Abstract
I seek to depict in a relatively grounded way the form and character of social work practice under a late colonial regime. The article draws from an archival study of the development of social welfare in Singapore as a British colony, in the late colonial period from the end of Japanese occupation in 1945 through to final independence in 1965. In exploring social welfare in late colonial regimes, I take adoption as an illuminating example. I refer to the significance of private markets in adoption, the Chinese kinship system as it was at the time, and the cultural significance of mui tsai. I suggest that we should conclude that colonial governmental regimes were not monochrome, and that the tenor of late colonial welfare practices and policies should not be regarded as set on a unilinear course of modernisation. Taken as a whole, the historical material points to the need for a form of imperial social work research – and of imperial social work as such – that avoids the assumption, perhaps too evident in social work writing, ‘that all they needed to know about colonialism was its horrors’ (Cooper).
‘In the midst of this exploration over a period of almost one hundred years social workers themselves remain somewhat elusive. We can reconstruct their real world with difficulty. Rarely do we encounter some reference to the pattern and quality of their lives’ (Timms, 1970: 5).
The aim of this article is to depict in a relatively grounded way the form and character of social work practice under a late colonial regime. Notwithstanding the frequency with which the word ‘colonial’ and its variants occur in social work writing, it is treated with a curious lack of inspection and reflection. It barely calls for saying that the almost universal assumption is that we know what colonial regimes entailed, and that they were unequivocally negative in their import. As a consequence, it is rarely suggested in social work accounts that further historical inquiry or inspection is required.
The article draws from an archival study of the development of social welfare in Singapore as a British colony, in the late colonial period from the end of Japanese occupation in 1945 through to final independence in 1965. I draw on evidence deposited in the Singapore national archives; the archives of the Singapore Children’s Society; and archival materials deposited in the library of the National University of Singapore. The material takes the form of sound recordings and transcripts of interviews carried out in several projects in the 1980s and 1990s, most prominently a project on ‘Women through the years: economic and family lives’; deposits of records and correspondence between the colonial government and various welfare agencies and individuals; and the annual reports of the Singapore Children’s Society from its inception in 1952 through to 1965. I have drawn directly and indirectly on archival interviews with seven women engaged in varying ways with social welfare. For each woman there are anything up to two dozen audiotapes with their transcriptions. Two were migrants from the UK, one was from North Borneo (‘My ancestors were from China’). Another was born into a wealthy Indian landowning family, whilst someone else was born in Malaya, from a Tamil family. One woman was part of a Eurasian family. I have not adopted a selective sampling approach to the records, but have included all material in the National Archives that bears on the question. I am not writing a history of the social work services in Singapore, so issues of finance, membership, structure, professionalisation and colonial social policies are mentioned here only in tangential ways. 1
The National Library Board and the Singapore Children’s Society gave consent for research access to these sources and have given ethical approval for the use I make of these sources in this article. Whilst it is impossible in some cases to present the material without assiduous readers being able to cross reference identifying details, whenever possible I have not named the people whom I quote, and have anonymised obvious identifying terms or names where it is possible to do so without losing the sense of the quotations.
The research questions that interested me evolved during the study. I started with a determination to extend previous work I had undertaken on the American, Ada Sheffield, by burrowing into the archives to understand the role of women in Singaporean social work (Shaw, 2019; Shaw and Lau, 2019). This was strengthened by the wealth of archival interviews with key women in Singapore in the second half of the last century. But, after working on a parallel book project (Shaw and Ow, 2019), the question became progressively focused on the wider significance of social welfare in late colonial regimes. The archives contain rich data on a range of associated themes. They shed light on wider governmental, political and regional contexts that shaped the forms and development of social work practice; shifts over time in how the aspirations and practices of social work were conceived; and on the sometimes-tense interplay between increasing conceptions of social work as a professional enterprise and the capacity of culture and tradition within ethnic communities to deflect ‘the best laid plans of mice and men’. 2 My approach in this paper is to frame the wider context, and to take a single area of practice – adoption – as a way of epitomising the general argument. 3
Welfare in late colonial Singapore
A brief sketch of Singapore’s history may help locate the period and subject-matter discussed subsequently. The island that later was recognised as Singapore existed as a significant trading settlement from the 14th century. In 1819, the British statesman Stamford Raffles negotiated a treaty with the regional ruler, which allowed the British to locate a trading port on the island, ultimately leading to the establishment of the crown colony of Singapore in 1867. The island was occupied by the Japanese during the Second World War from 1942 to 1945, during which many were interned, including several key figures who were engaged with welfare concerns. Following the war, the British gradually paved the way for independence, leading to Singapore’s merger with the Federation of Malaya to form Malaysia in 1963. However, social unrest and disputes resulted in Singapore’s expulsion from Malaysia. Singapore became an independent republic on 9 August 1965. 4
The laissez faire free trade culture of Singapore carried over to the kind of society that developed mid-century. The different social orders met only, as Ho Chi Tim and Ann Wee express it, in the market-place of buying and selling. This meant, so they argue, that there was no overall common will, meaning that, ‘the provision of social services would theoretically be difficult and disorganised, as it would have several potential obstacles to negotiate: tension between the economic drive for profit and humanitarian concerns, cultural differences within the plural society, and particular conditions posed by a colonial environment.’ (Tim and Wee, 2016: 18)
Up to the end of the Second World War ‘the absence of a common social will resulted in official reluctance as well as societal reticence in providing for overall social well-being’ (p. 35). The way Singapore was established and developed meant ‘People came to Singapore to work and to make a living, but not necessarily to settle down. Society was predominantly transient for the most part and governance followed suit’ and hence social services remained a low priority such that even when initiatives were taken, they ‘demonstrate not just state reluctance, but also societal ambivalence’ (p. 18).
