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43
Mothers, Sons and Lovers: Fidelity and
Frugality in the Overseas Chinese
Divided Family Before 1949
1
MI CHAEL SZONYI
The predominance of men, including married men, among Overseas
Chinese emigrants gave rise to a distinctive family structure, in which the
male emigrant lived apart from his wife and other family members who
remained back home in China. This article considers two very different bodies
of evidence, archives concerning Overseas Chinese efforts to recover property
lost during World War II and magazines and newspapers published for
Overseas Chinese in North America and Southeast Asia, in order to discuss
tensions within the Overseas Chinese divided family in the early twentieth
century. Family members who remained in China came to play important
roles in the management of the family estate, including remittance-funded
investments. Heightened anxiety about female sexuality and the trustworthiness
of family members in general reflected the concern of absent Overseas Chinese
men that their family members back home might make decisions about family
management that were different than those desired by the migrants themselves.
ON 31 MAY 1931, READERS OF SAN FRANCISCOS Gonglun chenbao were
shocked to learn the sorry tale of Chen Mourong, also known as Big-eyed Rong,
the adopted son of a certain Mr Lei. Lei, like many of the papers readers, was
a native of Taishan county in South China, now sojourning overseas. Big-eyed
Rong was not alone in the ancestral home, for Lei had also left behind in China
his young and beautiful concubine, nee Zhu. Zhu conformed to few of the
expectations of a virtuous woman; she wore makeup and fancy clothes, and
frequently went out in public, leaving early and returning late. Adopted son
Chen fell for her, and tried every scheme to win her heart. Finally, she succumbed
to his advances. From mother and son, they were suddenly transformed into man
and concubine. The inevitable happened, and Zhu became pregnant. Recognizing
that the situation had become impossible, Big-eyed Rong fled the village and
disappeared.
2
Michael Szonyi is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. His email address is
mszonyi@chass.utoronto.ca
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This story, which must have outraged as well as titillated San Franciscos
Chinese population, articulated and intertwined two of the most profound fears
of Overseas Chinese men, the infidelity of woman and the faithlessness of sons.
For the historian, such stories are useful less as accurate accounts of sexual trans-
gression than as representations of the anxieties that plagued male migrants.
Chen Mourongs tale was a concise expression of powerful tensions within the
Overseas Chinese divided family between the individual interests of migrants
themselves and those of their family members who remained behind in China.
This article explores two different bodies of material, archives relating to property
disputes involving disagreements between family members, and media accounts
of incest and other sexual transgressions, in order to discuss this tension. The basic
argument is that heightened anxiety about the sexuality of wives and sons,
especially adopted sons, was an expression of the concern of male migrants about
the potential of family members to undermine, through their personal choices,
the migrants own vision of the goals of migration. The image of incest captured
most effectively the sense of danger that family members at home might collude
to make decisions concerning family matters that were contrary to the wishes of
the migrant himself.
Chen Mourongs story and the many others like it remind us that Overseas
Chinese were typically members of families that transcended national boundaries,
and this could have profound implications for family life. The introduction of
the notion of transnationalism marks an important advance in the historiography
of Overseas Chinese. In previous analyses of migration, the highly skewed sex
ratios and circulatory or cyclical movements of Chinese immigrants were interpreted
as an aberration from what was seen as the more natural pattern of permanent
migration and assimilation. This aberration was then explained either in terms
of the cultural peculiarities of the Chinese, or of their racist exclusion from the
societies into which they immigrated. A transnationalist or global perspective
allows Chinese migration to be seen rather as a specific form of migration, in
which male family members circulate between home and distant locales, but
remain tied to their places of birth and the family members who remain there
(McKeown 2001: 412).
Adam McKeowns recent work (2001) has illuminated the conceptions of
family and household that made households amenable to this type of dispersion.
Sucheta Mazumdar (2003) has illustrated how a gendered division of labor made
it possible for men to leave, while women remained behind to play crucial roles
of economic reproduction and maintenance. Together with Madeline Hsu (2000)
and others, building on earlier work by James Watson (1975) and Woon Yuen-
feng (1984), these scholars show that the characterization of the Chinese
immigrant world in North America as a bachelor society is a gross oversimplification.
Even the migrant who went abroad while single belonged to a patrilineal family,
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and the maintenance of the patriline created strong pressures to return, even
briefly, to take a wife and produce heirs. As Hsu has shown so well, migration
was a family strategy, but it could threaten the very institution it was designed
to serve. Within this larger collective strategy, different members had different
roles to play, some to leave and some to stay.
Some previous scholarship on the Overseas Chinese divided family has already
noted tensions between family members, but the full implications of the different
roles played by different individuals, and the way individuals articulated their own
role in the larger family strategy, have yet to be fully elaborated. In an influential
formulation, Evelyn Nakano Glenn characterizes the divided family, for which she
uses the term split household family, as one in which economic production is
carried out by the absent migrant, while all other functions, including reproduction,
socialization, and most consumption, are done by the wife and relatives in the
village (Nakano Glenn 1983: 39). The families of Overseas Chinese migrants thus
resembled the families of sojourners and internal migrants at other times and
places in Chinese history, with some family members living away from their
household while remaining part of and concerned for the family economy and
estate (Cohen 1976).
Nakano Glenns formulation, however, oversimplifies the role played by family
members who remain at home. As scholars increasingly recognize, these family
members were not passive and dependent, but active participants in the migration
strategy. The ultimate goal of the strategy was typically not only maintenance but
also improvement of the familys economic and social position, and those who
remained behind in the household performed crucial roles in achieving this goal.
First, family members at home had primary responsibility for maintaining and
expanding the familys remittance-funded investments. Previous scholarship on
remittances has mainly been divided into two broad categories. On the one hand,
scholars such as Lin Jinzhi (1985) and Hamashita Takeshi (2000) have considered
how Overseas Chinese remittances were used to fund productive investments that
had a major impact on economic development in South China. On the other hand,
Paul Siu (1987), Hsu (2000) and others have focused on the importance of
remittances for consumption needs of family members back home, and have drawn
attention to disputes over distribution and spending. Besides quotidian consumption
and large-scale investment, it is also analytically useful to isolate a third type of
purpose to which remittances were put, namely investment in houses, lands, and
rental property, which was intended to improve the long-term financial situation
of the family. Family members at home had considerable power to make decisions
regarding such investments.
