老樹：... ...那是很久以前了，也不知道是誰，把它砍了，又沒有用他，就扔在河邊讓他曬太陽。有一年，起了一場驚天動地的暴風雨，河都漲到岸上，小樹讓水淹了頂，魚蝦佔據了樹上的鳥窩，他那麼大的樹，也輕易地浮在水面上，越過大片陸地，游向遙遠的大海。
可是，大海太遠了，他還沒有游到，水位已經逐漸下降。也不知過了多久，他發現自己的枝幹觸到了河床，再也游不動了，他眼睜睜地看著大河把他那寬闊的大流收起來，縮進自己細長蜿蜒的河道。
不久，岸上的草木又繁生了，蝴蝶鳥獸也重返故鄉，不幾年，綠油油的大片森林又鋪滿了河的兩岸。
... ...
姑娘：...你的祖宗不是游泳到河裡去長成小島的嗎？樹既然可以動，人是不是也可以停？

──郭寶崑“第五幕：枯樹小島”
取自《傻姑娘與怪老樹》

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In The Silly Little Girl and the Funny Old Tree, the late Singaporean playwright Kuo Pao Kun (郭寶崑) suggests that migration is a natural process of life. The ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are products of such migration—a movement of people that is bound to processes of change and acculturation. At the end of the quote above, the girl’s rhetorical question reinforces this fact: if trees can move across oceans by scattering their seeds and rerooting in foreign lands, why can’t humans?

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Introduction: The history of Chinese migration to Southeast Asia
The history of Chinese migration can be dated back to the 15th century during the Ming Dynasty. Admiral Cheng Ho (鄭和), China’s first seafarer who was tasked with expeditions to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, and East Africa. Between 1405 and 1433, Cheng Ho made a total of seven diplomatic voyages. Although the admiral’s official records were destroyed by the Emperor succeeding the Emperors whom Cheng Ho served during his time as diplomat for them, drawing from the individual records put together by four of his crew members, some members who traveled on these voyages would stray from the admiral’s fleet. Instead of returning with the fleet to China, they would choose to settle in places such as Melaka in Malaya, a seaport Cheng Ho visited at least times. This suggestive information explains the presence of the Chinese community in Melaka since the 15th century, despite the lack of official documentation of this migratory history.

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A major wave of Chinese migration to Southeast Asia began in the late 18th Century. The growing presence of European colonial powers in the region attracted Chinese traders to Southeast Asia as they saw the abundant resource there and the opportunities to do business with the British, Portuguese, Dutch, and French, etc., who had over centuries taken over the economy in the region by trade and/or by force. Mid 19th century to early 20th century saw another major wave of Chinese migration to Southeast Asia. The expansion of trading business at various entrepot such as Melaka and Singapore, contributed to the growth of industry such as rubber and tin, which subsequently increased the demands for labor in these industry, including labor forces at the ports. Chinese from Southern regions such as Guangdong and Fujian, which were at the time suffering from famine due to draught, and civil wars, made their way to Southeast Asia as coolies.

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By the 20th century, the Chinese in Southeast Asia had formed various communities of distinct characteristics. First, the early immigrants who migrated prior to the western colonization had mostly assimilated into local cultures over generations. Many preserved their native tongue such as Hakka and Teochew while adopting local Malay culture into their own, forming the Nonya and Baba (娘惹與峇峇) culture of today. This hybrid culture is most prominent in food and fashion. During the height of colonialism, the Nonyas and Babas were close to the British. Many Nonya and Baba saw themselves as British subjects; they were fluent in English because many of them attended English school and some even studied abroad in England.

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Although the Chinese traders and the coolies who arrived in Southeast Asia as part of the history of European colonial expansion came to the region for different reasons and belonged to different social classes, they did not see Southeast Asia as their new home. They were sojourners who hoped to eventually return to their home villages once they had earned enough money to support their families back home.

