Home > Events > Fidelity and Frugality: Divided Chinese families in Southeast Asia and southern China before 1949

Most of the millions of Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were male.  But these men almost universally belonged to families back in China, and these families persisted despite their absence.  Using evidence from families where a male family member was working in Burma, Indonesia, Singapore or Vietnam, as well as North America, this paper explores how cyclical male migration to Southeast Asia led to conflicts over family property, an issue neglected by current scholarship.  It links these tensions to the new managerial roles for women and other family members in the ancestral village that resulted from male emigration.  Last, it ties these tensions to heightened concern on the part of men in Southeast Asia about the sexual regulation of their wives and children back in China.

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Cost: Free and open to the public.

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For more information please contact

Barbara Gaerlan
Tel: 310-206-9163
cseas@international.ucla.edu
www.international.ucla.edu/cseas/

Sponsor(s): Center for Southeast Asian Studies