Family members at home were also largely responsible for maximizing the
familys reputation. The burden of this responsibility fell primarily on the women
of the household, who were charged with living up to the ideals of feminine
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46
behavior, while balancing the additional task of managing investments. The
conduct and loyalty of sons were also crucial to the familys reputation. This was
of particular concern when sons were adopted, a practice common in the Overseas
Chinese divided family because of the many obstacles to the migrants returning
to China to procreate.
Male migrants fears of cuckolding and betrayal were thus part of a larger
concern, that migration inadvertently weakened their authority as heads of
households, giving other family members rights and responsibilities and the power
to make important decisions themselves. These decisions could include both the
management of family investments and choices about personal conduct that could
damage the familys reputation. Male migrants noted that, in their absence, other
family members were freer to act in service of their own individual interests, and
their own perceptions of the family interest. This had implications for the family
and all of its members including the migrant himself. The larger family strategy
of migration left room for multiple individual articulations, and the contradictions
between these different articulations were the source of considerable tensions
within the Overseas Chinese divided family.
Emigrants Tell Tales
Tension between family members over the management of investments is a central
concern of documents in the surviving archives of the Overseas Chinese Affairs
Commission (OCAC) of Guangdong province from the period 194549. The
Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission had been established by the Republican
government in Guangzhou in 1926. In the Nanjing decade, its responsibilities
included the administration of entry and exit, encouragement of investment, and
promotion of education for Overseas Chinese and their descendants, as well as
propaganda efforts among communities abroad. After the end of the war with
Japan, a new responsibility was added to the Commissions brief. Communication
between the Overseas Chinese and their families back in China, which had been
largely cut off since the fall of Hong Kong in 1941, was restored. As news, letters,
and people began once again to flow back and forth, joy at the ensuing reunions
was commingled with distress at the tragic losses suffered in China. By some
estimates, in the famous Overseas Chinese homeland (qiaoxiang) of Taishan
county, more than 200,000 people, nearly a quarter of the total population, had
fled or died of starvation or as a result of the war by 1945. Overseas Chinese
migrants also learned of the grievous losses to their property in China. Crops,
homes, and furnishings had been seized by local bullies, Japanese collaborators,
and Republican officials returning after the end of the war. Starving dependents
had sold property to buy food. As one elderly Chinese-American wrote to a
Guangdong official, when he learned of the situation, the efforts of my blood
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and sweat for several decades were wiped away in an instant (Guangdong
Provincial Archives [hereafter GDPA] 3-4-132-600).
3
A special organ, Diwei
chanye chuli ju [Bureau for the Handling of Property Seized by Enemy and
Collaborators], was created to resolve the complex problem of restoring property
to its rightful owners. Depending on the circumstances under which a piece of
property had been lost, the Bureau was empowered to order it be returned
outright; redeemed by repayment of the amount for which it had been sold plus
the cost of any improvements; or leased by the current holder from the original
owner. The Guomindang, which had long acknowledged a special responsibility
to the Overseas Chinese, also hoped to secure their confidence and investment
for national reconstruction and economic development. The government therefore
ordered the OCAC to work with the Bureau to ensure a speedy resolution of claims
involving Overseas Chinese. In the summer of 1946 the Guangdong government
issued Instruction 3-50789, which laid out a framework for cooperation. The
Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission was empowered to certify that applicants
under the program were indeed Overseas Chinese, returned Overseas Chinese, or
Overseas Chinese dependents, that is, that they were eligible to apply under the
program, and to act on behalf of applicants who were unable to return to China,
by requesting local authorities to conduct further investigation, and by making
submissions to the Bureau and to the court system (Guangdong sheng dangan
guan 1991: vol. 2, 46465).
The first 558 files in the archives of the Commission in the Guangdong
Provincial Archives have been analyzed for this article.
4
Of these files, 55 relate
to matters other than property claims, such as requests for copies of documents,
appeals by indigent returned Overseas Chinese, and education for Overseas
Chinese dependents, and three involve corporate property owned by Overseas
Chinese organizations. Removing these extraneous files yields 500 files related to
individual or family property disputes. The nature of the dispute in each of the
500 cases can be broken down as follows: 117 cases relate to claims that a tenant,
unrelated to the applicant, has illegally occupied property, 27 cases relate to claims
that a government agency has illegally occupied property, and 71 cases concern
a fellow villager unrelated to the applicant who is accused of occupying property.
In 192 cases, the relationship between the applicant and the accused is not
mentioned. In the remaining 93 cases, the dispute is between family members.
(As will be discussed below, family members are generally involved in some way
even where the dispute itself is not between family members.) Of 476 files in
which the applicants identity can be determined, 316 are files initiated by
Overseas Chinese themselves, or their lawyers; 107 by returned Overseas Chinese;
six by corporate groups such as native-place associations; and 47 by family
members of Overseas Chinese. Of these 47, the majority is made up of appeals
by wives or widows of Overseas Chinese. There are also appeals launched by sons,
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48
uncles, and in one case each by a daughter, a mother, and a father of Overseas
Chinese. The geographical distribution of the claimants places of residence or
sojourning is indicated in Table 1. At the risk of anachronism, modern states are
used as the basic unit. For comparison, I have also looked at some 60 cases in
the files of the Fujian Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission, located in the
provincial archives and Jinjiang county archives.
A typical case consists of a letter from an individual Overseas Chinese to the
Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission explaining the situation; supporting letters
Table 1. Geographical distribution of claimants
Location # %
Kenya 1
Madagascar 3
Other Africa 1
Total Africa 5 1.0
Australia 9
New Zealand 3
Solomon Islands 1
Total Australasia 13 2.6
Britain 9
Germany 1
Total Europe 10 2.0
Chile 3
Colombia 1
Cuba 58
El Salvador 2
Guatemala 1
Mexico 7
Panama 2
Peru 12
Total Latin America and Caribbean 86 17.2
Canada 51
United States 109
Meizhou i.e. America 18
Total North America 178 35.6
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from Guomindang, native-place (tongxiang) or other Overseas Chinese organizations
in the place where the claimant lives; possibly correspondence from other
government offices such as the local police or the land registration bureau, and
drafts of the Commissions response to the claimant. If the claim seemed
persuasive, the Commission then made a supporting submission to the Bureau or
to the court, a copy of which is also included.
