing in 1947. We were in the middle of a civil war in China. I was 17 years old and had just come from a colonial education in Malaya. My friend had come back from the interior of China. He knew the Chinese classics, especially literature, both prose and poetry, but he also read many of the best writings of Western literature. <1> In addition, he was following British poets like W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. He found our classes in Chinese and Western literature less interesting than going to the British Council Library to read the latest poetry in English. There I saw him copying by hand the whole of the Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. <2> I was impressed and intrigued by my friend who, in the middle of student demonstrations against American imperialism and the Kuomintang government, saw English literature as an enrichment of his own heritage. I had a strong desire to emulate him. Till this day, the memory of seeing him treat Eliot with such reverence still fills me with wonder.

It is not yet April, <3> and we do not live in the dead land, but there are stirrings of spring in research and documentation on the Chinese overseas. So it may not be inappropriate to quote from Eliot’s poem here. The words I want to stress are memory and desire. The words capture my own mood, wishing to recall what has been done for the Chinese who had left home, and to understand the kinds of desires, dreams, hopes, longings these sojourners had, especially those for security, wealth and adventure, once they were away from China. The wide range of their desires is of the greatest interest. How does one begin to understand the nature of these desires if they are not documented in some way? This has made me curious about the memories that these Chinese have shared at different stages of migration, and in the many different places they went to. How much of their desires are consciously or unconsciously reflected in what they remember? Historians are concerned with what are found in recorded documents and hesitate to deal with what is unknown. This leads me to look at the way we might try to document what is unknown, and how we might find new ways to augment the documents we have. A few words about documents, and then I shall come back to memory and desire. It seems to me there are three large groups of documents that I shall call: the formal, the practical and the expressive. For each of these, there were public and private faces and they varied greatly in time and place. In places where the Chinese had the numbers to be seen as a community (however small), we can take the many periods and occasions when sojourners abroad organized themselves the best they could, and distinguish them from the times when migrations were institutionalized either by the host country or by the sending authorities. At various levels of these people movements, we get glimpses of the conditions under which individual migrants remembered their pasts and articulated their hopes for their future. To track some of the migrant cycles that the Chinese experienced, I shall first describe what I mean by formal, practical and expressive documents.

The formal is the most obvious. They are found in the official archives that provide the backbone of all documentary collections for historians. These archives range from basic administrative records registering arrivals and locating where the immigrants live and work, to the speeches and the acrimonious debates about what to do about migration policy, how to deal with those already settled and those planning to come. The reports may be found in dusty files, printed collections, political tracts, or recorded and quoted in magazine articles and newspaper accounts. Modern well-managed countries preserve these more or less systematically, but they are vulnerable to loss and decay when there is any breakdown of order. Outside archives and libraries, such formal documents would include buildings and monuments, and the memoirs of all those public figures who were involved in the management of migration matters, and also all the scholarly writings that have tried to immortalise the migrant sagas. Here the desire to keep records and the duty to remember have, on the whole, interacted effectively, especially in areas where there has been a strong bureaucratic and healthy historical tradition. But often the criteria as to what should or should not be retained have been inconsistent if not discriminatory, and actions to preserve the documents for the public to use have been slow and desultory, if not often come too late. The practical is much more varied. When written down, it would include everything noted down by private persons or organisations because there was a need to remember, even if it were merely for immediate use. They would include appointment records, accounts and receipts, legal briefs, business notes, correspondence of all kinds, the meeting minutes of social and cultural organizations, and the daily newspapers that people depended for local and useful information. Also included are family papers like genealogies and biographies and other clan records. But it is not limited to literate evidence that may or may not find their way into archives and libraries. The practical would also include the household goods in the migrant homes, the essential tools and instruments in their work-places, and the vehicles they used in a foreign land. It would include not only what they brought with them but also what they devised locally to enable them to adapt to different living conditions. Some of the most practical that would help support the community’s solidarity would be public festivals, temple operas, and social events like weddings and funerals. Certainly, the places where the men could eat and drink and meet their women, the temples that bound them in hope and solace, the medical shops and centres that kept them healthy and alive, the societies that linked them to their homes in China, and the cemeteries for their dead, all belong to this category of the practical. These documents were not always recognised and consciously preserved, but modern museums have changed that. We are better served by new generations of professionals who have often gone out of their way to identify what needs to be saved. Here memory has not been systematic, and actions to rescue the past for posterity have been erratic, even accidental, when they happen at all. In growing urban areas, the pressures of rapid development often threaten these documents as companies come and go, and migrant people are more mobile, and also when the settled among them are liable to forget what is no longer useful. Outside of towns, it is even easier to neglect what was once valued as land and labour that are now put to new uses. Old plantations and mining towns, and the temples and cemeteries that served their working populations, have often given way to roads and factories or returned to the jungle. There is now new desire by some communities, their heritage professionals, and local politicians and teachers to have some of these practical documents preserved. But, in many cases, the costs are prohibitive and only the determined and dedicated have succeeded in having the documents restored and protected.

