Engseng Ho proposes that “the study of Asia, thought of as an Inter-Asian space, and smaller than the whole globe, can provide tractable concepts for a new round of research to shed light on the social shapes of societies that are mobile, spatially expansive, and interactive with one other.” Moving us away from more static models of China studies, Japan studies, etc., the concept of “inter-Asian”—where I take the “inter” to stand for inter-national, inter-regional, inter-faith, inter-racial, and inter-ethnic—offers a productive framework for examining histories that have been previously marginalized in dominant historical narratives: for example, the history of colonial Hong Kong's Eurasian community. In such a case, where the scope of inquiry is neither fully global in scale nor strictly local, the inter-Asian framework provides a middle ground and intermediate scale that brings this history into focus.
During the colonial era, the communal group commonly labeled “Eurasians” constituted a small minority of Hong Kong's population compared with the two dominant social groups of European expatriates and Chinese, one that often disappeared from view on the census and might be considered negligible in purely numeric terms. Nonetheless, the “web” of Eurasian families, to borrow a term from Peter Hall ([Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012), included such influential individuals as Sir Robert Hotung, Lady Clara Hotung, Sir M. K. Lo, Sir Robert Kotewall, Sin Tak Fan, and Chan Kai Ming, among others, and played a significant role in building the colony into a successful hub for trade, migration, and cultural exchange. An examination of this “web” as a dense network of overlapping business, professional, and kinship ties enables us to trace paths of mobility and linkages that crossed boundaries of nation, empire, religion, race, language, and class.
Colonial Hong Kong's Eurasian community, as Tony Sweeting (Reference Sweeting2015, 83) has written, “in one sense … form[ed] a subset of the wider group of Asians of ‘mixed blood’ to whom this noun was applied from the middle of the 19th century.” First introduced in British colonial India as a designation for those previously denigrated as “half-caste,” the term “Eurasian” represents a simple conjoining of “European” and “Asian,” though it was often understood in specifically gendered terms. Herbert A. Giles's (Reference Giles1878, 39) A Glossary of Reference on Subjects Connected with the Far East, for example, defined “Eurasian” as: “The offspring of a European father and an Asiatic mother.” Yet, in Hong Kong, Sweeting (Reference Sweeting2015, 84) noted, “the meaning and usage of the term was always flexible.” In this essay, I follow Sweeting in employing a “social definition” of Eurasians that “includes all those residents of Hong Kong prepared to accept a Eurasian designation, as well as people of mixed Asian origin who identified themselves, at least to some extent, with Eurasians” (84). Whereas my own research on colonial Hong Kong's Eurasian community (Teng Reference Teng2013) focused on evolving ideas about “mixedness,” my aim here is to sketch some of the ways in which Ho's articulation of the “inter-Asian” prompts me to rethink my own work through the idea of the “web,” as a more expansive social group that encompassed individuals who were not considered “Eurasian” as defined above, instead of hybridity.
Foregrounding core concepts such as mobility, circulation, connections, and transregional axes, and emphasizing “outside-in” analysis, the Inter-Asian moves us in a different direction from postcolonial theoretical concepts like hybridity and mimicry that have been so readily attached to so-called “mixed” populations such as Eurasians, and yet have their conceptual limitations, as Ho argues. Influentially formulated by Homi Bhabha (Reference Bhabha1994), the metaphor of hybridity is a powerful critical idea that contests the static binaries upon which the colonial orders and entrenched racial hierarchies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rested. Yet, as I have argued in my work on Chinese Eurasians, the notion of the “hybrid” remains tethered in many ways to its flipside—the putatively “pure” or “originary,” of which the hybrid is conceived as a mix or cross (Teng Reference Teng2013). With overtones of biology and genetics, and grounded in the idea of reproduction, hybridity implicitly reinforces the conceptualization of race as “stock,” “strain,” or “blood,” and hence can never entirely shake primordialist formulations of identity even as it challenges and undermines them (Young Reference Young1995). The retreat from hybridity as globalization's zeitgeist and from the “postracial” moment has thus been swifter than many of us perhaps imagined.
“Outside-In Analysis”: Intersecting Diasporas
To take up more specifically some of these Inter-Asian concepts as a means of thinking through certain issues that arise in my own work, I begin with Ho's notion of “outside-in analysis.” If hybridity's “third space” connotes the interstices that open up in the encounters between colonizer and colonized, East and West, and white and nonwhite (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994), Peter Hall's ([Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012) metaphor of the “web” suggests instead an expansive stretching across space, with multiple nodes of connection that lead not only back to a center, but also to other points of intersection and contact. The notion of the web, moreover, allows me to shift away from race as the primary lens for understanding the lived experience of this communal group, and to consider social identities that do not neatly fit the British colonial definition of “Eurasian” as the “offspring of a European father and an Asiatic mother.” Indeed, the multiplicity of connections, intertwinings, boundary-crossings, and transgressions conjured up by the word are so manifold that this label often introduces more confusion than clarity (Dover Reference Dover1937; Ondaatje Reference Ondaatje1982; Wallace and Dover Reference Wallace and Dover1930).Footnote
1
For example, commonly considered “Eurasian,” Hong Kong's Sir Robert Kotewall (1880–1949, Chinese name Lo Yuk Wo) was descended from a Parsi father and a Chinese mother (Carroll Reference Carroll2005, 141). And where should we place the Kew family, descended in the paternal line from a Chinese migrant to Australia who married a white Australian woman and brought his family to Hong Kong? The British colonial definition of “Eurasian,” with its privileging of the white European patriarch, at times proves too narrow to account for the interethnic and gendered diversity of the “web” as it was understood from the community (“inside-out”) perspective.
