Tracing the history of Chinese immigrants: Lee Khoon Choy

Book tells the story of how they helped shape the socio-political landscape of S-E Asia

By Leong Weng Kam, The Sunday Times, 30 Jun 2013

Back in the 1930s when Lee Khoon Choy was a seven-year-old enrolled in Primary 1 at St Mark's School in Butterworth, he was puzzled why the Peranakans (descendants of Chinese immigrants who married local Malay or Indian women) could not speak, read or write Chinese even though they followed many Chinese customs and cultural practices.

He would have become one of them, he says, if not for a quick switch from the Catholic school to the Chinese-medium Yeok Keow School there - much against his father's wishes.

"I didn't know why, but I just felt very uncomfortable with the environment at St Mark's where Chinese wasn't taught," he says.

The former senior minister of state and retired diplomat, an old guard of the People's Action Party (PAP), remembers that his late father Lee Kim Fook, then a wealthy rubber plantation owner and philanthropist in Penang, chased him out of the house with a broom for leaving St Mark's, the school which most well-to-do Chinese families wanted their children to attend.

"My father, a former Customs officer for the British colonial government, sent me and all my other siblings - 11 brothers and five sisters - to English-medium schools because he believed that our futures depended on our mastery of the English language, not Chinese," says Mr Lee, now 89. A full-time author, he has been writing both in English and Chinese since retiring from politics in 1984, and as a business consultant a few years ago.

His tiff with his father was resolved after the Chinese school's principal spoke up for him, and the elder Mr Lee, who incidentally was also the school management board chairman, later gave his blessings.

"But I became the black sheep of the family as all my other siblings never learnt Chinese," says Mr Lee.

He went on to the prestigious Chung Ling High School in Penang before becoming a journalist - first with Sin Chew Jit Poh in Malaysia in 1946, and in the newspaper's Singapore office in 1949.

He left journalism in 1959, when he was a reporter with The Straits Times, and contested successfully in the general election that same year as a PAP candidate. The party won by a landslide to form the government.

He believes that his switch to a Chinese-medium school helped sow the seeds for what has become his 11th and latest book: Golden Dragon And Purple Phoenix.

It traces the history of Chinese immigrants in 10 South-east Asian countries, including Singapore, and tells of how they intermingled, integrated and assimilated into their respective local communities and helped shape the region's socio-political landscape today.

His other works include Passage Through China (2007), Pioneers Of Modern China (2005) and A Fragile Nation - The Indonesian Crisis (1999).

"Even as a boy, I wondered why the Chinese, through assimilation, had to give up their own language and identity and I wanted to find out more," he said in a Sunday Times interview last week. The new book will be launched by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at the Star Performing Arts Centre in Buona Vista this week.

His research on Chinese immigrants - who moved to South-east Asia from as early as the Song Dynasty more than 1,000 years ago or earlier - began when he became a journalist in the mid-1940s and when he started travelling to South-east Asian countries.

"I started collecting information for the book by reading and talking to academics, political and business leaders at the time - many of them with Chinese linkages," he recalls.

Hence the 584-page tome, which he spent the past eight years writing, including during a short stint as a senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in 2005, was more than half-a-century in the making.

His research continued when he became a politician in 1959; as the then Parliamentary Secretary for Culture in the Government, he often led cultural troupes from Singapore that performed in other South-east Asian countries, and even when he became Singapore's ambassador to Indonesia from 1974 to 1978.

He remembers meeting Professor Slamet Muljana in Indonesia who told him about the Islamisation of the Chinese in Java, and said that of the nine Wali Songo or Muslim Saints who helped overthrow the Hindu Majapahit Empire in the 16th century, eight of them were Chinese.

"I also met many political leaders from South-east Asia who were Chinese and had long discussions with them about their ancestry; they included former Philippine foreign minister Carlos Rumulo and former Thai prime minister Chatichai Choonhaven.

One of his last interviews was conducted as recently as last year in Hong Kong where he met 84-year-old Cambodian Ng Xi Beng, a former Chinese Communist Party spy who witnessed the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge on the ethnic Chinese in Phnom Penh in the 1970s.

In his book, Mr Lee writes that descendants of Chinese immigrants who intermarried and assimilated in South-east Asia are called by different names in different countries. They are known as Peranakans in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, but in the Philippines they are called Mestizos, in Thailand as Lokjins, in Myanmar as Tayoke Kabya, in Cambodia as Konkat Cen, in Vietnam as Min Huong, and in Laos as Sino-Lao. Brunei has no specific name for the Chinese descendants.

In the chapter on Singapore's Chinese, Mr Lee described them as "Westernised Singaporeans" because they were first led and governed by Peranakans or Babas, who included Mr Lee Kuan Yew, and the late Dr Toh Chin Chye and Dr Goh Keng Swee.

