Abstract
In this noteworthy book, the historian Guo-Quan Seng takes the concept of the “stranger” as a point of departure for the history of the Chinese community in colonial Indonesia. The idea of framing this minority group, who make up about 3 percent of Indonesia's current population, as strangers is compelling. Even though people of Chinese descent have lived in the Indonesian archipelago since at least the sixteenth century, they are still considered “foreign” by many Indonesians. This came pointedly to the fore, for instance, in the 2016 campaign against Ahok (Basuki Tjahaja Purnama), the former governor of Jakarta. After he was wrongly accused of anti-Islamic blasphemy, more than a million people protested in the capital to demand his imprisonment. Eventually, he received a two-year prison sentence. Ahok's double minority status as a Chinese-Indonesian and a Christian played a major role in shaping public opinion about his trial.
As Seng notes, the concept of the stranger usually implies a masculine subject: for instance, in the work of the sociologist Georg Simmel, who laid the groundwork for the field of migration sociology, the stranger is always a “he.” Seng asks how we might look at the history of the Indonesian Chinese from a gender perspective instead. In particular, this book focuses on what Seng calls “inter-Asian intimate relations” (p. 8). This term covers topics as diverse as colonial marriage law, inter-ethnic relationships, and romance novels about young Chinese couples. Despite this wide range of research themes, Seng ties the different narrative strands of the book together into a cohesive argument about the role of women and gender in shaping the Chinese-Indonesian patrilineal community. At the same time, the book also underlines how women negotiated the boundaries of Chinese patriarchal power, and sometimes resisted these boundaries, for instance in court.
The focus on inter-Asian relationships, rather than Asian-European ones, is original in a field that has long been marked by a focus on interracial families. It feels refreshing to read about love, desire, and race outside of often-repeated arguments about European fears of racial mixing. Leading anglophone scholars, most prominently Ann Laura Stoler in her book Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (University of California Press, 2002) have mainly been interested in how European imperial powers dealt with the controversial issue of miscegenation in their Southeast Asian colonies.
Furthermore, as most people with Indonesian roots in the Netherlands today are of mixed Indonesian-European (Indo) descent, the Dutch-language historiography on colonial families likewise usually does not include the Chinese community. This is the case, for instance, in Reggie Baay's work on the Indonesian concubines of European men, De njai: het concubinaat in Nederlands-Indië (Athenaeum-Polak and Van Gennep 2008) and in Suze Zijlstra's recent exploration of her own ancestry, De voormoeders: een verborgen Nederlands-Indische familiegeschiedenis (Ambo/Anthos 2021). An additional reason for this is the language barrier: while most historians of colonial Indonesia can read Malay, this is certainly not the case for (Hokkien) Chinese.
Seng, by contrast, reads Chinese, Malay, and Dutch, and these skills greatly enrich his work. This particularly pertains to the first three chapters of the book, which are almost exclusively based on minutes from the proceedings of the Chinese Council of Batavia, which were written in classical Chinese. The Council was appointed by the Dutch to deal with marriage, divorce, and conflicts within the Chinese community of colonial Jakarta. The remaining chapters of Strangers in the Family are mainly based on sources in Dutch and Malay. These include civil registries, articles from the Sino-Malay press, and, notably, novels. This is an interesting combination of historical sources, which are not often used in the same historical narrative: many historians prefer to limit themselves to archives rather than adding literary sources to their body of source material. Seng's book shows that the combination can work particularly well.
Apart from the historiography of gender and family in colonial Indonesia, Strangers in the Family speaks to the broader historiography of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. It should be read in conversation with other recent books that explore the hybrid culture of totok (immigrant) and peranakan (local-born) Indonesian Chinese, such as Tom Hoogervorst's Language Ungoverned: Indonesia's Chinese Print Entrepreneurs, 1911–1949 (Cornell University Press 2021). Because of its extensive engagement with colonial marriage law, the book also contributes to the legal history of colonial Indonesia.
The chronological scope of Strangers in the Family spans from the late eighteenth century to the 1930s. This is an interesting choice in a historical field that does not always recognize the continuities between the period before and after the turn of the twentieth century: historians often use the year 1900, when the colonial government embarked on the civilizing mission of the so-called ethical policy, as a cut-off point. Seng's broad chronological delineation allows for more comprehensive insight into the workings of gender within the Chinese community.
The eight chapters follow a chronological outline and are divided into four pairs that each deal with an overarching theme. The first four chapters analyze “the legal and discursive formation that gave birth to a creolized Chinese society” (p. 12), in other words, the gendered origins of the Chinese-Indonesian community. They deal with intimate relationships between Chinese men and Indonesian women, Confucian marriage, Chinese women's wealth, and divorce respectively. Indonesian women who had relationships with Chinese men and their mixed-race children figure prominently in the first two chapters. Importantly, Seng reminds the reader that both Indonesian and Chinese women were not accorded the full patrilineal privileges that Chinese men had; the first group was excluded from this because of their ethnicity, and the second because of their gender.