As for the expressive documents, these are the most closely linked to desires and have not always been as easy to recognise as the other two kinds. They go beyond the recording of facts and data that are usually found in formal and practical documents, although the expressive bits may also be located in the formal and practical documents if you are clear in your own mind what you are looking for. For example, in an official document, one may find accounts relaying specific examples of heroism or cowardice, greed or generosity, ingenuity or criminality brought about by strong desires. Some administrative and court records included stories that revealed the rich variety of experiences of migrant peoples, many of which confirmed how truth was often stranger and more unforgettable than fiction. This is even truer of the practical documents, notably in newspapers after they became popular and inclusive towards the end of the 19th century. Many, and especially those that had magazine sections, narrated or discussed the unexpected and remarkable, the pains of failure and the delights of achievement, the joys and agonies of meeting and parting and, above all, gave opportunities to the literate to put their feelings down as prose or poetry. Other examples, and again these came later when more migrants were literate, were the letters written home. Although most of these were conventional and practical, conveying family news and answering inquiries, some occasionally included anecdotes of unusual people whom the migrants had met, or incidents of exceptional kindness or cruelty, or descriptions of strange sights and sounds and places of exceptional beauty or ugliness.

Expressive documents are more often found when the Chinese stopped sojourning. Some of these Chinese returned to China to record their experiences; others chose to settle down abroad and set out to explain what they achieved by so doing. Most often, these are the most consciously produced by the second generation or the third, especially those born to families of some means who were given new educational opportunities. This was particularly true of those who went to Southeast Asia where the families needed time and opportunity to progress from rags to riches. Thus, although Chinese traders have been going to the Nanyang for centuries, expressive documents were late in appearing and became noticeable only in the 19th century. In comparison, more literate sojourners headed for the goldfields of California in the US, British Columbia in Canada and Victoria in Australia and, especially in the US, where they were joined by students sent by the Chinese government and those sent by Christian missions working in various parts of China. <4> The literate could express themselves almost immediately and also knew how their documents might be preserved. But for most other areas where migrant Chinese went, it was not until the 20th century that expressive documents began regularly to surface, especially in the most difficult area of literature, i.e. short stories, novels, and poetry.

Returning to memory and desire, I would like to focus on these expressive documents. I believe that such documents capture a valuable dimension of the transnational networks that is the theme of this conference. For the rest of this paper, I shall relate some of my experiences with the kind of desire that enliven migrant societies. Inevitably much of what follows is a personal document and I seek your indulgence for letting me share that with you this morning.

I came across two contrasting sets of desires when I was still a boy living in Ipoh, a small mining town in the state of Perak in northern Malaya. The first was when a schoolmate of mine went back to Penang where his parents came from to attend the wedding of his eldest sister. He brought back photographs of the wedding ceremony, with the bride dressed in a traditional Chinese wedding dress together with her mother dressed in the sarong kebaya that Straits (called “Baba” by some) Chinese had adapted from what Malay women wore. He showed them to us with great pride and told us that he would one day want to marry in the same way. He said that he was hurt by the way newly arrived Chinese scorned his local family customs, and that his family was more truly Chinese than some of the Chinese who loudly claimed to be patriotic Chinese. He felt strongly that what generations of his family had loyally maintained should be respected and preserved. <5>