Responding to Ho's call for “outside-in analysis,” I would argue that Hong Kong's colonial-era Eurasian community can be conceptualized not only in terms of hybridity as formulated by Giles, but rather in terms of intersecting diasporas—including British, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Jewish, Armenian, Parsi, and others—the Chinese diaspora further a multiplicity of Fujianese, Cantonese, Hakkas, and Sui Seung Yan. As certain of these diasporas moved eastward toward and across Asia, others moved southward or westward out of Asia, thus crossing paths in the Hong Kong hub of commerce and migration, and establishing mixed families where they intersected. As Ho writes: “Diasporas are no islands, and certainly can intertwine with other diasporas, such as those that come with their own states called empires.” These diverse movements were interlinked, for it was the British colonization of Hong Kong that prompted other migratory flows to follow in the wake of empire, transforming a sleepy fishing village into a global entrepôt (Carroll Reference Carroll2005; Sinn and Munn Reference Sinn and Munn2017). An “outside-in” analysis seems particularly apt for Hong Kong, which was sparsely populated before 1842.
Mobility
Mobility can be understood not only as geographic mobility, but also as social and economic mobility—either upward or downward, as the case may be. The zigzagged thread of mobility is certainly evident in the story of Sir Robert Hotung/Ho Tung (1862–1956), once the “Grand Old Man of Hong Kong,” and perhaps the colony's most famous Eurasian. Ho Tung's origins can be traced back to a family of silk growers on the Yangtze River's Chongming Island. When the male head of household died unexpectedly, his young widow fell on hard times and was forced by relatives to sell one of her daughters “down the river” to Shanghai; thus began the migration of Shi Tai (ca. 1841–96), Ho Tung's mother, a movement that eventually landed her in Hong Kong (Ho Reference Ho2010, 42–44). There, the young Shi became the “protected woman” of Charles Henri Maurice Bosman (1839–92), a Dutch Jew who was born in Rotterdam as Mozes Hartog Bosman, the son of a butcher with German roots. In sharp contrast to Shi, whose (involuntary) mobility was propelled by poverty and facilitated by the institutionalized buying and selling of human beings, Bosman's migration to the colony was driven by the thirst for adventure and economic opportunity that brought so many Europeans to Asia in those years. Bosman began his Hong Kong career as a clerk for Cornelius Koopmanschap, a Java-based Dutchman who was a notorious “coolie trader,” sending Chinese workers to labor in distant lands. Rising through the ranks, he became a successful businessman before going down in a series of bad deals. Bosman removed to London, married, converted to Christianity, and was naturalized as a British citizen (Hall [Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012; Ho Reference Ho2010; Liu and Bartholomew Reference Liu and Bartholomew2003).
If Ho Tung's origins can be traced to these intersecting diasporas, his spectacular ascent to the pinnacles of Hong Kong society can also be understood through this lens, for it was the intersections of diasporas in conjunction with the transnational flow of goods that provided Hong Kong's early Eurasians with their chief career opportunities: European trading houses, the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, and the colonial courts where they served as clerks and interpreters. Working in these institutions, Eurasians who were equipped with bilingual and bicultural skills (generally through training in Hong Kong's Government Central School/Queen's College or the Diocesan Boys’ School) served at the interface between Chinese and Europeans. Exceling at Central, Ho Tung first worked for the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs office in Guangzhou and then joined Jardine, Matheson and Company in Hong Kong, where he soon became chief comprador before establishing his own business. Along with his brothers Ho Fook and Ho Kom-tong, Ho Tung rose through this route to great wealth and power in Hong Kong—converting economic and social capital to symbolic capital (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1989) through philanthropy and public service. Notably, another brother, Ho Yau-kai, or Walter Bosman, pursued a different avenue for mobility, winning a scholarship for university in Britain, where he trained in civil engineering. Bosman subsequently went to work as an engineer for the Natal Government, hiding his Chinese origins to follow the path of British empire in a new direction (Hall [Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012; Ho Reference Ho2010; Liu and Bartholomew Reference Liu and Bartholomew2003).
A legendary figure in Hong Kong's rags to riches mythology, Ho Tung was knighted by the British and also awarded several medals by the Chinese government. Further exemplifying the potential for Eurasians to move from margins to center within such a context, Ho and his brothers used their wealth and influence to purchase posthumous titles that transformed Charles Bosman (alias Ho Shiwen) into a Qing court official and Shi Tai into a Lady of the Second Rank (Ho Reference Ho2010; Liu and Bartholomew Reference Liu and Bartholomew2003). Mobility, much more than hybridity, I would argue, encapsulates the Ho family story.
Circulation
The related concept of circulation also helps elucidate Eurasian lived experiences on the China coast. Indeed, circulation was key to upward mobility for Hong Kong Eurasians who had the opportunity to pursue education abroad (especially in the United Kingdom) and/or move among career opportunities in places like Shanghai, Tianjin, and Singapore.
As compradors, the Ho brothers continually circulated through China and Southeast Asia, tracing the well-worn routes of the Chinese trade diaspora and weaving, as they traveled, inter-Asian linkages. These journeys provided opportunities not only for accumulating wealth, but also for expanding social capital and making marriage connections, as I will show below.
