Description
Book SynopsisEducation has long been a cornerstone of Chinese culture. Traditional Chinese norms have also held that the less education and exposure to influence from outside the home a girl had, the more likely she would be to remain true to conventional domestic values and to remain morally upright. In the mid-nineteenth century, overseas Chinese communities encountered a new perspective via Western European and American missionary schools. Formal education could be not just helpful but integral to preserving female virtue and had the added benefit of elevating the socio-cultural status of the overseas Chinese. As a result, increasing numbers of girls began to attend school. Within a few decades, other groups who sponsored female education-local Chinese community leaders, mainland Chinese reformists, the British colonial government-were offering a competing approach: education for the sake of modernization. These diverse and sometimes divergent priorities preoccupied educators, parents, politicians, and, of course, the girls and women who attended these institutions.In this work, Karen Teoh relates the history of English and Chinese girls'' schools that overseas Chinese founded and attended from the 1850s to the 1960s in British Malaya and Singapore. She examines the strategies of missionaries, colonial authorities, and Chinese reformists and revolutionaries for educating girls, as well as the impact that this education had on identity formation among overseas Chinese women and larger society. Such schools ranged from charitable missions operated by nuns who rescued orphans and prostitutes, to elite institutions for the daughters of the wealthy and powerful. They could tailor their curricula to suit the specific needs of female students, emphasizing domestic skills such as sewing and cooking, or, later, training for women''s work in teaching, nursing, or secretarial jobs. They would help to produce what society needed, in the form of better wives and mothers, or workers and citizens of developing nation-states, while ensuring compliance with desired ideals. Chinese women in diaspora found that failing to conform to any number of state priorities could lead to social disapproval, marginalization, or even outright deportation. Overseas Chinese communities were mindful of these perils, and their responses were as myriad as their modes of identity construction and adaptation. They grappled with questions of how this project might support Chinese nationalism, absorb the best of British colonial influence, and strengthen their image as a stable, modern, and desirable population in their countries of settlement.Bridging Chinese and Southeast Asian history, British imperialism, gender, and the history of education, Schooling Diaspora shows how these diasporic women contributed to the development of a new figure: the educated transnational Chinese woman.
Trade ReviewKaren M. Teoh helps readers both visualise and envision, through descriptive and detailed research, the lives, culture, and lived experiences of overseas Chinese women in female schools in British Malaya and Singapore from 1850s to 1960s. The work is a collection of oral histories, shared experiences, and research that presents a remarkable tribute to the collective body of overseas Chinese females whose experiences are represented therein ... [it] ensures that the complicated and winding history of overseas educated Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore is neither overlooked nor forgotten. The work also ensures imagined notions of overseas Chinese and female education in historical British Malaya and Singapore are viewed through their authentic, deeply dynamic realities. * Jennifer Schneider, History of Education *
Schooling Diaspora is a valuable contribution to our understanding of education as part of the colonial project and competing notions of gender in the Chinese community in Southeast Asia. * Dr Stan Neal, Reviews in History *
This book is an important contribution not only to the history of female education in Malaya, it also contributes significantly to our understanding of the experiences of Chinese migrants and the political participation of overseas-Chinese women in Malaya. It demonstrates how the intersections of national, ethnic and gender identities were played out for overseas-Chinese women as well as the convergences and divergences in the educational experiences of Chinese women across English-medium and Chinese-medium schools. * Siao See Teng, Journal of Chinese Overseas *
Schooling Diaspora... breaks new important ground in the historical study of the overseas Chinese. Not only does this book depart from the conventional focus on male mobility, but it also rejects tired assumptions of in-betweenness or a divided sense of belonging about a diasporic group. Rather, Teoh carefully delineates how different ideologies of colonialism, ethnonationalism, and patriarchy simultaneously lay claim to her subjects' commitments, complicating their identities... By moving beyond the national framework in considering questions of ethnicity and power, Teoh successfully recasts these familiar questions in a wider terrain where identity options were multiple and constantly shifting... The result of Teoh's efforts is a groundbreaking work that deftly brings together a variety of sources and interpretations about the transnational lives of educated Chinese women. * Shelly Chan, American Historical Review *
Schooling Diaspora successfully depicts how diasporic women's education has been woven into the transnational narratives of modernity and nationalism, and how education and women's self-identity mutually shaped each other. Bridging the gap between Chinese and Southeast Asian history, it provides an important transnational case study of diasporic Chinese women and their educational experience for the global discussion of education, gender and nationalism, and identity. * Jinghong Zhang, Women's History Review *
Schooling Diaspora tells the fascinating and little-known history of female education among the Overseas Chinese communities of southeast Asia. Using previously untapped sources in multiple languages and sensitive personal interviews, Teoh shows how the concerns of community leaders, colonial officials, and missionaries, and young women and their families combined to shape the educational experience of Chinese women. She shows beautifully how the question of what role women should play in the transition to a modern nation took distinctive forms in the colonial and multi-ethnic settings of southeast Asia. * Michael Szonyi, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University *
To this history of women's education in Southeast Asia Teoh adds an insider's view from her own schooling in two of the institutions. Although Western missionaries and colonial officials frequently championed education for females and wrote about their achievements, she finds that local Chinese also sponsored schools for young women and may have had a more significant modernizing influence. * Beatrice S. Bartlett, Yale University *
Teoh's research presents the intersection among gender, class, and inter-ethnic relationship in the contested terrain of overseas Chinese education in British Malaya. This book contributes greatly to understandings of the multifarious faces of overseas Chinese women and their unique trajectory of modernization. A must-read book for scholars interested in transnationalism and overseas Chinese. * Huei-Ying Kuo, author of Networks beyond Empires: Chinese Business and Nationalism in the Hong Kong-Singapore Corridor, 1914-1941 *
This study skillfully integrates perspectives from history, political economy, and ethnography to unravel the complex interweaving of the education of Overseas Chinese females in colonial Malaya and Singapore with British colonialism, Chinese ethno-nationalism, patriarchy, and hybrid cultural identities. The archive-based narrative is enlivened by original interviews with Southeast Asia-born women who were schooled in the 1930s and 1940s, including some who were motivated by their education to re-migrate to China following the Communist revolution. Particularly striking are the different gendered worldviews embodied in English- and Chinese-language girls' schools, reflecting the different transnational as well as local political influences to which they were subject, within the same spaces. * Linda Y.C. Lim, University of Michigan *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments A Note on Spelling Introduction: Women, Education, and Overseas Chinese Identity Chapter 1: A Little Education, A Little Emancipation: The Colonial Politics of Female Education, 1850s-1950s Chapter 2: Barrier against Evil, Encouragement for Good: English Girls' Schools, 1850s-1960s Chapter 3: So That They May be an Honor to You: The Nyonya Problem and the Singapore Chinese Girls' School, 1890s-1940s Chapter 4: Rare Flowers, Modern Girls, Good Citizens: Chinese Girls' Schools, 1900s-1950s Chapter 5: Home is That Which I Adore: Re-migration to China, 1940s-1960s Conclusion: The Domestic Citizen and Female Education in the Postcolonial Era Notes Bibliography Index