About the same time, relatives of family friends arrived as refugees from the Japanese invasion of China. They had come from Shanghai where they were all born. I found them very different from the rest of us and their memories very fresh and exciting. Through the eldest of them, I met a strong longing for the home he had left. Together, we learnt patriotic songs about the war in China, went to tearful Chinese films, read lively Shanghai magazines. But what struck me most was his admiration for an aunt who stayed on in Shanghai. I was shown photographs of her wedding to his uncle. She was radiant in a beautiful wedding gown that would have drawn sighs from brides-to-be in London or Paris. I learnt that she was born of Cantonese parents in Sydney and had grown up with English as her first language. Her father founded a department store in Sydney and the success of that venture led him to establish similar stores in Hong Kong and Shanghai. <6> These stores grew to be part of an international chain that has pride of place in the business history of modern China. Following the success, the aunt moved to Shanghai and made that her home. To my friend, she was the epitome of all that was modern and progressive, and symbolised the China that he wanted to see flourish. In today’s terms, she was transnational before the word was invented.

The two sets of desires stayed in my memory as I followed some of the later documents, both formal and practical, that recorded what happened to the Baba or Peranakan Chinese on the one hand and the people and society of Shanghai on the other. Today, there are innumerable books that seek to capture both these subjects. On the Baba, there have been many memoirs, biographies, family histories, numerous scholarly studies of people, artefacts, rituals and commemorations and a wide range of affectionate accounts, much of which has enriched the book by Khoo Joo Ee entitled The Straits Chinese: a cultural history (1996). <7> But I have not found anything that quite captures the strong desires my school friend had about keeping his family traditions alive against the unjustified scorn expressed by Chinese who had just come from China. Similarly, the mountain of books and articles about old and new Shanghai is now overwhelming. I now know the city in ways that my young refugee friend could not have known. Certainly, he was not able in 1940 to communicate all that he felt for the city. His aunt’s story has now been told. This was done through her letters, memorabilia and oral accounts, in a book compiled by a Shanghai journalist two years ago. I read it with keen interest, especially when I realised that she was the aunt of my childhood friend. I was particularly moved when I read about how his aunt felt about the death of her husband in the hands of fanatical Communist youth, and why she stayed on in Shanghai to dedicate herself to teaching English to another generation. She continued to do so into her eighties, until a few years before she died. Every page of the book added to my understanding of how this daughter of Sydney, despite all that happened to her and her family, came to love Shanghai. <8> I think I also began to feel something for the sense of awe that my childhood friend had expressed at his aunt’s return to China, but I am not sure that anything can help me describe his fervent desire at the time that Shanghai be the hope of modern China. This has certainly been made more multi-layered by the fact that, for the very practical reason of being a success in his adopted country, he eventually chose not to return. These two of my memories marked the beginnings of my awareness of what constitutes people’s desires that are so difficult to preserve. There are millions of such desires that contain insights concerning the wandering Chinese which are forever lost because we lacked the ways to have them documented. But let me not give way to sentimentality here. When feelings are strong, and the opportunity arises, I am confident that people do have the ability and the determination to get their story recorded whether in prose or verse or in a non-literary form. The ideal medium to express these desires would be, to give a few examples, creative writings, compositions, paintings, sculptures, buildings, food and clothing and various kinds of design. The choice of medium varies with the social, economic and political environment the Chinese have to