Mr Lee said he wrote the book as a journalist and that it was not a historical account nor academic thesis. Hence his own personal encounters and experiences were also added in the narrative.

In the foreword to the book, President Tony Tan Keng Yam praised Mr Lee for drawing on his personal insights, careful research and observations to write such an "important book to add yet another layer to the rich and complex story of the Chinese in South-east Asia".

Professor K.K. Phua, 71, chairman of World Scientific Publishing, the publisher of the book, said the work was "unique" as it dealt in detail with the assimilation of Chinese immigrants in South-east Asia in such a readable manner.

Not one to rest, Mr Lee disclosed that his next book is already in the works. It will be on the history of the PAP and titled: My Role In The Hustings, and is a sequel to his autobiography, On The Beat To The Hustings, published in 1988.

"I am targeting the book to be out next year when I turn 90," he quipped.

PAP veteran launches book
Tome traces the history of integration of Chinese immigrants into S-E Asia
By Andrea Ong, The Straits Times, 4 Jul 2013

A PEOPLE'S Action Party (PAP) veteran and former diplomat Lee Khoon Choy has launched a new book tracing the history and influence of inter-marriages between Chinese immigrants and South-east Asian natives in the region.

Golden Dragon And Purple Phoenix draws on his lifelong interest in the concept of assimilation and the different ways Chinese immigrants had integrated into the various South-east Asian nations.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong launched the book yesterday at the Star Performing Arts Centre in Buona Vista. On the guest list were dignitaries from the academic, diplomatic and political spheres as well as Mr Lee Khoon Choy's contemporaries like retired MPs Ch'ng Jit Koon and Joe Conceicao.

The 89-year-old Mr Lee, who has written more than 10 books, said his latest offering draws on his personal experience and observations from his career as a journalist, PAP MP from 1959 to 1984, senior minister of state and ambassador to countries including Indonesia and Japan.

Growing up in a Peranakan family, he was the only one of 15 siblings to be Chinese-educated. His travels around the region later in life led him to start researching the intermingling between the Chinese, who moved to South-east Asia from as early as the Song Dynasty, and native races.

The 584-page tome studies such mixed heritage descendants in 10 countries, from the Peranakans to the Lokjins in Thailand, the Minh Huong in Vietnam and the Tayoke Kabya in Myanmar.

President Tony Tan Keng Yam, who wrote the foreword, congratulated Mr Lee on providing a "very useful account of the evolution of the Chinese communities... set in the context of the respective host country's social and political history".

Mr Lee called for more research to be done on inter-racial assimilation in the region. Books on overseas Chinese tend to focus on the Chinese schools and associations the immigrants form rather than the deeper blood ties that have evolved, he said.

These ties also underscore Mr Lee's belief that there can be a balance between nationality and ethnic roots in one's identity.

He was of the generation which once believed being Chinese-educated meant being loyal to China. But after meeting founding fathers Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee and Toh Chin Chye while studying in England, Mr Lee said he became conscious of his nationality and "became Singaporean".

He also hopes his book will spark more interest in finding out more about one's roots. Many young Singaporean Chinese do not know their dialect group or the district in China their ancestors hailed from, he said. "Our dialects have been killed... the Nanyang University, gone, Chinese schools, no more, dialect, no more, so naturally they are Westernised. That is not a good thing," said Mr Lee, who was a key player in connecting the PAP with the Chinese-speaking ground.

"I think every human being should know his own roots. A tree without roots cannot grow. Human beings are the same," he added.

Mr Conceicao, 89, said Mr Lee was "an example of that ability to find a place in a multi-ethnic situation". Mr Lee Kuan Yew had relied on the other Mr Lee's advice on Indonesia because of his understanding of ethnic identities, said Mr Conceicao, a former diplomat. "He (Mr Lee Khoon Choy) remains Chinese to some extent but he is a Singaporean." Former MP Heng Chiang Meng, 68, agreed: "In my opinion, race is not important. What's important is nationality: where you are born, where you are brought up, the culture."

Being Chinese in South-east Asia
Ethnic community in this region is as deeply embedded as any other today
By Asad Latif, Published The Straits Times, 6 Jul 2013

Golden Dragon And Purple Phoenix: The Chinese And Their Multi-ethnic Descendants In Southeast Asia by Lee Khoon Choy

AMONG the more than 60 million ethnic Chinese settled around the world, 33 million live in South- east Asia.

Their identity was once overshadowed by the idea that wherever there are Chinese, there is China. That assertion incorporated them into the Sinic sphere of influence, questioned the possibility of loyalty to the lands of their birth, and undermined their claim to the region.

Ethnic Chinese became targets of a deadly stereotype: To be Chinese meant to be clever, rapacious, inscrutable and suspect. They were envied for their industry and thrift, but their business success was imputed to the clannish networks that cornered commercial power. Perceptions of racial exclusiveness tinged with chauvinism threatened to turn them into eternal outsiders in South-east Asia.

