Abstract
Migrants are contradictory subjects for nations. They negate the integrity of the nation-state, yet the nation-state must define itself with reference to the migrant as other (Dirlik, 2004: 491). The transnational turn in the social sciences brought greater attention to the study of migrants, foregrounding this contradiction. Questions regarding how nations simultaneously incorporate and marginalize migrant subjects now trouble the social sciences. Kelvin E.Y. Low brings these concerns into the field of social memory studies with Remembering the Samsui Women: Migration and Social Memory in Singapore and China.
In the late 1990s, memory studies pushed beyond the conceptualization of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ defined by a constructed common past (Anderson, 1991). Interrogating the rise and decline of the memory-nation, Pierre Nora (1989) opened the way for thinking about the many ‘sites of memory’. Memory scholars have since refigured the nation as a practical category that draws on a multitude of lived realities and social memories (Brubaker, 1996), explored the strategic use of history and memory as a political act central to nation-building (Olick and Robbins, 1998), examined the instrumentalization of social memories (Bell, 2003) and personal narratives (White, 1999) in the crafting of national identities, and interrogated how private memory can both challenge and be complicit with public memory (Sarkar, 2006). Remembering the Samsui Women draws on these rich theoretical insights while pushing the field to overcome methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002) by bringing together memory and migration studies to explore how migrant pasts complicate their incorporation into new nations (Glynn and Kleist, 2012).
From the 1920s to the 1940s, women from Samsui District in China’s Guangdong Province migrated to work in Singapore. These women are popularly remembered for laboring in the construction industry and by their distinct livery: red-cloth headdresses, dark apparel, and shoes made from tire rubber. Remembering the Samsui Women excavates the layers of social memory that surround these women to examine how memory-making operates at different social registers that impinge on one another. This impingement, which Low theorizes as ‘entanglement’, sits at the heart of his analysis (p. 16). The book dissects the entanglements of memory-making at four registers: (1) between diachronic socio-political processes that underpinned Samsui women’s migration from Southern China to Singapore, which are referenced across memory, history, and historiography texts; (2) between state, popular, and personal memory makers; (3) between the local, national, regional, and transnational geographies of memory; (4) between memories past and present. By critically reading a diverse body of memory texts, including national celebrations, exhibits, newspapers, documentaries, children’s books, photographs, paintings, souvenirs, and life stories, for such entanglements, Low produces a multi-dimensional and theoretically nuanced reading of Samsui women memories in Singapore and China.
Remembering the Samsui Women explores how social acts of memory-making are socio-political acts whereby the state and public appropriate the past to serve the needs of the present. Low probes how state and popular memory makers strategically incorporate Samsui women as national heroes to demonstrate social memory-making as a border-making process and reveal the transnational dimensions of memory-making as state-making. State and popular memory texts depict Samsui women as independent feminists and resourceful pioneers, emphasizing their labor in the construction industry as a contribution to nation-building. By glorifying the realm of productive labor, these texts eclipse the realm of reproductive labor. The narratives homogenize and misrepresent Samsui women’s lives, obscuring their work in less glorified economic sectors and erasing rich kinship relations that defined their lives. Low argues that such socio-political acts of remembering constitute acts of ‘dismemberment’ (pp. 59–60) because they fracture, freeze, and incorporate only the migrant subjects and aspects of their lives amenable to nation-making. Such narrative strategies of incorporation and exclusion reveal how states politically, socially, and economically manage different migrant groups (p. 207).
Chapter 1 contextualizes Samsui women’s migration from southern China to Singapore within three entangled moments of social, economic, and political transformation. First, the mid-19th to mid-20th century British imperial expansion into Eastern Asia brought growing diplomatic, commercial, and economic interdependence between south China and the Nanyang (South Seas) region. Britain’s economic development of Singapore, the British Empire’s opening of China, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States converged to produce mass Chinese labor migrations and channel them toward Singapore. Second is the politicization of overseas Chinese during China’s 1911 Revolution, which combined with economic downturn to provoke Singaporean fears of the Chinese as destabilizing social elements. Deploying new modes of colonial governance, the Singaporean state passed the 1933 Aliens Ordinance Act to restrict the entry of Chinese men. Finally, the decline of the silk industry in southern China during the 1920s–1940s channeled the movement of women into productive labor sectors, a survival strategy adopted by poor rural families, toward Singapore.
