This Forum reflects the rich conversations we had as participants in a roundtable at the 2023 Boston meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. There, Barbara Watson Andaya, Christina Firpo, Chie Ikeya, Guo-Quan Seng, Taomo Zhou and myself (Chiara Formichi), presented and discussed our reflections on the position of women (as both contributors and subjects) in competing visions of modernity in Southeast Asia, through our current work.Footnote ¹ We thus situated the status of women in the context of major historical events and transformations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from colonialism and capitalism to religious reform and political crises. And as we each focused on different geopolitical locales, we appreciated the difficulties of historical investigation as ‘Southeast Asianists’. As neatly summed up by our Chair, Professor Barbara Watson Andaya, ‘Though similarities constantly emerge, there are also distinct differences, and the opportunities for women to “pave the road ahead” through the colonial and postcolonial environments varied considerably’.

As in the Boston roundtable, this Forum brings together scholars at a variety of stages in their careers, and from across the world. Chie Ikeya is at Rutgers University; Chiara Formichi at Cornell University; Christina Firpo at California Polytechnic State University; Barbara Watson Andaya is at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, and both Guo-Quan Seng and Taomo Zhou are at the National University of Singapore. We rarely have the opportunity to be in the same room, sharing ideas and pushing and supporting each other in our thinking. Getting together in Boston was a reminder of the value of these opportunities, which are social as much intellectual. Yet, the genesis for this roundtable is to be found in the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased ways we found to interact and collaborate remotely.

Christina and I found each other in those interstices, bemoaning the thin body of scholarship on women in 1910s–1950s Southeast Asia, especially when compared with equivalent studies in South Asia and Northeast Asia; and further reflecting on the dearth of engagement with the paradigm of ‘modernity’. There are some notable exceptions—such as Tamara Loos’ Subject Siam, or Chie's own Refiguring Women—but that's what they are: welcome but rare blips on the radar. Christina and I found common ground—or rather, challenges—as we each explored the intersection of gender and modern consumption in the late colonial period, she in Vietnam and I in Indonesia. Although we had different ends to this exploration, we both grappled with how to present popular women's magazines into ‘proper historical sources’ and adapt the theoretical paradigms that have emerged from the study of East Asia to Southeast Asia, where formal colonialism emerged as a key defining feature of social and political transformation.

Drawing on Tani Barlow's model of multiple modernities, then, we addressed competing visions and realities of what it meant to be modern in Southeast Asia, and the role of women in shaping those visions and realities. Our overall goals were to explore how women contributed to these visions; to what extent they realised these visions; what were their experiences in these modernities; how did class, ethnicity, religion, and age influence women's roles? And, finally, how do such analyses of women-centred experiences inform broader understandings of social, cultural, economic, and political transformations in the region?

Throughout the Forum, we argue that the experience of women, and their (often but not necessarily agentic) contribution, is necessary to fully grasp the region's multiple entanglements with ‘modernity/ies’ in a variety of fields. In the following, Professor Watson Andaya invites the panellists to reflect on their own ‘pathways’ to studying women's history, the sources they have been able to leverage for this purpose, the intersection between ‘modernity’ and nationalism, and the related issue of women's position in postcolonial nation-states. Lastly, throughout the presentations and discussion, it was evident that the study of women opened new windows on how ideas of sexuality (in the family, society, politics) were changing.

BWA: As a collective, the members of this roundtable panel on Paving the Road Ahead: Women in (Post) Colonial Southeast Asia reach across generations (Christina and Chie with Taomo and Guo-Quan following in their footsteps), and came to the subject through a variety of pathways. In some cases, an interest in particular aspects of women's history came through the academic journey.

Guo-Quan, I believe that was how you came to think about women in the family. Could you tell us a little about this journey?