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The Rise of a Chinese Consciousness in Southeast Asia
Since most Chinese did not understand their relationship to China in the way citizens conceptualize their relationship with a nation-state, it is no surprise that the sojourners in Southeast Asia did not harbor any strong nationalistic sentiments for China. After all, the strong affect for the motherland was a given narrative folded into their hope of an eventual return to the ancestral home. This changed as China underwent modernization after encountering the threats from foreign powers in major conflicts such as the Opium War. The waning in power of the Qing dynasty and the Japanese invasion in the 1931 via Manchuria made it even more urgent for the Chinese to rise up, modernize and unite to resist foreign invasion and exploitations.

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As nationalistic sentiments grew among the newly awaken China at the dawn of World War II, a similar nationalism began to brew in Southeast Asia among the overseas Chinese. When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, the Chinese in Malaya launched the anti-Japanese national salvation movement to boycott Japanese businesses and goods. This Chinese consciousness (or huaqiao [華僑] consciousness) grew stronger when Sun Yat-sen visited Malaya to specifically solicit physical support and financial aids from the overseas Chinese. For the first time, overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia were reminded of the potential loss of their homeland. This threat to one’s homeland conflated the concepts of “home village” with “China,” making them interchangeable; China losing the war to the Japanese would have meant the loss of home village to the overseas Chinese. When the Japanese troops arrived in Malaya on 8 December 1941, this Chinese consciousness reached its peak. The Chinese, many who were members of the Malayan Communist Party and the English educated Straits-born Chinese, led by Baba physican and educator Lim Boon Keng (林文庆), united in their effort to fight the Japanese. They also collaborated with the British Malayan government in the resistance.

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This Chinese consciousness became the basis of what constitutes the identity formation of the overseas Chinese, an identitarian feature we understand as conveniently as “Chineseness” today. The end of World War II led to a reconfiguration of the concept of “Chineseness” among the Nanyang Chinese. The war against communism in Southeast Asian was to eliminate the influence of the local communist forces led predominantly by the Chinese. The suppression of the Chinese communists and the attempt to distance them from the rest of the Chinese communities created a notion of Chineseness that is, in appearance, apolitical and solely defined by a cultural identity that is broader than a national one. Scholar like Tu Wei-ming (杜維明) has theorized such development in his concept of “Cultural China.” Today, when we use the term “Chineseness,” it is this pervasive notion of a shared culture that all Chinese throughout the world supposedly possess that we are referring to. This is no doubt a myth because each and every Chinese diasporic community has its very own local characteristics and uniqueness that might not correspond to the all-encompassing notion of Chineseness. Yet, this myth continues to haunt generations of Chinese in diaspora. We continue to see renditions of various forms in cultural productions such as literature and media that perpetuate the often unconsummated desire to mourn for the loss of one’s homeland, and to nurse one’s nostalgia for being displaced from “home.” Yet, “home” often looms large over the sense of identity among overseas Chinese cultural producers without its validity as “home” being questioned against the physical land in which these overseas Chinese have already spread their roots for generations. How many generations does it take for the descendants of Chinese immigrants to feel at home in their physical homeland without being haunted by the void of a sense of myopic homelessness simply because they were not born in their ancestral homeland, China? Does the local experience not count vis-à-vis one’s ancestral culture in the formation of identity contingent to one’s lived experience? These are common themes found in the literature written by ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. Contemporary writers from this region address these tensions through their works, which are multicultural in essence and multilingual at times.

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Nanyang Literature and Its Variants
The earliest modern literature in Southeast Asia written in Sinitic script is known as Nanyang Literature (Literature of the South Seas/南洋文學). Most Nanyang writers resided in Malaysia and Singapore with some scattered in West Malaysia (Borneo and Sarawak) and Sumatra, Indonesia. They were influenced by the 1919 May Fourth Literary Movement in China, a movement that advocated for the modernization and vernacularization of Chinese literature. Despite the influence of the movement, Nanyang writers insisted on the importance of establishing their own literary tradition that was representative of the local characteristics. Nanyang Secai (South Sea Colors/南洋色彩), the particular style that features loan words from an array of local languages including Sinitic dialects, and specific descriptions of local scenery and life, became the center of debate among writers and artists between 1920s and 1930s. They argued over what constituted Nanyang colors and how much tribute this new literary tradition of that time should pay to Chinese literature from the mainland. May Fourth pioneer writer, Yu Dafu (郁達夫) participated in this debate when he took up the post of literary editor for Sin Chew Jit Poh (星洲日報) in Singapore in 1938, which, interestingly, reshape his understanding of his own view of Nanyang Literature. Before the war broke in Malaya in 1941, Yu Dafu invested his effort in supporting and promoting the works of young Nanyang writers.

