Chinese Women in the Southern Diaspora History Symposium

Transcription

1 Chinese Women in the Southern Diaspora History Symposium Date: Friday, 5 December 2014 Venue: Rooms 201 and 202, Building 24, University of Wollongong Organisers: Associate Professor Julia Martínez and Dr Kate Bagnall Contact: juliam@uow.edu.au; kate.bagnall@gmail.com PROGRAM 9.00 Tea & coffee 9.20 Introduction: Julia Martínez & Kate Bagnall Chinese families in colonial Australia (Chair: Kate Bagnall) Pauline Rule Being a Chinese wife and mother in colonial Victoria, Sandi Robb Daughters of the Flowery Land: Chinese women in Queensland Morning tea Shaping modern Chinese women (Chair: Sophie Loy-Wilson) Kate Bagnall Family politics: Chinese wives in Australia, 1902 to 1920 Sophie Couchman Chinese Australian brides, photography and the white wedding Grace Yee Chinese women in New Zealand: a gross and bitter evil Lunch Internationalising Chinese women (Chair: Claire Lowrie) Sophie Loy-Wilson Paul Macgregor Julia Martínez Afternoon tea Discussant Jan Ryan Daisy Guo s Shanghai: Narrating the lives of Chinese Australian women in Shanghai before and after 1949 Mrs Fabian Chow of Shanghai journalist, radio star and goodwill ambassador: an Australian Chinese colleague of the Soong sisters University education and Chinese women s mobility in the twentieth century Reflections on Chinese women s history Also contributing but unable to attend on the day are Dr Mei-fen Kuo and Professor Antonia Finnane. 1

2 Pauline Rule Independent scholar ABSTRACTS Being a Chinese wife and mother in colonial Victoria, This paper focuses on recovering the immigrant experiences of Chinese women who settled for a time in the Australian colony of Victoria. These range from successful integration into society as the wife of a Chinese Christian minister, country hotelier or interpreter through to extreme isolation and loneliness resulting in insanity and death. Occupying the middle of this spectrum of immigrant experience is the majority of Chinese women, those living a more interior, domestic life as the wives of Chinese merchants and storekeepers. Unlike Chinese women who immigrated to South-East Asia at this time to enter the external labour market or those who entered the manufacturing industries of San Francisco in the later decades of the 19th century, those who came to Victoria were involved in family formation. Even the small number of girls who came to Victoria as maids and companions to other Chinese women or as an amah for a European family soon had a Chinese husband. In the case of these Chinese women their tiny number compounds the traditional problem of women s marginal presence in historical writing. The decision of Chinese male immigrants to bring so few of their wives to Victoria plus the domestic roles of these women as wives and mothers makes them an almost invisible presence in the colony. But enumerations of their existence in the decennial censuses raises such questions as who were they and how did they fare in an overwhelmingly alien environment. Yet historical fragments and scraps of information, recorded for instance because of western fascination with their exotic otherness or details from times of crisis do survive. The fragments and scraps that remain in the historical record can be pieced together to reconstruct their worlds and bring them out from the shadow of invisibility and allow us to understand the micro history of their experiences. Names can be given to a significant number of them and an examination undertaken of their negotiation of the challenging experience of being Chinese wives and mothers in a host society, operating between a new culture and that of their homeland. Sandi Robb PhD candidate, James Cook University robbsandi@gmail.com Daughters of the Flowery Land: Chinese women in Queensland, 1860 to 1920 To many, Chinese settlement throughout Queensland begins and ends with the Palmer River Goldfield, where much has been written about the great influx of miners, the sojourning Chinaman, the secretion of gold out of the colony and the perceived lining the pockets of many a departing alien. It is a familiar landscape, populated with the imagery of a vast number of industrious yet exploited men, treacherous geographic conditions and life threatening perils often resulting in an early and sometimes violent demise for many. Yet behind the popular Chinese settlement interpretation lies another perspective which remains hidden that is, the immigration and settlement of young Chinese women who arrived to join their husbands and the families that became British subjects. Rendered historically invisible by the sheer numerical magnitude of the Chinese male population and hidden through confinement to the private comfort of the family home, the lives of immigrant Chinese women can be unpacked to reveal a rich history of circumstance, acceptance, separation and endurance. Just exactly who were these women, where did they 2