Circulation is furthermore evident in the trajectory of the Anderson/Hung family, Eurasians descended from Scotsman John Graham Anderson. The brothers Hung Kam Shing (1858–1907) and Hung Kam Ning (ca. 1862–1919), were both prize-winning pupils at Hong Kong's Central School who had notable careers as top-level Chinese interpreters at the Hong Kong Supreme Court. Hung Kam Ning (a.k.a. Henry Graham Anderson) then retired in Shanghai. The second generation enjoyed even greater upward mobility, as the sons of Kam Shing and Kam Ning moved outward from the colony, with a number studying in England before returning east to assume prominent positions as lawyers, stockbrokers, or other professionals in Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Beijing. Following more closely the trajectory of one member of this generation, Hung Kam Ning's son Hung Iu-chi/Charles Graham Anderson (1889–1949), moves us along a path from Hong Kong, where he was born and educated, to Macau, where he married the Anglo-Chinese-Austrian-Spanish Lucy Eleanor Perry (1892–1979), to Shanghai, where he worked as a stockbroker before returning to Hong Kong in an economic downturn. After the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, Anderson's family took refuge in Macau, aided by Portuguese family connections. In the subsequent generation, Charles's daughter Joyce Anderson, born in Shanghai but raised in Hong Kong and Macau, married Eurasian Bob Symons in Shanghai and spent the rest of her years divided between Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, where she eventually died (Hall [Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012; Lee Reference Lee2004; Smith Reference Smith2005; Symons Reference Symons1996; Teng Reference Teng2013).
The notion of circulation (in contrast to “circular migration”) as proposed in Ho's “Inter-Asian” framework provides a different angle for thinking about the movements of people and proves useful as a lens for capturing the restless and multidirectional mobility of the Anderson/Hung family across generations. While distinct from the “one-way” migrations that were the focus of traditional migration studies, “circular migration” nonetheless connotes a fixed point of “home,” from which the migrant moves outward but ultimately returns in a “round-trip” movement. Rather than “closing the circle,” however, the repeated movements of the Anderson/Hung family, tracing arcs of both geographic mobility and (upward and downward) economic mobility over time, remind us of the tenuousness of fixing a primordial or ancestral “home” in the case of mixed-heritage Eurasians. Finally, circulation as exemplified by this family calls our attention to the fluidity between groups such as “Hong Kong Eurasians” and “Shanghai Eurasians,” suggesting how an Inter-Asian approach can address some of the limitations of local studies.
Connections
The “old boys' networks” and professional connections among men who worked in the China coast's trading houses, customs offices, and courts were vital threads in spinning the Eurasian “web.” Equally important were marital connections that joined families together in the bonds of kinship, and in this respect women played a central role. As a response to social prejudice from both Chinese and European elites, a pattern of endogamous marriages among Eurasian families in colonial Hong Kong and China's treaty ports emerged. In 1881, for example, Ho Tung married Margaret MacLean/Mak Sau-Ying (1865–1944), the daughter of Hector Coll MacLean, Jardine's insurance agent in Tianjin, and a Eurasian woman surnamed Ng, whose American father was in Shanghai. This match was arranged by Ho's mother during his childhood, as was common for the time. In 1895, Margaret arranged for Ho Tung to marry her cousin, Clara Cheung Ching-Yung (1875–1938), the daughter of Eurasian Cheung Tak Fai, who worked for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service in Jiujiang, and his Eurasian wife. Ho Tung's brother, Ho Fook, married Lucy Rothwell/Lo Sui-choi, a Eurasian born in Shanghai and educated at Hong Kong's Diocesan School. Ho Kom-tong married Edith Sze Lin-Yut, the daughter of Archibald McClymont, a Scottish tea merchant for Jardine's in Shanghai, and a Parsi Eurasian mother (Cheng Reference Cheng1976; Hall [Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012; Ho Reference Ho2010; Liu and Bartholomew Reference Liu and Bartholomew2003). In the subsequent generation, endogamous marriages among Hong Kong's Eurasian elite gave rise to a popular saying in the community: “The daughters of the Ho, Lo, Shi [Zimmern], Sin [Hall] and Choa families need not worry about being married outside [their network]” (Ho Reference Ho2010, 11).
Such endogamous marriages were a means for Eurasians to overcome their double marginalization from elite Chinese and expatriate circles, and to consolidate their wealth, influence, and status through affinal connections. A traditional Chinese ideal in marriage is “marriage matching doors” (mendang hudui 門當戶對), that is, arranged marriages among families of equal status. For late-imperial Chinese gentry, this was an important strategy in consolidating power and status in the local community. With the emergence of Hong Kong's Eurasian elite, the pursuit of “marriage matching doors” frequently extended to the trans-local level. Marriage connections strengthened ties between British colonial Hong Kong and Chinese ports like Shanghai, Tianjin, and Jiujiang; consolidation thus entailed both outward and inward movement.