The archive consists entirely of correspondence to, from, and within a bureau-
cratic organ that was intermediary to the legal process; we have no record of the
outcome of a single case. But the purpose of reviewing these files is not to uncover
how the ROC (Republic of China) government dealt with property disputes
involving the Overseas Chinese. Rather, it is to find out what these files can tell
about the relationships between the members of divided families. In order to do
so, it is necessary to consider how these documents function as narratives. As
Natalie Zemon Davis has put it so well, archives can be thought of as fictions,
not in the sense of being feigned, but rather because they are formed, shaped, and
Table 1. Continued
Location # %
Burma 11
Cambodia 1
Hong Kong 4
India 4
Indonesia 23
Japan 3
Malaysia 26
Philippines 18
Singapore 20
Thailand 9
Vietnam 23
Nanyang i.e. Southeast Asia 15
Total Asia 157 31.4
Unknown or Unstated 51 10.2
Total 500 100
Notes:
1. The figure for Britain may be over-stated, as claimants used the term Yingguo to cover
the United Kingdom as well as its colonies.
2. The table does not distinguish between claimants residing in these countries and
returnees from these countries, or their relatives.
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50
molded into narratives (1987: 3). Zemon Davis uses her archive, letters of
remission for her study of sixteenth-century crimes, to uncover the larger mental
structures that conditioned notions such as law, mercy, and truth. My ambitions
here are more modest, simply to point out some of the conventions of the
narrative, and consider the implications for the topic at hand.
The verisimilitude of their appeals notwithstanding, Overseas Chinese had
strong incentives to lay claims under the process set up by the government. This
was not simply a matter of recovering lost property, but was also conditioned by
larger economic issues. According to a 1935 account, land prices in Taishan
typically rose and fell in tandem with overseas remittances. When the global
economy deteriorated in the early 1930s, Overseas Chinese lost their jobs and
could not even feed themselves, let alone send remittances. So buildings in the
city and land and houses throughout the four [surrounding] districts were all put
up for sale at a low price (Taishan huaqiao zazhi, 4.1 [Jan. 1935]: 16ff ). The
war, when remittances were cut off entirely, caused land prices to plunge even
further. But by the time the first claims were launched in late 1946 the spiral of
hyper-inflation that would contribute to the downfall of the Guomindang was
already underway. Articles in a village newsletter give a sense of the inflation of
property values. A shop which was sold during the war for 6,500 yuan was sold
again in October 1946 for just under four million. A dry goods shop purchased
in 1942 for 28,000 yuan was sold in November 1946 for 2.8 million (Ziyang
yuekan 8 [Dec. 1946]: 2122). Thus the prospect of recovering property, even
property which had been legitimately sold during the war, at the low wartime price
using devalued postwar currency probably encouraged many to launch a claim
with the OCAC.
5
Lawyers and pettifoggers were not unaware of the possibilities
offered by the process; several letters to the Commission come from Guangzhou
lawyers acting on behalf of clients abroad, and the frequent use of stock phrases
common to many narratives suggest their involvement in other cases as well. The
appeals are obviously structured in ways that the claimant or his lawyer believed
would strengthen the case. All claimants were ardent supporters of the 1911
revolution, the Guomindang, and the anti-Japanese effort. They had been forced
to go abroad by economic circumstance, there to toil diligently for many years
while remaining loyal Overseas Chinese. (It is not only historians who have
found it difficult to transcend the limitations of a nation-state based approach
to the Overseas Chinese.)
As in Zemon Davis account of remission letters, time is a crucial aspect of
the narrative of the OCAC archive. Wider historical events are drawn upon to
account for what happened, to justify motive, or to give coherence to the actions
(1987: 25). The exceptional times of the war, with communication cut off and
terrible devastation at home, are central to the stories being told. But closer
reading shows that some authors sought to take advantage of the process to resolve
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property disputes that really had little to do with the war. Luo Bingju, for example,
appealed to the Commission for help in recovering a mulberry orchard and fish
pond that his sister-in-law had sold without his permission in October 1947
(GDPA 3-4-141-32). Other sources show that the same kinds of property disputes
between family members that are found in the archive also occurred in more
ordinary times. For example, a newspaper account tells of Huang Xianhou, who
had died in the early Republican period. Two of his three sons had also died. In
1947, some cousins sought to sell Xianhous old house but were prevented when
a lineage elder stepped in and declared that the surviving son, who had long been
sojourning in Canada, was the legitimate heir to the estate (Daheng zazhi 123
[Oct. 1947]: 1415).
The cases show that migrants were well aware that their wives at home played
an important role, neglected in current scholarship, in the household economy.
Specifically, their unwaged labor supervised investments funded by Overseas
Chinese remittances. (Of course, this does not exhaust the contributions made
by women to the household economy in the divided family, a topic explored more
thoroughly by Hsu [2000] and Mazumdar [2003].) Though war increased the
danger, even in calmer times the long absence of Overseas Chinese made their
property vulnerable. Thus George Chong, who had lived for several decades in
Windsor, Canada, fell victim to local bullies who believed that I must either have
died in the violence and turmoil [of war], or in any case had no hope of returning
home, and had seized his lands and fields (GDPA 3-4-140-194). Wives and
family members at home could help secure property bought with remittances.
Their roles could be as simple but important as holding the land deeds which
confirmed legal title. As one migrant put it, even when the whole family was able
to move abroad, the government offices might at any time require that the deeds
be produced for inspection, so they were left behind (GDPA 3-4-141-160).