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After the war, as the region began its decolonization process, Nanyang Literature assumed disparate forms in parallel to the distinct independence of various nations. In the case of Malaya, the literary environment developed in two separate directions with the separation of Singapore from the Federation of Malaya in 1965. Chinese Malaysian under the Malay government continued to write about their local experience as they avoided discussing their longing for the ancestral homeland in order not be accused of sympathizing with the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) which was cast as the enemy of the Malayan government during the Cold War era due to their link to the Chinese Communist Party in China. After the war, the Malayan government with the support of the British began suppressing the Malayan Communist Party and any rhetoric among the Chinese that appeared to be in support of the local communist groups. The “New Village” (新村) initiative relocated Chinese communities to what was called New Chinese Villages to segregate the Chinese from the influence of the MCP during the Malayan Emergency. Resettling the Chinese communities away from rural areas allowed the government to concentrate on their anti-communist efforts by curtailing the MCP’s attempt to recruit members in rural Chinese villages. Writer and scholar Wong Yoon Wah (王潤華) documented the life in the “New Village” in his 1999 Chinese poetry collection titled 《熱帶雨林與殖民地》/Tropical Rainforest and Colony in his Chinese poetry collection New Village. In 2012, Ho Lian Geok and Ng Yi-sheng translated Wong Yoon Wah’s poems on the “New Village” into English and published them in a bilingual edition.

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As Malaysia standardized public education to a Malay-medium only system by 1982 with the emphasis on the role of Bahasa Malay as the official language of the country, national-type private Chinese Independent High Schools continued to offer Chinese education to Malaysian Chinese. Many students who attended these Chinese high schools eventually pursued college degrees in Taiwan under the Overseas Students Education Policy (僑教政策) managed by Overseas Community Affairs Council in Taiwan. 1980s saw a large wave of Malaysian Chinese students studying in Taiwan. Among these students are Chang Kuei-hsing (張貴興), Ng Kim Chew (黃錦樹), Li Tianbao (李天葆), Chong Yee Voon (鐘怡雯), and Chan Tah Wei (陳大為) who have settled in Taiwan after their studies and become renowned writers in the Taiwan and other parts of the Sinophone World. Though living abroad, they write in parallel with their fellow writers such as Shang Wanyun (商晚筠), Fang Lu (方路), and Li Zishu (黎紫書) in Malaysia, addressing the racial politics among the Chinese, Malays, Orang Asli, etc., the blood history of Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and its ambiguous status in the history of Malaya, etc. These writing often incorporate the characteristics of Nayang Secai to mark the uniqueness of Malaysian Chinese literature. The growing interest in Malaysian Chinese writings starting in the late 1980s in Taiwan offered a boost to the local Chinese literary scene, encouraging more Malaysian Chinese writers to produce and seek publication of their works both locally and in Taiwan. Li Zisu is one such example. As a result, the boom in Malaysian Chinese writings brought to light an ongoing debate on the status of Chinese Malaysian literature: because the official language of Malaysia is Malay, Malaysian literature is not regarded in any official capacity as National Literature of Malaysia; on the other hand, Taiwan’s attempt to subsume Malaysian Chinese literature written by writers residing in Taiwan as a subcategory of Taiwanese Literature would only end up eroding the identity of Malaysian Chinese literature. This double-bind status Malaysian Chinese writers experience with the lack of legitimacy in their works reflects, ironically, on the one hand, their status as second-class citizens in a country made up of Malays as majority; on the other hand, the perpetuation of their overseas Chinese identity in a country where some of them adopted as their new home.

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In comparison, the Anglophone Malaysian Chinese writers are a smaller community. Of this group, there are pioneer writers such as Shirley Geok-lin Lim, whose early work such as Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands (1996), explores her own life as a Peranakan, growing up in a Malay state where her struggle for identity can only materialize through the tensions between the ancestral and local cultures. In recent years, Anglophone Malaysian writers such as Tan Twan Eng and Tash Aw have earned increasing international recognitions and have published their works under international press.