GQ: Neither Southeast Asian, nor Gender Studies was part of my formal PhD training. At the University of Chicago I was trained in the fields of ‘China and the Overseas Chinese’, ‘Empires and Postcolonial Theory’ and ‘International History’. My PhD dissertation was more about Orientalist colonial law-making, and the colonial discursive construction of ‘Chinese’ patrilineal identity in colonial Indonesia.Footnote ² But it was the chapter on women's rights that most excited my dissertation committee, and during my two years of postdoctoral fellowship at the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University the project took a more decidedly gender and Southeast Asian turn as I thought about the ways in which overseas Chinese families were created, and how the Chinese were assimilated and acculturated in Southeast Asia. The result is Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia, which tells the history of community formation from the perspective of women.

BWA: Chie, you, too, write about interAsian intimacies in the colonial period, but in the context of Burma/Myanmar. What drew you to this topic?

CI: The roots are enmeshed in my family history. My mother is Anglo-Burmese and my father is Japanese. My experience of racism and discrimination in Japan, where I was labelled haafu (literally: half) and regarded as a stain on the putatively pure-blooded Japanese nation, nurtured curiosity about ideologies and national identities that stigmatise mixed families and births such as mine. While I found Burmese society to be quite multicultural and pluralistic, it too condemned certain forms of intermarriage, such as those between Burmese women and Japanese men. For much of my childhood, I was told that my father's family, in typical Japanese fashion, disapproved of my parents’ marriage. As it turned out, my mother's sisters objected even more vehemently to their marriage. This is how I became interested in suppressed histories and memories of belonging across boundaries, the subject of my second book InterAsian Intimacies across Religion, Race, Law, and Colonialism.

BWA: Christina, in your work on Vietnam you too were drawn to the study of mixed relationships. Your first book, The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980, focused on the fate of metis children, and your second, Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945, explored the sex industry during the French regime. How did you come to your present interest in the commercialisation of beauty in colonial Vietnam?

CF: While researching my last book, Black Market Business, which was about the clandestine sex industry in colonial Vietnam, I came across heated debates in the primary sources over an emerging trend among women to showcase their appearance with fashion and makeup, in violation of traditional norms of modesty. What surprised me about these debates was the political and racial meaning the authors attached to even the most nuanced of fashion and beauty trends. This discovery shifted my research interests towards colonial Vietnam's emerging class of female consumers, the fashion and beauty trends they followed, and the political symbolism associated with such trends. My latest book, Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam, explores the beauty industry and gendered consumerism that took Vietnam by storm at the height of colonial capitalism. I argue that women's faces and bodies became hotly contested sites for signifying what it meant to be Vietnamese in a modern world.

BWA: Taomo, like Guo-Quan, you have become an ‘overseas Chinese’, but although female activists do figure in your first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution, you have only recently focused on the Indonesian Communist, Francisca Fanggideaj. How did you come to consider women as part of the economic story, and what inspired you to investigate her life?

TZ: My first book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War, examines the volatile geostrategic partnership between two leading countries in the Afro-Asian movements. My second book, Made in Shenzhen: A Global History of China's First Special Economic Zone, will connect China's reform to the proliferation of export-processing zones in Southeast Asia. Spanning the global moments on which each of my books focused is Francisca Fanggideaj's life story (1925–2013) as an activist in Third World internationalist movements and a mother of seven. Due to the rise of an anti-communist military dictatorship in Indonesia in 1966, Fanggideaj spent 19 years living as a political exile in China before migrating to the Netherlands in 1985. When Fanggidaej ultimately reunited with her adult children, they were intimate strangers whose relations were irrevocably changed by decades of forced separation.

My third book, tentatively entitled Finding Francisca: Becoming and Unbecoming Mother in a Decolonizing World, places motherhood at the core of our understanding about the political and economic developments in the Asia Pacific in the latter half of the twentieth century. Fanggidaej's experiences—from her struggles to juggle childcare with career to her prolonged absence as a mother and the relentless guilt she suffered—helps us reinterpret Cold War, decolonisation, the decline of Third World internationalism and the rise of neoliberalism from a gender perspective.