Virtually every case involving wives and property includes the phrase, Because
my wife held the deeds to the property . (for example GDPA 28-2-20-85;
GDPA 3-4-112-016). But womens roles went well beyond this. Some were
responsible for investment decisions. Migrant Wu Duxiu had purchased property
in Guangzhou city. Later his wife sold the property, and invested the proceeds
in a two-room house and paddy fields back in the village. She then used the rent
from the fields to support herself (GDPA 3-4-138-1). A similar example of women
making investment and management decisions was recalled in 1970 by May Low,
who grew up in a village near Guangzhou. In the absence of her father, her mother
saved what he sent back every month, enough to buy about thirty acres of rice
field, so we would always have food . She leased rice fields out to farmers and
they had some kind of agreement, each year, [on] how many barrels of rice they
would give back (Nee and de Bary 1972: 17376). The husband of a woman
nee Li returned briefly from the United States in 1938, bringing with him a vast
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52
sum. On his instructions, Li herself purchased a shop to support his descendants
(GDPA 28-2-20-94). One common pattern was the purchase of a multi-storey
building. Family members moved into the upper floors, and took responsibility
for managing the rental of the lower floors, which often included a shop-front.
This was the case for Zhao Yingqi, whose husband, a sojourner in the U.S., had
purchased a three-story foreign-style building (yanglou) in the heart of Guangzhou
into which she moved with her relatives after the war (GDPA 3-4-132-548).
Migrant family investments could be complex. Because remittances were
usually sporadic, the result of economic conditions and decisions made in far-off
lands, investment tended to be adventitious. Zou He, a successful shop-keeper
in Havana, purchased a building in Guangzhou in 1931, for HK$15,000, and then
built a second new building elsewhere in the city in 1936, on which he spent
HK$50,000. His family of ten relied on the rental income for their livelihood
(GDPA 3-4-171-149). One Indonesian Overseas Chinese instructed his wife to
handle rent collection on 17 different shops he had purchased over the years in
Guangzhou (GDPA 3-4-132-142). Families often diversified their investments
between the home village, nearby market towns, and Guangzhou city. Mrs Huang
nee Li lived in Taishan, but she managed the property and collected the rent
of a shop purchased by her husband in the city (GDPA 3-4-139-319).
Besides their wives, Overseas Chinese men also turned to their male relatives
at home to supervise investments funded by their remittances. A resident of the
Solomon Islands asked his uncle to purchase a shop in Chikuan using the money
he had sent back, and had his father collect the rent on the shop on his behalf
(GDPA 3-4-112-10). Liu Jinjiu despatched his son back to China from Thailand
in 1940, instructing him to use funds he provided to purchase farm property and
a site for a house, in preparation for when I grow old and return home to live
(3-4-139-93).
The power of women and sons to make decisions about family property was
evidently enshrined in customary law in qiaoxiang. As Li Jinwen, who had
purchased vast tracts of paddy fields after a successful career in Southeast Asia,
wrote in his letter to the Commission, according to village custom, when the
father goes abroad, the wife and sons have control over the management of
property (GDPA 3-4-132-553).
Despite their frequency, the cases show that such arrangements created
considerable tensions within Overseas Chinese divided families, when family
members at home took decisions regarding the family estate that were contrary
to the wishes of the migrant abroad. Typically, wives are blamed for selling
investments that they should not have. Liang Zhangs story provides an example.
His family engaged in a generational sojourning strategy. His father had sojourned
in the United States, returned to China, and bought property in Guangzhou before
his death. Zhang inherited the estate, but in 1938 he traveled to Madagascar to
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make his fortune, leaving behind his mother in charge of the Guangzhou property.
After the war, he learned that his mother had died in 1941, and his wife, being
foolish, was tricked into selling the property in 1942

(GDPA 3-4-143-49). A
similar case was that of Hu Zunhua, a 49-year-old native of Kaiping who was
sojourning in Canada. In 1930, he purchased a property in Guangzhou, which
was rented out. Eight years later his wife died, so he returned to China to take
a new wife, Huang Bixiu, before setting off back to Canada again. Initially, he
entrusted management of this property not to Huang but to his sister-in-law.
When Kaiping fell to the Japanese, the sister-in-law fled, handing over the deeds
to Huang before she left. Presumably Huang had no means of support, for, as Hus
appeal to the Commission reads, unexpectedly, since I have gone abroad Huang
Bixiu has behaved beyond the restraints of propriety, and because she held the
deeds to the property I myself established in Kaiping, took them to the market
and used them as collateral for loans, or sold them. In the end, Hu had turned
to his male relatives to restrain his untrustworthy wife (GDPA 28-2-20-85).
While women are blamed for being foolish, the common complaint against
sons is immorality. Lu Chongrun, a merchant from Xinhui, had been in Australia
since at least 1922. In 1937, he was able to bring his wife and second son to join
him, leaving behind his eldest son Shezhao to look after family interests. But
Shezhao did not follow an upright path. Taking drugs and gambling became his
habit. He sold off several plots of land belonging to his father in succession
(GDPA 2-2-94-61). When Lin Wen spent the money his emigrant father had given
him to invest in a business on prostitutes, his father declared him disinherited,
and eventually killed him with a knife (Taishan huaqiao zazhi 3 [1947]: 3940).
Though natural sons were often guilty of taking to the vices, a special opprobrium
was reserved for betrayal by adopted sons. Adoption was a common strategy for
dealing with the difficulties that the long absence of Overseas Chinese created for
procreation, transmission of the family line, and continuing the generational
exchange of support (Hsu 2000: 12123).
6
Adoptees were found both within
and without the kin group, and there were advantages and disadvantages to both
approaches. As Waltners (1990) study of adoption in Chinese history has shown,
nephews adopted from within the lineage would be more subject to the regulation
of other kin, but could not necessarily be trusted to abandon their birth parents
interests in favor of their adoptive parents. Adopting a son of another surname
from a distant village minimized this possibility. But it raised in turn the
possibility that other male kin would not recognize the adoption, and would claim
that their secondary rights of inheritance superseded those of the adoptee. This
was clearly the fear expressed by Lin Wende, who was living in Banff, Canada.
