The Epic Immigrant Saga Waiting to Be Told

(Bloomberg Opinion) — A few weeks ago, I posted a preview of Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, Michael Luo’s moving, eloquent and meticulously researched history of immigration. In a way, Luo’s book, which officially publishes on April 29, is a companion to Edward Wong’s poignant At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China, which I’ve also featured in a column.

While Luo’s book examines nearly 200 years of Chinese immigration into the US — with a mesmerizing focus on the turbulent, often genocidal late 19th century in California and the Pacific states — Wong follows his father’s epic journey from coastal China and Hong Kong in World War II up to Manchuria during the Korean War and then westward to the home of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, which was being welded into the People’s Republic, and where Han majority of the rest of the country was a privileged minority. Together, the books provide a stereoscopic view of Chinese identity — the experience of migrants to a distant continent of promise and hostility, and of Chinese in China itself as the nation settled into its territorial bounds and ambitions.

I believe there’s a third aspect awaiting magisterial treatment: the saga of the Chinese in Southeast Asia. Today, the region stretching from Myanmar to New Guinea is the home to more than 675 million people in about a dozen countries, including the vibrant economies of Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. Among them are about 25 million people of Chinese ethnicity. According to some studies by the family office industry, about three-quarters of Southeast Asia’s roughly $400 billion in personal wealth is held by the region’s Chinese. In addition, Southeast Asia also has a substantial number of people with some Chinese ancestry, a statistic that is difficult to assess, making this region particularly intriguing.  It’s because the Chinese in Southeast Asia, while affluent and influential, can seem to disappear in plain sight — a skill they’ve honed at great cost over the last three or four centuries. It is the paradoxical key to their persistence in the sometimes inhospitable nations where they live.

For example, while ethnic Chinese form perhaps 14% of Thailand’s population of 66 million, one study estimates that as much as 40% of all Thai have some Chinese DNA. That includes the royal family and many of the families who dominate politics and the military. There’s a parallel situation in the Philippines: While the official number of Chinese is perhaps 1 million out of the total of 110 million, the traditional ruling class has many Chinese ancestors in their family trees. Intermarriage and integration were part of the Chinese immigrant survival process. That’s created the distinct cultures in the region, including the Peranakan in the Malay Peninsula as well as local vocabularies replete with words that can trace their origin from China’s coastal regions in Guangdong and Fujian, the source of most of the migrants to Southeast Asia. There is a continuity between the delights of Bangkok street food and the cooking of China’s Teochew people.

While assimilation helped integrate the migrants, their presence — both genetic and cultural — chronically triggers nativist hostility. Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian Federation in 1965 because the city was predominantly Chinese. In the 1960s, too, anti-communist mobs targeted Chinese Indonesians simply because of the China connection. Most of the victims weren’t members of the party, but because China was ruled by communists, they were victims of violence and massacre. Many of the so-called boat people escaping Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975 were ethnic Chinese, fleeing a regime inimical to their race and culture despite their lifetimes in the country.

Xenophobia is a universal human disease. But this was more than a fear of strangers: It was uneasiness from living in the shadow of the giant, often grabby empire to the north that the migrants left long ago. The Spanish and Dutch colonial governments in the Philippines and Indonesia slaughtered or ousted ethnic Chinese. In the 17th century, the Spaniards were constantly afraid that China (or Chinese pirates operating out of Taiwan and the islands in the South China Sea) would invade Manila. The Dutch went out of their way to label Chinese residents as foreigners and discriminated against them as carpetbaggers and opportunistic merchants, slurs adopted by locals. Vietnam — ruled at various moments by Chinese dynasties — had fought wars of independence as well as fended off invasions (one as recent as 1979). There’s a lot of history and paranoia.

And so Chinese migrants — often fleeing poverty and turmoil in China — had to deal with the perception of being agents of a predatory foreign power. But not — in the 1950s to ‘70s — as a military threat. Most countries perceived China as a source of ideological subversion rather than a potential invader (apart from Vietnam, which in any case was able to fight Beijing to a draw in that desultory one-month war). That was because the People’s Republic was in the middle of its many convulsions — the catastrophic Great Leap Forward, the cancerous Cultural Revolution, the nebulousness of the post-Mao era. It was a basket case of self-defeating ideology and cliquish mayhem. Why would any person of Chinese descent in relatively prosperous Southeast Asia want to be associated with all of that? It was impetus for further integration into their local societies. I remember that sentiment growing up ethnic Chinese in the Philippines in the 1960s: China was for losers.

But that’s all changed — so is the calculus for the visibility of Chinese-ness in the region. China is the second-biggest economy in the world; its tourists spend millions; its companies invest billions; and for more than a decade now, it has become the largest trading partner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the 10-country economic and political bloc encompassing most of the area. All that may be a prod to greater cooperation with China, if only to hang together against US President Donald Trump’s tariffs (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam got the highest at 49%, 48% and 36%, respectively; Singapore got the minimum 10%). And in Southeast Asia, people of Chinese ancestry are suddenly proud — or at least curious in a positive way — about their heritage. Think of the movie Crazy Rich Asians with the Chinese quotient turned way up. At the same time, China has enough military muscle that it can’t be cast as the regional loser anymore. Indeed, the Philippines is once again being threatened by Chinese navies. 

And so, as the region’s people of Chinese descent undergo stirring of suppressed identity because of a resurgent China, the nations of Southeast Asia are increasingly wary of their giant neighbor with its ships and soldiers, investors and money. Will we see partnerships, rivalries and fair weather friendships? Will China play on ancestral heartstrings? It’s a conjunction of sentiments that’s not quite happened before. Someone better get cracking on a book.

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Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion’s international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine. 

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