At the re-occupation of Singapore in 1945, following the sudden Japanese collapse, ‘the town was dirty, neglected and dilapidated, the roads full of potholes, while water, electricity, gas and telephone services had run down. There was chronic overcrowding, poverty and disease’ (Turnbull, 2009: 220). Turnbull regarded ‘the corruption of public and private integrity’ as ‘the Occupation’s worst legacy’ (p. 220).
There was a radical shift in the British government’s expectations and planning for the future of the colonies. Chilver interprets that shift in her reflections on her period as Secretary of the Colonial Social Science Research Council:
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‘Ministers had abandoned any hope of indirect rule as a route to independence, except in a few areas, in which the past refused to lie down. The implicit assumption was that self-government should be based on parliamentary democracy and that a popular basis for it must be laid first, and rapidly, in local government based on election.’ (Chilver, 1977: 241)
Only one day after Lord Mountbatten had received the surrender on 12 September 1945 the Straits Times reported that his wife was part of a meeting to discuss ‘the coordination and problems regarding the welfare and health of the peoples of Malaya’ (quoted Tim and Wee, 2016: 39). The Singapore Department of Social Welfare was established in June 1946, staffed from the British Military Authority Emergency Relief Centre, such that ‘The SWD started out dealing with the social consequences of World War II and the Japanese Occupation’ entailing ‘a host of issues and problems that demanded immediate attention’ (p. 47).
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These included ‘vicious and anti-social tendencies … manifesting themselves among the youth of Singapore’, and ‘street loiterers, pick-pockets, burglars and gangsters’ (Beginnings, 1947). The sections in this initial 1947 report are interesting for their implicit mapping of the issues facing and envisaged responses of the nascent department: The New Department of Social Welfare The Wake of War The Relief of Distress Food for the People of Singapore The problem and the service of youth Social Research and the Social Survey The Training of Staff, Staff Amenities and Lessons
In 1948 7 a social survey of Singapore was published by the Department. A Social Survey of Singapore was, for its time, a remarkable study. The project was first ‘put on paper’ in September 1946. The department’s duty was ‘to deal with certain aspects of the problems of want, of delinquency and of leisure, which had not hitherto been handled by a Government agency specially deputed for the purpose’ (Singapore Department of Social Welfare, 1947: 1). Goh Keng Swee led the majority of work and set out the intention ‘to avoid the pitfall of being merely a purveyor of palliatives, and in order to establish its true position as a primary and necessary instrument of good government’ (p. 1). ‘For the first time in Singapore, the depth and extent of deplorable social conditions were presented in stark statistical data. Chief among the findings…the survey found that close to two-thirds of the city’s population were living in over-crowded conditions’ (Tim and Wee, 2016: 52).
Writing the 1952 report for the department, R W I Band, the thoughtful civil servant heading the agency, remarked that, compared with 1946, by 1951 ‘Singapore had shed all the obvious scars of war and the city contained one of the most prosperous urban communities in the Orient’, yet ‘behind the façade of real prosperity, the welfare problems of Singapore were, in their way, as large and difficult of solution as ever before’ (Band, 1952: 1).