Transregional Axes
As Ho writes: “In following peoples, movements, goods, and other things, scholars often find themselves retracing links between adjacent regions, and come up with studies we can call transregional.” Indeed, marital connections in the web were also transregional, forging links with the Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia and Australasia. One of Ho Tung's daughters, for example, married a (Hokkien) Chinese Malaysian from Penang, while Ho Fook's grandson married a woman from a Chinese Australian family. Following these transregional threads of the web again enables us to recognize the shortcomings of the British colonial definition of Eurasians as the “offspring of European fathers and Asian mothers.” In addition to the example of the Kews noted above, the Choa family were descended patrilineally from a Fujian family who had settled in Malacca over several generations (and likely intermarried with Peranakans) then later moved to Hong Kong and intermarried with Eurasian families. Marital and other connections furthermore linked the Armenian Chater family, the Baghdadi Sassoons, and the Parsi-Chinese Kotewalls to the web, expanding its transregional axes (Hall [1992] Reference Hall2012; Ho Reference Ho2010; Liu and Bartholomew Reference Liu and Bartholomew2003). Ho explains that “in schematic terms, the transregional is an intermediate level, neither local nor global. Phenomena at this level do not come into view under a localist or national lens. They also disappear in the abstractions of globalism.” The Inter-Asian perspective indeed helps to make visible aspects of the web that might remain out of sight in localist or nationalist historical narratives, and thereby foregrounds the plurality and diversity of a community that encompassed individuals who were not strictly “Eurasian,” based on the British colonial definition.
From Hybridity to Hub
The lens of Inter-Asian studies as proposed by Ho provides an opportunity for me to revisit my own work on Hong Kong Eurasians and to consider some of the pitfalls of hybridity as a critical concept. Although my own work has focused on tracing a genealogy of “mixedness” as an idea in the United States, China, and Hong Kong between 1842 and 1943, in many respects one might argue that the concepts of intersecting diasporas, mobility, circulation, connections, and transregional axes tell us more about those who inhabited the “web” (whether or not they were, strictly speaking, “Eurasian”) and help to move us beyond the nineteenth-century preoccupation with race and nation as the dominant lenses through which to view social identities and historical narratives. Telling the story of Hong Kong's leading Eurasian families without examining the broader network of the “web” masks the rich complexity of multiethnic and multigenerational mixing that historically characterized this social circle; the Inter-Asian perspective shifts our attention precisely to these multifaceted connections and axes.
Located between the “local” and the “global,” and born from intersecting diasporas, colonial Hong Kong's mixed families as a “mobile, spatially expansive, and interactive group” are a fitting subject for Inter-Asian analyses, and their history helps in turn to elucidate the transregional, transnational, transracial, and multi-nodal, “webbed” character of human migration, past and present. In this regard, I concur with Ho's critique of traditional migration studies, which in Western academia since the 1920s were focused on “large numbers, one-way movements, and internal frameworks.” The examples in this essay demonstrate that even in the colonial era, circulations coexisted alongside the one-way migrations that were taken as the norm in narratives of rural-urban migration or Old World migration to the Americas. Diaspora studies in the US academy too, as Ho argues, has frequently employed a “bipolar frame,” of home country and host country. As rich as these studies are, I argue that the concepts of mobility and circulation can prove more useful in analyzing Eurasian lived experiences and identity formation than notions of “home” or origins, upon which the homeland/host country dichotomy of diaspora rests. Indeed, whether we are talking about the traditional “one-way” movements of migration studies, diaspora, or even the “round-trip” movements of circular migration (Hugo Reference Hugo2003) that are increasingly common in today's world, where globalization coexists in tension with tightening regimes of immigration restriction and border control, the dominant framework for understanding human migration still rests on a fundamental bifurcation between “homeland” and “host country” that can be problematic in certain cases.
The notion of diaspora—a scattering of peoples—implies an originary “homeland,” from whence people are dispersed, to which they imagine a return, and with which they remain connected in some fashion, whether through family, economic, cultural, religious, or political ties, or simply in terms of sentiment and symbolism. Although often posed in contradistinction to the nation-state and national borders, the nation nonetheless looms large in discussions of diaspora that treat migrants more or less as extensions of the homeland abroad (Bauböck and Faist Reference Bauböck and Faist2010). In addition to setting up an implied duality between homeland and host country, “diaspora” presupposes a certain fixity of ethnic identity over time, as numerous critics have pointed out (Ang Reference Ang2001; Chow Reference Chow2000; Palumbo-Liu Reference Palumbo-Liu1999; Shih Reference Shih2007; Wang and Wang Reference Wang and Wang1998). In other words, the imagined community of Chinese diaspora, for example, operates on the presumption that descendants of Chinese migrants, no matter how many generations removed, or how far from China located, or whether they still speak Chinese or use Chinese surnames, are still in some essential way Chinese. Other diasporas as well are conceptually dependent on the homeland/host country dichotomy.
As the case of Hong Kong's Eurasian families makes evident, however, the binary between “home” and “host country” can at times prove false, or simply unproductive. Migration, mobility, and circulation are central to their story, but ideas of ancestral homeland, host country, assimilation, and cultural retention are less germane (Teng Reference Teng2009). In order to resist the false binary of homeland/host country and disrupt my own temptation to box people in neat containers, whether of the nation or of ethnicity, even as they move in space and time, I have attempted to shift my focus away from diasporas per se, to the intersections of diasporas and thus to hubs. Hong Kong provides a pertinent example of how I might view migration not from the perspective of the host country (with attendant anxieties regarding integration and assimilation), nor from that of the homeland (with attendant anxieties regarding deracination), but rather from that of the hub, where flows, encounters, exchanges, and connections are paramount (Sinn and Munn Reference Sinn and Munn2017; Siu Reference Siu2016). Migration as seen from this perspective creates a web, and is thus central to the very notion of the “inter-Asian.”