BWA: Let's now turn to the question of sources, which in many instances explains why the female experience in modern Southeast Asian history has been, as Chiara put it in her call to action, ‘surprisingly understudied’. I'm asking our panellists now to talk about the relationship between their projects and the sources: does the nature of the sources shape the project, or can one begin with an idea and then pursue it?

Guo-Quan, I believe your book falls within the former framework, could you explain how this happened?

GQ: Yes, the sources did change my dissertation topic! I was inspired at Chicago to pose postcolonial questions about settler Chinese identity formation in Southeast Asia, but I had gone in thinking I would work on the Cold War and decolonisation (1945–65) period. The rather painful ‘eureka’ moment came when I encountered the published minutes of the Batavia Chinese Council at Xiamen University in Summer 2009. There were all the voices of people from all walks of life, ethnic backgrounds, and especially women, going to the Chinese Kapitans for conflict resolution from the late eighteenth century until the turn of the twentieth. It was a treasure trove for doing history from below, but it also meant having to take about another year to learn Dutch in order to work on the colonial period. Besides the colonial language, the bulk of my primary sources were either recorded in a locally inflected form of classical Chinese or printed in creolised Sino-Malay—both of which I could more or less manage having learnt the standard forms in school.

I was struck researching Dutch colonial legal discourses of Chinese-ness by how fixated officials were with the question of the rights of ‘Chinese women’. I went back to reread many of the postcolonial scholars who had made gender arguments, and realised what my sources revealed was a striking manifestation of the nineteenth-century colonial state's ‘woman's question’. I pushed my sources to uncover the colonial politics of talking about women's rights, and how in the Chinese context, this discussion reified new traditionalist, patriarchal elites —Confucianists in my case.

BWA: Taomo, you are one of the rare scholars who had a ‘gold mine’ at hand that was tailor-made for investigation. Could you tell us more about these sources and why you felt Francisca's life story was worth telling?

TZ: Fanggidaej was an extraordinary woman intellectual with her own sense of historical consciousness. She kept her own records, curated her own archives, and actively made herself into a historical subject. Across four decades and three continents, from her hotel room in Havana when attending the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, from the Nanjing Military Academy in China when undergoing guerrilla war training, from her humble apartment in the Dutch city of Zeist, she persistently documented her life in her diary. She wrote mostly in Bahasa Indonesia, sometimes in Dutch, occasionally adding a sprinkle of romanised Chinese. All her diaries and more than 180 personal letters are available at the Institute of International Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. The IISH also hosts Fanggidaej's oral history interviews with Hersi Setiawan—a former political prisoner, activist and historian. Part of the interviews were adapted into a memoir, which is one of the few sources that tell us what it meant to be a woman and mother in the Bandung era.Footnote ³ Fanggidaej's history-making project is a powerful form of resistance against the Suharto dictatorship. She was also acutely self-aware. As she wrote in her diary in March 1986, she wanted to situate herself as simultaneously the protagonist and an ‘enthusiastic and warm spectator’ of her own life story. A self-centred account of one's own life would be meaningless, she said; one's personal narrative can only become a meaningful piece of history with complete honesty, self-reflection, and self-reflexivity.Footnote ⁴

BWA: Chie, I believe you began your study of InterAsian Intimacies with official records—never intended for historians of gender—but you felt a need to explore the personal aspects of family life more deeply. How did you go about this?

CI: For InterAsian Intimacies, I conducted extensive research on civil court records, with which I had little familiarity at first, to explore the lives of people who seldom left behind personal documents such as autobiographies, memoirs, letters, or family portraits. Civil court cases are, by nature, about disaffection. Embittered battles over marriage, fidelity, and inheritance by wayward husbands, repudiated wives, disobedient children, and conniving relatives—these are the stuff of courtroom dramas, not the ‘intimacies’ of my title. This pushed me to consider the limitations of the sources I was using and their impact on the study itself, and prompted me to pivot back to the original inspirations for the study: intergenerational family stories of intermarriage and conversion that were shared with me long before and after I began training as a historian, and often by women. Yet, over the ten years I have been working on my book, I struggled with a question that has faced many other historians: how to bridge the gap between the finished history of interAsian intimacies that have been chronicled in written records and government archives on the one hand, and the living, unfinished history told in families, specifically by women storytellers, on the other. This very personal challenge of ‘sources’ has guided my effort to reauthorise embodied knowledge that eludes verification and remember what the archive has obscured.

