Strait Thuggin' It

The turn of the half decade put me in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I was in a country I had long poorly understood. I was first puzzled by Malaysian Chinese in London back in 2008, where I happened upon a group of them speaking Cantonese outside a LSE party. I was quickly impressed by how fluent they were in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and presumably Malay. As someone struggling to become trilingual, I couldn't understand and how they all so effortlessly seemed to speak all those languages. I came to find many more Malay Chinese with similar polygottal aptitude, who when pressed would often say they speak many languages at home, especially Hokkien, and learned Cantonese from watching TVB. Very little of this made sense to me.

My perception of immigrant life, especially immigrant Chinese life, could not account for these Malays. Most immigrants I've met speak the language of their parents and heritage country at home, but speak the language of their current country best. Many immigrants can't speak their heritage language at all, and most lose it within 2-3 generations.  I've met many Chinese from Australia, America, Canada, Thailand, UK, France, Italy, Philippines, Côte d'Ivoire, Vietnam and Panama who fit my model. It seems simple.

Malacca town centre with red Dutch colonial buildings

But the Malaysian communities, which are also related to Singaporean and Indonesian communities, are very different and their histories are fascinating to me. For starters, they are a large group, which Chinese making up about a quarter of the population in Malaysia and the majority of Singapore. The oldest of them, called the Peranakan or Baba Nyongyan, came as early as the 1400s. Chinese communities were well established by the 1600s and many who arrived in the 1800's got rich. This period saw a great blossoming in trade as the West discovered the will and ability to sail to the East and the world changed forever. With Constantinople falling to the Ottoman Empire in 1421, the Silk Road was cut off for Europeans and the much desired silk and spices stopped showing up in the markets of Venice and Bruges. The Portuguese saw a market gap here and made big ships, reached India and established a colony in Goa. They soon realized the importance of the Malacca Straits in reaching East Asia from India. The Malacca Sultanate is considered the first Malay independent entity on the land after eras of empires of Indian or Indonesian extraction and established themselves as policers of the straits. With Europe really loving the spices, jade, silk and porcelain that these ships could bring back, a quote by the Portuguese Tomé Pires which is inscribed in the garden of the Malacca Sultan Palace: "Whoever is Lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice."

Chinese shop houses with Straits-style architecture

So the Portuguese went ahead and conquered Malacca. That was 1521, and while their 140 year rule must have been eventful, this tale is usually abridged by mentioning that the Dutch took it over in 1640s and the British in the 1800s. The British especially had a large empire in place at this time, and they seemed to see some untapped economic potential in the resources of Malaysia. They encouraged a lot of Indians and Chinese to migrate to Malaysia, and these communities really got going. 

I read a lot of this in the book "How Trade Shaped the World." It's description of some of the major centers of trade made me pine to visit: Venice, Hormuz, Malacca, Canton (Guangzhou). I've been to three of these now in the past two years. Venice is one of the most touristy places in the world, still showing off the wealth of its ages past but no longer a vibrant economic center of trade. Guangzhou is the opposite, now a bustling metropolis but with a disappointedly paltry amount of physical history remaining to boast of its role in the Age of Discovery. I'm sitting now in Malacca, where I can see the signs of loss in the modern economy, the diluting cultural effects of tourism, but also a healthy amount of European settlement and a charming abundance of a Chinese culture no longer found in China. In Guangzhou I felt lost in the midst of what seemed like any other Chinese city, in Venice charmed but removed from the era of trade. In Malacca I can sense the melting pot history and feel connected to what seems like a much more exciting era.

The Chinese here came from many regions and in many waves. Like seemingly all Chinese diaspora, they established Chinatowns and tried to preserve their traditions more conservatively than those in China. Chinese shops are equipped with ornate signs all reading from right to left. They primarily spoke Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Cantonese and some Wu. I've met plenty of people in my generation who still claim to speak five dialects (including Mandarin) fine. All mixed together, it seems everyone could speak everything. I can envision some poor laborers in Fujian boarding a boat and ending up in a tin mine in Malaysia, working alongside lots of other Chinese men. They would have had to pick up all other dialects, which wouldn't have been too arduous over enough time. If they interacted with locals more or the authorities, they would've had to speak good Malay or English. As their children settled and an education system was standardized/imposed, they would have learned Malay and English well. Nowadays, a lot of Chinese children go to Chinese primary schools where they learn to properly read and write Mandarin (which they uniquely call 華語 Huayu). They'll also learn Malay and English from the age of 6 or so, and transition into a Malay high school because Chinese high schools are not recognized. Because English is the language of universities, those pursuing higher Ed have to keep that up. Not every Malaysian Chinese is like this, completely multilingual. My friend in Borneo doesn't speak any Chinese, and plenty of poorly educated people don't speak English. Some of my friends have admitted to struggling with Malay, particularly after years abroad.

