The Peranakan Chinese Home. Ronald G. Knapp
fortune. A high percentage of the 50,000 or so victims of the horrendous massacre of male Chinese slaughtered by the Japanese military during the early days of their Singapore conquest were heads of Baba households and young Babas in the flower of their manhood” (Gwee, 1998: x–xi).
Moreover, as the post-colonial establishment of Malaysia and Indonesia as sovereign countries occurred, new national identities were being forged that generally marginalized Peranakan Chinese. Nonetheless, it is important to note that prominent Peranakan Chinese played key roles in, first, the formation of Malaysia and then Singapore. In Malaysia, Tan Cheng Lock, whose ancestral home in Malacca was featured in Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia, and others committed their lives to Malaya’s Chinese population, both Peranakan and immigrant, and then played crucial roles in the formation of modern Malaysia. Similarly, well-known Peranakan Chinese such as Lee Kuan Yew, Wee Kim Wee, and Goh Keng Swee were key players and important public servants in the creation of independent Singapore in 1965.
When Tan Chee-Beng completed his Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell University in 1979, he wrote, “[M]any people in Malaysia, as well as students of Chinese society, know little about the Babas” and “more and more young Chinese of Baba families are reluctant to categorize themselves and be categorized as ‘Baba’” (iii, 1). A Baba himself, Felix Chia wrote in 1980, “[T]here is hardly a Baba youngster today who is aware of his heritage and culture” (viii). During those years, when thought of at all, Peranakan Chinese communities were perceived as declining and disinte-grating, losing attachments with their roots and adrift in terms of their relationship with other Peranakan communities across the broader region.
Tan Cheng Lock, venerable statesman in the then Malaya, is pictured here wearing a comfortable sarong, with his son Siew Sin and daughters Lily, Alice, and Agnes in his Malacca villa, c. 1925. Photograph courtesy of the family of Tun Tan Siew Sin.
While there had been periodic hand wringing about the decline of Peranakan Chinese in terms of influence and wealth during this transitional period, there was nonetheless a revival of sorts in the decade or so between the middle of the 1970s and the late 1980s as both academics and the public increased their interest. This attention, however, was less on the historical narrative of Peranakan Chinese than on their material culture, especially the material culture connected with Nyonyas—cooking, ceramics, clothing, beaded slippers, silverware, jewelry, and home furnishings.
As the twenty-first century began, however, there increasingly was less talk of Peranakan decline and more of its resilience as a vibrant culture with a proud history as some began to probe what it means to be Peranakan. In Malacca, Penang, and Singapore initially and in Phuket and in Indonesia more recently, a renaissance of things Peranakan arose, some well grounded in history while others were reformulated to meet the contemporary needs of tourists. The formal associations of Peranakan Chinese in Singapore and Malacca, which both have a history of more than a hundred years, having begun as exclusive organizations for Straits Chinese, began to reach out to the general population—and younger Chinese Peranakans who have less connection with their heritage—to generate interest, understanding, and appreciation. The website of the Peranakan Association Singapore today bills itself as “your one-stop resource site for everything Baba!” and unlike decades ago, Peranakan Chinese culture today is highly visible.
However, some conservative voices now lament that it is now much too easy to make a claim of being Peranakan Chinese. The passing hazy recollection of a grandmother wearing a sarong kebaya or of her making a tasty Nyonya-style dish seem to be enough to reawaken memories that lead to the declaration, “I am a Peranakan.” The necessary markers often no longer include speaking a Malay or Hokkien patois, addressing elders with the proper term, or observing Chinese rituals, among others, as would have been the norm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, a great many Peranakan Chinese are Christians, have intermarried with non-Peranakans, and have been schooled in Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa Indonesia, Mandarin Chinese, or English. Few today doubt that Peranakan Chinese have shown themselves over centuries to be particularly adept at meeting changing circumstances, and thus are continuing to evidence an internal cultural dynamism that underscores that ethnic identity need not be static and is often multidimensional.
While an emphasis of this book is celebrating old homes as well as their furnishings and ornamentation, these are not presented as ossified phenomena salvaged from a dead or dying culture. Rather, in support of the heightened interest in things Peranakan, these inherited forms found in old Peranakan Chinese homes continue to serve as inspiration for life in the twenty-first century. It is somewhat ironic and significant that swelling numbers of Chinese tourists traveling to Southeast Asia discover rather quickly that aspects of their own material culture, which were obliterated over the past century within China, can be easily appreciated in old homes and temples where Peranakan Chinese continue to be the custodians of Chinese culture’s rich legacy.
This recently restored century-old three-storey terrace residence presents a brightly decorated facade, with an ornate pintu pagar swinging fence-door, a pair of surname lanterns, a jiho wooden board above the door with characters proclaiming “The Glory of the Lineage,” and additional pictorial and calligraphic ornamentation. Wee family residence, now Baba House Museum, Neil Road, Singapore.
There is no single house type that can be described as exclusively Peranakan Chinese. Like Peranakans themselves, Peranakan housing developed with many variations that reflect place, time, and economic circumstances. Moreover, as the twenty-first century begins, the Peranakan Chinese residences that are still standing represent only a fraction of those built in the past when the community thrived. Thus, unfortunately, the surviving examples do not provide a sufficiently large enough sample to establish clearly whatever characteristics might have once distinguished them from the residences of others.
Peter Lee and Jennifer Chen in The Straits Chinese House adroitly demonstrate the adaptability of the Peranakan Chinese that made it possible for them to enjoy “a lifestyle both deeply rooted in Chinese tradition, and receptive to the cultures of other local communities” (2006: 20). This is indisputable and has contributed significantly to the maintenance of Peranakan Chinese identify, including some well-documented homes, over time. Yet, contemporaneous—and extant—late nineteenth and early twentieth-century residences of wealthy Chinese immigrants who were not Peranakan also reveal adherence to Chinese tradition while incorporating eclectic, opulent, and fashionable elements similar to those found in Peranakan Chinese homes at the time. As the sections below suggest, the fine homes of Tan Yeok Nee in Singapore, Tjong A Fie in Medan, as well as Cheong Fatt Tze and Chung Keng Quee in Penang, among many others who were immigrant Chinese, saw their homes as statements of their cosmopolitan nature even as some of them took local wives and thus began to establish Peranakan Chinese households.
Whatever similarities can be discerned when comparing Peranakan and non-Peranakan residences, however, striking differences are detected once focus is put on family life within the homes of each community, which admittedly were not homogeneous. As the nineteenth century ended, the cultural markers for successful Peranakan Chinese that distinguished them from non-Peranakan Chinese included speaking a Malay patois, schooling in English or Dutch, participating in life-cycle events such as twelve-day weddings and matrilocal marriages, as well as having distinctive clothing, porcelain, jewelry, and cuisine, among others. In addition, surface colors, furnishings, and ornamentation differed from one community to another. Photographs in the following chapters will present not only artifacts that are distinctively Peranakan Chinese within their homes, but also to some degree compare them with non-Peranakan Chinese homes.
Section drawings for what may have been the last fully Chinese-style residence constructed in Singapore at the end of the nineteenth century for the Fujian immigrant Goh Sin Koh. Later converted into an ancestral hall, this grand courtyard residence was demolished in the 1980s. Courtesy of National Archives of Singapore.