‘Does home have to be a country or a city?… Or is home this house or that? We have been fortunate. … We seemed always to have been home.’
How does one lead a ‘nomadic’ life and career without losing one's inner anchor? In his two-volume autobiography, Home is not here and Home is where we are, Wang Gungwu, prominent historian of China and Southeast Asia, together with his late wife Margaret, provide an answer that is at once historically substantive, intellectually inspiring, and deeply moving. The two volumes detail the couple's extraordinary multigenerational experiences and reflect upon an epoch of change and agency that spanned almost a century. Hand in hand in this journey, Gungwu and Margaret navigated turbulent, multiethnic currents across Asia and around the globe to forge cultural and political identities that transcended territorial confines — identities that are cosmopolitan and encompassing, stemming from the loving, truthful, and dignified bond between them. Meanwhile, an interconnected maritime ‘China's South’ and Southeast Asia emerged into the limelight; the notion of ‘cultural China as homeland’, real or imagined, receded.
More than a personal biography, the volumes are a valuable complement for those seeking to make sense of China's global positioning from the perspective of someone dwelling outside its political boundaries but not quite detached from its reach. First, how overseas Chinese of Gungwu's time as well as from his father's generation culturally and politically oriented themselves toward China not only informed but enriched his early views of Chineseness, shaping it into something multifaceted, transcending physical, geographical boundaries.Footnote 1 This notion of Chineseness includes identities that are self-generated or, at times, imposed by regimes that seek to effect allegiance from dispersed populations. In fact, Chineseness has always been an intensely personal, instrumentally political arena of power.Footnote 2
Second, Wang the itinerant embodies a reconceptualisation of modern China — the integrity of its boundedness and connections.Footnote 3 Wang's narrative of ‘China's South’Footnote 4 not only traces the natural and multicultural contours of the lower Yangzi region, but also weaves together dynamic human-scapes that transcend borders, connecting maritime East Asia and Southeast Asia with the Indian Ocean and Australia, with Europe and North America, adding significant albeit episodic elements to his life-worlds. Equally nuanced are the land-based, administratively bounded conceptual categories of polities, populations, and cultures. Wang reorients the traditionally-perceived East-West dichotomy — à la John King Fairbank and an entire generation of Chinese intellectuals of the May Fourth ‘Enlightenment’ tradition — toward an interactive ‘North-South’ perspective in the long view, retracing his own footprints to unveil a fresh understanding of China's global positioning and self-perception. His maritime remapping of China echoes the work of scholars such as Fernand Braudel, K.N. Chaudhuri, Anthony Reid, Eric Tagliacozzo, Takeshi Hamashita, Enseng Ho, and Sunil Amrith, and of the writer Amitav Ghosh.
Third, his adamant placing of Eurasia on the analytical map of world histories,Footnote 5 which parallels what anthropologist Jack GoodyFootnote 6 and sociologist Janet Abu-LughodFootnote 7 have suggested, not only challenges both Eurocentric and Sinocentric paradigms but has inspired many to make Inter-Asia Connections their major research agenda, and to rethink Asia as an empirical reality and a conceptual category.Footnote 8
Variegated Chineseness
The story begins with an inside look at the Chinese cultural heritage of Wang's parents — a world where literati aspirations closely associated with officialdom and transformed by centuries of imperial state agenda were promoted and institutionalised, and where scholarly priorities permeated art and literature, everyday rituals, folk religion, family morality, and business strategies for the elite and commoners alike. What is ironic, however, is that against a backdrop of seemingly immovable reverence for Confucian traditions, Wang's family history, like countless others, is markedly mobile; between heritage and reality, much incongruence would be dispersed by the sociopolitical whirlwinds of the twentieth century.
For Wang's father as well as many other erudites, colonial Southeast Asia was a land of opportunities and refuge as much as it was also for labourers and businessmen. The huaqiao (overseas Chinese) communities they formed must have, in turn, been eager to maintain ties with the motherland, at least culturally if not physically or politically — why else would they have put themselves through the toil of building Chinese schools and offer employment to teachers of language and culture from mainland China? For these huaqiao, imaginaries of a ‘home’ were reinforced by multiple socioeconomic ties and a sojourner mentality, and the Wang family was no exception.