In April of the same year, the Singapore Children’s Society was formed. Among the issues facing both the Society and the Social Welfare Department were the care and protection of women and children. Protection problems, Band suggested, ‘were aggravated by the period of Japanese occupation and, although the position has since improved, exploitation of women and girls still exists’. It is interesting that concern regarding trafficking has become a 21st century focus, but it was recognised widely at this earlier time. ‘Every possible effort is made to suppress trafficking. One of the chief difficulties is the fact that the girls generally change hands several times from the time when they are first purchased in their native villages to the time when they arrive in Singapore’, so they were not able (or willing) to give information to vice officers (Band, 1952: 6).
In case we should mis-remember the daily circumstances of practice, ‘There were lots of children who came in with malnutrition. There were children who came in with different stages of blindness…related to poverty…. Their physical conditions at that time were…terrible. All the rural areas had no running water. Maybe we had a pipe stand somewhere, you know, in the middle of the kampong
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somewhere. No proper toilet facilities. No roads. I can remember going on home visits through mud and pigsties.’ (NLB, Accession #000621/17)
Many were living in a kongsi – sharing place – up dark steep stairs. Someone describes it as living in a hole, with ‘such terrible overcrowding. Like in say, Chinatown, each cubicle had about eight to 10 people living in it. There might be three floors in the house, and there would be one toilet, one bathroom, and one kitchen’ (NLB Accession #000621/17). 9 Someone else remembered that the mid-1950s was ‘a rundown period’ and ‘if you went to Jurong 10 you needed to put clogs in the car as it was so swampy’ (NLB, Accession# 001623).
A lot of older people, including single elderly from China and India, slept rough or in temples or lodging houses. Many lived by the sea in houses on stilts and down lorongs
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by the river. Home visits involved careful walking across boards, and social workers grew skilled at walking the narrow bridges (NLB Accession #000621/17). Someone else who moved from social work practice to working in what became the National University of Singapore spoke in similar ways of the following decade. In the sixties there was ‘a lot of poverty… At that time we did home visits when dark rooms in Chinatown, there is no ventilation, people had nothing more than a bed, children had worms and these terribly infected sores where they have been bitten by sandflies and scratched’. ‘Way out in the kampungs there were dirt floors and terrible malnutrition, TB. You know, just incredible life situations, and having had that experience I think you can never forget it. You know, we’d go to home visits, and you’d be frightened by the people who would be looking at you, because they may be gangsters.’ (NLB Accession # 001645).
The office conditions were rudimentary. The Social Welfare Department ran a crèche in an old shop house and allowed the Children’s Society a room at the beginning. ‘Mrs Kinna 12 had one of those little rooms, because I remember…picking my way among the toddlers in the corridor of the crèche when I was going to visit her in her office’ (Accession # 003264).
Cultural crevices within colonial power
Late colonial social workers constantly wrestled with their endeavours to interpret and carry through a culturally appropriate practice. How they understood and navigated that uncertain path varied widely. To bring a focus to this question, I will explore how child adoption developed within Singapore in the period, linking that to how actors in the social welfare field plotted a course through the challenges posed by the ethnic make-up of the colony. Whilst there were some slight shifts in this period, the Chinese population made up about 75% of the community. Malays accounted for about 13% and people of Indian origin a further 7%. During the period ‘Eurasian’ also was normally recorded as an ethnic community, and sometimes ‘European’ was given.
It is illuminating to understand these practices and challenges in ways rather different from the standard social work response to the colonial. I will take the theorising and critique developed by the American historian, Frederick Cooper, as the point of departure for the following analysis. The wider reaches and ramifications of his arguments fall beyond this paper, but his analyses of colonialism and related themes of modernity and citizenship are invaluable for our point. He laments the dangers of ‘treating colonialism abstractly, generically, as something to be juxtaposed with an equally flat vision of European “modernity”’ (Cooper, 2005: 3–4), and cautions against ‘turning the centuries of European colonization overseas into a critique of the Enlightenment, democracy, or modernity’ (p.15). He argues so in part on the ground that this results in ‘the occlusion of the history of the people who lived in colonies’. This ‘reduces the conflicting strategies of colonization to a modernity perhaps never experienced by those being colonized, and gives insufficient weight to the ways in which colonized people sought—not entirely without success—to build lives in the crevices of colonial power, deflecting, appropriating, or reinterpreting the teachings and preachings thrust upon them.’ (p. 16).
Cooper wants to question the way that modernity is seen as a single package. ‘The use by historians and others of the concept of colonial modernity flattens history, elevating messy histories into a consistent project and underplaying the efforts of colonized people to deflect and appropriate elements of colonizing policies’ (p. 117). The unfolding of adoption practice in 1950s Singapore illustrates the outworking of such late colonial cultural and social dynamics.
