Diaspora

Who Are the Peranakan Chinese?

Rebecca Choong Wilkins

Deep roots and many routes – Rebecca Choong Wilkins

Between 1850 and 1940, almost 20 million people journeyed from mainland China to Southeast Asia across the South Seas, known in China as the Nanyang or “Southern Ocean.” Mostly hailing from coastal cities and villages in southern China – including Amoy (now Xiamen), Swatow (Shantou), Hainan and Hong Kong, over ten million of these migrants travelled to Malaya (now Malaysia), and roughly three million headed to the islands of the Dutch East Indies in modern-day Indonesia.

When they arrived in Southeast Asia, they were called sinkeh (xīn kè 新客) – “new guests” – or the more derogatory cheena gerk (“low-class Chinaman” in Baba Malay) by Chinese settlers with much deeper roots in the region. These earlier Chinese communities formed in the 15th century, when Chinese merchants emigrated to Southeast Asia and married into indigenous families. Forming sui generis cultures that embraced Chinese and Southeast Asian traditions as well as contemporary colonial trends, they developed their own distinctive clothing, cuisines and languages.

Essays

China’s Middle-class Rebellion

Robert Foyle Hunwick

What the comfortably-off have to protest about – Robert Foyle Hunwick

Park Avenue, central Beijing, is known for its luxurious serviced apartments, landscaped gardens and Western-style amenities, certainly not its dissident population. Yet, strolling past the compound one weekend, I was surprised to see a protest in progress.

A small group of around two dozen had assembled with signs and were milling around outside a locked shop, arguing with a harassed-looking man in the Chinese junior-management uniform of white shirt and belted black trousers. The cause of all the chaos: a swanky gym that had opened in the gated community a few months before, promising unparalleled 24-hour access to upscale fitness machines and personal trainers, had used a recent public holiday to sell all its equipment and, apparently, make off with everyone’s membership fees. Now a dispute was in full swing over who was going to take responsibility for this fiasco. The building management, who presumably had vetted the gym? The police? The residents?

Q&A

Taking Risks in Hong Kong

Jeff Wasserstrom

Maura Cunningham tells Jeffrey Wasserstrom about controversy at the Hong Kong Literary Festival

In the first week of November, I crossed the Pacific to take part in several events dealing with the past: university talks about the Boxer Crisis of 1900 and a panel on the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, held this year in Tai Kwun – a former prison turned heritage site cum arts and shopping district (think Alcatraz meets Covent Garden). I thought these activities would prove interesting, especially the panel, where I was paired with the versatile writer Mishi Saran (a LARB contributor) and the historian Stephen Platt (author of an acclaimed new book on the Opium War). I was not disappointed.

What I did not expect – though perhaps I should have, given recent clampdowns on rights in the territory – was how many interesting discussions relating to a single contemporary issue, censorship, would be taking place while I was in the territory. Before I departed the US, my schedule for the week included attending a November 3 launch party for the first international exhibition of work by a China-born and Australia-based satirical cartoonist I admire, Badiucao. Two members of Pussy Riot, as well as local artist Sampson Wong and local activist Joshua Wong, were scheduled to speak at the party. By the time I reached the Hong Kong airport on the evening of November 2, however, both the party and the exhibit had been called off due to concerns about Badiucao’s safety.

Essays

The Passion of Giuseppe Castiglione

Matthew Ehret-Kump

How an 18th century Jesuit painter revolutionized Chinese art – Matthew Ehret-Kump

Hardly anyone in the West knows of the name Giuseppe Castiglione. Even fewer know of the name Lang Shining (郎世寧). Yet if you were to ask a Chinese citizen with an elementary knowledge of painting, both of these names would invoke the greatest affinity and respect. For Giuseppe Castiglione and Lang Shining are the same individual, who fomented an artistic revolution by combining the best artistic traditions of European and Chinese culture.

Born in 1688 in Milan, Castiglione mastered the greatest artistic techniques of the Italian renaissance. After his career as a muralist had only begun, the talented young artist, who had recently joined the Jesuit order, was tasked with an incredible challenge: he was invited to China. 

Essays

Poetic Friendship

Denis Mair

Thoughts on Meng Lang’s passing – Denis Mair

My friend Meng Lang passed away in Hong Kong on December, 12 2018. The fact that I heard the news on my birthday (December 16) is perhaps an indication of our close karmic tie. His death is a jolt of mortality for me, because he was ten years my junior.

Meng Lang was active in the underground poetry scene from the mid-1980s. He was co-editor of an anthology of underground and non-official poetry published in 1986 called An Exhibition of New Poetry Groups (86年诗群大展). He left China in 1995 to spend three years as visiting poet at Brown University. After that he remained in exile, dividing his time between Boston and Hong Kong. Meng Lang’s passport was revoked when he left mainland China in 1995, so he was unable to go back to visit his family in Shanghai. He was given special “white travel passes” to return to Shanghai three times, for very short periods, to visit his ailing parents and attend their funerals.