face. In areas where literacy in any language is low, expressions are more likely to occur in music and dance, and paintings and sculptures. Where aesthetic preferences are in the visual arts, there would be good examples in the world of design in addition to that of painting and architecture. Elsewhere, there may be room for creativity with food and clothing. And where literacy and a strong literary tradition already exists, the quality of fiction, drama and poetry could be expected to be high. Personally I am most attracted to literary expression. The Chinese themselves have a rich writing tradition, so much so that, where they do not have a large readership in the Chinese language, they could adapt to using foreign languages to bring forth what they have to say. The measure of their success in writing works of quality may be determined by the literary traditions of the people they have settled among, and how receptive the host peoples are to writings by new immigrants. I do not need to go far in Southeast Asia to find expressive works in the fine arts. Chinese contributions to painting, architecture and design have been around for generations and may be found throughout the region. With literature, however, we know how much has been done in the 19th century in languages like Vietnamese, Thai and Bahasa Melayu Tionghua. <9> But, with some exceptions, the emphasis then has been more on transmission and entertainment than on creativity. This was particularly true with the retelling of stories drawn from the great romances of China. How much of these can be said to be expressive, however indirectly, of the desires that the settled Chinese community felt about their new homes has yet to be established. It was not until the 20th century when a sizeable audience literate in Chinese emerged, especially in the cities and towns of British Malaya, that creative writings in Chinese inspired by the baihua movement in China came to its own. <10> This literature was, for a while, largely dominated by themes drawn from China, and the desires that are found in them reflect those of the recent immigrants and rarely capture a local perspective. Certainly the settled Straits Chinese could not express themselves in this way and, from the point of view of quality, their writings in English could not match those in Chinese by the sojourners for at least another generation. <11> The more recent writings by settled Chinese in languages like Thai, Bahasa Indonesia and English are gaining recognition, but few have gained the wide transnational audiences that those writing in English in the West have attained. Clearly, the Chinese living in the West have a marked advantage in their literary contributions. Of course, they are also represented in painting and other fine arts and even in areas like design, fashion and the culinary arts. But, given the powerful literary traditions in migrant nations like the United States, Canada and Australia, literature has attracted the largest numbers of practitioners, and increasingly we are seeing major contributions being made to mainstream literature in those countries. When we see how much their work has succeeded in expressing their manifold desires for a wider public, it suggests that we have indeed lost much in documenting the desires of those Chinese who had sojourned or settled outside the English language realms. <12> I am partial to literate expressions of desires because they are more direct and far easier to understand. Today, these are not limited to the printed word but can be powerfully transmitted through films and the electronic media, where they, of course, draw on many of the other skills in expression that I have mentioned above. But there is a paradox here. Creative expressions, especially those of high quality, quickly rise above nationality or ethnicity or even the language medium chosen. At that point, we go past the point when we talk about what is Chinese and what is not. It is no longer a question of the desires of diasporic or displaced Chinese, but the literary genius of transnationals whose best work may be compared with other writers whether of migrant origins or not. Such achievements that belong to humankind deserve our admiration but, in the context of our concern here with documents about the Chinese overseas, it may not necessarily add to our store of the expressive documents that our libraries and archives are short of.