Even at a young age, Wang understood that there was no single uniform imaginary of China as ‘home’, and he would detect the differences between imaginaries: his father had abstract ideas of home and belonging through his appreciation for Chinese language, literature, and Confucian ethics; his mother, on the other hand, whose roots were in an elite (business/literati) family from the prosperous Jiangnan region steeped in local customs, treated her homeland as an empirical socioeconomic entity energised by family careers and friendship networks. While overseas, however, she would follow her husband from Surabaya to Ipoh, and her commitments would become pegged to the fluctuating fortunes of polities in the early twentieth century, as various regimes attempted to build modern nations out of imperial remnants.
All the while, the Wangs had their minds set on returning to China, where their only son Gungwu could receive that proper Chinese education and become a worthy Chinese scholar, and for ten years they had prepared for that ‘homecoming’. As Wang observes, his mother's idea of home made her more concretely ‘patriotic’ — indeed, she had written, in Chinese, detailed episodes of their family history to remind Gungwu of their roots (which Wang translates into sections entitled ‘My mother remembers’). In the memoir's second volume, Margaret provides some key threads of the narrative, particularly on the central role of women in constructing the family history.
Wang's own positioning is marked by a distinct ‘in betweenness’: first, his coming of age was shaped by that huaqiao sojourner mentality; second, as much as his parents endeavoured to instil in him a sense of Chinese cultural heritage, his identity was also obscured by British colonial rule in a multiethnic, migrant-prevalent Ipoh: unlike his parents who remained largely detached from the local community, Wang mingled with migrant children of other Chinese heritages — Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew; studying in an English school he had Malay and Indian friends. For young Gungwu, British Malaya at the time was a concrete social reality; China was merely an abstraction.
In the decades to come, Wang would endeavour to forge an organic sense of belonging to his multiple life-worlds, but it was a gift from his father on his tenth birthday that vastly expanded his intellectual cosmos and at the same time fused it all together for him:
From then on, every time I felt uneasy about who or where I was, I would think about the atlas and my lists [of countries, cities, islands, oceans, gulfs, and capes]. I would then feel a pleasurable calm […] All places and people had become knowable. I began to feel that nothing could stand in the way of my learning about them. Looking back, I believe I had accidentally found a way to make my oddity easier to bear. (p. 50)
The last part of Home is not here shows the 16-year-old Wang making the journey to China with his parents after the Second World War. Visiting his parents’ extended families, colleagues, and friends turned that China experience from abstract to real, but he found himself out of sync with the elitist Chinese education curriculum; an unintended choice to study English language and literature ensued. Nanjing was not only the political centre of Republican China but also a cosmopolitan intellectual space wedged between volatile fields of power. For Wang, as much as Nanjing was unsettling, it also inspired him to contemplate competing ideas — nation-building versus revolution.
As it turned out, the Wangs would only sojourn in Nanjing; the Nationalist–Communist civil war had rendered any of their ideas to come home to Nanjing unsustainable. There was more: Wang's father had to return to Malaya because he had become too acclimatised to the warm tropics of Southeast Asia — he could no longer withstand Nanjing's winter — so, as much as his mind wished to be a northerner, his body made him a Chinese Southerner after all. And as the civil war raged on and filial responsibilities beckoned, Wang too returned to Malaya, which now looked to be the place to eventually call home.
Home is not here thus closes with Wang's hopes to have a part in building a new China dashed. However, though he parted ways with teachers and friends in China, that brief taste of life away from his parents’ priorities had added another layer of complexity to Wang's evolving Chineseness. Meanwhile, Sun Yat-sen's Three principles on revolution, nationalism, rights, freedom, and equality, which he studied in Nanjing, now haunted his mind. These terms appeared eminently relevant for him in Malaya, where there was a newly awakened Asia to participate in. He felt at home during an interim year in Ipoh, where he reassessed his education and future, and, soon after, the excitement of being a part of post-colonial Malaya swept him up. In Singapore, he entered the newly founded University of Malaya, amidst a brave new world looming large.
Wang's family histories in Home is not here give an appreciation of how China's South and its intimate connections with a multiethnic maritime inter-Asian space shaped the hearts and minds of Chinese migrants in the first half of the twentieth century. His personal life-worlds having absorbed macro political reorientations, Wang's identity became ever more complex. Decades would pass before he returned to China to locate the close friends whom he once shared China dreams with but who were now scarred by the torments of the Maoist revolution — then and there, he must have realised, unfolding in front of his eyes was his life's alternative ending had he not evacuated from China all those years ago.