I think the reason Malay Chinese haven't dropped their Chinese language heritage and fully adopted Malay is largely owing to the size of their community but partly because of the role of English. For us immigrants abroad, learning the local language is a prerequisite to upwards mobility. For Malaysian Chinese, a lot of high paying colonial jobs required English first, and nowadays with great English you can go abroad and study. Many of the educated elite Malay Chinese in fact speak primarily English at home. Thus Malay has been relegated to a role language, used strictly for communicating to the Malays and other ethnicities around. Cantonese, Hokkien and now Mandarin are the lingua francas within the Chinese community, Malay the lingua franca within the country, and English within the world. Depending on which communities you spend more time in, your linguistic aptitudes will adjust naturally.

I'll finish with one personal anecdote. I wandered far outside historical Melaka center, past shopping malls and seaside construction and residential neighborhoods in search of the Portuguese settlement on my map. I didn't find much there. Closely packed ranch or two floored houses with intense Christmas decorations were exhibiting an ordinary Saturday afternoon that could have just as easily taken place in North Attleboro, Massachusetts or Irvine, California. I reached the seashore finally, after the entire previous 4km stretch had been blocked by construction or industrial activity. There wasn't much here either. I was very confused, no seaside city passes up on coastal development, much less one historically known as an entrepôt. So I found a restaurant that was completely empty save for what seemed like staff and children. A brown man served me a bottle of water, while an old man and woman conversed in a Chinese language. I tried but all I could pick up were phrases that I thought were purely Mandarin or English. Finally I asked the woman if she could speak Cantonese, with an idea what the answer would be. She said, "yes, no problem la" but spoke with a fairly strong and unusual accent. She told me that they had been conversing in Hokkien, and that they spoke basically everything in their community, but qualified this statement by saying "we can speak some of everything, but all of nothing." Her Cantonese wasn't perfect, but it was communicable, kinda like mine. The guy didn't seem to fully understand us.

I asked if there were any Portuguese here. The woman explained sure, this place was setup specifically for Portuguese, from all over Malaysia in fact. I asked how many this was. 2000, 3000 about? she confirmed with the man. In fact her husband, who was moving crates around in the restaurant, was of Portuguese and Malaysian descent. He still spoke Portuguese, but she added "已經變了" meaning the Portuguese they speak has already evolved to the point of unintelligibility with Europeans. At this point the man jumped in, and explained in English the history of the settlement. Portuguese had been in Malaysia since the 1500's, and amazingly some of them were still there as a distinct entity. In 1933, the community was granted a tract of land on swampy, reclaimed land 5km from city centre. The reason this waterfront lacks much development or history is that it's not historical at all, and "there's no fish out there." The community seems so unremarkably residential belying their unique heritage were it not for the very visible Christmas celebrations still up in January. In a country where it has become controversial for Muslims to even say "Merry Christmas," the Portuguese community are known as Kristang (from Christian) and defiantly loving the Christmas spirit. 

The man reintroduced himself as Mr. Lau and said his mother was a Peranakan. I would learn from my museum visit later that the Peranakan were, as the earliest Chinese arrivals, usually the first to take advantage of the crops and trade here and become societal elites. It was no wonder that he was so well versed in the region's history and his English evidently fluent. He told me about a black house built in 1945 that was of a more original style, still made entirely of wood, and was now inhabited but also preserved by the local museum. He told me how there used to be a bell to alert people to fires and events by the statue of St. Peter. He told me he'd been to Hong Kong and how it was nice but that there were too many people.

I had never been much of a history buff growing up, but I'd never been so affected by the history of a city as I was now. When I visited the Peranakan house and museum, a 19th century two story triple house owned by a rich Peranakan family of the last name Chan, I understood the history a lot better. The original Mr. Chan had come penniless from Fujian and ended up owning a spices plantation and diversifying into rubber and fruits. The house had cool elements, including a peephole from the 2nd story bedroom to the front door, rainwater collection, furniture from England and a stone bowl for grinding spices. The family is now 5 generations descended from the original immigrant and spread throughout the English speaking world (Canada, Singapore, US, UK, Australia). As I looked at the family picture taken just a year ago, I felt like I was seeing familiar faces. How many Chinese people had I met along the way who mentioned some heritage to Malaysia that just confused me? One of them easily could have been from this family. The world was somehow making more sense now. Maybe I've done a poor job of explaining it, but this group of Malaysian Chinese that was so puzzling to me had been solved after this one trip, and that was as much as I could expect for a New Year's holiday.