Tag: Books

Book launch for ‘Chinese Australians’, Melbourne, 24 April 2015

Cover of 'Chinese Australians'Everyone is warmly invited to the launch of Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, edited by Sophie Couchman and me.

Bringing together contributions from eleven key scholars in Chinese Australian history, the book explores how Chinese Australians have influenced the communities in which they lived on a civic or individual level. Focusing on the motivations and aspirations of their subjects, the authors draw on biography, world history, case law, newspapers and immigration case files to investigate the political worlds of Chinese Australians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The book will be launched by Ms Nancy Gordon, Australian Consul-General in Chengdu, China.

Coincidentally held the day before Anzac Day, the launch is also a great opportunity to see the Chinese Museum’s exhibition Chinese Anzacs: Chinese Australians and World War One.

When: Friday, 24 April 2015 at 11.00am
Where: Chinese Museum, 22 Cohen Place, Melbourne (behind Her Majesty’s Theatre)
RSVP: 22 April 2015 to curator@chinesemuseum.com.au or 03 9662 2888

Books will be available for purchase on the day at a discounted rate. For more information about the book, see www.brill.com/products/book/chinese-australians.

Sophie and I look forward to seeing you there.

Foreign wives and second marriages: a Chinese perspective

While in Hong Kong I’ve been reading, and really enjoying, Huifeng Shen’s book China’s Left-Behind Wives (NUS Press, Singapore, 2012). The book tells the story of women who stayed in China while their husbands migrated from Fujian province to Southeast Asia between the 1930s and 1950s.

Shen interviewed a number of these left-behind wives, all in their 80s or older, and their oral history testimonies provide a poignant insight into some of the most intimate aspects of their lives — the sorts of things that I struggle to uncover in my own research. Although the women in Shen’s book are from Fujian not Guangdong, and their husbands migrated to Southeast Asia not Australia, her work rings very true with what I know of the lives of wives of Chinese men in Australia. One of the most fascinating things for me, who approaches the subject from an Australian perspective, is seeing the Chinese side of story, particularly where it comes to the question of first and second marriages.

My research has uncovered the unhappiness that many Australian wives felt on discovering that their Chinese husbands had wives, and sometimes children, in China, and the difficulties Australian wives faced when they travelled to China with their husbands. Shen’s research shows that overseas marriages and overseas families created unhappiness, and hardships, for Chinese wives too. Shen notes that — as the result of often long-term separation from their husbands and feelings of fear, jealousy, hurt and betrayal — ‘many fankeshen [left-behind wives] hated the second wives of their husbands, especially the fanpo [‘barbarian’ foreign women], even if they never met them’ (Shen 2012, p. 100).

Some years ago, when I was in a ‘Cuban’ village in southwest Taishan, I was told a story about foreign wives. The story went that foreign wives of Chinese men would give their husbands a dose of poison before they made a return visit to China, a poison that could be reversed only if the man returned overseas to his foreign wife for the antidote within a particular time. My informant stated that this was the cause of the death of his uncle, who had been a laundryman in Cuba in the 1920s and was known to have had a Cuban wife.

I thought this might have been a local fable until I came across an article in the Tung Wah News from 1899 that told a similar story.

I was very interested then to read in China’s Left-Behind Wives that the emigrant communities of Quanzhou, Fujian, also ‘believed that fanpo sometimes … cast spells or hexes on the male migrants who married them’ (Shen 2012, p. 101 n. 58). Furthermore:

Wives who visited their husbands overseas were very careful when they met an overseas wife, believing that the woman might cast spells that would make them sick or insane, or cause them to die. Wives were particularly wary of food and drink provided by an overseas wife, suspecting something harmful might have been added. Hong Q [a left-behind wife interviewed by Shen] said she experienced stomach pain after eating with her husband when she visited him in the Philippines. She did not eat any food prepared by the overseas wife, but she believed that the woman put a spell on her by touching her hand three times (Shen 2012, pp. 100-101).

I came across China’s Left-Behind Wives by accident in the bookshop here in Tsim Sha Tsui, but I’d suggest you seek it out a bit more proactively. As Shen notes in her conclusion, ‘the story of the left-behind wives is not merely an appendix to male migration history but a subject worthy of study in its own right, and an integral part of the history of women, the history of migration, and the history of China’ (Shen 2012, p. 216). Here, here.