At this juncture, it is already plain to see why Sun Yat-sen would inspire Wang: Sun was Cantonese, received a medical education in British Hong Kong, galvanised the huaqiao in the United States and Europe, toppled the Imperial Qing and established a republic. Sun's worldly idealistic endeavours ushered in momentous changes with global ramifications, and he has clearly shown us that, when Chinese Southerners embrace their Chineseness with vigour, they are a force to be reckoned with.
More importantly, Wang's processual and constructional Chineseness decidedly challenges our concept of China's global mapping, problematising the sinocentric insider–outsider dichotomy entrenched in Chinese history writing. To contemporary intellectual giants of sinology — the likes of Yu Ying-shih (余英時), Hsu Cho-yun (許倬雲), and Ho Ping-ti (何炳棣) — Wang, having been born and raised outside China, is an outsider; from the perspective that his Chineseness is deeply grounded in Confucian tradition, however, he is unmistakably an insider, only one who is moored outside the conventional geographical northern Sinosphere. With his diasporic positioning challenging traditional notions of civilisational permanence, Wang's personal story has, in fact, amalgamated with his intellectual concept of China.
Home is where we are: Love in the brave new world
The first volume flows seamlessly into its sequel, where an intimate look at Wang's life continues to illuminate the tumultuous times. In Singapore, Wang settled into the University of Malaya, put his parents’ China dream behind him, and realigned his story as a Malayan citizen engaged in a world of post-colonial ethnic politics. At the encouragement of senior mentors at the university, he extended his love and talent for English literature to poetry and European classical music. Soon, however, he would find himself caught in a dilemma: on one side, his artistic sensibilities; on the other, the birth pains of his multiethnic nation, as well as his own political awakening and quest for an encompassing language of expression (his affinity for humanist values were at odds with his colleagues’ passion for a ‘Malayan’ voice). Being ethnic Chinese complicated matters; Malayan huaqiao communities were torn between the ideological turmoil ‘back home’ in China and in the transitioning Malaya: in a bid to work with local elites to cobble together a friendly, post-independence order, the British colonial establishment in Malaya in its final days went after ethnic Chinese activists, citing communist sympathies. These were precarious times for Wang.
It was while navigating these political and intellectual currents that Wang found his anchor of a lifetime — Margaret. Indeed, Margaret brought to his life the blessings of companionship — in every sense of the word. They shared remarkably similar family backgrounds: her family originated from coastal China (Fujian); her parents wedded in Shanghai, where Margaret was born. Like Gungwu's father, Margaret's strong, adventurous mother also answered a call to teach Chinese, in Singapore. She would stay there after the war and single-handedly raise two girls and three boys.
It was Margaret's wit, artistic talent, and elegance that captivated Wang. He regarded their love as penning its own unique poetry unlike any he encountered in the literature class, even Shakespeare's great sonnets. Wang writes:
the word [‘love’] took clearer shape in our lives through the years. I no longer hesitate to say that I have loved and know how I have been loved… I now know that meeting Margaret in the University in Singapore was when this awareness began its long journey from what was often a literary cliché to an enduring personal experience. (p. 84)
Margaret encouraged Wang to begin a life-long academic pursuit of Chinese history, from pre-modern sinology to contemporary politics, and from the fortunes of land-based dynasties to maritime Nanyang and beyond. Under renowned Tang historian Denis Twitchett at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, he studied the Five Dynasties, a choice that reflected the great tradition of sinology in his mind and the insider side of his Chineseness, which he would continue to balance against cosmopolitanism over an extensive career. The couple's careers would eventually traverse a globalised Asia bearing the impact of European cultural tradition, but it was while Wang was at SOAS and Margaret at Cambridge, engaging in deep quests for knowledge (enabled by the world-class scholarly environments), that they fathomed the vast underlying values of humanism. This sojourn in England gave them a taste of the cosmopolitan freedom that they would thereafter never relinquish. ‘Looking back,’ Wang muses, ‘that was an excellent foundation for that elusive something called love’ (p. 89).