He had gone to Canada in 1933, leaving behind his mother, his wife, two sons
and at least one daughter, and had never returned. The family had been unlucky,
for both the sons had died, and with Lin now over 50, it seemed unlikely that
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54
another heir would be born. So his mother instructed him to adopt two boys to
carry on the family line. Lin worried that village rascals would take advantage
of the situation to bully or humiliate in some way, or spread rumours slandering
my family members. Since he was unable to return to China and go through the
formalities of appointing the boys as heirs, he deputized his son-in-law to swear
an affidavit and publish a notice in the newspapers declaring that his entire estate
was to be managed by these two sons (GDPA 3-4-137-149). There was also the
danger that adopted sons from outside the lineage could not be trusted, as Ma
Guangzhan found to his dismay. He returned from the United States in 1934,
and, being old, promptly adopted a son and then found him a wife. When
Guangzhan and his wife took a trip to Guangzhou, the son and daughter-in-law
stripped their home of everything of value, including money, jewelry and clothing,
and disappeared (GDPA 3-4-143-17).
Overseas Chinese men were especially anxious about the threats that adopted
sons posed to their interests when they were absent from China. Xie Ruixiang of
Taishan had long lived in Batam, Indonesia. In 1934 together with a maternal
uncle who had already returned to China, he built a house in their home village.
Ruixiang had adopted a son, whom he named Yazhen, to inherit my estate and
carry on the sacrifice. When the uncle died, Yazhen turned bad. There was no
one to restrain his behavior. He wasted money and frittered away the inheritance.
During the war, Yazhen sold the residence and disappeared with the proceeds
(GDPA 3-4-143-17). A similar case was that of Chen Guangbing, originally of
Taishan, now living in Penang. Chen came from the village of Shuibei, but his
investments were in Taishan town, being looked after by relatives. Unfortunately,
Chens adopted son had sold one shop in 1943, and another in 1945, in both
cases in violation of his fathers wishes. Interestingly, in his appeal to the OCAC,
Chen vowed that if he was able to recover the property, he would entrust it to
his daughter-in-law to manage until he was able to return himself (GDPA 3-4-
132-7).
7
Bitter experience had taught him that a relative by marriage could be
more trustworthy than ones own son.
The cases from Fujian show that emigrants from that province employed
similar measures to protect their interests at home, and ran into similar problems.
Migrants looked to their wives and male kin to manage their remittance-funded
investments, and claims to the OCAC were often ostensibly the result of the failure
of these relatives back home to look after emigrant interests satisfactorily. But the
cases from Fujian differ from those from Guangdong in that emigrants sometimes
entrusted their property to people with whom they had no kinship connections
whatsoever, something that never appears in the cases from Guangdong. For
example, when the parents of Zheng Mujin of Fuqing emigrated to Singapore in
1919, they entrusted the family estate, including several plots of land, an orchard,
and their home with its thirty pieces of furniture, to their neighbor to look after.
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55
It was clearly stated that on the day we returned to the village he should
completely hand them over to the owner. Having lost all of their property in
Southeast Asia during the war, the family decided to return to China and a life
of farming. In preparation, they asked a fellow villager, Mr Yu, who also happened
to be returning to the village, to begin the process of recovering their property.
Yu soon wrote with the sad news that the neighbor had died, but had entrusted
their property to another villager Lin Chundi. Lin had already torn down their
house and used the materials to build his own home, and claimed the rest of his
property as his own (Fujian Provincial Archives 1-6-1946).
8
It would be tempting
to connect this phenomenon to the longer history of emigration from Fujian and
the tradition of Fujian migration to Southeast Asia, where there were fewer
restrictions discouraging migrants from moving their entire household including
women. But the circumstances of the cases do not vary systematically with the
place where the absent male is sojourning, be it in North America, Southeast Asia,
or elsewhere. Moreover, it bears remembering that throughout this period, much
migration from Guangdong also went to Southeast Asia. Thus this discrepancy
cannot be accounted for by reference to migrant destination. It is also possible
that the apparent discrepancy is simply an artifact of the incomplete preservation
and opening of the archives. Alternatively, the causes may lie in differences in the
property regimes of the two places, differences not directly connected to migration,
but further research is needed to support this thesis.
There is a tone of disappointment in the appellants claims, but little sense of
outrage or indignation. Though their letters may ask, how could my family
members have done this? the question is rhetorical rather than an expression of
surprise. This convention suggests that conflicting expectations of appropriate
behavior was largely a given in the minds of our authors, and generally needed
no elaboration or explanation. As we have seen, the character of the relative is
often to blame, a wife who is foolish, or extravagant, behaving beyond the
restraints of propriety, a son who takes to the vices. The cases do sometimes offer
additional explanation that lays the blame on circumstance, or outsiders, and this
is where the wider context is most often invoked. Because remittances were cut
off by the war, relatives had been forced to sell property to survive. Huang Suos
wife and son had together sold 34 mu of his land in 1942, while he was in Canada.
Not only was this illegal, as he had not granted permission, but they had sold
the land at a low price. As he explains in his request for help, that with no
remittances, the two family members had to support themselves from the rental
income of the land. But bullies illicitly occupied the land, and there was no rent
to collect, so they were forced to sell the land (GDPA 3-4-142-59). The weakness
of relatives, especially women, in the face of bullies is also cited frequently. For
example, the head of the Havana Lin surname association writes on behalf of
member Lin Huakuan of Xinhui county about the theft of his family property
MI CHAEL SZONYI | FI DELI TY AND FRUGALI TY
56
back in Xinhui. Lin had been in Cuba for over 20 years, and by dint of hard work
had been able to remit funds for a fine residence in his village. During the war,
it had been rented out to the village government. After the war, two local bullies
had taken it over and were in the process of dismantling it and selling the tiles,
stone and lumber. The estate of his late brother, also a Cuban Overseas Chinese,
had fallen into the hands of these same ruffians. His only son had died shortly
after marriage, leaving behind only his young widow, nee Zhong. She is young
and foolish and has no experience of the world, so she has colluded with them
into selling the property [at a low price]. She has also been tricked into remarriage
to another (GDPA 3-4-140-48).
Other sources suggest other reasons why family members might disagree about
how best to manage investments funded by remittances. A village newspaper
reported the story of Zhu Kaizhun, an Overseas Chinese in the United States, who
before the war had purchased a property in the city. His wife was lonely at home
in the village, so she moved to Guangzhou to taste city life. Because the house
there did not accord with the spirit of Westernization of the new age, she had
it rebuilt, at a cost of 20 million yuan (Ziyang yuekan 15 [July 1947]: 14)
(Bourdieu might tell us she was seeking to convert material into social capital).