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In the case of Singapore, ethnic Chinese writers, both Sinophone and Anglophone, acquired a new mission with the nation’s independence in 1965. With a society built on the beliefs of racial and religious harmony, multiculturalism, and economic progress, the immediate concerns among the writers of Chinese descents at the dawn of the nation’s independence were no doubt different from the their peers in Malaysia. Even though Sinophone writers in Singapore continue to explore themes, such as nostalgia for China (for example 潘正鐳’s poem <赤道走索>) and the preservation of one’s cultural heritage (for example, 柯思仁’s essay《身為福建人》), unlike their counterparts in Malaysia, as the majority in the new nation, they do not experience similar racial marginalization and discrimination as the Sinophone Malaysian writers who live and write in a Muslim state; hence, their writings differ in themes and content. The major effort of the Singapore government ran by the People’s Action Party (PAP) in eliminating the MCP’s infiltration of the island placed sanctions on Sinophone writers because majority of the communists members were Chinese and they had been actively recruiting young members from Chinese schools. Most writers avoid writing on subjects related to communism or the MCP for the fear of being persecuted. Singapore’s theater doyen, the late Kuo Pao Kun was held in detention from 1976 to 1980 and then house arrest until 1983 during one of the government’s biggest leftist purge mission. Because Chinese theater was seen as heavily involved in leftist politics, Kuo Pao Kun, a leading figure in the literary scene, was regarded as complicit with communism and its negative impact on the Singapore society.

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An important theme common in earlier Sinophone literature from Singapore is the conflict between the old and new generations (such as 謝裕民’s short stories 《蹲向傳統或坐看現代》), a theme that parallel the binary opposite of tradition versus modernity commonly found in postcolonial literatures. The rapid urbanization of Singapore not only became the focus of the nation-building narrative (for example 希尼爾’s new mythology《浮城六記》)but also triggered the anxiety of losing one’s cultural roots (such a張曦娜’s short story 《任牧之》) among the various ethnic groups. Sinophone writers saw it as their responsibility to use their writing to caution this impending threat to the growth of a nation. After all, what is a nation without a common culture that could unite its people? It is not that Anglophone writers of Chinese decent were not concerned about issues of tradition, these English educated writers seemed to be more ideologically attuned to the PAP’s narrative of nation-building at the dawn of Singapore’s independence, such as Tan Kok Seng’s Son of Singapore Son (1972) and Robert Yeo’s Singapore Trilogy (2001). Though contemporary Anglophone Chinese writers such as Ng Yi-Sheng, Joshua Ip, Koh Jee Leong, Jeremy Tiang, Christine Chia have used their writing to challenge the ideology of the PAP government in the past decade or so.

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Conclusion: Multicultural Literature from the South Seas––Kuo Pao Kun’s Plays
For some Sinophone Singapore writers, their concerns were not simply the loss of a remote ancestral culture but the lack of any culture in the burgeoning nation. After he was released from custody and home detention, Kuo Pao Kun returned to the literary and arts scene. He continued to write, direct, and train young writers and theatre workers until his passing in 2002. In 1988, Kuo Pao Kun wrote his first multi-lingual play, Mama Looking for Her Cat/尋找小貓的媽媽, which includes English, Mandarin, Tamil, Sinitic dialects (such as Hokkien and Cantonese), etc. While the debut of the play attracted both praises and criticism, it marked the first attempt by a Singaporean writer to reflect on the social realities of a multi-lingual and multi-cultural Singapore, which is the very essence of a new national culture in the making. In the play, Mama can only speak Hokkien. The children have been neglecting her by lessening their communication with her because they have complied with the state’s Bilingual Policy implemented in 1966 and the Speak Mandarin campaign launched in 1979 by the government. In a pivotal scene, the dialect-speaking Mama encounters an Indian man who speaks only Tamil; yet, the two are able to communicate by mimicking the cat’s cries. What brought them together is the fact that they both lost a cat. While some critics suggest that the cat represents the cultural heritage that is lost in the form of language, Hokkien and Tamil for Mama and the Indian man, respectively, I think, perhaps, it represents something common in the multi-lingual and multicultural Singapore that the people of this island city regardless of race ethnicity and religion, need to be searching for—a culture that is representative of all.