Globalising: Becoming world citizens
Career led Wang into an intellectual orientation that set him further apart from fellow sinologists. As Asia was dragged into the looming Cold War, Wang faced new academic challenges far surpassing localised ethnic concerns. Compared to the first half of the twentieth century which belonged to his parents’ generation, the second half — when the Maoist revolution and internal turmoil engulfed China — was no less turbulent. Outside geographical China, anti-Chinese, anti-Communist sentiments were exacerbated by the Korean and Vietnam Wars as well as the 1965 coup in Indonesia. Almost synchronously, to the shock and disappointment of Wang and Margaret, Singapore was excommunicated from the multiethnic Malaysian federation, to which the couple had committed themselves, body and soul.
How should one find intellectual mooring in a polarising world when the realignment of new nation-states was pursued by governments and social movements with exclusive, nationalistic fervour? Wang's deep commitment to scholarly pursuits based on humanist values gave him the necessary intellectual space to transcend nationalistic priorities: through a programme-building assignment to survey new centres of Asian Studies he was introduced to the precipitous rise of government- and privately-funded area studies in the United States, which aimed to make sense of a new world order in the making — such studies provided an interdisciplinary platform to address contemporary social science concerns and China's global reach; and, with Margaret’s foresight and support, Wang pilgrimaged to the mecca of late-twentieth-century Asian scholarship and networked with intellectual giants from history to sinology and beyond. Concurrently, a generation of anthropologists and political scientists were tuning their intellectual energies toward a Weberian/interpretive turn in anthropology and shifting focus onto Southeast Asia and its diverse paths of modernisation and development (Clifford Geertz, James Scott, Benedict Anderson), while the closure of the People's Republic of China for fieldwork drove a generation of China anthropologists (Maurice Freedman, G. William Skinner, Arthur and Margery Wolf, William E. Willmott) toward Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. With these scholars Wang built not only intellectual affiliations but also friendships that dovetailed with his unique insights on maritime ‘China's South’ and Southeast Asia. These were flourishing years for Wang's scholarship, whether he and his family were making a ‘home’ in Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, or Singapore. Looking back on decades of nomadism, multiple levels of belonging, and a deep commitment to interdisciplinary and interregional scholarship evolving organically into a uniquely cosmopolitan career, Wang writes:
all that time, home in another form continued to take shape in my mind, one tied to a campus, but increasingly linked to a university as a site of free and open learning. I was not really conscious of how significant that was to the idea of home, simply comfortable and content to be surrounded by people with inquiring minds. (p. 268)
This notion of ‘home’, binding both volumes together, reveals Wang's lifelong search for the meaning of belonging. The same search has proved onerous, and unavoidable for most Chinese humanist intellectuals of his generation, those who received the best of traditional education, were well-versed in Western languages and cultures, but had in their youth experienced national devastation and cultural decline: the aforementioned Yu Ying-shih, preeminent historian of China, born and bred there, managed to dissociate cultural China with geographical China and find solace in the idea that ‘China is where I am’. He therefore avoided the tragic fate suffered by the iconic Chen Yinke (陳寅恪 1890–1969), brilliant classicist who could not bear to make that dissociation.Footnote 9 For Wang, a truly global, multiculturally-rooted scholar, from the moment he laid his ten-year-old hands on that atlas, to finally securing freedom and making peace with the idea that ‘Home is where we are’, the world had always been at his fingertips.
Autobiographies are meaningful not only for their authors, but also for readers who can intellectually inhabit the environments in the writer's tales and relive their plights and choices. Wang's volumes narrate three generations of remarkable lives through extraordinary times in an ‘Asian’ life-world in flux. More importantly, they illuminate the negotiated meanings of Chineseness against competing polities that essentialise attributes of identity and sense of belonging to elicit a show of allegiance. Gungwu and Margaret were right: despite all the uncertainties of their cultural, intellectual, and political odyssey spanning much of the twentieth century, they never ceased to find constancy in each other and to feel ‘at home’ wherever they happened to be. In maritime Asia where their footprints abound, horizons stretched far and wide, but it was at the margins of empires and nation-states where the pair of free spirits began to pursue personal and scholarly growth, unbeholden to any political or powerful agendas. They have been, first and foremost, humanists and world citizens.