Whatever the explanation, what is common to all these disagreements is that
different family members articulated the larger family strategy differently according
to their individual interests. Family members at home had strong incentives to
limit the proportion of remittances used for investment, and to liquidate existing
investments to support consumption needs. This may be one sphere in which the
Overseas Chinese are distinct from other patterns of sojourning in Chinese history.
Migration, or transnational practice, created a distinctive regime of property
rights, in which family members especially wives and sons who remained behind,
could exercise de facto ownership of the household estate, and might dispose of
that estate in ways that the absent male perceived as contrary to the family, or
to his own, interests.
Tabloids Tell Tales
In Chinese popular media from the first half of the twentieth century, the
consequences of emigration for the home community were as devastating as they
were unexpected. Chinese-language newspapers, including both the Chinese
dailies in the United States and Canada as well as community and lineage
newspapers produced in South China for distribution to townsmen and relatives
abroad in North America, Southeast Asia and elsewhere, featured a steady stream
of stories showing how male absence led to madness, degradation, vice, and
adultery.
9
Incest is a common theme in articles found in these media reports over
the course of the first half of the twentieth century. It is reported between wives
J OURNAL OF CHI NESE OVERSEAS | V1 N1
57
and adopted sons, and between concubines and natural or adopted sons. Chen
Mourongs story broke in the American and Canadian Chinese-language media,
but similar tales can also be found in local publications. In a Taishan community
magazine, the story An adopted son commits incest with his mother and bullies
his wife, tells how the faithless wife of an Overseas Chinese man arranged a
marriage for her adopted son in an attempt to cover up their illicit affair (Xinning
zazhi 27.6 [1927]: 3738).
10
Mrs. Huang adopted a 29-year-old son after her
wealthy husband died in the United States. He tended to her when she fell sick,
bringing her medicine to her sickbed. When a single man and a single woman
face one another in the bedroom, the fires of desire prove hard to quench .
Though they were called mother and son, in fact they were no different from
husband and wife. Concerned about village opinion, the two decided to flee to
Hong Kong with Huangs dead husbands wealth (DaHan gongbao, 19 May 1931).
Incest is also reported between fathers of absent Overseas Chinese and their
daughters-in-law, as in the case of a Chaozhou man who went abroad shortly after
his marriage, leaving his young bride and his widowed but lascivious father behind.
When the wife one day forgot to lock the bedroom door behind her when she
took her nap, her father-in-law crept in and molested her. After that, morning
and night they made like husband and wife. Village opinion was particularly
outraged when the father-in-law threw the traditional feast on the one-month
anniversary of their illegitimate child (DaHan gongbao, 15 May 1920).
11
Incest
is also reported between wives of absent Overseas Chinese and other male relatives,
like the uncle of Rong Ying of Taishan, who took advantage of his nephews
sojourn in Southeast Asia to seduce his young wife (Shijie ribao, 6 July 1931).
Newspaper accounts of incest among divided families are representations, not
social facts, so what they reveal to us is not necessarily a sexually licentious society
but rather a heightened concern about sexual transgression when male emigrants
are absent from the home. The sexual license of wives whose husbands are
sojourning as merchants or scholars is an old trope in Chinese literature. But the
frequency with which such stories appear in publications by and for Overseas
Chinese, show that emigrant concern about the promiscuity of wives and to a
lesser extent sons back home in China was particularly strong, and had distinctive
aspects. A 1926 article in a lineage magazine is typical. Fang Fujue received letters
from his fellow villagers about his wifes infidelity. In the early morning hours,
she allowed working-class men into her rooms, where they stayed concealed for
days (Suyuan yuekan 4 [1926]: 2122).
12
A more ambiguous article, which seems
to equate rape and adultery, appeared in San Franciscos Shijie ribao on 2 May
1931. The young men of Ma Jinlongs village, taking advantage of the fact that
there are only the old and the weak at home, went to his house and fulfilled
their desires with his young wife. Angered that her husband esteemed profit and
thought nothing of being absent, she did not resist.
MI CHAEL SZONYI | FI DELI TY AND FRUGALI TY
58
Hsu (2000: 107) has discussed the range of supports used to enforce fidelity
and make it more difficult for the wife to undermine the absent husbands efforts
to enhance the familys social status and honour. These included gossip and
reporting of behavior to husbands abroad, as well as more active punishments
such as exile from the village. Some villages established special patrols to enforce
chastity. According to one 1947 article, a village teacher, observing that all of
the women were Gold Mountain wives, who would occasionally have lascivious
intentions, organized the youth of the village into a golden net to catch married
[people who took] lovers (Taishan huaqiao zazhi 10 [1947]: 50). But this
heightened regulation of female sexuality could backfire against the effort to secure
property. A 1934 report in the Xinning zazhi tells of an Overseas Chinese wife
whose husband sent back considerable remittances. She began an affair with a
younger man, generating much gossip. After he was spotted going into her house
to spend the night, villagers surrounded the house, and rousted him from the
closet where he was hiding. They then dragged the couple off to the ancestral hall,
where it was decided to fine both of the adulterers. Whether or not the wifes
household had other sources of income besides remittances is hardly relevant; her
husband surely must have seen himself as paying for the privilege of being
cuckolded (Xinning zazhi 23 [1934]: 58).
The Link Between Fidelity and Frugality
In the previous sections of this article, we have seen on the one hand how disputes
could arise between family members, especially absent husbands and their wives
back home in China, over the disposition of family property, and on the other
how migration gave rise to fears and heightened regulation of the sexuality of
family members who remained in China. These two phenomena were linked. The
sojourning venture was a success when it improved the material and social status
of the family. This meant not only shepherding wealth, that is, being frugal, but
also conforming to social expectations, the most important of which was fidelity.