Chapters 2 through 5 deconstruct state, public, and personal memories. Chapter 2 explores the politics of memory-making for three dominant narratives crafted by the postcolonial Singaporean state: a master narrative depicting Samsui women as pioneers who labored to build the nation, a misrepresentation of Samsui women as Singapore’s first feminists, and a later depiction of Samsui women as aged, helpless, and deserving of charity. Driven by the need to construct a shared national past, the state depicts Samsui women as model citizens who embody the ideal national values of frugality, diligence, resilience, and independence. During the 1980s, when the state restructured Singapore into a tourist hub within the global economy, these memories underwent ‘merchandization’ as Samsui women became the subjects of tourism history (pp. 69–70). The chapter demonstrates how state-crafted memories serve the state-making needs of the present.
Chapter 3 explores popular memories in Singapore and China. Low examines how popular memory narratives valorize ordinary lives by crafting intimate portrayals, raising questions of justice, and employing emotive narrative techniques. These memories simultaneously affirm and contradict the state’s master narratives, revealing popular memory as a site of contestation, negotiation, and appropriation between personal and state memories. This is a process with transnational dimensions. In China, popular memory makers create a local pioneer ‘master commemorative narrative’ that celebrates Samsui women as successful migrants who survived hardship, contributed to nation-making in Singapore, and returned to their native places to support their families and aid the Chinese nation (p. 102).
Chapters 4 and 5 recover life stories of Samsui women as told in their own words and by people close to them. Although interwoven with national and community memories, personal memories also critique the politics of social memory-making. The women’s diverse labor and family experiences defy representations of Samsui women as independent-minded, unmarried feminists and dedicated construction workers. Samsui women depended on family and native-place networks to survive migration journeys, secure jobs, and resettle in Singapore. Life stories punctuated by memories of arduous working conditions, economic precarity, and thrift reveal these women upheld kinship obligations and struggled to support relatives in their native places. Even their iconic livery lacks symbolic meaning for the women, who adopted the attire to protect themselves from the sun, dust, and nails of construction sites. The stories reveal lives defined by the practical imperatives of survival.
Chapter 6 addresses the politics of forgetting. It examines two migrant groups excluded from Singaporean social memories. Ma cheh, another group of Chinese migrant women, are excluded because they took up domestic work, a form of hidden reproductive labor not valued by the state. They are also problematic subjects for national heritage because many worked in the leisure industry. Contemporary migrant workers, who often work in the construction sector, are also forgotten. Because they labor in an already developed Singapore, their labor is not deemed essential to nation-building. They are regarded as temporary, low-wage, transient outsiders whose origins in underdeveloped nations mark them as a dangerous nuisance. The chapter demonstrates the gender, class, occupation, and temporal dimensions of social memory construction as border-making.
Remembering the Samsui Women makes a strong contribution to memory studies through its theorization of ‘entanglement’, a productive concept for analyzing the overdetermined nature of social memory. Low makes impressive use of ‘entanglement’ to grapple with the contradictions inherent to nation-making as a transnational process involving the strategic incorporation and marginalization of migrants. Low’s incorporation of popular memory-making in China offers a productive lens into the complex ways migrants function as sites of memory-making and raises questions about who else might be laying claims to migrant memories. One wonders, for example, whether the Chinese state might factor into this equation given its strong promotion of overseas Chinese cultural work, including the creation of museums, documentaries, magazines, and tourism to nurture native-place sentiments among migrants and to cultivate a global image. What about organizations like United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which have played a critical role in disseminating ‘heritage’ as a keyword of culture, history, and memory-making in ways that make these ‘intangibles’ accessible for the development agendas promoted by the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)?