“Music hath charms but no greater charm can be found than in Penang Nyo Nya Bangsawan by a party of Chinese Ladies of Penang.”
The advertisement in the Dec 21,1926 issue of Straits Echo, a newspaper in Penang, indeed promised much. Performing on three consecutive nights, the new amateur group would tackle three different plays at the Drury Lane Theatre Hall.
To modern-day audiences, nothing may seem amiss in the old advertisement – just another performing arts group making its foray into the rich cultural scene of the early 20th century Pearl Of The Orient.
On closer inspection, however, noteworthy facts are derived.
First, the production featured an all- female cast, a first for the Peranakan community that closely guarded women in the home setting.
Coming out with a bang, these women would cross-dress as males in a reversal of roles that had before then seen men taking the roles of women on Baba stages everywhere.
The performances were also altruistic with all proceeds going to charity – a norm in Peranakan stage events of the day.
This was a reflection of the Peranakan community which was and still is a melting pot of culture, originating from Hokkien traders from China’s Fujian province who married local women in the Malay Archipelago.
In essence, the advertisement, one of several that have been reprinted in Eclectic Cultures For All: The Development Of The Peranakan Performing, Visual And Material Arts In Penang, is a fitting representation of this new book, featuring writings by Prof Dr Tan Sooi Beng, Dr Sarena Abdullah and Grace Choong Ai May.
Its list of women authors offer a historical narrative of the blending of cultures.
Tan edited the book, and set the editorial direction. From cartoons to rhymes, weddings to oil paintings and kerosang (or kerongsang/brooches) to airplane hairstyles, the book explores the unique ways the Baba Nyonya channelled their creative expressions until World War II and the Japanese Occupation hit Malaya’s shores.
From then, it looks beyond to the current revival of the culture in today’s Malaysia.
Porous borders
Eclectic Cultures For All is a publication three decades in the making.
Tan, an ethnomusicologist and researcher from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), first embarked on her studies on bangsawan – traditional Malay opera and theatre – in the 1980s.
“I was working with a group of Malay musicians, moving around with them for their performances.
“These musicians actually played for Peranakan events, with the Peranakan community employing them to perform for weddings, ronggeng (Javanese dances) and in dondang sayang groups (Portuguese folk music troupes that often including Malay pantun).
“So, this is how I got introduced to the Peranakan culture in Penang, ” says Tan.
Peranakan, Tan explains, soon identified themselves as British subjects, learnt English and adopted many Western customs.
This was on top of the already diverse cultural interludes resulting from the inter-racial marriages, which brought together Chinese and local customs, some of the latter including Thai, Burmese and Dutch East Indies traditions.
“I found the Peranakan culture most exciting because they blended a lot of cultures. And this mixture attracted me because in Malaysia, you cannot put strict borders (on race), because we are always mixing.
“When we interact, we are always mixing. I think crossing borders is something in-built for people in the Malay Archipelago, ” says Tan.
Around the turn of the millennium, Eclectic Cultures For All started to come together with Tan supervising artist Choong in her PhD studies on Penang Baba Nyonya costumes and accessories from the early to mid 1900s.
Tan then teamed up with USM School of the Arts deputy dean Sarena for a university grant to produce the book, to be published under Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia.
Music, dance and cartoons
Armed with decades of collected material in the form of newspaper clippings, face-to-face interviews with members of the early Penang Peranakan community and an impressive collection of 78rpm records (flat disc records made from just before the 1900s to the late 1950s), Tan sat down to produce four chapters of the book.
First analysing Chinese street festivals, wedding ceremonies and music indulged by the Peranakan, Tan then writes about the various Straits Chinese troupes that took to the stage starting from 1919 when the first amateur group in the state – Penang Baba Bangsawan – was created.
She also explores the different types of performing arts the Peranakan practised, from dondang sayang, ronggeng, joget and keronchong to the foxtrot, rumba and jazz.
Her writing includes an impressive number of interviews with around 30 Babas and Nyonyas, conducted from the late 1980s to more recent times, which adds authenticity to the publication.
“I tried to capture the voices of the people that we were writing about and use their words (to tell the story).
“Unfortunately, a number of these interviewees had already passed away by the time the book was completed, ” she says.
In an interesting study on historical texts, Tan dedicates one chapter solely to cartoons drawn by Peranakan artist Yan Kee Leong and others between the late 1920s and the 1930s.
Through drawings and caricatures published in Malaya Tribune and Straits Echo, the concerns, hardships and complaints of the community are laid plain in this unique social commentary of colonial times.
From the preferential treatment of the tin industry at the expense of rubber production to the hardships of the unemployed, reactions on foreign intervention and the consequences of war, this collection of cartoons provides an uncommon and eye-opening depiction of the society and government of the day.
“(While doing research in the 1980s) I spent months and months in the library looking at microfilm. I looked at newspapers from the 1890s until the post-war period in the 1950s.
