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Part III INSTITUTIONSSample essay: "The Overseas Chinese Family" This section reviews basic overseas Chinese institutions. We are concerned here with the grounds for association and assistance by people who left their homes to work in a foreign environment, the historical and contemporary networks that have knitted clusters of overseas Chinese together. Because these did not spring out of thin air but were adumbrated in the Chinese homeland, we begin with an account of how the fundamental structures and hierarchies of traditional Chinese society fitted together. We move on to an overview of the entire spectrum of overseas Chinese institutions, beginning with the family. Then we turn from the human realm to the supernatural to examine the form of Chinese religious worship and its place in the modern world. Next we survey the entire spectrum of non-profit ethnic Chinese associations in both the past and the present. Finally we look at the growth of formal economic organization, showing how overseas Chinese businessmen have financed and managed their enterprises. To this survey is appended a debate on the popular perceptions of business connections between ethnic Chinese in different parts of the world... Sample essay: from "The Overseas Chinese Family" ...The remittances sent home, the wife left behind, the maintenance of a claim to an equal share of the patrimony--all these were aspects of the overseas Chinese sojourner's relationship to his family in China. On the whole women did not emigrate, but sons would join fathers in the latter's place of sojourn as chain migrants. Departures from the pattern were few. One was that countless men were too poor to send back money, to undertake the periodic homeward journeys, to marry and to perpetuate their line. To quote Daniel Kulp, who studied an emigrant village in south China in the 1920s: 'Not a few persons are forced to live from hand to mouth, finally returning broken in productive efficiency, a charge upon their families, or dying miserable deaths away from home with none to burn the candles.' In China, too, access to women was unequal, but it was even more so in the 'bachelor society' in which the overseas migrants found themselves. The total absence of family life turned the mass of the overseas plantation and mining workers and coolies to the surrogate solate of prostitutes. The second departure was that some men married, or formed liaisons with, local non-Chinese women abroad, siring children of mixed parentage. These children were called mestizos in the Philippines, lukjin in Siam, gwe chia in Burma, Minh Huong in Vietnam and so on... Elsewhere, such as in the United States, anti-miscegenation attitudes and legislation worked against inter-racial unions. Intermarriage in some instances entailed conversion to a religion: Islam in Malaya and Catholicism in Mauritius, to cite two examples. In mixed marriages, there tended to be more equality between the sexes and, especially if they were foreign-educated, more independence on the part of the women... By and large the offspring of mixed marriages was brought up as Chinese... Choi Kwai Keong, Research Fellow, Chinese Heritage Centre, Singapore
Excerpt copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
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Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.