BWA: Christina, you were using a rather different genre of sources to explore the relationship between commercialised beauty and the state. In terms of sources, what makes this genre of particular interest?

CF: Because my previous books had relied largely on male-authored sources, I decided that for my next project I would look for topics that women found important to write about—and were allowed to write about. Among those were fashion and makeup. ‘Beauty and the Nation’ explores the role of women's faces and bodies in defining Vietnamese identity during a critical period in Vietnamese history. Drawing from large data sets, I investigate the broad political, cultural, and economic trends of the interwar years (1920–40) that contributed to this process. Vietnamese-language newspapers, whose readership exploded during the interwar era thanks to the rapidly rising literacy rates, especially among women, provide the richest data on beauty culture in Vietnam. Newspaper stories, mostly written by women, appealed to female readers, including film, beauty contests, fashion, cosmetics, sports, dieting, exercise regimes, and published letters from readers often critical of new trends. Beauty businesses, many of which were women-owned, took advantage of the explosion in newspaper's female readership to reach prospective customers via print advertisements. Female entrepreneurs published manuals teaching women how to improve their looks, while male novelists and short fiction writers also drew on the imagery of modern fashion and cosmetics and quirks of female behaviour to speak to larger themes about the human condition during the interwar years in Vietnam.

BWA. I'd like now to turn to the problematic issues of women, ‘modernity’ and nationalism because all panellists saw these issues as intimately connected.

Guo-Quan, you referred to underlying tensions in Chinese-Indonesian society as a modernizing legal discourse reified a new traditionalist Confucianist elite. Could you tell us more about why you decided that the theme of your book should focus on women and gender, rather than the ways in which patriliny was constructed?

GQ: Both strains of inquiry were there from the beginning, but in the book, I came out more strongly in favour of historicising the patriliny through the experience of women who were excluded from it. This turn to women and gender came out of a nagging dissatisfaction with a kind of postcolonial methodology or disposition that makes little attempt at going beyond colonial sources (and discourses) besides being critical about (patriarchal) coloniality.

This delay in turning to the question of women and gender was also in part logistical and methodological. Records about women, and women's voices, were in fact present in my primary sources in a quantitatively significant way, but they were embedded there in such a diffuse way that it took time to assemble and analyse. I'm referring here, first, to the Batavia Chinese Council marriage registry and divorce trial records (1780s–1919), and, second, to the colonial Chinese civil registries (1919–1950s). For instance, it took a lot more time than I had expected to assemble, transcribe, code and then analyse all 738 divorce trial records. Women formed the bulk of petitioners, and the Chinese Kapitan adjudicators were surprisingly pragmatic in granting them divorces—something unheard of in Chinese customary law (Strangers, chap. 3). It also took time to scroll through ream after ream of civil registries, before realising that what was sociologically (and quantitatively) meaningful for my project was to explain why native women appeared in birth registries but were absent from marriage ones (chap. 8).

BWA: Christina, you have also focused on the ways in which ‘tradition’ was challenged by the new forms of ‘modernity’ associated with female fashion. In what sense, do you think, can fashion be regarded as an expression of nationalism?

