Melissa Macauley - Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on Chinas Maritime Frontier

There the pilgrim on the bridge that, bounding

Lifes domain, frontiers the wold of death.

CHRISTOPH AUGUST TIEDGE

CHEN JINHUA WAS BORN in the Chaozhou region of southeastern China in 1911. His parents cultivated a fruit orchard on 15 mu (2.47 acres) of land, which was not a particularly large propertythe average farm size in the area was 9.43 mubut local communists reviled his family as rich. His village comprised about a thousand Chens, but they also had kinfolk overseas who owned businesses in Siam and the British Straits Settlements. Jinhua decided to leave his homeland and join them in 1932. His village was located in the once-thriving commercial district of Puning, which had fallen on hard times after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the eruption of communist insurgencies and Nationalist counterinsurgencies in the 1920s. A communist base had been established in mountains nearby, and comfortable farm families like the Chens were constantly harassed. This is why I went to Siam, because of this situation, he recalled years later in an interview:

There was nothing you could do. Because of this, our large household of twenty or thirty people all escaped. There was no way we could stay. Our family could not live in peace and enjoy our work. We lived in suspense the entire day. We were terrified the Nationalist army would come, and we were terrified that the communist army would come. If the communists came, even if you had no money, they would say youre rich and take it, whatever the amount. Otherwise they would detain you. And if the Nationalists came, they would also detain you arbitrarily, and then beat you, beat you just shy of death. So we all fled.

Jinhua sailed to Siam, where his sisters husband owned a three-hundred-acre sugar plantation and refinery. The spread was so enormous, they rented most of the land to local Thais. Jinhua went to work in the refinery, which was staffed by Chaozhou migrs who spoke his own Puning-inflected Chaozhou dialect. The business suffered during these Depression years, however. Perceiving that opportunities for advancement in his in-laws rural businesses were limited, he first moved to the nearby city of Bangkok to work for a cousin and then hitched a ride on a Chinese-owned steamer heading south for Singapore, where his older brother peddled fish. Most of the Chinese migrants in his new village also hailed from the Puning district of Chaozhou and specialized in vegetable production. Encouraged by his brother to start at the bottom, Jinhua took the backbreaking job of night soil collector, someone who lugged buckets from gate to gate to gather excrement for use as fertilizer. His wages were relatively high, he recalled, laughing, because no one else wanted to do it. His early sojourn in the British colony was full of such travails, but in time he made a new life for himself. After a decade trudging as a fruit peddler, he managed to establish his own fruit shop and, later, other enterprises. He married a woman his mother, back in China, selected for him. He raised a family, sent remittances home, endured the horrors of the Japanese occupation, and retired a moderately successful businessman who served the Chinese community in a number of philanthropic capacities.

Chens life story is unique in some ways, but it is emblematic of the larger trends characterizing the social and economic connections between southeast coastal China and Southeast Asia from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Sojourning overseas had become fairly normalized by his day, but catastrophes big and smalla feud, a flood, a government campaigninclined villagers and urbanites alike to embark on foreign journeys for work and sanctuary. Many of these sojourners already had relatives or acquaintances living overseas on whom they could rely initially. Absent that close connection, they turned to other expatriates from their native place in China. A significant number of migrs who achieved fame and fortune hailed from the trading classes at home or had family overseas who were engaged in commerce, shopkeeping, or other small businesses. Because of that overseas connection, families like the Chens tended to own more property and have more financial resources back home than their neighbors who lacked that lifeline. Although the vast majority of Chinese emigrants were males, female relations played an important role in commercial networking across the South China Sea. Siam was the default destination of the Chaozhou overseas sojourner after the eighteenth century, but the prosperous colonies of the British in Malaya and the French in Indochina also beckoned ambitious or desperate young migrants.