“Now, there are digitalised versions of certain newspapers so you can just key in search words, but back then, I had to go through each paper one by one. And I didn’t trust anyone to help me with it because I was scared they would miss out interesting things so I did it all myself, ” says Tan candidly.
Kebayas, kerongsang and cucuk sanggul
Choong, a fifth-generation Peranakan, explores the evolution of Peranakan clothing, jewellery and accessories and how these link to sociocultural transformations within the society from the 1900s to 1960s.
From baju panjang or th’ng-sah to a shorter tay-sah, and cheongsams to the constantly changing baju kebaya, Choong analysed over 2,000 old photos from Baba Nyonya families, private collectors and friends, collected for her research into the topic that started two decades ago when she embarked on her first degree.
“A few hundred came from my own family’s collections including those of my aunts and grandaunts. It was difficult to source the rest of the pictures as normally, you need to know the families personally for them to share photographs with you.
“The photos I managed to collect came from about five or six Peranakan families and a number of my other friends, ” says Choong, who is an accomplished artist and art educator.
The decline of the Peranakan culture has been noted to have started after the Japanese Occupation as many of the industries the Baba were connected with had collapsed during the war.
As a result, Nyonya began venturing outside the home after the war to work in order to help support their families.
Tan and Choong say from this era, the Peranakan began formally identifying themselves more and more as “Chinese” for economic and social reasons.
Choong, who has Peranakan blood on both sides of her family, says this is one reason why young people in the community today have little clue that they are of Peranakan descent.
“I have always identified myself as Peranakan because when we were small and went back to my grandparents’ houses in Macallum Street and Malay Street, the older generation were all in sanggul and kebaya.
“It was very normal for us. But a lot of young people are not aware or just don’t think about it that much. So, when I ask my students and even adult friends to think back or look at old photographs of their families, some realise that they are also Peranakan, ” she says.
Portraits and paintings
One person who suspects that she may have some Peranakan ancestors from her family in Melaka is Sarena, the third contributor of Eclectic Cultures For All. Sarena, who is also a USM senior lecturer, says Tan had sought her out when the latter was looking for someone who could analyse local visual art.
“I’m the art historian on campus who specialises in Malaysian art. I have to say, I was a bit apprehensive at first because only (artist) Sylvia Lee Goh is well-known in Peranakan art so there was a lot of research to do to find out who else was out there in the Peranakan art circle, ” says Sarena.
As part of her work on the book, Sarena visited museums and exhibitions in Melaka and Singapore, where, aside from Penang, the Baba Nyonya have had a strong historical presence.
She presents her research in two chapters of the book. The first focuses on visual artworks done by three Straits Chinese artists – Low Kway Song, Yong Mun Sen and Tay Hooi Keat, who all lived in the timeline of exactly a century from 1889.
Much of their artwork concentrated on portraits and as well as oil paintings depicting local scenes and landscapes.
Her second chapter moves to contemporary times as Sarena explores Peranakan imagery by modern artists – both Peranakan and not.
One interesting note about the chapters is that men were largely the subject of Straits Chinese artwork in the olden days – with portraits being commissioned by the wealthy – while in more recent times, there is a tendency for Peranakan depictions to centre upon the Nyonya.
From colourful drawings of food, cooking and sewing, those aiming to capture the Peranakan culture tend to focus more on the domestic life of Peranakan women as representations of the culture as a whole.
Related to this, Sarena says there seems to be both internal and external pressures to “franchise” the Baba Nyonya culture into one that depicts the Nyonya, in particular, to possess static traits and asserted elements.
“Certain skills like sewing and embroidery... though we cannot see this type of activity happening anymore, we always associates certain skills with the Nyonya and these have become popular subject matters (to those depicting the Peranakan in artwork), ” she says.
Merging of cultures
While the Peranakan culture was hit hard during the Japanese Occupation and greatly dwindled after World War II, there have been efforts to revive, preserve and move the culture forward.
Tan says yearly Peranakan conventions began in the 1980s, pushed forward by Datuk Seri Khoo Keat Siew, the Straits Chinese Penang Association president at the time, and the advancement of technology that allows people to easily source information on the past. Their ancestry has sparked a revival of interest in Peranakan culture.
Moving forward, she adds, it is important to not try to “freeze” the culture from a specific period instead of allowing it to naturally grow and change.
“I would like to emphasise that Peranakan culture is eclectic and is always evolving. This is important because we live in a society that is racially divided and we are told that we have to identify ourselves as ‘Malay, Chinese, Indian or Others’.
“At the ground level, there is a lot of cultural mixing and people cross boundaries all the time, ” says Tan, adding that the country’s continuous search for a national identity should encompass the merging of cultures.
“The Peranakan are very inclusive of other cultures and I think this shows that people on the ground are open to other cultures, as long as they are not forced to accept something as ‘national’. So, in our search for a national identity and national culture in a polarised society, we have a lot to learn from the Baba and Nyonya, ” she concludes.
Eclectic Cultures For All: The Development Of The Peranakan Performing, Visual And Material Arts In Penang is available at selected bookstores nationwide.
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