CF: I should start by acknowledging that women's fashion choices during the interwar years depended first and foremost on aesthetics and economics, and it is unlikely that the average woman intended to make a political statement when she put on clothing and makeup in the morning. Having said that, there was a healthy discourse among journalists that linked fashion, modernity, and nationalism. In the late 1920s, Vietnamese feminist journalists defended short hairstyles, arguing that the new hairdo allowed women to be more productive and thus contribute to the national economy. Those same feminists encouraged women to embrace the muscles that developed from playing sports on grounds that stronger female bodies made for a stronger nation. But the link between nationalism and sartorial choices came in the early 1930s with a ‘clothing reform campaign’, led by male journalists who were embarrassed by Vietnamese women mismatching French styles. It was within this campaign that in 1934 artist Nguyễn Cát Tường debuted his design for the Lemur Tunic, the first iteration of what would today be called the áo dài. Influenced by the Franco-Vietnamese collaboration movement and concurrent Franco-Vietnamese hybridisation of art, architecture, literature, and music, he designed a dress that also combined the two cultural influences and presented it as the new national dress. Although the French influences earned the outfit much criticism, the Lemur tunic was wildly popular among Vietnamese middle-class women, who came to see it as symbol of modern, bourgeois Vietnam.

BWA: Chie, historical studies usually depict nationalism in colonial Burma in a positive light, especially in relation to gender relations. How have you dealt with this received wisdom in your current work?

CI: In InterAsian Intimacies, I trace how intermarriage and conversion became the subject of political agitation, legislative activism, and collective violence. Those who self-identified as ‘protectors’ of the buddha batha bama amyo (‘Burmese Buddhist kind’) charged amyo gya (‘other’) men with seducing unsuspecting Burmese Buddhist women into fraudulent marriages and involuntary conversions. They imagined the Burmese Buddhist as an exceptional species of just, tolerant people who had no history of sex, caste, racial, and religious discrimination; the Burmese Buddhists were therefore worthy of universal admiration and protection from conversion and miscegenation. A woman who disobeyed the conjugal mandate to marry a Burmese Buddhist was deemed an infidel who had betrayed her own religion, race, and nation. This alarmist imagination of the Burmese Buddhist as an exceptional and endangered community, what I term Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism, authorised eugenicist attempts to consign minority Asians to subordinate status and restrict women's reproductive autonomy. I recognise that Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism constituted not only a nationalist strategy, but also a form of patriarchal bargain intended to centre Burmese Buddhist women in political movements and win concessions such as female education and franchise against the wishes of patriarchal authorities, colonial and indigenous. But I question whether such tethering of a feminist agenda to the interests of community and nation actually empowered women.

BWA: Taomo, we were all fascinated by your account of the ways in which Fanggidaej made herself into an historical source and at the same time created her own idea of modernity. Can you explain the context that made this possible?

TZ: Chie, Guo-Quan and Christina's works have shown how Southeast Asian women envisioned various forms of modernities in the colonial context, and I am extending this discussion to the Cold War. If we see the Cold War as a wider twentieth-century struggle between different visions of modernities based on different interpretations of capitalism and Marxism, motherhood was a central part of this competition between two oppositional sociopolitical systems. States in both the capitalist and socialist camps regulated women's reproductive roles for their respective modernisation projects.Footnote ⁵

Fanggidaej's experiences index the evolution of modern motherhood as an ideological construct, social institution and mass culture in Southeast Asia and the wider world under the long shadow of the Cold War. From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, the left-leaning atmosphere in Indonesia affirmed women's equal status with men in workforce and public affairs, allowing Fanggidaej to pursue her political passion outside of home.Footnote ⁶ Yet after the anti-communist mass killings of 1965–66, the Suharto regime enshrined home-centred mothers as the key to stabilising the family unit.Footnote ⁷ As the Cold War thawed, socialisation of childcare ended across the former Eastern bloc while Western Europe and the United States initiated welfare cuts.Footnote ⁸ With the global retreat of state socialism, the rise of neoliberalism and nuclear family, child-centred motherhood—something Fanggidaej might have criticised as bourgeois in the past—became the new social norm in her late years and burdened her with retrospective maternal guilt.

4. BWA: The twentieth century was a time of transnational mobility and global communication of ideas, including those that promoted gender equality and an enhanced role for women as citizens of newly independent countries. How does your study of colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia contribute to current scholarly discussions?

Chie, how did the colonial state conceptualise a ‘modern’ Burmese family?