3 come from, and how did they survive to successfully pave the way for future generations throughout the region? This is the story of the daughters of the Flowery Land. Kate Bagnall Research Associate, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific Family politics: Chinese wives in Australia, 1902 to 1920 This paper considers the entry of Chinese wives to Australia in the first two decades of the twentieth century, a time of significant changes to law and policy on the admission of Chinese women. For 15 months after the introduction of the Immigration Restriction Act in 1901, almost no limitation was placed on the arrival of the wives and families of Chinese men already domiciled in Australia. Alarmed by the number of families choosing to take advantage of this relaxation of restrictions, from March 1903 the Australian government removed this right and, from then on, admission of wives and families was solely at the discretion of the minister and officially for limited periods only. Placing this history within ongoing international debate over the reasons why few Chinese women migrated overseas, in this chapter I will discuss the changes to Australian law and policy, including an overview of 19th-century colonial anti-chinese laws as they applied to women and how things changed in the early twentieth century. I will then focus on case studies of Chinese wives who arrived in Australia after 1903, including Ham Hop (Mrs Poon Gooey) whose 1913 deportation was pivotal to the government's subsequent handling of such cases. The stories of these women, their husbands and children illustrate the political nature of family formation for Chinese living in early twentieth-century Australia. Sophie Couchman Curator, Chinese Museum in Melbourne and Honorary Research Fellow, La Trobe University sophie.couchman@gmail.com Chinese Australian brides, photography and the white wedding From the late 19th century an increasing number of women married and were photographed in white, including Australian women of Chinese heritage. The decision about which cultural practices to follow when marrying is a negotiation between bride and groom, their families and the societies in which they live. Despite unchanging tradition being a key characteristic of the white wedding, the cluster of cultural practices that make up the white wedding has evolved over time and has become integrally linked to the creation of the wedding photograph. This chapter will analyse Chinese Australian wedding photographs dating from the 1890s to the 1940s within the context of larger global movements in fashion and culture. It will suggest that by marrying in white, Chinese Australian women were not assimilating into Western, Christian cultural practices that already existed, but that they, alongside other women in Australia, China, Hong Kong and around the world, were building something new the global phenomenon of the white wedding. Grace Yee PhD candidate, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne gyee@student.unimelb.edu.au Chinese women in New Zealand: a gross and bitter evil The Chinese presence in New Zealand was an intractable issue for over a century, with women s reproductive capacity perceived as particularly threatening. For a prolonged period, exclusionist legislation had a significant impact on women s lives. But while more recent narratives celebrate Chinese women s participation and assimilation into the mainstream, there persist denigrating representations that reflect entrenched Orientalist beliefs. In this paper, I trace mainstream Pakeha perceptions of Chinese women in 3

4 New Zealand from the time of their first arrival in the 19th century through to the early 21st century. My analysis of a broad range of narratives, including parliamentary debates, histories, works of fiction and photographs, reveals two enduring hegemonic readings of Chinese women: the Oriental and the Invisible. Sophie Loy-Wilson Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Sydney sophie.loy-wilson@sydney.edu.au Daisy Guo s Shanghai: Narrating the lives of Chinese Australian women in Shanghai before and after 1949 This paper uses an oral history interview with Chinese Australian Daisy Guo as a window into the lives of Chinese Australian women Shanghai before and after the fall of China to Communism in In the early 1990s Chinese historians in Shanghai began a series of oral history interviews with residents living in the city in the 1920s and 1930s. They wandered up high-rises, into the art deco homes of the old French concession now owned by China s rich and into decrepit apartment blocks known locally as boat houses because they were cramped and damp and, after the nationalisation of property under the Communists post- 1949, they housed up to four families in one room. In one of these they met 95-year-old Daisy Guo, born in Sydney in 1919 and the grand-daughter of Chinese Australian department store owner Guo Le, associated with the Wing On company. The interview they conducted with Daisy was published in Mandarin in Shanghai de feng hua xue yue (Shanghai Memorabilia) in 2008 and tells the story of Daisy s life before and after China s fall to Communism in When the Communists took over the city, Daisy, a wealthy socialite, was placed in a re-education camp. During humiliation sessions in the 1950s she wore a dunce cap and placard with characters on it she could not read, accused of crimes she could not decipher, for her Chinese was still rudimentary. Her Australian roots and her links with Wing On department stores aligned her with capitalist imperialists and singled her out for harsh punishment. Her life story, as told to Chinese historians, demonstrates how transnational Chinese Australian exchanges take on dense cultural meanings in ways productive for historians. Daisy s association with the Wing On department store has been written into Chinese and Australian national narratives in particular ways. In Australia, her story is bound up with the restrictions placed on Chinese Australian business under the White Australia policy. In Chinese histories of Shanghai, her life and connection to the Wing On retail empire is associated with a perceived Chinese Australian collusion with Western capitalism and imperialism during the treaty port era. These differing historiographical treatments of Daisy s story tell us much about the strange ground between Chinese Australian historical memory and modern Chinese nationalism. Paul Macgregor Independent scholar paulmacgregor@diversity.org.au Mrs Fabian Chow of Shanghai journalist, radio star and goodwill ambassador: an Australian Chinese colleague of the Soong sisters Alice Lim Kee appears in series of photos in the Chinese Museum picture collection, recorded only as a woman from Rutherglen, Victoria, who was unofficially engaged to Melbourne s Frank Chinn, then went off to become a film star in Shanghai in the 1920s. The four photographs show a beautiful woman, gracefully adorned by modern European and Chinese attire, progressing from teenage through to her late 30s, and in one image, Shanghai 1929, she is seen posing with global cinema s first celebrity couple, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Yet a search via Trove in Australian newspapers has revealed an extraordinarily diverse career for the same woman, but under different names in different circumstances, and a career in which cinema is definitely 4

