North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2013. 160 pp. (Colour illus.) US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8048-4142-9.
The Peranakan Chinese Home and Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia (the latter of which I reviewed in Pacific Affairs 86, no. 2, 2013) were published two years apart, but they could be seen as a coupling by their author Ronald Knapp, an authority in the field of vernacular architecture. They suggest that, for all their differences, they are to be seen as belonging to a common project which derived from Knapp’s longstanding interests on Chinese house forms and culture. The main difference, as Knapp points out in his acknowledgement, is in “approach and scope of the narrative. The Peranakan Chinese Home takes an explicitly comparative approach, rather than the episodic house-by-house approach of our earlier book, in order to focus on generalizations that help illuminate similarities and differences.” The result is an informative and valuable book about the homes of Peranakan Chinese in Southeast Asia. Supported again by the superb photography of Chester Ong, the book offers a well-narrated description and systematic room-by-room view of Peranakan homes. The book has a quality of an “exhibition,” as the texts and images powerfully constitute each other, panel by panel and room by room. Moving in and through the series of rooms, one feels one is entering a big extended family home of Peranakan Chinese, with each family exhibiting similarities and differences in their material cultures.
Like an exhibition space, the book is organized around architectural spaces that make up the “Chinese house.” The chapters include “facades,” “the reception hall,” “the courtyard,” the “ancestral hall,” “the living areas,” “the bedroom,” the “kitchen” and “signs and symbols.” The room selection reflects a decision already made as to what counts as the significant features of the Chinese house. There is here a risk of approaching Southeast Asia through the optic of houses in China which could compromise the specificity of Peranakan cultures. Knapp’s comparative perspective is productively framed by his deep and wide knowledge of Chinese cultures which gives the book particular strength, but it also raises the question of how much the Peranakan cultures have been shaped by cultures other than Chinese that crossed paths in Southeast Asia. With Chinese culture as a dominant framework, it is harder to see which items or elements of the Peranakan material cultures are borrowed from the locals. We see the Daoist Eight Immortals, the Three Star Gods (Fu Lu Shou), Guan Gong and Guan Yin, but we don’t see much discussion on Datuk Kong (the local guardian spirit).
Peranakan is a term for “native-born Chinese” of Southeast Asia, a term that suggests their hybridity and rootedness to local cultures despite their cosmopolitan outlook and global mental world. The term however is treated differently in different parts of the region. For instance, the notion of Peranakan, while acknowledged, is not widely used in Indonesia. The Suharto regime referred to ethnic Chinese as “Cina” and only later on as “Tionghoa.” The term “Peranakan” and its counterpart “Totok” (foreign-born, and thus pure Chinese) had no use to the regime, which sought to “other” the Chinese by reducing the diversity or the hybridity of ethnic Chinese by lumping them under a single category. How the cultural policy of Suharto might have shaped the home of Peranakan Indonesia remains unclear, and Knapp, like his earlier book, does not wish to cover the politics of the term.
The complex nature of “Peranakan” identity and identification and how it is represented in material cultures is what makes this book interesting. The rich images brought back memories of my childhood home. Compared to Knapp’s collection, our home (a 1960s row house) in a Chinese neighbourhood in Medan, Sumatra, Indonesia, and its furniture would be too modern and cheap (should I say) for the collection identified by the book. Our little courtyard was multifunctional but it was mostly for washing clothes and dishes. It was a space filled with the ordinary household activities associated with the position of my mother and aunts in the household. It was a gendered space. I wonder how ordinary are the collection of spaces depicted in the Chinese Peranakan Home. The book indeed has a mission to classify, clarify and visualize the most exquisite of the Peranakan homes, as Knapp acknowledges that “while researching our 2010 book, Chinese Houses of Southeast Asia, we found ourselves puzzling as to how to differentiate residences built and occupied by Peranakan Chinese from contemporaneous homes. It is our hope that The Peranakan Chinese Home will help clarify this” (158). Time thus is as important as space. The book however is more successful in its representation of space. It is less able to capture the formation and transformation of the home in response to the socio-cultural changes of the long twentieth century.
The difficulty of taking time more seriously seems to be acknowledged rather unconsciously, through the first image in the book: The close-up photo of a jolly gramophone with a huge horn. The gramophone was one of the prime symbols of class formation, modernity and social change. It was favoured especially by the Peranakan elites for its capacity to acquire “culture” and bring both global and local music to the home. Tio Tek Hong, the most known distributor, became famous in Java for his dealership and his collection of records, but his own shop, still standing in Jakarta, is left to deteriorate. A lot can be said about this image of a gramophone, along with the “unnoticed” remote control on a table. They both represent time, but Knapp leaves them alone as no word is said about them. This photo is the least museum-like piece in the book. It serves as a silent commentary to what is not narrated in the book: class formation, ethnic tension, cultural policy and the socio-historical change of the home within which it is embedded.
Abidin Kusno
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 905-906