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This proposal to search for a cultural that is unique to Singaporean continue to take shape over the next decade. In 1995, Kuo Pao Kun completed a monologue entitled Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral in English. In the following year, Kuo rewrote the play in Chinese. The play is a prime example of a multicultural literature that, though, meditates on the notion of “Chineseness” in the context of Chinese Singaporeans, does not limit the discussion of identity to a specific race or ethnicity. Admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho), a Muslim and non-Han individual has been sold to the imperial court to serve as a eunuch in order to support his family. The physically castrated Zheng He ironically also undergoes symbolic castration when he gives up his religion and language to adopt those of the Han-Chinese when he becomes a eunuch. Yet, it is this flexibility that Zheng He learns at a young age that allows him to engage with the foreign cultures he encounters throughout the seven voyages he leads around the world with an open mind. Refused to be disadvantaged by his emasculation, Zheng He turns it into an opportunity to create for himself a new identity and philosophy that involve adopting the essence of cultures and tradition he comes across, first in the Han Chinese territories where he first serves, and then on the voyages he embarks as admiral and ambassador. This is the philosophy Kuo Pao Kun aspires to relay to Singaporeans in his play, Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral by implying that culturally-castrated Singaporean are the descendants of Zheng He. Like Zheng He, Kuo Pao Kun believes that Singaporeans can also transform and invent a culture they can call their own. The prime example of Zheng He’s celebration of cultural exchange and diversity appears in a magical realist scene in the play:

晨光乍現，鄭和的大隊已經遙遙在望，不一會兒，水上的、岸上的、出迎的、探訪的，全都匯聚在港灣岸邊的廣場上：清真的、拜佛的、信天妃的、拜牛神的、一下子就混雜得難分你我了。
交易會還沒有正式完結，聯歡會已經迫不及待地開始。歌舞之聲震耳欲聾，千種百樣的吃的、喝的、玩的、鬧的、一桌一桌、一組一組、一批一批、一隊一隊，都來了…… 到了聯歡尾聲，鄭和跟大王交換了禮品。客人送的金銀瓷器精緻鮮豔，在落日餘暉裡光芒閃耀；主人送的奇珍異獸之又怪，令太監官兵們驚嘆稱奇。當客船順著潮水駛出了港灣，岸上岸外的歌聲還斷斷續續的遙相傳送。

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This multicultural market is a contact zone for exchange of commodities such as fabrics, metalwork, seeds, stones, games, etc. The market soon transforms into a carnival-like festival that embraces the nature of the material exchange of an array of commodities to the celebration of cultural interactions of diverse forms and origins. This festivity promotes an active comingling of cultures in contact and exchange. The result of such a comingling is the diversification of all distinct cultural traditions. This scene celebrates not just the festivities and hospitality of the host but also the ideal of multicultural exchange that are not burdened by the cultural baggage on either the host or the guest. Multiculturalism, as suggested by the play celebrates diversity by denouncing cultural superiority.

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This play is Kuo Pao Kun’s response to the claim that Singaporeans are cultural orphans who do not know their ancestral culture and do not have one that they can call their own. While Kuo focuses on Chinese Singaporean in this play and investigates the cultural currency of “Chineseness” to overseas Chinese in a globalizing world, he is suggesting that this paradigm of identity construction can also be applied to any other cultures. Hence, in 1998, he put forth the concept of “Open Culture” as a framework to rethink cultural identity as fluid and constructive. With “Open Culture,” he proposes that an individual be open to absorbing world cultures that would have positive influence instead of obsession over a specific ethnic identity they inherited at birth. By using a culture they are most accustomed to as the basis (the ancestral culture to some but not all), the individual should be able to construct an identity of global vision by incorporating other positive cultures they encounter in their daily life, like Admiral Zheng He in Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral. In this sense, Nanyang Chinese is by default a multicultural identity.