CI: British authorities declared Burmese Buddhist family law and custom free of the civilisational defects they attributed to ‘Oriental’ societies, such as polygamy, concubinage, child marriage, and pardahnasin. A Muslim man could unilaterally divorce his wife while a Buddhist man could not; a Buddhist widow could remarry while a Hindu one could not; Buddhist children were entitled to inheritance regardless of sex while the Chinese followed the rule of primogeniture; Orientals of whatever religion observed patrilineal kinship structures while bilateral descent was the norm among the Burmese. British legal experts extolled the Burmese as practically monogamous, although Burmese Buddhist law permitted polygyny, which remained common among the elite. Burmese Buddhists wielded this idealised image of the Burmese Buddhist family as uniquely enlightened and egalitarian to denigrate other family forms and demand that Burmese women make the propagation of the Burmese Buddhist family the object of their desire. Even avowedly liberal critics of Burmese traditions who championed women's personal choice drew the line at intermarriage. Echoing modernist debates about the conjugal family globally, they promoted the companionate love marriage—forged between two autonomous, equal individuals of the opposite sex—as the epitome of liberty and the foundation of the modern family. But they decried the intimate relationships of Burmese women to amyo gya men as the antithesis of true love and social progress.

BWA: Guo-Quan, it seems that the relationship between ‘modernity’ and ‘traditionalists’ was communicated through Orientalist studies. Can you tell us more about these studies, and how they link Southeast Asia to global conversations about gender and family?

GQ: It has long been established that Asians in colonial situations drew on colonial Orientalist scholarship to re-invent traditions. Gandhi famously read the Bhagavad Gita in English first from London. For the case of the Chinese in Indonesia, it is well known that the Peranakan Chinese turned Confucianism into a modern religion by reinventing Confucius as a prophet. Less well known is the fact that they drew on European (French and Dutch) Orientalist studies of Confucianism, and remodelled their theology after Christianity. I am less interested in the theological arguments per se than in the effects these male-dominant discourses had on Indonesian Chinese womanhood. Strangers in the Family shows how male Confucian reformers attacked calls for marriage reform in the 1910s, especially those made by one Leiden-educated Indonesian Chinese woman, as un-Chinese. A small contribution I believe I made, is in drawing the connection between this cohort of male Confucian reformers and the appearance of a new Sino-Malay genre of sexual hygiene manuals, and thereby showing, that there was a sexually inflected ethical dimension to their reform campaign. These manuals proffered ‘social hygiene’ instructions to men and women with a mystical twist, and were made to serve, I argue, the eugenics ends of the creole Confucian movement.

BWA: Christina, could you pick up from here and explain how ‘modern’ ideas about femaleness and modernity were being communicated in Vietnam?

CF: Vietnamese women of the early twentieth century were bombarded by new ideas about femininity communicated through the capitalist market and new forms of media. Alongside newspaper articles demanding education for girls, employment opportunities for women, and the right for widows to remarry, appeared columns highlighting the latest clothing and hair fashions, articles teaching cosmetics application techniques, and pictures detailing exercises designed to obtain a curvier figure. Newspapers attracted buyers by placing photographs of local and foreign beauty queens on the front page, and papers even staged their own beauty contests with promises to reveal pictures of the winner. Editors brought in revenue from French, Japanese, American, and British companies advertising cosmetics and other goods. On the streets of Hanoi, Saigon, Huế or Hải Phòng, pedestrians admired window displays in French boutiques or popped into a department store to try on a polka-dot chiffon dress and solicit makeup advice from a pretty métisse girl working behind the cosmetics counter. Local bookstores hawked novels—a recent literary innovation—that deployed Modern Girl characters strategically in plots critical of modernity. On the same shelf, one might find beauty manuals written by Vietnamese female entrepreneurs. In the dry season, local fairs staged beauty contests, allowing the audience to catch a glimpse of crowned beauty queens in person. And, in dance halls, young women in slinky Bombay dresses allowed handsy men to swing their bodies around to the latest Tino Rossi song. Consequently, a new image of ‘modern’ femininity emerged among urban middle-class women during the interwar years. As noted above, young women cut their long tresses and abandoned the practice of lacquering their teeth. They wore brightly coloured Western dresses that emphasised their figures—and some even augmented their curves with rubber falsies. They rode bicycles to school and bounced around on the tennis court in short white jumpers. They invited the male gaze by competing in beauty pageants and flaunting their figures in revealing bathing suits.