The Singapore Children’s Society 13 set up an Adoption Sub-Committee in 1955 to co-ordinate the work of other agencies as ‘an advisory one to assist parents wishing to obtain children for adoption and those wishing to give children away’ (Annual Report, 1955). 14 It was noted that the committee ‘will not consider cases arising from irresponsible parents wishing to avoid the burden of the care of their children’. There is an unashamed bluntness of language – ‘obtain’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘give children away’. I will sketch the recorded figures as they appear in the Society’s Annual Reports and other governmental papers, before commenting on the issues they raised at the time for the agency, how they were understood by the participants with hindsight towards the end of the 20th century, and how we may ‘read’ them today.
By the following year the Committee had received 50 applications from couples wishing to adopt. 15 These are recorded as 13 from Chinese couples, 12 Malay, 10 Indian, five European, four Sikh, two Eurasian and four from a further scattering of backgrounds (AR1956). They had made just six placements. They aimed at this stage to encourage natural parents to keep their children ‘and this policy has natural resulted in insufficient babies to meet the demand’.
In the following year there had been an increase in natural parents wishing to ‘give their babies for adoption’ – 23 babies from 21 parents. All but two were Chinese babies (the other two were Indian). Of the Chinese babies 19 were girls, of whom five were given away by their natural parents after being on a waiting list for 1–3 months, two were eventually kept by their parents, two were placed with Malay couples and one with a Chinese couple. Of the two boys, one was placed with a Chinese couple, and one was given away by the natural parents. Of the two Indian babies, one placement broke down and the baby was then given away by the mother (AR1957). Cases continued to be recorded in a similar way in the following years.
Within these rather bald figures, several puzzles strike later readers. Firstly, ethnicity and gender were clearly accepted unquestioningly as the key ways in which adoption work was categorised. Secondly, decisions were usually described as made by ‘parents’. Thirdly, there are frequent references to babies being ‘given away’.
Colonial ethnicities
Before delving further, it may contextualise the figures more fully by comparing them with the way ethnicity was recorded more generally in the Society’s record of work. 16 In the first few years the Children’s Society did not make ethnicity a prominent distinguisher in the annual reports. We find general remarks of the kind that the cases reflect ethnically ‘in much the same proportions as are revealed in the colony’s population figures’, but without supporting figures (AR1956).
A striking development took place in the 1960 report where for new cases in that year we have a detailed table cross referencing kinds of problem with ‘Race’, with each cell divided between ‘closed’ and ‘current’. It is apparent that every new case since the launch of the agency had been consecutively numbered, and these cases are #1479 to 1968, giving a total of 487 new cases in that year. The problems are distinguished between ‘medical, malnutrition, hardship’, ‘problem behaviour’, ‘marital problems’, ‘neglect, schooling, supervision, illtreatment’, ‘mental defective’ and ‘other’ (AR, 1960). 17 ‘Race’ is categorised as ‘Chinese’ (193 cases), ‘Malay’ (142), ‘Indian’ (108), ‘Eurasian’ (14), ‘European’ (1), ‘Filipino’ (1) and ‘Jew’ (1). 18 In percentage terms, Chinese people accounted for 42%, Malay for 31% and Indian for 23%. Whatever may have been the case in 1956 it is clear that these few years later the 1956 remark about cases reflecting ‘in much the same proportions as are revealed in the colony’s population figures’ was far from the facts. Malay 19 and Indian individuals and families are substantially over-represented by that measure. The fluctuations in relative ethnic proportions continued, with ‘Chinese’ remaining below the population rate and ‘Indian’ continuing above. 20
The colonising situation is complex. The cultural and social weight afforded the Chinese community was apparent in the concerns not long after the launch of the Society regarding how the Children’s Society would be accepted within the Chinese community. The Executive Committee minutes of 10/11/55 indicate discussion of Chinese translation of the Society’s name. A ‘Dr. of letters thought the translation quite reasonable, however, Mr. Han Swee Inn of the Joo Jot Poh said “it was no good, and out of the question.”’ At the 1st of December meeting a wording was agreed that translated would mean ‘Singapore Children’s Help Society’ (Library Board Archives. ME3992_2388/55). However, it was not until 1964 that the agency’s name appeared in three languages in the annual report.