This brings me now to the migrant cycles in the title of this lecture that I hope memory and desire can help me track. My two stories of undocumented desires marked two ends of the Chinese sojourner spectrum. At one end, with my Straits Chinese schoolmate, the desire to firm up the roots that his ancestors had already sunk into their adopted homes, in this case, the Malaya of the Straits Chinese who had settled there four or more generations ago. How long should their desires and memories be considered as recognisably Chinese? Should they not be seen as something quite distinctively new? At the other end, with my friend from Shanghai, the longing for a home just abandoned, and his affection for an uncle’s family, determined that my friend should stop sojourning and go home as soon as he could. How should we distinguish these desires and memories from those of Chinese in China? As long as they come from those who are self-consciously sojourners who are awaiting a chance to return to China, are they not merely variants of homesick longings found in China itself? The gap between the two sets of desires is wider than I understood when I first heard them. The more I know now, the more it appears that the spectrum of desires in between are fluid and transitional. What these responses in between can offer to our collection of expressive documents concerning the Chinese overseas may turn out to be more elusive than illuminating. Let me explore this further. I did not follow the stories of my two young friends further, having my own confused desires to deal with. The Japanese occupied Malaya from 1941 to 1945, I went to study in Nanjing where I met the friend who loved T.S. Eliot, the communist victory there drove me back to Malaya to face a hopeful nation-building future, and I subsequently made a fateful decision to pursue an academic career in Chinese history. Step by step, I found myself narrowing the spread of my desires in order to help me find my professional niche. Even as I did that, something led me back to China’s relations with our region, a field still poorly researched. Thus, I began my apprenticeship with work on Kang Youwei and Sun Yat-sen in the Straits Settlements and then, going far back into the ancient past, the search for the Nanhai trade between China and Southeast Asia. <13> This brought me in touch with two pioneers who guided me in my early work: Chen Yusong (Tan Yeok Seong) and Xu Yunqiao (Hsu Yun-ts’iao). There was here also a clear contrast between the two. Tan Yeok Seong was a Hokkien descended from generations who were committed to the Nanyang and who called Malaya his home. He was closer in spirit to my Straits Chinese friend, with the important difference that he had studied in Xiamen University and knew Chinese well. <14> Hsu Yun-ts’iao, on the other hand, was a newcomer to Southeast Asia. He came from Suzhou on the south bank of the Yangzi river in Jiangsu province. He brought a sojourner’s sensibility to his studies, but he saw China and the Nanyang as historically and economically inseparable. <15> As a result, the more I did my readings in their personal libraries and with their guidance, the more I felt the need to know China better. Thus I turned totally towards Sinology and the history of China. This gave prominence to one of my desires, to be the Chinese scholar that my parents would be proud of. But it was not so simple. I remained outside of China and lived among a variety of peoples in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, including a great variety of people of Chinese descent. I married Margaret who, although born in Shanghai, leant to love the Malaya that later became the Federation of Malaysia and the Republic of Singapore. Soon my desires intermingled with all those who chose to make their homes there. China became a vocation and a memory while I tamed my earlier desires so that I could accept my role as a local university man. My academic colleagues remained curious why I did not follow up my Nanhai trade story beyond the 10th century. Friends outside the campus also asked me to talk about the Nanyang Chinese both past and present. Furthermore, among the questions regularly asked of me were the story of Admiral Zheng He’s visits to Malacca between 1405 and 1433, and the reasons why those expeditions were stopped. Above all, the anti-communist and nation-building politics of the time ensured that someone keenly interested in Chinese history would be under suspicion. To make matters worse, I was not allowed to read any books and journals published in China without the approval of the Malayan security authorities. <16> This was how my various desires converged, leading me to place China’s maritime troubles in history side by side with what sojourner and settled Chinese were doing in various parts of Southeast Asia. By adjusting my interests to a longer perspective of Chinese ventures overseas, I was introduced to what the early sojourners desired and how little they remembered. From China’s point of view, there were cycles of care and neglect. As the Chinese were seen in the eyes of indigenous rulers and other Asian traders from India and West Asia, there were different cycles of useful service and competitive threat. More recently, when the Europeans arrived in force, there were even more distinctive cycles of collaborationist merchants and effective but unruly labour that needed to be carefully managed. And, at the same time, from the perspective of the Chinese overseas themselves, there were recurring and sometimes contradictory cycles of longing for a strong China that could protect them coupled with a preference for weak officials serving the coastal provinces of China who would leave them and