BWA: Taomo, your idea that motherhood should be a key consideration in discussing the Cold War, the decline of Third World internationalism and the emergence of the neoliberal economic order is intriguing. Have you engaged with other scholars about this?

TZ: I use Fanggidaej's life story to bring together three bodies of scholarship: research on women in internationalist movements, family politics during the Cold War, and household economy in the neoliberal era. Fanggidaej's transnational campaign for Third World solidarity challenged the stereotypical understanding of international networks forged during the Bandung era as a largely homosocial space.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, by shedding light on Fanggidaej's struggles to juggle her political career with childcare, my work resonates with recent scholarship that expands our understanding about Cold War motherhood beyond the commonly known American suburban housewives.Footnote ¹⁰ Fanggidaej stood among other socialist women in the Global South, including the North Korean ‘good wives and wise mothers’ representing both the Confucian tradition and socialist ethos and the Cuban women using materialist rhetoric for peace activism.Footnote ¹¹ I also closely analyse the emotional turmoil Fanggidaej experienced during her prolonged absence as a mother. The shame she felt during the Cultural Revolution reflected how totalitarian states such as Mao's China and Suharto's Indonesia used the image of ideal mothers to consolidate legitimacy and exert social control.Footnote ¹² Finally, in Fanggidaej's memoir published in her 80s, a recurring theme was the conflict between the mobility demanded by her public duty and the homebound orientation demanded by an individualised notion of motherhood—a product of the neoliberal era. By contextualising Fanggidaej's maternal guilt, I join sociologists such as Arlie Hochschild and Nancy Fraser in their critique against neoliberal societies’ double demands on mothers: as caretakers because the states have offloaded the costs of social reproduction to individual families, and as wage-earners as the economic security of the sole-male-breadwinner family model vanished.Footnote ¹³

BWA. Finally, if sexuality and sexual reproduction enter into your sources, how do they fit into the vision of ‘modernity’ such sources convey?

Chie, you've tapped a variety of sources, from personal accounts transmitted orally to written regulations and archival court records. Is it possible to track changing attitudes to sexuality as colonial times merge into the postcolonial?

CI: The main currents of scholarship on Southeast Asia have emphasised the corrosive effect of European colonialism on gender and sexual pluralism and diversity. Nevertheless, how colonised subjects improvised colonial modern categories and hierarchies that assigned varying degrees of sexual aggression and perversion to ‘inferior’ religions and races has yet to be adequately interrogated. Responding to this question, I show in my second book that across the long twentieth century, interAsian intimacy served as an especially potent site through which state and society came to know and care about sexual, religious, and racial difference. The persecution of the ethnic minority Rohingya as ‘Bengali terrorists’ waging ‘love jihad’, an alleged conspiracy to forcibly convert unsuspecting women to Islam through rape and duplicitous marriage, is only the most recent example. Burma is not an exception. The fear of the sexual exploitation and violation of presumptively vulnerable women by Asian ‘others’—that is, Chinese, Muslims in the case of Buddhist majority nations, and Indian Muslims in the case of majority Muslim nations—has allowed governments and nationalists in Southeast Asia to subject their minoritised populations to both mundane and exceptional forms of violence and politicise the sexual and reproductive choices of women. All the while, they declare themselves liberal, multicultural societies that, unlike neighbouring countries in South Asia and East Asia, oppress neither their women nor their racial and religious minorities. InterAsian intimacy was, and remains, foundational to modern regimes of difference, knowledge, and power throughout Asia.

