Historians & Their Discipline: The Call of Southeast Asian History

The Pull of Southeast Asia

The Pull of Southeast Asia By WANG GUNGWU At Nicholas Tarling’s celebratory conference in Auckland in 2006, where a group of scholars was asked to examine the state of Southeast Asian studies, I spoke on Southeast Asia as part of other people’s empires.* As others spoke, I noted the many other factors that explained the special pull of Southeast Asia in our lives. Some factors were more directly related to the history of Western empires in Asia, but others would point to the region’s own imperial past. For myself, I had an additional interest in the historic empire to the region’s north that was linked to my father’s origins. He was someone who was born and spent his early years under the Manchu Qing Empire and then saw the empire fall dramatically and the anarchic consequences that followed. As someone who grew up in Malaya as a faraway subject of Britain’s extensive empire, I was conscious how distant I was from both empires. I did not, however, expect my life and work to remain so connected with the edges of such empires through my involvement in the study of Southeast Asia. Being drawn to Southeast Asia’s past and present, my attachment to the region may be directly related to changes in my life that kept me interested despite being physically and mentally located outside for years, eighteen years in Australia and ten years in Hong Kong. The changes were of three kinds, all rooted in my life but very different in nature. The first came from the fact that the part of the British empire that I grew up in became briefly a “military colony” of the Japanese empire. The second arose because I had the chance to observe imperial Britain’s success in spawning a large number of new nations and actually lived through various kinds of nation-building process, most dramatic of all in Malaysia, but also the last stages in Australia, and the impossible mission in the last great colony of Hong Kong. The third came when I looked back a few centuries to study the conditions under which the British and other European nations converted their own emerging nation-states into empires and created modern national empires. 161 * The lecture was given on February 1st 2006 and will be published by the New Zealand Asia Institute. I have adapted some of the points made in that lecture and included them to illustrate my efforts to study the region. My imperial experiences began at birth. I was born in Surabaya, the second city in the Netherlands empire in the East Indies. My parents, both born in imperial Qing China and thus nationals of its successor state, the Republic of China, worked in Java before moving to the state of Perak, one of the British Federated Malay States. Thus I grew up in a British quasi-sovereign protectorate and, having lived there continuously for about 16 years, was qualified to be a subject of the Sultan of Perak. In 1941, British Malaya became one of Japan’s “military colonies” in the Nanyo (Nanyang or Southern Ocean), part of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Thus, in my most impressionistic years between the age of 11 and 15, like many of my generation, I saw imperialists at their worst. After 1945, the British empire returned, but now only a shadow of its former self. Nevertheless, it was remarkably resilient and set out to create the conditions for new nation-states everywhere that would adhere to an exclusive British club called the Commonwealth. I lived through the turbulent years of 1939–1945 with no sense that British Malaya or the state of Perak was my home. My sojourner parents, like those of many of my Chinese friends, left China to work, with the intention to return. It was the larger picture that fascinated me. Here was the British empire, the world’s greatest, pushed back and eventually disintegrating, reminding me of the end of the Chinese imperial system. But I was also made conscious that something creative and positive had been left behind by the struggle between Japan and the West during the war. For the first time, the concept of Southeast Asia as a political region began to take shape. My generation in British Malaya saw a decolonization process that was expected to produce a nation-state modelled on those in Western Europe. The multiple communities of Malaya were filled at...