Discussion on Stan Hunt’s book ‘From Shekki to Sydney’

I’ve already mentioned Stan Hunt’s book From Shekki to Sydney: An Autobiography. Here’s an opportunity to meet the author, editor and publisher.

What: Discussion on Stan Hunt’s book From Shekki to Sydney: An Autobiography
When: Thursday 11 March, 12:15pm
Where: Customs House Library, Circular Quay (Level 2 Meeting Room), Sydney

Blurb: Join Stan Hunt, Diana Giese as editor and Dr Mabel Lee as publisher, to discuss Stan’s new book, From Shekki to Sydney: An Autobiography. It’s an enthralling account of his family story, including his close relationship with his father, and the arrival of his grandfather in Australia in the late 1880s. The book offers a window into vanished worlds such as the villages of interwar southern China and country New South Wales emerging from the Depression. Stan describes setting up a series of successful family businesses in Sydney, as well as contributing to the community through service to Rotary, the Freemasons, the Chung Shan Society and the Australian Chinese Community Association.

Stan will discuss the book with Diana Giese at a free event at Customs House Library, Circular Quay (Level 2 Meeting Room), from 12.15–1.00pm on Thursday 11 March 2010.

Diana Giese has worked with Chinese Australian communities countrywide to produce the Post-War Chinese Australians project for the National Library of Australia, and have written books in the field including Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons (University of Queensland Press) and Beyond Chinatown (National Library of Australia). Diana Giese has collaborated on life story books with people of Polish, Hungarian, Slovakian, German, Austrian and Indian background, as well as Stan.

Dr Mabel Lee set up and runs the independent publisher Wild Peony, showcasing new writing and arts, focusing on Chinese-related themes. She has facilitated the careers of many of the most celebrated Chinese writers, artists and performers, including 2000 Nobel Prize-winner Gao Xingjian, whose work she translates. Her academic research is on modern Chinese intellectual history and literature.

From Shekki to Sydney: An Autobiography by Stanley Hunt

A new book that might be of interest (via chinatown.com.au):

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries large numbers of Chinese travelled to the USA, Australia and other parts of the world to prospect for gold, or to work as labourers, gardeners and traders, but there are few eyewitness accounts of the lives of these people who predominantly came from South China. Stanley Hunt’s From Shekki to Sydney fills part of that gap in Chinese and Australian social history by documenting his childhood in Shekki, his experiences after relocating to Australia, and the lives of his parents and grandparents. His story will resonate with those of many silent others all over the world.

From Shekki to Sydney by Stanley Hunt

Stanley Hunt was born Chan Pui-Tak in Shekki, Zhongshan county, Guangdong province, China. The Japanese had invaded North China, and were beginning to bomb Shekki and the nearby coastal areas of South China when he, his mother and two younger siblings, left home to join his father in Australia. Reunited in Sydney on 5 April 1939, the small family travelled north to the county town of Warialda where his father ran a general store. Australian troops were fighting in Europe and Asia, the country was still suffering lingering effects of the Great Depression, and his father was on the verge of bankruptcy. On the timely advice of a travelling salesman, his father was able to save himself from financial ruin by negotiating new terms for repaying his accounts.

Through times of rations and quotas, the family value-added to their limited supplies, worked very hard and paid off their debts before relocating to Sydney in early 1945. Stanley and his father acquired businesses and prospered. Stanley is recognised for his significant contributions to social and community work in Australia, and China.

The father worked in Australia and had only returned to Shekki a couple of times during the author’s childhood: father and son were virtual strangers when they were reunited in Australia in 1939. As a twelve-year-old boy he began to work as a man alongside his father, and the development of their relationship contains many poignant moments that underscore the impact of ‘old country’ traditions on a younger generation of Chinese maturing into adults in Australia. The author is a highly observant ‘outsider’ as he grows from boy to man and is transformed into an ‘insider’.

If you are interested in the above abstract, please order your new book: From Shekki to Sydney: An Autobiography by Stanley Hunt, 200 pp. including 42 black & white photographs. Softcover: AUS $37.50.

In Sydney, copies are now available at GLEEBOOKS at 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe NSW 2037, phone (02) 9660 2333, www.gleebooks.com.au.