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‘Does home have to be a country or a city?… Or is home this house or that? We have been fortunate. … We seemed always to have been home.’
How does one lead a ‘nomadic’ life and career without losing one's inner anchor? In his two-volume autobiography, Home is not here and Home is where we are, Wang Gungwu, prominent historian of China and Southeast Asia, together with his late wife Margaret, provide an answer that is at once historically substantive, intellectually inspiring, and deeply moving. The two volumes detail the couple's extraordinary multigenerational experiences and reflect upon an epoch of change and agency that spanned almost a century. Hand in hand in this journey, Gungwu and Margaret navigated turbulent, multiethnic currents across Asia and around the globe to forge cultural and political identities that transcended territorial confines — identities that are cosmopolitan and encompassing, stemming from the loving, truthful, and dignified bond between them. Meanwhile, an interconnected maritime ‘China's South’ and Southeast Asia emerged into the limelight; the notion of ‘cultural China as homeland’, real or imagined, receded.
More than a personal biography, the volumes are a valuable complement for those seeking to make sense of China's global positioning from the perspective of someone dwelling outside its political boundaries but not quite detached from its reach. First, how overseas Chinese of Gungwu's time as well as from his father's generation culturally and politically oriented themselves toward China not only informed but enriched his early views of Chineseness, shaping it into something multifaceted, transcending physical, geographical boundaries.Footnote 1 This notion of Chineseness includes identities that are self-generated or, at times, imposed by regimes that seek to effect allegiance from dispersed populations. In fact, Chineseness has always been an intensely personal, instrumentally political arena of power.Footnote 2
Second, Wang the itinerant embodies a reconceptualisation of modern China — the integrity of its boundedness and connections.Footnote 3 Wang's narrative of ‘China's South’Footnote 4 not only traces the natural and multicultural contours of the lower Yangzi region, but also weaves together dynamic human-scapes that transcend borders, connecting maritime East Asia and Southeast Asia with the Indian Ocean and Australia, with Europe and North America, adding significant albeit episodic elements to his life-worlds. Equally nuanced are the land-based, administratively bounded conceptual categories of polities, populations, and cultures. Wang reorients the traditionally-perceived East-West dichotomy — à la John King Fairbank and an entire generation of Chinese intellectuals of the May Fourth ‘Enlightenment’ tradition — toward an interactive ‘North-South’ perspective in the long view, retracing his own footprints to unveil a fresh understanding of China's global positioning and self-perception. His maritime remapping of China echoes the work of scholars such as Fernand Braudel, K.N. Chaudhuri, Anthony Reid, Eric Tagliacozzo, Takeshi Hamashita, Enseng Ho, and Sunil Amrith, and of the writer Amitav Ghosh.
Third, his adamant placing of Eurasia on the analytical map of world histories,Footnote 5 which parallels what anthropologist Jack GoodyFootnote 6 and sociologist Janet Abu-LughodFootnote 7 have suggested, not only challenges both Eurocentric and Sinocentric paradigms but has inspired many to make Inter-Asia Connections their major research agenda, and to rethink Asia as an empirical reality and a conceptual category.Footnote 8
Variegated Chineseness
The story begins with an inside look at the Chinese cultural heritage of Wang's parents — a world where literati aspirations closely associated with officialdom and transformed by centuries of imperial state agenda were promoted and institutionalised, and where scholarly priorities permeated art and literature, everyday rituals, folk religion, family morality, and business strategies for the elite and commoners alike. What is ironic, however, is that against a backdrop of seemingly immovable reverence for Confucian traditions, Wang's family history, like countless others, is markedly mobile; between heritage and reality, much incongruence would be dispersed by the sociopolitical whirlwinds of the twentieth century.
For Wang's father as well as many other erudites, colonial Southeast Asia was a land of opportunities and refuge as much as it was also for labourers and businessmen. The huaqiao (overseas Chinese) communities they formed must have, in turn, been eager to maintain ties with the motherland, at least culturally if not physically or politically — why else would they have put themselves through the toil of building Chinese schools and offer employment to teachers of language and culture from mainland China? For these huaqiao, imaginaries of a ‘home’ were reinforced by multiple socioeconomic ties and a sojourner mentality, and the Wang family was no exception.