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Engseng Ho proposes that “the study of Asia, thought of as an Inter-Asian space, and smaller than the whole globe, can provide tractable concepts for a new round of research to shed light on the social shapes of societies that are mobile, spatially expansive, and interactive with one other.” Moving us away from more static models of China studies, Japan studies, etc., the concept of “inter-Asian”—where I take the “inter” to stand for inter-national, inter-regional, inter-faith, inter-racial, and inter-ethnic—offers a productive framework for examining histories that have been previously marginalized in dominant historical narratives: for example, the history of colonial Hong Kong's Eurasian community. In such a case, where the scope of inquiry is neither fully global in scale nor strictly local, the inter-Asian framework provides a middle ground and intermediate scale that brings this history into focus.
During the colonial era, the communal group commonly labeled “Eurasians” constituted a small minority of Hong Kong's population compared with the two dominant social groups of European expatriates and Chinese, one that often disappeared from view on the census and might be considered negligible in purely numeric terms. Nonetheless, the “web” of Eurasian families, to borrow a term from Peter Hall ([Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012), included such influential individuals as Sir Robert Hotung, Lady Clara Hotung, Sir M. K. Lo, Sir Robert Kotewall, Sin Tak Fan, and Chan Kai Ming, among others, and played a significant role in building the colony into a successful hub for trade, migration, and cultural exchange. An examination of this “web” as a dense network of overlapping business, professional, and kinship ties enables us to trace paths of mobility and linkages that crossed boundaries of nation, empire, religion, race, language, and class.
Colonial Hong Kong's Eurasian community, as Tony Sweeting (Reference Sweeting2015, 83) has written, “in one sense … form[ed] a subset of the wider group of Asians of ‘mixed blood’ to whom this noun was applied from the middle of the 19th century.” First introduced in British colonial India as a designation for those previously denigrated as “half-caste,” the term “Eurasian” represents a simple conjoining of “European” and “Asian,” though it was often understood in specifically gendered terms. Herbert A. Giles's (Reference Giles1878, 39) A Glossary of Reference on Subjects Connected with the Far East, for example, defined “Eurasian” as: “The offspring of a European father and an Asiatic mother.” Yet, in Hong Kong, Sweeting (Reference Sweeting2015, 84) noted, “the meaning and usage of the term was always flexible.” In this essay, I follow Sweeting in employing a “social definition” of Eurasians that “includes all those residents of Hong Kong prepared to accept a Eurasian designation, as well as people of mixed Asian origin who identified themselves, at least to some extent, with Eurasians” (84). Whereas my own research on colonial Hong Kong's Eurasian community (Teng Reference Teng2013) focused on evolving ideas about “mixedness,” my aim here is to sketch some of the ways in which Ho's articulation of the “inter-Asian” prompts me to rethink my own work through the idea of the “web,” as a more expansive social group that encompassed individuals who were not considered “Eurasian” as defined above, instead of hybridity.
Foregrounding core concepts such as mobility, circulation, connections, and transregional axes, and emphasizing “outside-in” analysis, the Inter-Asian moves us in a different direction from postcolonial theoretical concepts like hybridity and mimicry that have been so readily attached to so-called “mixed” populations such as Eurasians, and yet have their conceptual limitations, as Ho argues. Influentially formulated by Homi Bhabha (Reference Bhabha1994), the metaphor of hybridity is a powerful critical idea that contests the static binaries upon which the colonial orders and entrenched racial hierarchies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rested. Yet, as I have argued in my work on Chinese Eurasians, the notion of the “hybrid” remains tethered in many ways to its flipside—the putatively “pure” or “originary,” of which the hybrid is conceived as a mix or cross (Teng Reference Teng2013). With overtones of biology and genetics, and grounded in the idea of reproduction, hybridity implicitly reinforces the conceptualization of race as “stock,” “strain,” or “blood,” and hence can never entirely shake primordialist formulations of identity even as it challenges and undermines them (Young Reference Young1995). The retreat from hybridity as globalization's zeitgeist and from the “postracial” moment has thus been swifter than many of us perhaps imagined.
“Outside-In Analysis”: Intersecting Diasporas
To take up more specifically some of these Inter-Asian concepts as a means of thinking through certain issues that arise in my own work, I begin with Ho's notion of “outside-in analysis.” If hybridity's “third space” connotes the interstices that open up in the encounters between colonizer and colonized, East and West, and white and nonwhite (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994), Peter Hall's ([Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012) metaphor of the “web” suggests instead an expansive stretching across space, with multiple nodes of connection that lead not only back to a center, but also to other points of intersection and contact. The notion of the web, moreover, allows me to shift away from race as the primary lens for understanding the lived experience of this communal group, and to consider social identities that do not neatly fit the British colonial definition of “Eurasian” as the “offspring of a European father and an Asiatic mother.” Indeed, the multiplicity of connections, intertwinings, boundary-crossings, and transgressions conjured up by the word are so manifold that this label often introduces more confusion than clarity (Dover Reference Dover1937; Ondaatje Reference Ondaatje1982; Wallace and Dover Reference Wallace and Dover1930).Footnote 1 For example, commonly considered “Eurasian,” Hong Kong's Sir Robert Kotewall (1880–1949, Chinese name Lo Yuk Wo) was descended from a Parsi father and a Chinese mother (Carroll Reference Carroll2005, 141). And where should we place the Kew family, descended in the paternal line from a Chinese migrant to Australia who married a white Australian woman and brought his family to Hong Kong? The British colonial definition of “Eurasian,” with its privileging of the white European patriarch, at times proves too narrow to account for the interethnic and gendered diversity of the “web” as it was understood from the community (“inside-out”) perspective.