their families in China alone. What I did not expect was to have my desires shrink to a deepening concern for immediate challenges to the Chinese communities among whom I lived. I was drawn forward to 20th century problems, to the period I had started with in 1952, to the reformers and revolutionaries who transformed the politics of China. This was in some ways advantageous for me. The documents both formal and practical were more plentiful and accessible, and the protagonists were alive and around. Also, nation-building in our region, including in China itself, was pressing and seemingly urgent. Above all, the struggle for Malaysia that led to the independence of Singapore in 1965 highlighted the vital question of voting numbers where the ethnic Chinese were concerned. <17> It was simply not possible for the desire to remain Chinese in one way or another to be untouched by the growing pressures for change at all levels. Here the variety of Chinese responses to the new pressures showed how tangled their desires had become. They also revealed the coming together and crisscrossing of various cycles of attention and neglect, threat and usefulness, fears and hopes that had from time to time troubled Chinese lives in Southeast Asia. This was particularly true of those who wanted to remain culturally Chinese in countries ruled by indigenous Southeast Asians. The mid and late 1960s became a turning point for most Chinese overseas. The Cold War could not save the Malayan Communist Party and those Chinese who had supported similar parties around the region. The Vietnam War was the climax of the Cold War in Asia and this saw the destruction (perhaps temporary) of the Chinese communities in Vietnam and Cambodia. This was followed by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Mao Zedong’s China, accompanied by the ill-treatment of returned overseas Chinese and all those with overseas connections. Then there was the abortive coup in Indonesia, the so-called Gestapu of September 1965, during which all documents in Chinese were openly and officially destroyed. After that, the spirit of Bandung on which so many Chinese overseas had pinned their hopes also came to an end. Also, largely because of fears about the dangers of ethnic conflict, the new nations of the region adopted tightly controlled policies about their peoples’ right of self-expression. About the same time, countries like the United States and Canada, followed by Australia, began to revise their immigration policies. This made it possible for more Chinese to move there. With all these changes, there could no longer be a simple one-dimensional spectrum of desires. In Southeast Asia, in particular, choices had to be made from a complex web of possibilities. At least, this would seem to be so on the surface and there is little doubt that the formal and practical documents we have would reflect this development. But precisely because desires have rarely been articulated and are, in any case, difficult to chart, there will be big gaps in the expressive documents. And, without that, our picture of continuous challenge and change is surely incomplete. In any case, the desires of the large Chinese populations of the region have changed beyond recognition during these years, and the speed of change has left most of them bewildered and fearful. Under these circumstances, how could their memories be reliably recorded either by themselves or by others? Memories are notoriously faulty and selective but now, even what may be truly remembered is likely to have been fragmented by the pressures of events beyond their control. It is in this context that we observe that a new overarching migrant cycle, or perhaps more than one, is developing. The main thrust of the cycle derives from a China that has changed tack close to 180 degrees within the last couple of decades. The prospect of a strong and prosperous China would be unfamiliar to those who know little history or could only dimly remember the past 150 years of China’s disunity and decline. The signs are that great changes lie ahead and all Chinese everywhere are gearing themselves up for them. Beneath the overhanging arch are at least three lesser cycles. The first of these is experienced by former sojourners who have long settled down or now wish to settle down in new national homes. Another cycle would impinge on those who have moved on as re-migrants to other foreign lands and are seeking a new rhythm to a renewed stage of sojourning. And, not any less important, the third cycle is being carried by fresh immigrants out of China, those who are eagerly bringing their Chinese desires to the nations still willing to take them. To go back to Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is there now a new stirring of dull roots with spring rains? We know how pragmatic most Chinese are. The official bodies are there to collect the formal and practical documents, and most of those should survive for future stories to be told from. Given so many rapid changes in a lifetime, what more can the migrants expect? What if earlier desires and memories are not documented? Does that really matter? In their eyes, probably all that is needed is courage and luck and the willingness to take risks whenever necessary. There will be fresh lots of desires that the previous sets, even if remembered, could do little to explicate. As fresh migrants and re-migrants, they will need all their wits about them to deal with the perilous and the unforseen. An imperfect record should be good enough, it is still better than having none. If their predecessors had coped without roadmaps, so can they. The world is simply too demanding for them to have the luxury of learning from the past.