The chapter on divorce in particular clearly shows how legal practices, race, and gender were intertwined in the colonial legal system of the Dutch East Indies. In a plural legal system, with different legal codes for Europeans, “Natives,” and “Foreign Orientals” (Chinese), ethnic descent was of major importance in the courtroom. Crucially for his purposes, Seng is able to show how women defended their own financial interests in the face of divorce. This is reminiscent of Eric Jones's book Wives, Slaves, and Concubines: A History of the Female Underclass in Dutch Asia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). Even though the two books deal with women of different classes and ethnic backgrounds, they are both successful in amplifying the “voices” of women in court. This is unfortunately less the case for the second part of Strangers in the Family, which is largely based on novels and the writings of male legal experts. The romance novels that Seng uses to explore changing norms about love and marriage are all written by men, even though they are largely about women. The author could have made the account more balanced by including works of female authors. It would also have been interesting to include a few memoirs of Indonesian-Chinese women in the analysis, in order to ground this part of the book more firmly into social history.
While the first part of the book is set mainly in the nineteenth century, the second part brings the narrative into the twentieth century, when legal reforms as well as changing cultural perceptions transformed Chinese-Indonesian family practices. On the one hand, Chinese social reformers debated the nature of Confucian marriage rites, and love marriages as opposed to arranged marriages became more accepted. The colonial state, meanwhile, imposed monogamous marriage laws and birth registries on the community. Seng shows that these measures were met with various degrees of success. The Chinese community was subjected to colonial family law in 1919. The new laws surrounding monogamous marriage caused controversy, and few Chinese newlyweds registered their union with the government. The introduction of a colonial birth registry, by contrast, was greeted with enthusiasm, as the prescribed registration of family names “overlapped” with “customary Chinese notions of patrilineal descent” (p. 169). This part of the book thus highlights the varied responses communities could have to colonial lawmaking.
My main criticism of this book concerns its lack of clarity when it comes to the theoretical framework. The argument about the gendered aspects of Indonesian-Chinese society would have worked even better if the author had devoted more space to discussing the main theoretical concepts that carry the book. Most importantly, this critique pertains to Seng's reference to the category “creole.” Seng describes the book as “a history of how creole Chinese patriliny (…) kept itself alienated from the indigenous community by adapting and adjusting its intimate rules of inclusion and exclusion over time” (pp. 9–10). There is no further discussion of the term “creole” however. The term, which is most often applied in Latin American studies, implies an immigrant community and some degree of cultural hybridity, but it certainly calls for a clearer definition. What does the author mean when he writes about, for instance, “the Chinese creolization of courtship and love marriage” (p. 138)? Does it imply that the Chinese-Indonesian community adopted European customs, or did they invent their own version? This is not completely clear, and a more explicit definition of “creolization” would have been most helpful here. The same goes for the term “bourgeois.” Seng uses this word abundantly, for example, when discussing debates about what he calls “creole Chinese bourgeois morality” (p. 110). While the usage of the term here seems to imply material wealth and a certain class status, “bourgeois” has theoretical implications that are not explored. As a result, the use of the term comes across as anachronistic in the context of twentieth-century Chinese-Indonesian society.
Throughout the second part of Strangers in the Family, modern education forms a red thread. When Western-style education became more widely available to the Chinese-Indonesian middle classes during the first decades of the twentieth century, for instance, younger generations started to embrace monogamous love marriages as a mark of modernity. Similarly, the Chinese-medium schools of the educational organization Tiong Hoa Hwee Koan gave Chinese children “a head start in mass education” (p. 133) in the early 1900s. Given this book's focus on gender, it is a missed opportunity that Karen Teoh's book Schooling Diaspora. Women, Education, and the Overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, 1850s-1960s (Oxford University Press 2018) is missing from its references. Finally, the three-page comparison of Chinese communities in the British Straits Settlements, Thailand, and the Philippines in the conclusion (pp. 190–193) is too brief to be informative, especially since the comparative aspect is lacking in the rest of the book. It would have been more productive if the author would have used this space to expand his final segment on the legal integration of the Chinese in postcolonial Indonesia. As these pages provide the reader with a glimpse of the afterlives of colonial legal practices, they form a powerful ending to the book.
Because of its abundance of themes connected to gender and the family, its use of a wide range of source materials, and its readability, it is hoped that this book will find a readership beyond those with a specific interest in colonial Indonesia and the overseas Chinese. All in all, what Guo-Quan Seng presents here is an engaging social history. Perhaps most importantly, the book proves once again that the gender history of colonial Indonesia is no longer exclusively the terrain of Western senior scholars such as Stoler, Susan Blackburn, and Elsbeth Locher-Scholten. Later this year, Chie Ikeya will publish her new book InterAsian Intimacies across Race, Religion, and Colonialism (Cornell University Press 2024), which focuses on Burma under British colonial rule. There are thus exciting indications that Strangers in the Family is at the forefront of a new wave of publications that take gender and the family as a lens for Southeast Asian imperial history.