Responding to Ho's call for “outside-in analysis,” I would argue that Hong Kong's colonial-era Eurasian community can be conceptualized not only in terms of hybridity as formulated by Giles, but rather in terms of intersecting diasporas—including British, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Jewish, Armenian, Parsi, and others—the Chinese diaspora further a multiplicity of Fujianese, Cantonese, Hakkas, and Sui Seung Yan. As certain of these diasporas moved eastward toward and across Asia, others moved southward or westward out of Asia, thus crossing paths in the Hong Kong hub of commerce and migration, and establishing mixed families where they intersected. As Ho writes: “Diasporas are no islands, and certainly can intertwine with other diasporas, such as those that come with their own states called empires.” These diverse movements were interlinked, for it was the British colonization of Hong Kong that prompted other migratory flows to follow in the wake of empire, transforming a sleepy fishing village into a global entrepôt (Carroll Reference Carroll2005; Sinn and Munn Reference Sinn and Munn2017). An “outside-in” analysis seems particularly apt for Hong Kong, which was sparsely populated before 1842.
Mobility
Mobility can be understood not only as geographic mobility, but also as social and economic mobility—either upward or downward, as the case may be. The zigzagged thread of mobility is certainly evident in the story of Sir Robert Hotung/Ho Tung (1862–1956), once the “Grand Old Man of Hong Kong,” and perhaps the colony's most famous Eurasian. Ho Tung's origins can be traced back to a family of silk growers on the Yangtze River's Chongming Island. When the male head of household died unexpectedly, his young widow fell on hard times and was forced by relatives to sell one of her daughters “down the river” to Shanghai; thus began the migration of Shi Tai (ca. 1841–96), Ho Tung's mother, a movement that eventually landed her in Hong Kong (Ho Reference Ho2010, 42–44). There, the young Shi became the “protected woman” of Charles Henri Maurice Bosman (1839–92), a Dutch Jew who was born in Rotterdam as Mozes Hartog Bosman, the son of a butcher with German roots. In sharp contrast to Shi, whose (involuntary) mobility was propelled by poverty and facilitated by the institutionalized buying and selling of human beings, Bosman's migration to the colony was driven by the thirst for adventure and economic opportunity that brought so many Europeans to Asia in those years. Bosman began his Hong Kong career as a clerk for Cornelius Koopmanschap, a Java-based Dutchman who was a notorious “coolie trader,” sending Chinese workers to labor in distant lands. Rising through the ranks, he became a successful businessman before going down in a series of bad deals. Bosman removed to London, married, converted to Christianity, and was naturalized as a British citizen (Hall [Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012; Ho Reference Ho2010; Liu and Bartholomew Reference Liu and Bartholomew2003).
If Ho Tung's origins can be traced to these intersecting diasporas, his spectacular ascent to the pinnacles of Hong Kong society can also be understood through this lens, for it was the intersections of diasporas in conjunction with the transnational flow of goods that provided Hong Kong's early Eurasians with their chief career opportunities: European trading houses, the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, and the colonial courts where they served as clerks and interpreters. Working in these institutions, Eurasians who were equipped with bilingual and bicultural skills (generally through training in Hong Kong's Government Central School/Queen's College or the Diocesan Boys’ School) served at the interface between Chinese and Europeans. Exceling at Central, Ho Tung first worked for the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs office in Guangzhou and then joined Jardine, Matheson and Company in Hong Kong, where he soon became chief comprador before establishing his own business. Along with his brothers Ho Fook and Ho Kom-tong, Ho Tung rose through this route to great wealth and power in Hong Kong—converting economic and social capital to symbolic capital (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1989) through philanthropy and public service. Notably, another brother, Ho Yau-kai, or Walter Bosman, pursued a different avenue for mobility, winning a scholarship for university in Britain, where he trained in civil engineering. Bosman subsequently went to work as an engineer for the Natal Government, hiding his Chinese origins to follow the path of British empire in a new direction (Hall [Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012; Ho Reference Ho2010; Liu and Bartholomew Reference Liu and Bartholomew2003).
A legendary figure in Hong Kong's rags to riches mythology, Ho Tung was knighted by the British and also awarded several medals by the Chinese government. Further exemplifying the potential for Eurasians to move from margins to center within such a context, Ho and his brothers used their wealth and influence to purchase posthumous titles that transformed Charles Bosman (alias Ho Shiwen) into a Qing court official and Shi Tai into a Lady of the Second Rank (Ho Reference Ho2010; Liu and Bartholomew Reference Liu and Bartholomew2003). Mobility, much more than hybridity, I would argue, encapsulates the Ho family story.
Circulation
The related concept of circulation also helps elucidate Eurasian lived experiences on the China coast. Indeed, circulation was key to upward mobility for Hong Kong Eurasians who had the opportunity to pursue education abroad (especially in the United Kingdom) and/or move among career opportunities in places like Shanghai, Tianjin, and Singapore.
As compradors, the Ho brothers continually circulated through China and Southeast Asia, tracing the well-worn routes of the Chinese trade diaspora and weaving, as they traveled, inter-Asian linkages. These journeys provided opportunities not only for accumulating wealth, but also for expanding social capital and making marriage connections, as I will show below.