Whilst Malay individuals and families were at this period over-represented through the 1950s among Children’s Society clients, we should note that ‘Partially because they were deemed to be reliable and loyal, British authorities in Singapore actively favoured the Malay minority for employment in areas such as the police, the armed forces, and lower levels of the public service. Thus, in 1961, more than half of Singapore’s Malays depended on employment in the public sector’. 21
This apparently positive attitude to Malay families is occasionally reflected in the Society’s records. The 1958 annual report refers to how a paper on family life among Singapore Malays was received at an International Union for Child Welfare conference. It almost glows with sentimental appreciation. ‘It tells you why the Malay Muslim housewife is not in constant fear of divorce; how the prosperous Malay cannot deny his wife a gracious standard of living. You will discover why the Malay housewife has considerable status in the economic decisions of the home; why she has more voice in family affairs than her Indian or Chinese counterpart…and why the European mother’s threat “Wait till your father gets home” is in Malay turned into “Wait until your father is away at work.”
This should not be taken too seriously beyond its rhetorical significance. Speaking of the Chinese community, someone recalled with regard to family patterns, ‘in this kampong the whole family would live together. So, if you have four sons and they got married, they would bring their wives and all their children will stay in the same house. From my contact with the grandparents…the grandmother had very strong control over the whole family…In those days the problems, I bear [witness] to it, a lot of them were related to problems with the mother-in-law, because…she controlled them. The money her sons earned, they would give her the money. She would make the decisions…’ (NLB Accession #000621/17)
Sense-making in late colonial practice
The initial explanation of difficulties in finding placements followed from the agency’s analysis of circumstances within each ethnic community. ‘Each couple stated their requirements and preferences and…Malay couples usually wanted Chinese babies, Chinese couples wanted boys rather than girls, whilst Indian couples wanted babies of dark complexion, and so on’ (AR1956). We noted above that the Society aimed at this stage to encourage natural parents to keep their children and that this policy had resulted in insufficient babies to meet the demand.
In the following year, 1957, attention remained on the mismatch of supply and demand. Chinese couples seldom wanted girls unless over they were over the age of two or three. They wanted boys but they were rarely available. There were no Malay babies available for adoption though demand was highest from Malay couples. There was some demand from Indian couples but babies were rarely available for adoption. They explain this problem as due to (a) ‘strict conditions laid down by natural parents regarding choice of adopters. (b) ill health or disease of parents which prejudice prospective adopters. (c) premature birth, which also prejudices prospective adopters’ (AR1957).
There also are references to a strong desire on the part of adopters to pass the child off as their birth child. ‘Thus, childless people were reluctant to adopt because upon granting of adoption they are given extracts from the Adopted Children’s register rather than the Birth Certificate’ such that ‘in later years, anyone handling the extracts will know that the children concerned were adopted’. (AR1958). ‘The birth certificate of an adopted child has the word “Adopted” stamped right across it, which, in the Sub-Committee’s experience, is regarded as something of a social stigma’ (AR1957).
A former chair of the sub-committee later became interested in the Singapore pattern of the adoption of Chinese baby girls into Malay and Indian families, in ways that illustrate Cooper’s point regarding the efforts of colonized people, often successful, to ‘deflect’ or ‘reinterpret’ colonizing policies. They would be absorbed into the families and not be told they were adopted. She illustrated this in relation to one girl who had not realized she was Chinese until she saw her birth certificate (NLB, Accession# 001623). 22 Wee recalls how adoptions arranged through a midwife were not uncommon prior to around 1970. They did so ‘quite unconcerned about the illegality of what they had done’ and ‘if occasionally a birth certificate labelled a visibly Chinese girl as the birth child of a Tamil or Malay couple, they saw that as a small matter’ (Wee, 2017: 96).
Several issues lie within these agency and cultural practices. Firstly, the existence of a private market in adoption. Secondly, the outworking of family culture and kinship systems, especially within the Chinese community, but also for how these interacted with Malay and Indian cultural practices. Thirdly – perhaps as an aspect of such kinship systems – the relationship between adoption and mui tsai. Mui tsai means ‘little sister’ in Cantonese, 23 and describes young Chinese women who worked as domestic servants in China, or in brothels or affluent Chinese households in traditional Chinese society and, by way of cultural transfer, in Singapore. They were typically from poor families and were sold at a young age. Fourthly, and overarching all others, how late colonial social workers understood the relationship between the culture and practices of the West and those on the colonial country. I will deal briefly with each of these points.