5 underplayed. Alice returned to Australia twice, in 1938 and 1943, both times as a goodwill ambassador for China, representing the Nationalist government and encouraging support, in lectures around Australia, for China s struggle against Japan. Yet on these tours she is Mrs Fabian Chow, with her original maiden Chinese Australian name appearing only occasionally as backgrounding. It is also revealed that she is a noted journalist in China, writing under the nom-de-plume of Wu Ai-lien, the Mandarin romanisation of her Cantonese birth name ( 伍愛蓮 ). One of the illustrated articles also makes it clear that one of the photographs in Frank Chinn s collection is not of Alice Lim Kee at all, but her fellow ambassador Elsie Lee Soong, a Chinese American woman. Reading between the lines it is clear that 21-year old Alice Lim Kee had not just left Australia to return to the China of her Cantonese parents, but to adopt an identity as a modern international woman in a modernising China, based first in Peking, then Shanghai, Hong Kong and Chungking. Yes, she was in the film industry, but she was also a teacher at the Teachers College in Beijing, the first woman radio announcer in the Far East, a writer on the North China Daily News, private secretary to Mrs H.H. Kung (wife of China s Minister of Finance and sister of Madame Chiang Kai-shek), Chairman of the Chinese Women s Club, on the staff the Chinese Ministry of Information, assistant editor of the British Ministry of Information in Chungking, and a representative of both the YWCA of China and also the People s Foreign Relations Association of Chungking. She was also one of the founders of the Sino-Australasian Association of Hong Kong and the first Australian-born Chinese woman to be elected a member for the Kuomintang in Chungking. Along the way she married Fabian Chow and has two sons, Cecil and Colin. This paper reflects on how the cultural memory of Alice Lim Kee, as expressed in varied forms of public record, has been fragmented by the diverse roles in which she lived her life teenage lover, film actor, journalist, broadcaster, wife, mother, social and public figure, political operator, roving ambassador. It will also follow Alice in her exploration of the multiple identities of being Chinese, Western, Australian, modern and female in Republican China. Julia Martínez ARC Future Fellow, University of Wollongong juliam@uow.edu.au University education and Chinese women s mobility in the twentieth century By the turn of the twentieth century in China there was a growing movement in favour of women s education supported first by the Dowager Empress, and after 1912 by Sun Yat-sen. Soon after, in Guangdong, Chinese women were being encouraged to attend university, though for those that could an overseas education was favoured. The famous Soong sisters Qingling, who became Madame Sun Yat-sen, and Meiling, who became Madame Chiang Kai-shek were well-known for having graduated from American colleges. They had attained the English language fluency and the level of education required of leading women in the New China. Another wealthy Chinese woman, Li Tsu Sung from Shanghai, enrolled in 1908 at the University of Berlin. In Australia too, the presence of Chinese woman at universities demonstrates the widespread support for women s education. Australia-born Alma Mary Chong graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Sydney University and went on to work for the Chinese consul in Sydney before moving to Nanking where she became Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs. Over the next decades a number of Chinese woman would graduate from Australian universities, gradually breaking through into new professions. In this paper I explore the cases of Chinese women at universities and consider the extent to which their push for education was viewed favourably, both in the media and within other Chinese and non-chinese circles. 5

6 Mei-fen Kuo Research Fellow, Centre for Social Impact, Swinburne University of Technology Reading gender in Chinese Australian newspapers of the early twentieth century In this paper I present a reading of discussions of gender in Australia s early Chinese-language newspapers to discuss the transformation of the role of women, the function of the family and the social identity of Chinese Australians in the early twentieth century. The diaspora experience enhanced a sense of modern family life for Chinese Australians, in contrast to patriarchal traditions, and Chinese Australians accepted the Australian notion of social respectability and middle-class values in discussing women s roles as wife, mother and daughter. Changing ideas about gender relationships and the modern family also contributed to the growing presence of women and children in efforts to enhance the public profile of the Chinese Australian community, part of its struggle against the White Australia Policy. This policy isolated many Chinese, who were for the most part men without families in residence in Australia, thereby codifying them as the Other in the eyes of British and European Australians. This paper argues that public narratives provide a window onto the role of gender in the public fashioning of community and the behaviours of domestic consumption in the early twentieth century. Antonia Finnane Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne a.finnane@unimelb.edu.au Looking for Ruby Yen On the night of 13 July 1925, a young Perth woman called Ruby Yen, twenty-one years old, failed to return home. Around ten days later her body was recovered under circumstances that were widely reported in the press at the time. The inquest and a subsequent trial were closely followed by the public, with courtrooms packed. A number of Ruby s relatives were called on to give evidence. From press reports and legal documents concerning the case emerge details of family life in the small Australian-Chinese community in between-the-wars Perth. The paper draws on Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon s concept of the singularisation of history to discuss the implications of research on one person, or one family, for a sub-field such as Chinese Australian history, or the history of Chinese women in Australia. Ruby s certainly was a singular story. How was it Chinese? How was it Australian? Where is the historiographical space for it to be recounted? 6