Circulation is furthermore evident in the trajectory of the Anderson/Hung family, Eurasians descended from Scotsman John Graham Anderson. The brothers Hung Kam Shing (1858–1907) and Hung Kam Ning (ca. 1862–1919), were both prize-winning pupils at Hong Kong's Central School who had notable careers as top-level Chinese interpreters at the Hong Kong Supreme Court. Hung Kam Ning (a.k.a. Henry Graham Anderson) then retired in Shanghai. The second generation enjoyed even greater upward mobility, as the sons of Kam Shing and Kam Ning moved outward from the colony, with a number studying in England before returning east to assume prominent positions as lawyers, stockbrokers, or other professionals in Hong Kong, Shanghai, or Beijing. Following more closely the trajectory of one member of this generation, Hung Kam Ning's son Hung Iu-chi/Charles Graham Anderson (1889–1949), moves us along a path from Hong Kong, where he was born and educated, to Macau, where he married the Anglo-Chinese-Austrian-Spanish Lucy Eleanor Perry (1892–1979), to Shanghai, where he worked as a stockbroker before returning to Hong Kong in an economic downturn. After the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, Anderson's family took refuge in Macau, aided by Portuguese family connections. In the subsequent generation, Charles's daughter Joyce Anderson, born in Shanghai but raised in Hong Kong and Macau, married Eurasian Bob Symons in Shanghai and spent the rest of her years divided between Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, where she eventually died (Hall [Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012; Lee Reference Lee2004; Smith Reference Smith2005; Symons Reference Symons1996; Teng Reference Teng2013).
The notion of circulation (in contrast to “circular migration”) as proposed in Ho's “Inter-Asian” framework provides a different angle for thinking about the movements of people and proves useful as a lens for capturing the restless and multidirectional mobility of the Anderson/Hung family across generations. While distinct from the “one-way” migrations that were the focus of traditional migration studies, “circular migration” nonetheless connotes a fixed point of “home,” from which the migrant moves outward but ultimately returns in a “round-trip” movement. Rather than “closing the circle,” however, the repeated movements of the Anderson/Hung family, tracing arcs of both geographic mobility and (upward and downward) economic mobility over time, remind us of the tenuousness of fixing a primordial or ancestral “home” in the case of mixed-heritage Eurasians. Finally, circulation as exemplified by this family calls our attention to the fluidity between groups such as “Hong Kong Eurasians” and “Shanghai Eurasians,” suggesting how an Inter-Asian approach can address some of the limitations of local studies.
Connections
The “old boys' networks” and professional connections among men who worked in the China coast's trading houses, customs offices, and courts were vital threads in spinning the Eurasian “web.” Equally important were marital connections that joined families together in the bonds of kinship, and in this respect women played a central role. As a response to social prejudice from both Chinese and European elites, a pattern of endogamous marriages among Eurasian families in colonial Hong Kong and China's treaty ports emerged. In 1881, for example, Ho Tung married Margaret MacLean/Mak Sau-Ying (1865–1944), the daughter of Hector Coll MacLean, Jardine's insurance agent in Tianjin, and a Eurasian woman surnamed Ng, whose American father was in Shanghai. This match was arranged by Ho's mother during his childhood, as was common for the time. In 1895, Margaret arranged for Ho Tung to marry her cousin, Clara Cheung Ching-Yung (1875–1938), the daughter of Eurasian Cheung Tak Fai, who worked for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service in Jiujiang, and his Eurasian wife. Ho Tung's brother, Ho Fook, married Lucy Rothwell/Lo Sui-choi, a Eurasian born in Shanghai and educated at Hong Kong's Diocesan School. Ho Kom-tong married Edith Sze Lin-Yut, the daughter of Archibald McClymont, a Scottish tea merchant for Jardine's in Shanghai, and a Parsi Eurasian mother (Cheng Reference Cheng1976; Hall [Reference Hall1992] Reference Hall2012; Ho Reference Ho2010; Liu and Bartholomew Reference Liu and Bartholomew2003). In the subsequent generation, endogamous marriages among Hong Kong's Eurasian elite gave rise to a popular saying in the community: “The daughters of the Ho, Lo, Shi [Zimmern], Sin [Hall] and Choa families need not worry about being married outside [their network]” (Ho Reference Ho2010, 11).
Such endogamous marriages were a means for Eurasians to overcome their double marginalization from elite Chinese and expatriate circles, and to consolidate their wealth, influence, and status through affinal connections. A traditional Chinese ideal in marriage is “marriage matching doors” (mendang hudui 門當戶對), that is, arranged marriages among families of equal status. For late-imperial Chinese gentry, this was an important strategy in consolidating power and status in the local community. With the emergence of Hong Kong's Eurasian elite, the pursuit of “marriage matching doors” frequently extended to the trans-local level. Marriage connections strengthened ties between British colonial Hong Kong and Chinese ports like Shanghai, Tianjin, and Jiujiang; consolidation thus entailed both outward and inward movement.