BWA: Guo-Quan, sexual relationships outside marriage (for instance, with a concubine) were a complicated issue as Chinese-Indonesian families negotiated colonial ideas of what constituted a family. Could you elaborate on these tensions?

GQ: This is related to one of the key questions I pose in the book—how did the colonial state manage inter-ethnic intimacies differently among its Asian subjects as compared with how White–Native intimacies, as we know from the work of Ann Stoler and others, became an area for intensified policing in the twentieth century? Strangers in the Family shows that the colonial state tried to curb sexual relationships outside marriage for their Chinese subjects through the introduction of a monogamous marriage law in 1919. This civilising legal reform, imposed with little consultation, was held out as a promise to the Chinese for eventual ‘equalisation’ (Dutch: gelijkstelling) with ‘Europeans’ in the colony's racially bifurcated judicial system—civil law for Europeans, and adat law for Natives (Inlanders). The tensions were thus manifold. The tiny Dutch-educated Chinese elite were keen to show that they could be just as ‘European’ as their colonial rulers, but racial equalisation en masse never happened. For the vast majority of the Chinese, however, marriage and more permissive sexual norms were slow to change, and the tide probably did not turn, as I show through my analysis of post-1919 marriage and birth registers, until the mid-1950s when the Indonesian authorities clamped down on concubinage relationships between Chinese men and native women.

BWA: Christina, you have suggested that the changing appearance of young Vietnamese women represented fundamental shifts in attitudes to gender and sexuality. Was this period a watershed in the pathway to ‘modernity’?

CF: During the interwar years in Vietnam, it is impossible to address gender without sexuality. The period between the First and Second World Wars was a time when women's role in family and society was being reconsidered. Urban middle-class women re-examined their debt to the Confucian ‘Three Followings’ dictating their relationship to their father, husband and sons. They demanded greater rights in the family by eschewing arranged marriages, protesting abuse by mothers-in-law, and asserting individualism. Young women also questioned the Confucian ‘Four Virtues’, which governed the proper ways to behave in society, specifically their appearance, speech, virtue, and work. Urban middle-class Vietnamese women of the interwar years insisted on publicly participating in society: they went to school, played sports, went dancing, and took vacations—and they wanted to look good doing so. The new styles they wore, the makeup on their faces, and ease in which they wore shorter skirts and tighter dresses that laid their arms bare and showcased their décolletage forced onlookers to confront a new future—and that future looked sexy.

BWA: Taomo, sexual politics imposed a heavy weight on Indonesian communists exiled in China. How did Fanggidaej deal with this in her own writing, and how did she relate sexual expression to her views of the modern future?

TZ: In 1966, Fanggidaej was diagnosed with leprosy. She subsequently spent seven years (1967–74) at a leper colony near the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou (Canton). In the leprosy asylum, Fanggidaej felt strong sexual attraction towards a Chinese young man, likely a fellow patient, 20 years her junior. Fanggidaej's medical condition gave her an unusual opportunity to break away from the sexual containment imposed by the Chinese government on foreign exiles. In Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Elaine Tyler May writes about how the United States suppressed minorities and interracial liaisons to prevent the spread of communist influence through body politics in the early Cold War.Footnote ¹⁴ Such sexual containment is not restricted to the capitalist bloc. The Chinese government offered protection to fellow communists from Indonesia after 1965. However, the Indonesian exiles lived in clandestine enclaves sealed off from the larger Chinese society and were strictly forbidden to engage in any romantic or sexual relations with the locals.Footnote ¹⁵ Although Fanggidaej managed to interact intimately with the local Chinese and expressed her sexual feelings in her diaries, she was under pressure to uphold the chaste and demure image of an ideal revolutionary woman. Communist women like her with high political status were much more vulnerable than their male counterparts to accusations of sexual and political impurity.Footnote ¹⁶ In the climate of military purism during Mao's Cultural Revolution, Fanggidaej regarded her own sexual feelings—which naturally emerged during a long separation from her husband—as an obstacle to the revolutionary future she dreamt about.