Merchants' Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China

II - Agency in Emigrant, Colonial, and Mercantile Societies

II Agency in Emigrant, Colonial, and Mercantile Societies Part II — Agency in Emigrant, Colonial, and Mercantile Societies 102 In the previous section, the chapters outline an emergent Confucian moral order during agentive historical moments of state-making in the late imperial period, the upward mobility of local populations, and an increasingly commercialized regional economy. In the process, women experienced ambiguous positioning. For merchant families, gentility signified upward mobility along a rather orthodox path shaped by literati pretensions. As in Jiangnan, education made daughters marriageable. They became respectable wives and mothers in the inner chambers and were competent household managers. Although culturally binding in the construction of gender expectations and in the cultivation of social capital, mercantile South China was also a fluid environment due to its connection with multiethnic trading empires and their mixed religious traditions and political-legal sensibilities. Chi-cheung Choi focuses on women’s roles in Chaozhou, a region in eastern Guangdong known for its long history of overseas emigration. In the absence of male members of households, women took over many managerial tasks, working to make ends meet for the family, functioning as buyers and sellers of property, acting as guarantors and witnesses in business transactions. However, Choi argues that culturally, they continued to be subordinated to Confucian morality and largely confined at home. Stepping out was realized only after Chaozhou city became a treaty port, with foreign business and legal institutions providing protection and recognition for a new generation of women entrepreneurs. Colonial encounters in Hong Kong and Macao added another layer of complexity. The following two chapters highlight the cultural dynamics generated for and by women in the Hong Kong-Macao region where colonialism, trading empires, and multiethnic unions intersected. The interstitial spaces provided for women’s mobility were unusual. Carl Smith traces the “careers” of some Dan fisherwomen who cohabited with foreign traders and officers and were left with property in Macao and Hong Kong. Although situated at the margins of traditional Chinese and colonial societies marked by sharp racial and social lines, these “protected women” were able to maneuver between racial politics and overlapping legal and administrative institutions. They established themselves as shrewd entrepreneurs in real estate, the opium trade, piracy, and other adventures. The characters in Carl Smith’s chapter remained at the margins of society, but history tells us that many offspring of interracial unions became successful professionals for the trading empires where cross-cultural finesse was an asset. As unusual cultural brokers crossing racial, social, and gendered boundaries set by Confucian and Victorian moralities, members 103 Part II — Agency in Emigrant, Colonial, and Mercantile Societies of Eurasian families, women and men were able to negotiate a visible presence in mainstream Hong Kong society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The life and work of Lady Clara Hotung, wife of Sir Robert Hotung, as narrated by Josephine Lai-kuen Wong, is a case in point. ...