Transregional Axes
As Ho writes: “In following peoples, movements, goods, and other things, scholars often find themselves retracing links between adjacent regions, and come up with studies we can call transregional.” Indeed, marital connections in the web were also transregional, forging links with the Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia and Australasia. One of Ho Tung's daughters, for example, married a (Hokkien) Chinese Malaysian from Penang, while Ho Fook's grandson married a woman from a Chinese Australian family. Following these transregional threads of the web again enables us to recognize the shortcomings of the British colonial definition of Eurasians as the “offspring of European fathers and Asian mothers.” In addition to the example of the Kews noted above, the Choa family were descended patrilineally from a Fujian family who had settled in Malacca over several generations (and likely intermarried with Peranakans) then later moved to Hong Kong and intermarried with Eurasian families. Marital and other connections furthermore linked the Armenian Chater family, the Baghdadi Sassoons, and the Parsi-Chinese Kotewalls to the web, expanding its transregional axes (Hall [1992] Reference Hall2012; Ho Reference Ho2010; Liu and Bartholomew Reference Liu and Bartholomew2003). Ho explains that “in schematic terms, the transregional is an intermediate level, neither local nor global. Phenomena at this level do not come into view under a localist or national lens. They also disappear in the abstractions of globalism.” The Inter-Asian perspective indeed helps to make visible aspects of the web that might remain out of sight in localist or nationalist historical narratives, and thereby foregrounds the plurality and diversity of a community that encompassed individuals who were not strictly “Eurasian,” based on the British colonial definition.
From Hybridity to Hub
The lens of Inter-Asian studies as proposed by Ho provides an opportunity for me to revisit my own work on Hong Kong Eurasians and to consider some of the pitfalls of hybridity as a critical concept. Although my own work has focused on tracing a genealogy of “mixedness” as an idea in the United States, China, and Hong Kong between 1842 and 1943, in many respects one might argue that the concepts of intersecting diasporas, mobility, circulation, connections, and transregional axes tell us more about those who inhabited the “web” (whether or not they were, strictly speaking, “Eurasian”) and help to move us beyond the nineteenth-century preoccupation with race and nation as the dominant lenses through which to view social identities and historical narratives. Telling the story of Hong Kong's leading Eurasian families without examining the broader network of the “web” masks the rich complexity of multiethnic and multigenerational mixing that historically characterized this social circle; the Inter-Asian perspective shifts our attention precisely to these multifaceted connections and axes.
Located between the “local” and the “global,” and born from intersecting diasporas, colonial Hong Kong's mixed families as a “mobile, spatially expansive, and interactive group” are a fitting subject for Inter-Asian analyses, and their history helps in turn to elucidate the transregional, transnational, transracial, and multi-nodal, “webbed” character of human migration, past and present. In this regard, I concur with Ho's critique of traditional migration studies, which in Western academia since the 1920s were focused on “large numbers, one-way movements, and internal frameworks.” The examples in this essay demonstrate that even in the colonial era, circulations coexisted alongside the one-way migrations that were taken as the norm in narratives of rural-urban migration or Old World migration to the Americas. Diaspora studies in the US academy too, as Ho argues, has frequently employed a “bipolar frame,” of home country and host country. As rich as these studies are, I argue that the concepts of mobility and circulation can prove more useful in analyzing Eurasian lived experiences and identity formation than notions of “home” or origins, upon which the homeland/host country dichotomy of diaspora rests. Indeed, whether we are talking about the traditional “one-way” movements of migration studies, diaspora, or even the “round-trip” movements of circular migration (Hugo Reference Hugo2003) that are increasingly common in today's world, where globalization coexists in tension with tightening regimes of immigration restriction and border control, the dominant framework for understanding human migration still rests on a fundamental bifurcation between “homeland” and “host country” that can be problematic in certain cases.
The notion of diaspora—a scattering of peoples—implies an originary “homeland,” from whence people are dispersed, to which they imagine a return, and with which they remain connected in some fashion, whether through family, economic, cultural, religious, or political ties, or simply in terms of sentiment and symbolism. Although often posed in contradistinction to the nation-state and national borders, the nation nonetheless looms large in discussions of diaspora that treat migrants more or less as extensions of the homeland abroad (Bauböck and Faist Reference Bauböck and Faist2010). In addition to setting up an implied duality between homeland and host country, “diaspora” presupposes a certain fixity of ethnic identity over time, as numerous critics have pointed out (Ang Reference Ang2001; Chow Reference Chow2000; Palumbo-Liu Reference Palumbo-Liu1999; Shih Reference Shih2007; Wang and Wang Reference Wang and Wang1998). In other words, the imagined community of Chinese diaspora, for example, operates on the presumption that descendants of Chinese migrants, no matter how many generations removed, or how far from China located, or whether they still speak Chinese or use Chinese surnames, are still in some essential way Chinese. Other diasporas as well are conceptually dependent on the homeland/host country dichotomy.
As the case of Hong Kong's Eurasian families makes evident, however, the binary between “home” and “host country” can at times prove false, or simply unproductive. Migration, mobility, and circulation are central to their story, but ideas of ancestral homeland, host country, assimilation, and cultural retention are less germane (Teng Reference Teng2009). In order to resist the false binary of homeland/host country and disrupt my own temptation to box people in neat containers, whether of the nation or of ethnicity, even as they move in space and time, I have attempted to shift my focus away from diasporas per se, to the intersections of diasporas and thus to hubs. Hong Kong provides a pertinent example of how I might view migration not from the perspective of the host country (with attendant anxieties regarding integration and assimilation), nor from that of the homeland (with attendant anxieties regarding deracination), but rather from that of the hub, where flows, encounters, exchanges, and connections are paramount (Sinn and Munn Reference Sinn and Munn2017; Siu Reference Siu2016). Migration as seen from this perspective creates a web, and is thus central to the very notion of the “inter-Asian.”
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my fellow roundtable panelists at the 2017 Association for Asian Studies conference—Engseng Ho, Nicole Constable, Jaeeun Kim, and Rian Thum—and also Jeff Wasserstrom and Jennifer Munger. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers of this essay.