Expectations of conformity to moral standards meant that their economic roles
aside, wives of sojourners had an important social role to play in fulfillment of
the family strategy: they had to be virtuous. But being virtuous required adequate
material capital. Women whose husbands were absent and who were unable to
support themselves and their families faced a double bind. They could sell off
investments, violating the principle of frugality. Or they could pursue options
that violated the principle of fidelity. Remarriage was one such option, one that
often led in turn to the loss of family property. The brother of Guo Zhuansen
had been in Southeast Asia for 40 years when his wife He Ada sold his two houses,
remarried, and disappeared (GDPA 2-2-93-186). In the most desperate circumstances,
prostitution was another strategy. A 1932 newspaper story tells of a woman nee
J OURNAL OF CHI NESE OVERSEAS | V1 N1
59
Huang, whose husband had emigrated to Southeast Asia 20 years earlier, and had
not sent word, or money, for many years. Not knowing if he was alive or dead,
she was compelled into prostitution. Eventually her husband returned, and finding
his house shuttered, tracked his family down in Guangzhou and brought them
back to the village. He hoped to make a fresh start, but this was something local
custom could not accept, and he had no choice but to leave. His familys overseas
venture had failed because of his wifes perceived lack of virtue, which was no less
forgivable for its being desperate (Louguang 4 [1932]: 27).
13
Huangs decision was
common during wartime, when remittances were cut off. During the drought of
1943, merchants established a temporary market in Taishan for the sale of
impoverished women, at which the 16-year-old daughter of an Overseas Chinese
man in the United States was sold for 100 catties of rice. An appeal for charity
by Taishan natives living elsewhere in China estimated that some 500 women had
been sold into prostitution in this way.
14
Another case in which a wifes turn to
prostitution undermined the whole migration effort is that of Chen Zhongyi,
whose husband Mr Lei returned to the United States shortly after their marriage.
She became a prostitute, and later formed relations with a second Mr Lei. When
the first Mr Lei returned home after the war, he found her pregnant. Worried
about local gossip, he took her to Hong Kong, where she gave birth to a baby
boy. Husband Lei had originally hoped to raise the child as if he was his own son,
but the baby turned out to look just like the second Mr Lei. So husband Lei
drowned the baby, and decided that they should both leave the village forever.
Within a few months of their arrival in the United States, however, Chen Zhongyi
had left him (Zhixiao fengqin yuekan [1948]: 4546).
Such extreme cases tell only part of the story. The link between frugality and
fidelity was a more general phenomenon. Overseas Chinese male concern about
the sexuality of the wives at home and their concern about the ability of the wives
to dispose of property were both expressions of a broader concern about the
possibility that differences of interest within the family could undermine the
dreams of the migrant and the larger family strategy. It was not only wives who
posed this danger; the OCAC cases are full of examples where siblings, parents,
or children sold off the property paid for by hard-earned remittances. This power
on the part of family members at home helps explain why stories of incest, illicit
sexual relations between family members who remained behind, appear so often
in the popular media, and must have struck such fear into the hearts of the
Overseas Chinese. The taboo of incest was a concrete articulation of the danger
that different family members might form communities of interests that thereby
strengthened their ability to shape the family strategy against the wishes of the
migrant himself. The relatives who colluded to sell remittance-funded property,
like the image of the relatives who became lovers, demonstrated that the family
strategy of migration was a contested one. The migrant male was only one of a
MI CHAEL SZONYI | FI DELI TY AND FRUGALI TY
60
larger group of individuals who had the power to make choices that affected the
outcome of the family strategy. These individuals had their own perspectives on
how best to serve family interests, and on the appropriate balancing of individual
and family interests, such perspectives being frequently in conflict with those of
the absent migrant. Family members at home were more likely to liquidate
investments than the migrant, and, for any number of reasons, more likely to
pursue alternatives to fidelity. What the one saw as unavoidable concession to
current consumption needs, the other saw as reckless extravagance. What the one
chose as the only response to financial difficulties or lack of companionship, the
other saw as licentiousness. Of course, this article tells only half the story of the
tensions between family members over the long-term migration strategy. A more
fully transnational perspective would also take into account how the activities of
the male migrant outside China conflicted with the strategies of family members
at home. Male profligacy and sexual transgression must have been as troubling
to wives and sons at home as female profligacy and sexual transgression were to
husbands and fathers abroad.
15
This argument adds to a growing literature on the way in which migration was
gendered, that is, was experienced differently by men and women. While in the
Chinese case it was mostly men who migrated, women did much more than simply
wait and squabble over the remittances sent back by the husband. Mazumdar
(2003) has shown that the well-known arguments that racism and discriminatory
immigration laws made emigration for Chinese women unappealing, and either
impossible or economically irrational, are incomplete. Male migration was part
of a deliberate division of labor wherein the waged and unwaged work of women
at home was what made male migration possible. The case records reveal a
heretofore unrecognized dimension of that division of labor, with wives and other
relatives who did not migrate playing an important if contentious role in the
management of investments in China.
This finding also has implications for the longstanding debate on whether
migration had a modernizing or a conservative impact on the home community.
The basic positions in this debate were laid out long ago by Chen Ta (1940), who
saw the Overseas Chinese as the source and route for modern ideas to enter the
village, on the one hand, and Watson (1975) and Woon (1984), who suggested
that the greater wealth of the Overseas Chinese enabled them more easily to fulfill
traditional Chinese patriarchal ideals, on the other. Scholars such as Linda Reeder
(2002) have noted that migration affected Sicilian women who remained behind
by allowing them to become involved in wider spheres of activity, as consumers,
property managers, and citizens. In the case of early twentieth-century Chinese
migration, there is indeed evidence of the expanding scope of female activity in
emigrant communities, with women serving as effective heads of households, and
participating in the economy and in local society in new ways as they managed
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61
family investments. However, this was not necessarily liberating, for it brought
with it new expectations and limits on female behavior. In other words, emigration
created new opportunities for women, but also new forms of patriarchy. In some
ways, the transformation of family relations discussed here parallels broader
changes in the modern Chinese family, but while this expansion of roles coupled
with new forms of restriction may be broadly applicable to Chinese women in
the twentieth century in general, the types and timing of expanded opportunity,
and the new types of regulation, were specific to Overseas Chinese emigrant
communities.
A similar nexus between male emigration, a property rights regime of de facto
female control over the household estate and investments, and heightened anxiety
about female sexuality has operated in other times and places besides early
twentieth-century China. Leslie Page Mochs account, based on the work of Abel
Poitrineau, of the eighteenth-century circular migration system linking the central
highlands of France to Spain, resembles the systems discussed here in several ways.