Writing at the time, the social anthropologist Maurice Freedman noted that the Government ‘at various times and in various ways (has) inquired into questions of Chinese family law,…legislated in this field, and, through the Chinese secretariat and the department of Social Welfare,…unobtrusively regulated certain matters connected with Chinese domestic life. Problems of Chinese marriage, divorce, mui tsai, and adoption, have all, at one time or another, been the concern of Government’ (Freedman, 1957: 227).
Private market
The 1957 Children’s Society report records ‘the number of physical transfers which take place unknown to the Protector, 24 usually because parents are ignorant of the necessary procedure… (M)any of the natural parents seem to prefer to give away their babies where they fancy, and such is the demand, particularly for boys, that they appear to have no difficulty in doing so’ (AR1957).
In the early 1960s the society was recording that ‘It is a matter of grave concern that it is still possible for most unsuitable persons to obtain children privately, and that almost certainly many such cases are not known to the Authorities concerned’ (AR1960). ‘The majority of Mothers of unwanted children have no knowledge of procedures available to help them; and dread the investigations that may be carried out some years after the matter has in their minds been dealt with. In addition, many like to know the family the child is going to, and to keep an eye on him for a period. Others also wish for payment which is of course illegal’ (AR1963).
A colleague from a Malay family remarked to me of her aunt-in-law’s mother, who had been adopted, that ‘From informal chats with the people in my community, adoptions of female Chinese babies among Malays were common, as the Chinese preferred sons. I’ve also heard that some Chinese families handed over care of their children to the Malays (and maybe Indians?), who were less targeted by the Japanese during the war’.
Kinship systems
To fully grasp late colonial adoption practices, one needs to understand the Chinese kinship system as it was at the time. Freedman (1957, chapter 3; Freedman, 1967) remains one of the most helpful sources on the Chinese arrangements of the time. It also is necessary to understand, for adoption, how this relates to Malay and Indian kinship systems. He argues that, despite diversity, ‘Chinese marriage rites everywhere can be represented by one basic model’ (Freedman, 1967: 6). ‘Family’ is accepted as property owning and ‘is composed only of males’ (p. 6). It is when the wife has a son that ‘she shares with her husband the privilege of preventing that son taking out his portion’ (p. 7). 25
Marriages, so it was believed, were ‘made in heaven’, which presupposed the preordaining of a completed marriage, and consulting the horoscope of the boy and girl, though ‘(a) diviner is quite capable of giving a client the answer he wants’ (p. 11). ‘One family gives a woman to another in the expectation that she will stay permanently in her new home, bearing children to her husband’s name, and submitting to the authority of her new family. It is quite simple. And yet it is not’ (p. 23). Hence, Freedman records, ‘My informants spoke often enough about the buying of strange baby boys in China to be brought up as sons’ (Freedman, 1957: 62). In Singapore when boys were adopted they were often from non-relatives. ‘In that way there is less chance of trouble’. One informant told him that, ‘To buy the rights in a boy one must be at least fairly well-to-do. While a baby girl can often be had for the price of its mother’s lying-in expenses, a matter of a few tens of dollars, a boy will change hands at a high price; people quote various figures between a couple of hundred and a thousand dollars.’ (p. 62).
Hence adoption ‘drains off some of the boys of the poorer people’. (p. 63). Wee echoes this when she says ‘the giving away of surplus babies whom they felt unable to rear was “the family planning method of the poor”’ (Wee, 2017: 97). Hence, unlike the West, ‘most of the babies given away in Singapore and Malaya were born to married couples’ (p. 98). What we appear to have at this point is the conjunction of adoption in the Chinese community to fill places in the patrilineal line and the adoption of children for economic reasons. The Chinese understanding of the family as a male descendent lineage shaped attitudes to adoption of boys and girls. A girl was only a ‘sojourner’ in the family, with no long-term role. A potential boy adoption meant careful examination of the baby’s body – earlobes (a signal of possible longevity) and genitals, as a sign, even in a baby a few weeks old, of generative capacity (Wee, 2017; NLB archives, Accession# 001623). There was no similar practice in Malay or Indian families.
Much of this lies behind the issues posed by adoption for late colonial social workers in Singapore, whichever ethnic community they themselves came from. One person recalls that in 1955–1956, when she was working for the Social Welfare Department, ‘there was such a surplus of baby girls given away that the Welfare Department was quite willing for those babies … they were all Chinese baby girls…to go to families that were not Chinese, rather than they should just lie in a children’s home’ (NLB archives, Accession# 001623). There were occasionally cultural stumbling blocks to this. For example the Children’s Society carries a note that ‘Special difficulty has been encountered in trying to place Chinese female babies born in the “Tiger year” (1962) which, according to local superstition is a most inauspicious year’ (AR1962).
