Cornell East Asia Series. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2021. xii, 226 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures, maps, B&W photos.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 9781501756184.
If many of the millions of southern Chinese who went overseas during the age of mass migration ultimately returned to China, what were their lives like after returning, and what impact did they have? Such questions have been asked since the pioneering research of the Chinese sociologist Chen Da in the 1930s. In Coming Home to a Foreign Country, Ong Soon Keong revisits these questions with a new twist, emphasizing that Hokkien, or southern Fujianese, returnees often did not go back to their native communities in the hinterland, but instead settled in Xiamen (Amoy), one of the five cities designated as treaty ports in 1842. Although located in the Chinese/Hokkien homeland, this port that served as a migration hub for outgoing migrants and returnees alike was in some ways foreign. For overseas Chinese who had obtained foreign nationality, any place in China was legally foreign. For most Hokkien returnees, regardless of nationality, Xiamen was foreign in the sense that this city was merely the node through which they had emigrated rather than their place of origin.
Ong explains to readers that the six substantive chapters of this book may be seen as forming two parts, with the first three chapters surveying the city’s history and the latter three focusing on returned migrants. Chapter 1, “Defining Xiamen,” offers a survey of the city’s history as a hub for Hokkien migration before the treaty port era. The chapter largely relies on existing scholarship but ends enticingly with an 1822 shipwreck of a vessel carrying 1,600 migrants bound for Batavia—one can imagine a background chapter beginning with this tragic event to make the author’s point that Xiamen was an important migration hub long before 1842. The second chapter, “Opening for Business,” more thoroughly mines primary sources to illustrate how Xiamen’s economy during the treaty port era was centred on providing migration services, supplying Hokkien communities overseas, and meeting the unique tastes of returnees who settled in the city. In effectively making this argument, Ong strikes a contrast to Shanghai, asking why Xiamen did not develop into such an industrial and commercial powerhouse. Of course, most cities in China were not like Shanghai. Would more apt comparisons not be with other hubs of out-migration, for example, Hong Kong (which the author does address via the work of Elizabeth Sinn), Guangzhou, Tengyue, or Hohhot?
The following three chapters most piqued this reader’s interest; here one learns much about the city and the migrants who passed through or settled here. In chapter 3, “Facilitating Migration,” Ong introduces us to headmen (migration brokers) operating between Xiamen and its hinterland and, in Xiamen, to emigrant inns, shipping brokers, and the “oarsmen” who transported migrants to ships in the harbour. The author leaves us thirsty for more details but convinced that in Xiamen “migration itself was a big business” (94). Chapter 4, “Manipulating Identities,” shows us how emigrants (and sometimes others) used foreign nationality (British or Japanese/Taiwanese) to gain advantages in Xiamen. This proxy use of power relations unique to imperialism and the resentment that this garnered among Chinese who did not have such access are reminiscent of Catholic converts in Shandong in the decade leading up to the Boxer Rebellion (Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, University of California Press, 1988). “Transforming Xiamen” traces the impact of overseas Chinese management of, and investment in, the development of Xiamen’s urban infrastructure, from roads to real estate, during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Ong explains that, compared to emigrant communities in the hinterland, Xiamen offered a relatively safe environment for investment. Thus, much of the vaunted wealth of overseas Hokkien migrants flowed to Xiamen rather than further into the hinterland.
Featuring case studies of two prominent overseas Chinese who sought to make their home in Xiamen in the 1920s and 1930s, in the final substantive chapter, “Making Home,” Ong argues against scholarly assumptions of immutable links between Chinese emigrants and their native places. To begin with, Ong reminds us that these two figures came “back” to Xiamen, not their ancestral villages. The first figure is Li Qingyuan, born to a Hokkien family that in each generation since that of his great-grandfather sent young men to the Philippines, where Li became a timber magnate and leader of the Chinese community, before turning to real estate development in Xiamen. The other case study is Lim Boon Keng, the Singapore-born, Edinburgh-educated doctor, entrepreneur, and Confucian revivalist. Lim is a familiar figure in English-language scholarship, most recently through the work of Shelly Chan (“The Case for Diaspora: A Temporal Approach to the Chinese Experience,” Journal of Asia Studies 74, no. 1, 2015). Ong’s discussion of Lim in particular is largely centred on his life before settling in Xiamen to head its new university. Readers will be eager to learn more about Lim’s experience in Xiamen as an overseas Hokkien who came “back.” Aside from his famous controversy with the writer Lu Xun, what was his experience in the city?
Ong convincingly debunks notions, perhaps now still more widely accepted in Chinese-language scholarship, of primordial ties between overseas Chinese and their native places in China. The author’s own approach could be pushed further to question other commonly accepted notions, for example, that emigrants were “traditionally marginalized people” in China (16). Granted, until its final decades, the Qing Court (though not always its officials in the field) remained wary of Chinese migrants across and beyond its frontiers. Likewise, literati in the cultural centres of Jiangnan did not, until the last decades of the dynasty, extol the virtues of overseas migrants. Nonetheless, a Xiamen- or Hokkien-based history holds out the promise of conceptually recalibrating centre and margin.
Steven B. Miles
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong