Rebuilding the Ancestral Village: Singaporeans in China

1 Introduction

This book is a study of the relationship between two groups of Chinese, the Singapore Chinese and their village relatives in Anxi County, Fujian. It covers the Singaporeans’ search for their cultural roots in their ancestral home villages in Anxi, which has resulted in the revival of their Chinese lineage. Anxi County is popularly known as a district of emigrant villages—a qiaoxiang (侨鄉)—from which people emigrated to various parts of the world, especially to Southeast Asia, during the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. The discussion here specifically focuses on the relationship between members of Xitou, or kway-tau [H] (溪 头), Ke lineage in Singapore and Penglai. Since the early 1990s, there has been much interest in the study of qiaoxiang and of the Chinese in overseas communities. While some literary works have focused on the attempts of ‘overseas Chinese’ to trace their roots back to their home villages in China, there has been very little systematic work done on the relationship between Chinese overseas and their qiaoxiang connections. The focus of this study is to address the question of why the Singapore Chinese continue to be interested in their ancestral home villages and, more specifically, why they, especially those born in Singapore, have become involved in the life and socio-economic reconstruction of their ancestral villages, as well as in the revival of their traditional culture. This study is thus about the creation of a moral economy, which has incidentally resulted in the general prosperity of the ancestral villages within the county. Central to this focus is an examination of how collective memory serves as a powerful force in pulling the Singapore Chinese back to their ancestral villages. Through this collective memory, the Singapore Chinese have been 1 Introduction Kuah_01_ch01.indd 1 11/11/2010 11:35 AM 2 Rebuilding the Ancestral Village able to revive their lineage and reinvent socio-cultural and religious roles. The involvement of Singapore Chinese in village activities has resulted in a need to reinvestigate the role of lineage structure in both contemporary urban Singaporean and rural Chinese village societies, and this will be discussed in the following chapters. The way in which a sense of moral responsibility has helped the Singaporeans to redefine their roles within the Chinese village milieu will also be discussed. At a broader conceptual level, this study looks beyond the Singapore Chinese/qiaoxiang connection and seeks to link it up with phenomena involving Chinese communities elsewhere. Finally, this is also a study of the positions of the Singapore Chinese and their qiaoxiang relations within a cultural network, and of the transformation of the Chinese lineage from a parochial structure to a transnational network structure. Establishing a Moral Economy Why do Singapore Chinese feel morally obligated to assist their ancestral homes? To understand their motives and actions we need to explore their understanding of, and their identification and affinity with, their ancestral villages and specific ancestral homes (laojia, 老家), as well as their understanding of their moral duty and the level of their moral consciousness. It is imperative to do this from an inter-generational perspective in order to understand the continuities and discontinuities between the Singapore Chinese and their qiaoxiang kin. Thus it is also important to understand the Anxi Chinese and their actions to create an environment which binds the Singapore Chinese to the villages and brings the moral economy into existence and maintains it. From the inter-generational perspective, it is often the case that migrants who moved to Singapore maintain strong sentimental ties with their ancestral villages, and this includes the majority of first-generation migrants from Anxi. Such immigrants feel morally obliged to assist their immediate village kin financially and materially. They have also contributed substantially to infrastructure development and socio-religious activities in the ancestral village. Even during times of political restriction, members of this first generation managed to send small remittances, medicines and other material goods to their village kin. Among other things, they have been motivated to do this by their knowledge of what poverty is, as their ancestral districts have, throughout history, been some of the poorest in China. Kuah_01_ch01.indd 2 11/11/2010 11:35 AM Introduction 3 But what about the Singapore-born Chinese, especially those of Anxi descent? How do they look at their ancestral villages, and what moral demands do they feel? A common view is that these Singapore-born Chinese have...