Alternatively, the book can be ordered through local bookshops.

ISBN: 978 1 876957 15 5
Sydney: Wild Peony, September 2009
International distribution: University of Hawaii Press. www.uhpress.hawaii.edu

Eric Rolls’ ‘Citizens’ translated into Chinese

Eric Rolls’ history of the Chinese in Australia from 1888, Citizens: Flowers and the Wide Sea, has been translated into Chinese by Zhang Wei, a professor at Shandong University. The translation was launched at the Australian Embassy in Beijing on 4 September. See an article about it in the People’s Daily Online. Makes me think that it really is time someone else wrote a ‘definitive’ history of the Chinese in Australia…

Transnational ties

An article of mine has just come out in a new volume called Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, edited by Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott and published by ANU E Press. The book is the result of a great conference, Transnational lives/Biography across borders, that was held at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU in July 2006.

My article, ‘A journey of love: Agnes Breuer’s sojourn in 1930s China’ explores a ‘scandal’ involving a young white Queensland woman, Agnes Breuer, who went to China with her Chinese husband in the early 1930s. (Their picture, together with their baby son, is featured on the front cover of the book.)

The couple had married contrary to the wishes of both their families, and Agnes found a very cold reception from her father-in-law on her arrival in China. Wishing to return to Australia, but with an infant son to look after, Agnes’ plight was exaggerated to the Salvation Army in Hong Kong – and she was ‘rescued’ under dramatic circumstances.

I first came across the story in John Sleeman’s White China, but he doesn’t mention Agnes Breuer’s name, or that of her husband, except as ‘Low Mun’. It took a bit of lateral thinking and a ship’s passenger list to find the family’s real name – Lum Mow. Sleeman had referred to a statement given by Agnes to Australian Customs officers when she returned to Australia, so I figured that there had to be some material in the National Archives about it all. More lateral thinking uncovered a file about her husband, known to most in Australia as William Lum Mow – but the file was listed under his Chinese name, Lum Wie. It was one of those lovely fat departmental files that contains correspondence and news clippings and all sorts of treasures.

More pieces of the puzzle fell into place when I managed to track down both Agnes Breuer’s granddaughter and William Lum Mow’s neice, who had themselves only recently made contact. Much thanks therefore has to go to Liz McNamee and Jenny Showyin for their generosity in sharing what they knew about the story of Agnes and William. Of particular value to me were the photographs, letters and other documents of Agnes Breuer’s that her granddaughter still had. The photographs are particularly wonderful, with a handful of pictures taken in China in 1932 during Agnes’ trip and many more of Agnes and William and their friends in and around Townsville in 1931. A detail from one of my favourites of Agnes and William is below.

3 new publications from Victoria

The latest issue of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria’s newsletter (History News, Issue 278) includes info on three new Chinese-related publications. Details are copied below.

George Ah Ling, Donald’s Friend

Donald History and Natural History Group of the Music, Literature and Art Society Inc., Box 111, Donald, 3840, 2008, pp. iv + 40. ISBN 1 876978 36 8

From the 1920s, George Ah Ling was a much-loved market gardener living alone in Donald. He died in 1987 and this book celebrates his life by publishing the recollections of those who knew him as well as some photos of George at work in his garden and with his horse and cart.

The Chinawoman by Ken Oldis

Arcadia with State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, pp. 261, $34-95. ISBN 978 1 74097 164 5

The murder of an English prostitute in Melbourne on 1 December 1856, the subsequent investigation, trial and conviction and hanging of two Chinese for her murder, and the flaws in the justice system that were revealed, are all fully examined in a most engaging and analytical narrative. The case involved both Redmond Barry as judge and Charles Hope Nicolson as detective, and is significant in the anti-Chinese hysteria of the late 1850s. Very well-documented but regrettably and surprisingly, no index.

Chinese in Echuca-Moama, a chronicle 1850s-1930 by Carol Holsworth

…an interesting collection of stories and reports about the early settlement and the involvement of the Chinese community in this exciting riverboat town.