Even at a young age, Wang understood that there was no single uniform imaginary of China as ‘home’, and he would detect the differences between imaginaries: his father had abstract ideas of home and belonging through his appreciation for Chinese language, literature, and Confucian ethics; his mother, on the other hand, whose roots were in an elite (business/literati) family from the prosperous Jiangnan region steeped in local customs, treated her homeland as an empirical socioeconomic entity energised by family careers and friendship networks. While overseas, however, she would follow her husband from Surabaya to Ipoh, and her commitments would become pegged to the fluctuating fortunes of polities in the early twentieth century, as various regimes attempted to build modern nations out of imperial remnants.
All the while, the Wangs had their minds set on returning to China, where their only son Gungwu could receive that proper Chinese education and become a worthy Chinese scholar, and for ten years they had prepared for that ‘homecoming’. As Wang observes, his mother's idea of home made her more concretely ‘patriotic’ — indeed, she had written, in Chinese, detailed episodes of their family history to remind Gungwu of their roots (which Wang translates into sections entitled ‘My mother remembers’). In the memoir's second volume, Margaret provides some key threads of the narrative, particularly on the central role of women in constructing the family history.
Wang's own positioning is marked by a distinct ‘in betweenness’: first, his coming of age was shaped by that huaqiao sojourner mentality; second, as much as his parents endeavoured to instil in him a sense of Chinese cultural heritage, his identity was also obscured by British colonial rule in a multiethnic, migrant-prevalent Ipoh: unlike his parents who remained largely detached from the local community, Wang mingled with migrant children of other Chinese heritages — Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew; studying in an English school he had Malay and Indian friends. For young Gungwu, British Malaya at the time was a concrete social reality; China was merely an abstraction.
In the decades to come, Wang would endeavour to forge an organic sense of belonging to his multiple life-worlds, but it was a gift from his father on his tenth birthday that vastly expanded his intellectual cosmos and at the same time fused it all together for him:
From then on, every time I felt uneasy about who or where I was, I would think about the atlas and my lists [of countries, cities, islands, oceans, gulfs, and capes]. I would then feel a pleasurable calm […] All places and people had become knowable. I began to feel that nothing could stand in the way of my learning about them. Looking back, I believe I had accidentally found a way to make my oddity easier to bear. (p. 50)
The last part of Home is not here shows the 16-year-old Wang making the journey to China with his parents after the Second World War. Visiting his parents’ extended families, colleagues, and friends turned that China experience from abstract to real, but he found himself out of sync with the elitist Chinese education curriculum; an unintended choice to study English language and literature ensued. Nanjing was not only the political centre of Republican China but also a cosmopolitan intellectual space wedged between volatile fields of power. For Wang, as much as Nanjing was unsettling, it also inspired him to contemplate competing ideas — nation-building versus revolution.
As it turned out, the Wangs would only sojourn in Nanjing; the Nationalist–Communist civil war had rendered any of their ideas to come home to Nanjing unsustainable. There was more: Wang's father had to return to Malaya because he had become too acclimatised to the warm tropics of Southeast Asia — he could no longer withstand Nanjing's winter — so, as much as his mind wished to be a northerner, his body made him a Chinese Southerner after all. And as the civil war raged on and filial responsibilities beckoned, Wang too returned to Malaya, which now looked to be the place to eventually call home.
Home is not here thus closes with Wang's hopes to have a part in building a new China dashed. However, though he parted ways with teachers and friends in China, that brief taste of life away from his parents’ priorities had added another layer of complexity to Wang's evolving Chineseness. Meanwhile, Sun Yat-sen's Three principles on revolution, nationalism, rights, freedom, and equality, which he studied in Nanjing, now haunted his mind. These terms appeared eminently relevant for him in Malaya, where there was a newly awakened Asia to participate in. He felt at home during an interim year in Ipoh, where he reassessed his education and future, and, soon after, the excitement of being a part of post-colonial Malaya swept him up. In Singapore, he entered the newly founded University of Malaya, amidst a brave new world looming large.
Wang's family histories in Home is not here give an appreciation of how China's South and its intimate connections with a multiethnic maritime inter-Asian space shaped the hearts and minds of Chinese migrants in the first half of the twentieth century. His personal life-worlds having absorbed macro political reorientations, Wang's identity became ever more complex. Decades would pass before he returned to China to locate the close friends whom he once shared China dreams with but who were now scarred by the torments of the Maoist revolution — then and there, he must have realised, unfolding in front of his eyes was his life's alternative ending had he not evacuated from China all those years ago.