Adoption and mui tsai
Arrangements for the protection of women and girls were connected to several issues – secret societies, disease control, morality and migration control. Prostitution was a major issue marked by fluctuating policies. The issue around the practice of mui tsai was linked to efforts to manage the consequences of prostitution. Young girls purchased to work in a family were seen either as domestic slaves or as prostitutes, or as examples of the Chinese custom of child adoption/purchase where poor families sold off their children so as to lessen their burden. More generally, Freedman refers to mui tsai as the taking of young girls from poor homes to be unpaid domestic servants. ‘Their social sphere was the kitchen, and they were treated with some severity’ (Freedman, 1957: 65).
The interlacing of mui tsai with adoption was evident in a 1955 report to the government, which recorded a writer saying ‘he saw a mui tsai’s two fingers cut out by her adopted mother because she took a piece of cake without the permission of the adopted mother. He…comes to the conclusion that the adopted parents usually ill-treat their adopted children’ (ME3992_2388/55).
Someone who had spent most of her adult life in Singapore after leaving Britain was active in lobbying for the interests of children. Speaking of the selling of children in the Chinese community, she remarked, ‘They seemed to think nothing of disposing their unwanted babes - by selling them and giving them away. And it was quite easy for such cases at once to get into the hands of bad people. They were very often sold as mui tsai, which means child slaves’. Of one child who came to live with her she says ‘she remembered that her mother had been paid $20, a piece of pork and a bag of rice for her. She remembered being sold and she was afraid’ (NLB Accession # 000184).
Navigating cultural shoals
Later advocacy of cultural competence as a sine qua non of good social work practice may seem perhaps too easy from inside late colonial social work practice. Running counter to the critical stance towards selling children cited above, was the position taken by someone from the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children, in a letter to The Straits Times (13 February 1952). ‘He said Chinese did not regard the idea of parents “selling a child” as cruel but rather the reverse…as it was intended to provide a better chance for the child…After all the main thing is to win the co-operation of the Chinese’ (ME3992_2388/55). A longer quotation from the woman we have just encountered illustrates attitudes aspects of which in some ways may seem close to now current positions regarding abuse. She says, apparently alluding to the Hong Kong representative, that ‘my English mind was not accustomed to think in the way of the Chinese, and the majority of the people were Chinese. One critic of steps to establish the Children’s Society said they sold their children not because they were brutes and because they were cruel, but because very often it was giving a better chance in life to their child. They sold their children very often because they were all hungry.’
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She responds with passion. ‘I pointed out the brutal beatings of children, the terrible cases of children scarred all over, burnt with hot irons and things, that were brought before us’, and, leaving her words uncompleted, if you ‘went into the depths of the Chinese slums, and the kampongs, Malays and so on. If you really go into those places… There are all kinds of people living in Chinatown. Some people are loving parents, adoring parents. But occasionally there are these bad cases…The cases are…unwanted babies’. They were referred to her, knowing her interest. ‘There must have been very many more who were kind. I don’t condemn the race as a race, but I feel that (a) lot of the things that they did (maybe to them) were no more, though they were very cruel in my eyes’ (NLB, Accession # 000184).
Someone else, speaking less forcefully, explained how ‘a certain number of these adopted children ended up in prostitution and it was customary for a prostitute to adopt little girls. They were called “walking sticks” so that when the mother’s earning power was reduced she would trade on the daughter’. There were other forms of exploitative relationships, ‘but many of them were genuine and loving. It’s just that they were poor people… Sometimes girls that were rescued out of the brothels would turn out to be adopted’ (NLB, Accession #001623).
This was not the only area where cultural challenges in work with children and families came to the surface. A prominent social work practitioner and teacher, herself from a Tamil background, referred to how parents from the Chinese community would leave their children in hospital believing it was the best place for them. They would then sometimes be labelled ‘abandoned’. But ‘I never felt they had abandoned their child as such…I tried to understand their reasons for leaving their child’.
Speaking in the 1990s about her experience working in medical social work in Singapore in the 1950s, she remarks the difference between Chinese and Indian families following a death of a child in hospital. Among the Indian families ‘the parents would come and cry and make a big thing’. But Chinese parents, when a child died in hospital, often would not come to take the body, which social workers found understandably distressing. ‘I thought this was a very (cruel is too harsh a word) unusual thing to do. Until it was explained to me that the Chinese couldn’t take to the house somebody who was younger than the parents. If it was an old person who died, they would take the body back. …This was something I had to explain to my English colleagues who found it very, very unacceptable. So, it then made it clear to me, that you have to understand the different cultures. What do Chinese people do about this? What do the Indians do about this? What do the Malays do? You can’t just take your values and impose it on others.’ (NLB Accession #000621/17).