Finding a connection to China

On 13 September 2008, I spoke at a gathering of the Chinese Australian Historical Society in Sydney. The workshop was called ‘Stepping ashore: How to research your Chinese family history’. It was attended by about 30 people – some just embarking on their family research, some struggling with particular research problems, some well into it and perhaps more knowledgeable than the speakers! Here’s what I talked about, with links and references as promised.

Most people doing Chinese family and community history research start in Australia, with what they know from families and from Australian records. But the lives and journeys of Chinese ancestors began before they stepped ashore here. While not without their challenges, Australian sources can help us find connections back to China – from clues in how Chinese names were romanised to working out what’s written on a Chinese headstone…

The talk focused mostly on how Chinese personal and place names appear in Australian records. Because there was no standard form for romanising Chinese until the 20th century, and because people spoke in different dialects, there is lots of variation in how personal and place names are recorded in English-language sources. Only rarely are Chinese characters included.

These romanised versions of personal and place names can tell us helpful things however. For instance, personal names written with a ‘sl’ or ‘shl’ sound at the beginning (like Dang Bown Sluey or Slit Schin) suggest that these people were likely to be from Taishan, as this sound is particular to Taishanhua rather than Cantonese. Or, a woman’s name that includes a ‘See’ or ‘Shee’ usually gives their father’s family name, and indicates that the woman was married. Ham See, for example, would be a married woman who was born into the Ham family – Ham would be her father’s, not her husband’s, surname.

The native place of many, many Chinese is recorded in Australian records as Canton – which usually means the province of Guangdong, not the city Guangzhou. More occasionally county or city or town or even village names are recorded: Sunning, Sun Wui, Heung Shan, Amoy, Shekki, Kongmoon, Lee Yuan, Bak Shek… Sometimes it’s easy to identify these places, sometimes it’s not. The smaller the place, the harder it can be to identify.

Finding Chinese characters for personal and place names can be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, but is very helpful if the goal is to locate and visit an ancestral village in China. There are Chinese-language sources, such as newspapers and clan or association records, that could provide these details; Chinese characters are also often found on gravestones and in certain types of government records.

The following are some websites, articles and books that might provide more clues to understanding personal and place names, or might help in locating Chinese characters.

Personal names

Chinese personal names, as they appear in English-language sources, are slippery things. They were written down in many different ways, often with the one person’s name recorded with multiple spellings or multiple variations.

American Emma Woo Louie has written on Chinese American names, much of which applies in the Australian context. Her book is Chinese American Names: Tradition and Transition (McFarland & Company, 2008). A preview of the book is available from Google Book Search. She has also published articles on the subject in the Chinese Historical Society of America’s journal Chinese America: History and Perspectives.

Also see:

Chinese names on the Chinese-Canadian Genealogy website

Kate Bagnall, Golden Shadows on a White Land, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 – Section 4: Belonging (starts on p. 196)

Janis Wilton, Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales 1850–1950, New England Regional Art Museum, 2004

Places

Like personal names, Chinese place names were written down in various ways. The trick is to be able to ‘translate’ back from the romanised version to how a place is known today. Today’s Jiangmen, for instance, might have been written Quong Moon, Kong Mun, Kongmoon.

The Chinese Genealogy forum is an excellent place to read up on locating and visiting ancestral villages.

You can also browse or search the Surname and Village Database, which provides access to information from the Index of Clan Names By Villages published by the American Consulate General in Hong Kong in the 1970s.

Have a look at Google Maps, or if you’ve got Chinese characters for the place name and can read a bit of Chinese, you can look for it in the online map at ditu.sogou.com. Smaller villages aren’t likely to be there, though.

Gravestones

Headstones in cemeteries can be a great place to find Chinese characters for personal names and native villages. Work on transcribing and interpreting Chinese headstones is happening more and more.

Doris Jones’ Reading Chinese gravestones, on the Golden Threads website, is an excellent introduction to understanding the information written on Chinese headstones.

Also see:

Doris Jones, Remembering the Forgotten: Chinese Gravestones in Rookwood Cemetery 1917–1949, Invenet, Sydney, 2003

Linda Brumley, Liu Bingquan and Zhao Xueru, Fading links to China: Ballarat’s Chinese Gravestones and Associated Records 1854–1955, on the Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation website

and

Kok Hu Jin’s numerous books describing and translating Chinese gravestones around Australia, published by the Golden Dragon Museum at Bendigo