Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press, 2015. x, 348 pp. (Illustrations.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8014-7908-3.
This is a study of the Chinese community in the city of Bukit Mertajam in the Penang state of Malaysia over a thirty-year period from 1978 to 2007, undertaken by deploying the two different but complementary investigative optics of history and ethnography. At the most basic level, it is a triangulation of the three processes of class, ethnicity, and state formation. The attractive central argument is that the working-class ethnic Chinese in this township were put in a disadvantaged, subjugated position vis-à-vis the racially discriminative state policies and, while accepting state sovereignty and second-class citizenship, they developed in their daily survivalist practices the art of deception and disputation. Their unfavourable entanglement with state formation on the basis of everyday experiences has thus been framed between the larger nation-state rubric of “making of citizens” and the vague, deceptive community mantra of “getting by,” which thus serves as the monograph title.
The book begins with an introduction and historical background before plunging into six chapters under “Part I Development, 1969–85” and another three chapters under “Part II Globalization, 1985–97,” with an epilogue on the decade from 1997 to 2007. This bifurcated structure works reasonably well because of an appropriate insertion of additional prefaces to explain the two respective major partitions. One map is included about a temple management committee’s dialect groupings in China’s southeastern coast (191) and another on a religious procession route (257). But strangely and sorely lacking for the general readers is a locational map showing visually where Bukit Mertajam is situated vis-à-vis the entire length and breadth of Malaysia. In terms of content, there is a neat balance between discussing theoretical or conceptual issues and the presentation of empirical ethnographic materials. There is also general fluency and clarity throughout the volume.
Although there are forays of exploration into the angle of gender (for example, through family labour of male proprietors and female garment factory workers), the study remains anchored on class. The key class segment under scrutiny is the community of male truck drivers which the author had spent much time with during his fieldwork. But the study touches upon all three major Chinese social classes: the small cluster of prominent mercantile capitalists, the group of petty businessmen and professionals, as well as the majority working-class people. Instead of violent class struggles and ethnic conflicts under adverse state discriminative policies, the societal outcome was far from revolutionary—it had merely produced an ethnic Chinese survivalist mantra of “getting by.” This chanting was often followed by an elaboration of how hard business or life had been under predatory governing logics of the Malaysian state, especially about the corrupt exactions as embedded within the pervasive tributary relations between government functionaries and Chinese petty capitalists. Reflective of the generally placid social scene are nineteen plates of inserted photographs on everyday town lives, religious ceremonies, and city development (150-164). Only the first photograph on police headquarters and barracks hints at heightened social tension, but even this is marked clearly as a residue of past counterinsurgency years, from 1948 to 1960. This reinforces the book’s starting point that it is the early history of violence, fragmentation, disorder, and chaos in the pre-1969 period that had produced the silences about the history of class inequality in Malaysia and the forgetting among Chinese Malaysians.
In trying to claim originality and high contribution, the study has perhaps overstated its repeatedly harsh critique of the extant scholarly and journalistic literature on overseas Chinese communities as being Sino-centric and overly focused on the Chinese mercantile elite (2, 5–7, 9–10, 125–126, 166, 202, 210, 282, 284, 300–301). It is indeed inaccurate to portray extant overseas Chinese studies as almost exclusively focused upon the rich and famous with their self-governing segmentary hierarchical Chinese society, to the total neglect of the ordinary working class with their everyday lives. It has already been widely recognized that the waves of mass migration out of China in the post-Opium War era were overwhelmingly loaded with poor labourers and peasants, with a scattering of petty property owners. There are numerous extant writings about Chinese coolies, tin miners, rickshaw pullers, squatters, prostitutes, etc. Also, this field of study has for most recent years been vigorously engaged with interrogating the term “Chinese diaspora,” de-centering “Sino-centrism,” questioning “unchanging, essentialized Chinese culture,” examining “localized pluralism,” and exploring “re-migrations.” It is not viable for a 2015 book to ignore or dismiss this body of writings.
One other notable feature of this monograph is its confession that it has been “so long in the making,” with a “long and circuitous route to publication” (viii, x). The journey began with Professor G. William Skinner dispatching the author to northern West Malaysia in 1978 to explore its regional, hierarchical, central-place economic system and ethnic Chinese traders (ix, 57). When practical ethnographical difficulties in this line of inquiry proved too daunting, the author switched to a more general approach and eventually submitted a PhD thesis in 1983 on “the political economy” of the Chinese community of a West Malaysian market town (332). Although he regards it as a “failed project” and he points out that “the dissertation was never revised or published,” the author states that “my faltering efforts at a regional analysis” and the “positivist impulse” behind it nonetheless provided him with a grasp of the economic profile and everyday life in the township (57–58). Hence, he picked up the project again years later to rethink and reformulate it into this present volume, with brief follow-up fieldtrips in 1990–1993, 2002, 2004, and 2007. The additional research work is primarily presented in part 2 on globalization from 1985 to 1997 and in the epilogue addressing the years from 1997 to 2007, thus positioning the monograph as a longue durée thirty-year study. Therefore, this arduous journey on the one hand reflects the difficulties and limits in dusting off and reinvigorating old research projects. On the other hand, it demonstrates how important it is not to discard preciously collected ethnographic data. The relatively unknown township of Bukit Mertajam has this handsome volume to thank for capturing the history and ethnographical profile of its Chinese community for posterity.
Huang Jianli
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 200-202