She subsequently concluded ‘We had to learn customs and the beliefs of the people who lived in the rural areas. There were many superstitions that they believed in, and it wasn’t my job to make them change their mind about this but to get them to accept the medical treatment that the child needed’.
An early annual report of the Social Welfare Department tentatively sets out a position. ‘The strong western influences which are felt in Singapore, while they are by no means wholly beneficial, have in many cases caused Chinese women to question the justice of the tradition of subservience and it is possible to trace a strong conflict of will between the older and younger members of the same family’ (Social Welfare Singapore, 1948: 25). The report refers to the need for the vacuum caused by the loss of tradition to be filled, ‘or else there will be seen in Singapore (it has happened elsewhere) the spectacle of the west destroying without rebuilding… The danger of losing one culture and one ancient set of traditions without embracing another is…very real and the acceptance of even what is good in western ideas must not be allowed to erode the finer points of traditional Chinese culture’ (p. 25). This stance is a long way from culture-blindness or even oppression that often is assumed in social work critiques of colonialism.
Imperial social work
A major task lies before social work community if a sufficiently nuanced and historically grounded understanding of imperial social work is to be gained. Within such an understanding, we may conclude that colonial governmental regimes were not monochrome. The social workers were from families varying from UK migrants who had moved to Singapore in their childhood or early adult lives, to people who themselves were born either to indigenous families within the colony or from other countries in Southeast Asia.
Furthermore, actors within colonial governmental regimes were equally diverse, lacking the political homogeneity that is assumed in much social work writing, and which ironically more often was to characterise postcolonial regimes. One of the women drawn on in this paper was to marry David Marshall, who became, prior to full independence, Singapore’s first elected Chief Minister. Of Marshall, it has been said he was ‘impetuous, impatient and quick-tempered, he wore his heart on his sleeve and met problems head-on, disdaining compromise as deceit’ and for whom ‘human justice, dignity, equality and protection for the underprivileged took first priority’ (Turnbull, 2009: 254). ‘Despite his difficulties and inexperience, Marshall … accomplished a great deal… While the Colonial Office and the Governor found Marshall a cross to bear, he aroused their grudging respect’ (256).
The tenor of late colonial welfare practices and policies should not be regarded as set on a unilinear course of modernisation. ‘Bashing the Enlightenment and criticizing modernity have become favourite activities within colonial and postcolonial studies’ (Cooper, 2005: 6). Within mainstream social work writing ‘colonial’ and its derivatives often are strung in a list of negatives as when Williams and Graham refer to ‘the global contexts of issues impacting on the migrant such as colonialism, slavery, wars and exploitation’ and with the catch-all ‘all integral elements of the process of modernisation’ (Williams and Graham, 2014: i7). A more nuanced position is to trace a form on modernisation agenda proceeding hand in hand with a constant interaction with, and moderation by, local cultural practices.
We quoted earlier the conclusion that after the Second World War social services remained a low priority such that even when initiatives were taken, they ‘demonstrate not just state reluctance, but also societal ambivalence’ (Tim and Wee, 2016: 18). The European mercantile community was ‘vehemently against … government intrusion’ (p. 22), but the history of the Chinese Protectorate ‘demonstrates the complexities and intricacies in attempting to discern the motivations of the colonial government in providing for the well-being of the Chinese migrant’ (p. 24).
We noted earlier Band’s recognition of the unwillingness of people to give evidence in cases of ill-treatment and abuse. His report interprets this as ‘an indication of the extent of the servitude to which many children are still subjected’ and the need for the public to develop ‘a finer conscience’ (Band, 1952: 12). This illustrates the need for social work understanding of colonial welfare engagement to represent both ’the micro-level of biography and the macro-level of society’ (Steinmetz, 2018: 13).
Taken together, the historical material points to the need for a form of imperial social work research – and of imperial social work as such – that avoids the kneejerk assumption of those who believe ‘that all they needed to know about colonialism was its horrors’ (Cooper, 2005: 34).
Archival sources
Singapore Children’s Society Annual Reports for 1952–1965.
Singapore National Library Board Archives. ME3992_2388/55; Accession Numbers 000184, 001623, 000621/17, 001645q; SWD 702/51.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Authors’ note
This paper is dedicated to the memory of Ann Wee (1926–2019).