I recognise the note of helplessness behind the Chinese traditional optimism here and offer my sympathies. But my heart belongs with the documenters, and not for professional reasons. We all need to know. The fact that the Chinese overseas knew so imperfectly about their past is no reason why we should continue to do so. Indeed, what little we do know can, in many cases, provide insights to what will happen. I recall writing about ten years ago, in a Foreword for the book edited by Ronald Skeldon entitled Reluctant Exiles? Migration from Hong Kong and the New Overseas Chinese, the following words, “what is remarkable is that this is the first time that any Chinese population has been studied as an emigrant group while in the throes of migrating.” <18> I still think that this is a remarkable project and look forward to the invaluable documents that it will provide for future historians. But, when I wrote those words, I was only focused on formal and practical documents. If I were to write the foreword again, I would have included an appeal for the memories and expressive desires to be sought out as documents. This gathering of librarians, archivists and scholars, I hope, will join me in this appeal. Too many migrant desires have been left without the memories needed to leave an impact, or at the least, some clear impressions. But, with the new processes now open to scrutiny and the current sources available for a fuller record, this is no waste land. Perhaps all we need is more spring rain.

Notes

1. My friend could recite Chinese poetry of most dynasties and was deeply immersed in the prose fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties. When I first met him, he had read all the poems of his favourite American poet, Walt Whitman, especially his Leaves of Grass. He also recommended that I read the youthful poems of W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. He stayed on in China and eventually became one of the most respected professors of German Literature in Beijing.

2. The first copy of Four Quartets to arrive in China, I was told by the British Council Librarian.

3. This lecture was given on March 13, 2003.

4. The literature on the mining and trading sojourners in North America and Australasia has grown by leaps and bounds during the past two decades; see the bibliographies in Lynn Pan, Ed., The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas. Singapore: Archipelago Press and Landmark Books, and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 375-387; Chan Sucheng, This Bitter-sweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860-1910. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. pp. 453-481; and Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp.315-340. The students sent by the Chinese government have received much attention from scholars in China, but we still have a lot to learn about those who went to the United States with the help of the Christian missions.

5. He was the first person to draw my attention to how much the Baba or Peranakan Straits Chinese were hurt when newly arrived Chinese from China looked down on their efforts to preserve old Chinese customs, especially on their inability to speak Chinese. In turn, as Chinese-educated Chinese grew more nationalistic and anti-colonial, they were hurt and angry when local-born English-educated scoffed at their traditional customs and their lack of English language skills. The parallel streams of English and Chinese schools were an important source of intra-community tension from the 1920s to the 1960s.

6. Most historians of Chinese business would recognise that my friend’s aunt was a member of the famous Kwok family that founded the Sincere and Wing On companies; Wellington K.K. Chan, “Organization and strategy of China's two premier department stores: the Wing On and Sincere companies, 1900-1941. In South China : state, culture and social change during the 20th century. Edited by Leo Douw and Peter Post. Amsterdam, New York: North-Holland, 1996; and “Personal Styles, Cultural Values, and Management: the Sincere and Wing On companies in Shanghai and Hong Kong 1900-194”. In Asian department stores. Edited by Kerrie L. MacPherson. Honolulu, HI and Richmond, Surrey: University of Hawaii Press and Curzon, 1998.

7. Published by Pepin Press, Amsterdam. There is an excellent bibliography in Khoo Joo Ee’s book.

8. Chen Danyan. Shanghai di jinzhi yuye (Gold branch and jade leaf in Shanghai. English title: Shanghai Princess). Beijing, Zuojia Publishers, 2nd edition, 2000. The book was first published in September 1999, and a second edition was produced in June 2000. By the time I bought my copy, the book had been through eight printings.

9. The pioneering studies by Claudine Salmon have opened this rich field of documentation. Her most important works pertaining to the writings of the Chinese in Southeast Asia are Literature in Malay by the Chinese of Indonesia : a provisional annotated bibliography. Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1981, and the excellent set of essays that she edited, Literary migrations: traditional Chinese fiction in Asia (17-20th centuries). Beijing: International Culture Publishing, 1987.

10. The writings of Malayan Chinese of the pre-war period is collected in Fang Xiu, Ed. Ma Hua xinwenxue daxi, 1919-1942 (Malayan Chinese New Literature). In ten volumes. Singapore: World Book Company, 1972. Fang Xiu had first written a three-volume history, Ma Hua xinwenxue shigao (Draft History of Malayan Chinese New Literature), Singapore: World Book Company, 1965. An abbreviated version was translated by Angus W. McDonald as Notes on the history of Malayan Chinese new literature, 1920-1942. Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1977. Also, see Wang Gungwu, "A Short Introduction to Chinese Writing in Malaya", in Bunga Emas, An Anthology of Contemporary Malaysian Literature, edited by T. Wignesan. London: Anthony Blond & Kuala Lumpur: Rayirath (Raybooks) Publications, 1964, pp. 249-256.

