How did women in the ‘creolized Chinese society’ of the colonial East Indies voice their interests before the twentieth century? In more recent times, as opportunities in both Chinese- and Western-language education opened up to women, woman writers and women's magazines began to speak to and for them. In this study, Seng Guo-quan has traced women's voices in the Chinese settler society of Java, and especially Batavia, to the early nineteenth century and beyond.
Chinese settlers in Java formed local families, with slave women, free Native partners or nyai, and, in subsequent generations, mestizo daughters of such unions. While their sons, where possible, were raised as Chinese, the daughters remained under the influence of their mothers, Natives or themselves mestizas, daughters of mixed Chinese-indigenous unions. A ‘legitimate’ union, however, had to fulfil Confucian marriage rites, and Native women were not eligible.
Dutch colonial rule administered local subjects through local elites; in the case of the Chinese, prominent businessmen that the colonial regime chose to be officers, kapitan (and lieutenants and majors). These officers were grouped in Batavia (and in Semarang and Surabaya) into a Chinese Council (Kong Koan) from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Batavia's Council disappeared some time after 1960; the others even earlier (see The decline of the Chinese Council of Batavia, by Monique Erkelens, Dissertation Leiden University, 2013, p. 67). In addition to maintaining temples and graveyards, and administrating internal community affairs, the Council oversaw social welfare and, above all, from 1717 was responsible for deciding marriage, divorce, and inheritance questions among the Chinese.
By consulting Batavia's Kong Koan Archives, which are available in print and online, Seng has looked at family relations, determining that, for example, divorce was far more prevalent among Chinese in Java than in China itself and that divorces were frequently initiated by the wives (most often because their husbands took second wives). He also finds that women comparatively often intervened in property matters to protect the interests of their male children, something he sees as the women's own efforts to consolidate Chinese patrilineal identity. Quotations from the testimony of the women themselves enliven the work and underline these conclusions. Maintaining the veneration of the paternal ancestors limited women's authority over both children, especially sons, and property.
In the Indies, Native and mestizo women might inherit property from their families or do business in their own names, possibilities that clearly contrasted with Chinese ideals.
The study also profits from an impressive bibliography. The author's ability to use classical Chinese seasoned with frequent local expressions, the official language of the Kong Koan documents (until the twentieth century), as well as Malay, the everyday language of the creole Chinese themselves and the second official language of the Archives, and Dutch has enabled him to assemble lists of divorce cases, to examine materials concerning widows and orphans and their property, gaining an insight in how these women pursued their own interests and those of their children in legal matters.
The narrative then moves on to the late nineteenth century, when gradually the colonial government applied principles drawn from family law in China to local matters, aided by sinologists in colonial service who, following their own understanding of Confucianism, promoted a stricter family system, compared with practice on Java. These changed began to have racial overtones as well.
Additionally, the arrival of more immigrants from China, changes within creole Chinese society, and better communications with the homeland, combined with the desire of some literate Chinese to defend Chinese religion against Christian inroads, fostered a ‘Confucian revival’ within the community itself. This included religious revival, with new Confucian temples, as well as the founding of the Tiong Hoa Hwe Koan, a Confucianist movement that above all resulted in the establishment of hundreds of modern Chinese-language schools (not always with a religious or Confucian emphasis) in Java and elsewhere.
Finally, in 1919, colonial authorities extended Western family law to the Chinese minority, again strengthening the patrilineal tradition but also propagating monogamy — against Chinese and local practices. When the Council thus lost its authority to the civil registry and Western law, its importance shrivelled. Seng also looks at twentieth-century transitions with reference to the Chinese-Malay press, with its hundreds of stories of love, desire, and race, citing in particular the prolific author Kwee Tak Hoay, whose love stories appeared in the 1920s and 1930s.
Seng has succeeded in giving the women of the creole Chinese community of Java, and especially Batavia, a surprising and authentic voice in their own affairs. One might still wonder whether the women of the nineteenth century really presented their statements before the court (which, in any case, would have been offered in Malay and translated by the clerk who wrote the official minutes, into Chinese), or if there was a group of go-betweens or even advocates who presented their causes for them. But this may be quibbling. In the liveliest part of his account, which deals with the nineteenth century, the author has shown how these wives and mothers had resources to defend their interests and those of their offspring, and that they used these resources stubbornly and often successfully.