The community paid a terrible price for that ethnic branding. It was the chief victim of the Japanese invasion and occupation of Malaya and Singapore during World War II.

It was brutalised at native hands as well, during subsequent convulsions in South-east Asia. Among the most notable instances are the suppression of the post-war Hukbalahap movement in the Philippines, the massacre of Indonesian communist sympathisers in the mid-1960s, the 1969 riots in Malaysia to silence demands for racial equity, the eviction of entrepreneurial Chinese from revolutionary Vietnam in the late 1970s, and the violence unleashed on middle-class Chinese as Suharto fell from power in the late 1990s.

Through all these eruptions, the Chinese paid a price for their ethnicity disproportionate to their numbers and irrespective of the ideological side they were on.

In this book, however, veteran diplomat Lee Khoon Choy tells the story of another kind of Chinese. They are the migrating children of the Golden Dragon, a mythical status often ascribed to Chinese emperors. Their marriage to natives produced descendants who integrated themselves well enough into their societies to rise to the top of the economic, political and social ladder. Thus, over time, migrants were transformed into the Purple Phoenix, the mythological bird which rises from its own ashes and whose complexion attests to the mixture of red and blue in the bloodlines of South- east Asian Chinese.

This book disproves the lie that the Chinese cannot be integrated because of their racial exclusivity, their loyalty by default to China, and the cultural insecurity of indigenous South-east Asian societies which do not have millennia of recorded history to match China's historical depth.

Lee documents how the descendants of Chinese sojourners and immigrants, themselves characterised by a great deal of dialectal and occupational diversity, have woven themselves seamlessly into the rich tapestry of a multi-ethnic and culturally eclectic region. Today, the ethnic Chinese are a South-east Asian community as deeply embedded in the region as any other.

Lee's understanding of the community is enhanced by his own roots - he was born into a Peranakan family in Penang in 1924 - and his first-hand understanding of both China and South-east Asia. This knowledge was cultivated over his 14 years as a journalist and almost three decades as a politician and a diplomat, during which he served as Singapore's ambassador to Indonesia in the 1970s.

This book combines several approaches in telling the story of Chinese integration. The first is that of biographical sketches of business, political and cultural leaders. Their lives are inserted into larger historical and social trends. Then, the author employs an anecdotal style when recalling his encounters with prominent purple phoenixes such as former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid and the Thai statesmen Kukrit Pramoj and Thanat Khoman.

The value of this book lies in extending its analysis of the contribution of the Baba to Singapore and Malaysia, with which Singaporean readers would be familiar, to ethnic Chinese in every other country in South-east Asia. In an extensive study of Indonesia which discusses tensions between settled Peranakans and newly arrived Totoks, the author assesses also the social impact of the Wali Songo, the Sufi saints of Java who were overwhelmingly Chinese.

Almost encyclopaedic in scope, this volume describes the role of the Thai monarchy in the integration of the Thai-Chinese Lokjins. The study of the Minh Huong (mixed blood) of Vietnam includes a vignette of former South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. The book shows how the Konkat-Cen (Chinese-Khmer) produced notable politicians but also the Khmer Rouge despot Pol Pot, who, in spite of his Chinese blood, initiated draconian measures against the Chinese in Cambodia. There is also a discussion of the Hmongs of Laos.

Lee traces the evolution of the Tayoke Kabya (Chinese-Burmese) community of Myanmar, which produced many distinguished politicians, and describes the contributions of the Kapitan Cina to Brunei. He examines the careers of Jose Rizal, the iconic Filipino nationalist, and former president Corazon Aquino as instances of the political rise of Mestizos, those born to Chinese immigrants and indigenous Filipinos.

This book is an important contribution to the knowledge of the ethnic Chinese past in South-east Asia. But since every past has a future via the present, it has implications as well for the region in the coming years.

Although China is accused unfairly of wanting to recreate the imperial tributary system in its dealings with Nanyang, or the lands adjacent to the South China Sea, its rise will place ethnic Chinese in South-east Asia in the political limelight again.

It is not impossible that self- declared nationalist forces in South-east Asian countries under economic or ethnic strain will turn, as they once did, against the ethnic Chinese and make them convenient scapegoats as fifth- columnists. Holding back the tide will be the embankments of integration, built out of the concrete, day-to-day achievements of multiracial living and interaction.

Lee celebrates Thailand - liberal, tolerant, open-minded and able to treat people equally irrespective of their race - for being the region's most successful country in integrating its ethnic Chinese minority. In Singapore, of course, the Chinese constitute the majority.

Ethnic Chinese fortunes will depend on what happens along the spectrum of South-east Asian polities between Thailand and Singapore. This book shines a discerning light on that spectrum.

The writer, a former Straits Times journalist, is an associate fellow of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.