11. Lim Boon Keng (1869-1957), the best known Southeast Asian Chinese writing in English of his generation, wrote many articles for The Straits Chinese Magazine (1897-1907), and several volumes of essays in English about China and Chinese viewpoints. His mastery of English was excellent, but his literary skills and understanding of things Chinese could not match that of his contemporary, Qiu Shuyuan (Khoo Seok Wan, 1874-1941), who not only wrote on current affairs but also composed impeccable classical poetry (Qiu Shuyuan jushi shiji, 1949). It is anachronistic to do so, but were Lim’s more literary work, Tragedies of Eastern life: an introduction to the problems of social psychology. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1927 to be compared with works published after 1960, the difference is stark. A sample of the writings by Lee Kok Liang (1927-1992) [The Mutes in the Sun and Other Stories, 1964 and Flowers in the Sky, 1981], Ee Tiang Hong (1933-1990) [I of the many faces, 1960 and Myths for a wilderness,1976], and Goh Poh Seng (b. 1936) [If we dream too long, 1972] would illustrate the marked changes in English writing since Lim Boon Keng’s pioneering efforts.

12. We have ample evidence to show how some Chinese have become keen on literature by the beginning of the 20th century. I have noted the writings in Chinese collected by Fang Xiu (note 10). Claudine Salmon has drawn attention to those written in Malay (note 9), but these have been out of print. Efforts to reprint those written in Indonesia have now begun. I have only seen volumes 2-5 in the series, Kesastraan melayu tionghoa dan kebangsaan Indonesia (Sino-Malay literature and Indonesian nationhood), edited by Marcus, A.S. and Pax Benedanto. Jakarta: Kepustakaan Popular Gramedia, 2001-2002, but they promise to demonstrate the variety of talents already developed before the Second World War.

13. The academic exercise for the Bachelor’s degree was, Chinese Reformists and Revolutionaries in the Straits Settlements, 1900-1911, Department of History, University of Malaya, 1953 (partly published as “Sun Yat-sen and Singapore”, Nanyang Hsueh-pao [Journal of the South Sea Society], vol. 15, no. 2, 1959, pp. 55-68); the dissertation for the Master’s degree was The Nanhai Trade: a study of the early Chinese Trade in the South China Sea (1954). This was published as a monograph issue of the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1959 (new edition, Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998, and republished by Eastern Universities Press, 2003).

14. Tan Yeok Seong (1900-1984) first made his name as a scholar of Nanyang history in 1934. His many works have been collected in Yeyin guan wencun (Collected writings from the Coconut Shade Studio) Singapore: Nanyang xuehui. In three volumes. 1983.

15. Hsu Yun-ts’iao (1905-1981) was a prolific writer who has over 40 books to his name. He was an educationist and journalist before he became the first editor of the Nanyang Xuebao in 1940 and continued as editor until 1957. He also taught a new generation of young scholars at Nanyang University from 1953 to 1961. Among his many writings, his best-known work was on the early history of the maritime world of Southeast Asia, notably Thailand and the Malay peninsula. He has also translated from Malay, Thai, Dutch and English writings.

16. Thousands of people like me were affected from the 1950s to the 1970s, first in British Malaya and the independent Federation of Malaya and the Colony of Singapore, and then in the Federation of Malaysia and the Republic of Singapore. Thailand and the Philippines had equally tight controls over writings from China. The strongest prohibitions were imposed on the Chinese in Indonesia after 1965 until very recently. Those who were driven back to China from every country in Southeast Asia have related some of their experiences, and anecdotes abound of how badly Chinese sojourners were treated. The attitudes of the younger generations have undergone radical changes and write about these experiences today may not attract a wide audience

17. The separation of Singapore from Malaysia is a story that has yet to be fully told. Two recent accounts are illuminating: Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story. Singapore: Times Editions, 1998, and Albert Lau, A Moment of Anguish: Singapore in Malaysia and the politics of disengagement. Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998.

18. Reluctant Exiles? was published by M.E. Sharpe in New York and London in 1994. The foreword is on pp. xi-xiii.