At this juncture, it is already plain to see why Sun Yat-sen would inspire Wang: Sun was Cantonese, received a medical education in British Hong Kong, galvanised the huaqiao in the United States and Europe, toppled the Imperial Qing and established a republic. Sun's worldly idealistic endeavours ushered in momentous changes with global ramifications, and he has clearly shown us that, when Chinese Southerners embrace their Chineseness with vigour, they are a force to be reckoned with.
More importantly, Wang's processual and constructional Chineseness decidedly challenges our concept of China's global mapping, problematising the sinocentric insider–outsider dichotomy entrenched in Chinese history writing. To contemporary intellectual giants of sinology — the likes of Yu Ying-shih (余英時), Hsu Cho-yun (許倬雲), and Ho Ping-ti (何炳棣) — Wang, having been born and raised outside China, is an outsider; from the perspective that his Chineseness is deeply grounded in Confucian tradition, however, he is unmistakably an insider, only one who is moored outside the conventional geographical northern Sinosphere. With his diasporic positioning challenging traditional notions of civilisational permanence, Wang's personal story has, in fact, amalgamated with his intellectual concept of China.
Home is where we are: Love in the brave new world
The first volume flows seamlessly into its sequel, where an intimate look at Wang's life continues to illuminate the tumultuous times. In Singapore, Wang settled into the University of Malaya, put his parents’ China dream behind him, and realigned his story as a Malayan citizen engaged in a world of post-colonial ethnic politics. At the encouragement of senior mentors at the university, he extended his love and talent for English literature to poetry and European classical music. Soon, however, he would find himself caught in a dilemma: on one side, his artistic sensibilities; on the other, the birth pains of his multiethnic nation, as well as his own political awakening and quest for an encompassing language of expression (his affinity for humanist values were at odds with his colleagues’ passion for a ‘Malayan’ voice). Being ethnic Chinese complicated matters; Malayan huaqiao communities were torn between the ideological turmoil ‘back home’ in China and in the transitioning Malaya: in a bid to work with local elites to cobble together a friendly, post-independence order, the British colonial establishment in Malaya in its final days went after ethnic Chinese activists, citing communist sympathies. These were precarious times for Wang.
It was while navigating these political and intellectual currents that Wang found his anchor of a lifetime — Margaret. Indeed, Margaret brought to his life the blessings of companionship — in every sense of the word. They shared remarkably similar family backgrounds: her family originated from coastal China (Fujian); her parents wedded in Shanghai, where Margaret was born. Like Gungwu's father, Margaret's strong, adventurous mother also answered a call to teach Chinese, in Singapore. She would stay there after the war and single-handedly raise two girls and three boys.
It was Margaret's wit, artistic talent, and elegance that captivated Wang. He regarded their love as penning its own unique poetry unlike any he encountered in the literature class, even Shakespeare's great sonnets. Wang writes:
the word [‘love’] took clearer shape in our lives through the years. I no longer hesitate to say that I have loved and know how I have been loved… I now know that meeting Margaret in the University in Singapore was when this awareness began its long journey from what was often a literary cliché to an enduring personal experience. (p. 84)
Margaret encouraged Wang to begin a life-long academic pursuit of Chinese history, from pre-modern sinology to contemporary politics, and from the fortunes of land-based dynasties to maritime Nanyang and beyond. Under renowned Tang historian Denis Twitchett at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, he studied the Five Dynasties, a choice that reflected the great tradition of sinology in his mind and the insider side of his Chineseness, which he would continue to balance against cosmopolitanism over an extensive career. The couple's careers would eventually traverse a globalised Asia bearing the impact of European cultural tradition, but it was while Wang was at SOAS and Margaret at Cambridge, engaging in deep quests for knowledge (enabled by the world-class scholarly environments), that they fathomed the vast underlying values of humanism. This sojourn in England gave them a taste of the cosmopolitan freedom that they would thereafter never relinquish. ‘Looking back,’ Wang muses, ‘that was an excellent foundation for that elusive something called love’ (p. 89).