There too, a strategy of male emigration intended to support and expand rural
holdings gave rise to painful and delicate problems for migrants families (Page
Moch 2003: 87). Linda Reeders study (2002) of cyclical male migration from
Sicily shows clearly how the absence of the husbands empowered women and
forced renegotiations of patriarchy, and also gave rise to media representations of
infidelity and family breakdown. The growing appreciation that despite normative
representations of family members, male and female, migrating together and
assimilating into the societies of their new homes, cyclical and predominantly male
migration characterized the movement of many communities to North America,
from Europe as well as Asia, suggests that the links discussed here may be of
broader comparative significance.
The case records of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission, and the stories
of sexual transgression in the media, describe exceptional situations, but reflect
a more general problem. Both testify to the complexities of family life in the
Overseas Chinese divided family. Family members had to be trusted, but they
often betrayed that trust. This is true of course of every family, but the stakes could
be higher in the divided family, and the possibilities for betrayal greater. While
migration was a strategy intended to raise the material and social status of the
family, it was a risky strategy. The individual members of the family interpreted
that strategy through the lens of their individual aspirations and survival needs,
and this frequently led to conflict. The story of the hard life and racist
victimization of Chinese immigrants abroad is now increasingly well known. The
standard explanation is that they were willing to accept these hardships because
of the returns they could yield at home. It is analytically crucial to consider the
Chinese migrant transnationally, as a member, albeit a physically absent one, of
a family with other members in China, and often in other countries as well. Only
MI CHAEL SZONYI | FI DELI TY AND FRUGALI TY
62
then is it possible to see that alongside the difficulties they faced abroad, the
Overseas Chinese were also subject to a distinct set of challenges back in China,
challenges arising from the reshaping of the family through transnational practice.
Notes
1
Research for this paper was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada. Versions of the paper were presented at seminars at the Universities
of British Columbia, Western Ontario, Huron College, and Harvard, and at the 18th
International Associations of Historians of Asia, and I appreciate the comments from
participants at each. Chen Yande was kind enough to share materials from the Fujian
provincial archives. I am also very grateful for the research assistance of Hu Haifeng, Vivian
Wei Liu and Wu Yuqing, and the comments of Tim Brook, Chang Pin-tsun, James Flath,
Belinda Huang, Francine McKenzie and Sue Morton, as well as the anonymous reviewers
for the Journal. The work of Belinda Huang (1998) in which I first learned of the story
of Chen Mourong, has been very helpful in formulating the ideas of this paper.
2
Chinese women typically retain their surname at marriage. In these sources, unmarried
women are generally referred to by the name of their father, in the form Xs daughter,
and married women by their husbands , in the form Ys wife surnamed X (Y X shi), and
only rarely by their own personal name. The form Ys wife surnamed X is translated here
as Mrs Y, nee X. Chinese newspapers of the time often substituted the pseudonymous
character mou, or so-and-so, for one of the characters in individual male names. Thus
Chen Mourong is more precisely translated as, A man surnamed Chen, with Rong as the
second character in his given name. For the sake of felicity, in this article I simply
incorporate mou in the transliteration of the name.
3
In references to the case files, the first three numbers refer to the catalogue reference for
the file that contains the case. In some of the files, individual case numbers have been added
on paper slips glued to the first page of the case. The fourth number is either the case
number, if one is given, or the page number in the file, if there is no case number.
4
Research was interrupted when the archives were closed prior to relocation. The collection
of archive is considerably larger than the 500 cases examined, but a cursory review of later
files suggests these cases are broadly representative.
5
My thanks to Peter Perdue for pointing this out.
6
Young boys could be readily purchased in qiaoxiang communities; local magazines report
many cases like that of the ten-year-old son of a Taishan cart puller, who was sold by his
maternal grandmother in 1935 for one hundred yuan (roughly equivalent at the time to
10 piculs of rice, or 20 catties of pork) (Xinning zazhi 32.6 [1935]: 28). Sales of children
seems to have risen and fallen in a cycle with overseas Chinese remittances. A 1946 Taishan
magazine reported that remittances to the Siyi region, which includes Taishan county, had
been very high since the end of the war. With insufficient outlets for the money, many
Overseas Chinese families had been purchasing children to be adopted sons. Criminals
kidnapped the children from their parents and brought them to the market to be sold. A
boy under the age of ten could fetch one million yuan. Seven or eight children were said
to be disappearing each day (Taishan huaqiao zazhi 15.9 [Dec. 1946]: 25).
7
For a story of an adopted son illicitly selling property from the newspapers, see Xinning
zazhi, 39.3 (Feb. 1947): 53.
J OURNAL OF CHI NESE OVERSEAS | V1 N1
63
8
A second distinctive element to the cases from Jinjiang in Fujian is that in many cases the
property which the plaintiff wished to recover was a son or daughter who had been sold
out of desperation during wartime. For example, Mrs Cai, whose husband Chen Youde lived
in Surabaya, relied entirely on his remittances. When these were cut off, she sold the familys
furnishings, clothes, and jewelry. In early 1945, she was driven to sell their five-year-old
son Chen Zu to a man named Wu Pan. After the war, Chen tried to redeem the boy, but
Wu refused, and Chen speculated that Wu sought to profit by reselling the boy (Jinjiang
municipal archives, 54-100-29; similar examples include 54-100-11, 54-113-34, and 54-
116-80).
9
On the latter genre, see Zheng and Wu (1982: 45488), and Hsu (2000: ch. 5).
10
Another example is Xinning zazhi, 19.27 (1927): 19.
11
Other examples are found in DaHan gongbao, 4 Dec. 1922 and 24 Apr. 1929.
12
Suyuan yuekan was a magazine jointly published by the Lei, Fang and Kuang lineages.
13
For another example, see DaHan gongbao, 11 Mar. 1929.
14
Cited in Kangzhan shiqi Taishan de sanci lianghuang, Taishan bao, 4 Dec. 2001 and
11 Dec. 2001.
15
Another limitation is that all of the migrants discussed here were among the more successful
Overseas Chinese, for they had at least managed to remit sufficient funds home to acquire
property. They had many fellows who were not even able to accomplish this goal. But the
basic tensions outlined here must have been present in a different form even in the families
of these migrants.
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