Globalising: Becoming world citizens
Career led Wang into an intellectual orientation that set him further apart from fellow sinologists. As Asia was dragged into the looming Cold War, Wang faced new academic challenges far surpassing localised ethnic concerns. Compared to the first half of the twentieth century which belonged to his parents’ generation, the second half — when the Maoist revolution and internal turmoil engulfed China — was no less turbulent. Outside geographical China, anti-Chinese, anti-Communist sentiments were exacerbated by the Korean and Vietnam Wars as well as the 1965 coup in Indonesia. Almost synchronously, to the shock and disappointment of Wang and Margaret, Singapore was excommunicated from the multiethnic Malaysian federation, to which the couple had committed themselves, body and soul.
How should one find intellectual mooring in a polarising world when the realignment of new nation-states was pursued by governments and social movements with exclusive, nationalistic fervour? Wang's deep commitment to scholarly pursuits based on humanist values gave him the necessary intellectual space to transcend nationalistic priorities: through a programme-building assignment to survey new centres of Asian Studies he was introduced to the precipitous rise of government- and privately-funded area studies in the United States, which aimed to make sense of a new world order in the making — such studies provided an interdisciplinary platform to address contemporary social science concerns and China's global reach; and, with Margaret’s foresight and support, Wang pilgrimaged to the mecca of late-twentieth-century Asian scholarship and networked with intellectual giants from history to sinology and beyond. Concurrently, a generation of anthropologists and political scientists were tuning their intellectual energies toward a Weberian/interpretive turn in anthropology and shifting focus onto Southeast Asia and its diverse paths of modernisation and development (Clifford Geertz, James Scott, Benedict Anderson), while the closure of the People's Republic of China for fieldwork drove a generation of China anthropologists (Maurice Freedman, G. William Skinner, Arthur and Margery Wolf, William E. Willmott) toward Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. With these scholars Wang built not only intellectual affiliations but also friendships that dovetailed with his unique insights on maritime ‘China's South’ and Southeast Asia. These were flourishing years for Wang's scholarship, whether he and his family were making a ‘home’ in Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, or Singapore. Looking back on decades of nomadism, multiple levels of belonging, and a deep commitment to interdisciplinary and interregional scholarship evolving organically into a uniquely cosmopolitan career, Wang writes:
all that time, home in another form continued to take shape in my mind, one tied to a campus, but increasingly linked to a university as a site of free and open learning. I was not really conscious of how significant that was to the idea of home, simply comfortable and content to be surrounded by people with inquiring minds. (p. 268)
This notion of ‘home’, binding both volumes together, reveals Wang's lifelong search for the meaning of belonging. The same search has proved onerous, and unavoidable for most Chinese humanist intellectuals of his generation, those who received the best of traditional education, were well-versed in Western languages and cultures, but had in their youth experienced national devastation and cultural decline: the aforementioned Yu Ying-shih, preeminent historian of China, born and bred there, managed to dissociate cultural China with geographical China and find solace in the idea that ‘China is where I am’. He therefore avoided the tragic fate suffered by the iconic Chen Yinke (陳寅恪 1890–1969), brilliant classicist who could not bear to make that dissociation.Footnote 9 For Wang, a truly global, multiculturally-rooted scholar, from the moment he laid his ten-year-old hands on that atlas, to finally securing freedom and making peace with the idea that ‘Home is where we are’, the world had always been at his fingertips.
Autobiographies are meaningful not only for their authors, but also for readers who can intellectually inhabit the environments in the writer's tales and relive their plights and choices. Wang's volumes narrate three generations of remarkable lives through extraordinary times in an ‘Asian’ life-world in flux. More importantly, they illuminate the negotiated meanings of Chineseness against competing polities that essentialise attributes of identity and sense of belonging to elicit a show of allegiance. Gungwu and Margaret were right: despite all the uncertainties of their cultural, intellectual, and political odyssey spanning much of the twentieth century, they never ceased to find constancy in each other and to feel ‘at home’ wherever they happened to be. In maritime Asia where their footprints abound, horizons stretched far and wide, but it was at the margins of empires and nation-states where the pair of free spirits began to pursue personal and scholarly growth, unbeholden to any political or powerful agendas. They have been, first and foremost, humanists and world citizens.