claudine_c

[I have made the previous post about my new job open to the public.]

Three major transitional events in one day is rather excessive. I hope not to make a habit of it.

Thursday was my last day at my former job, and a farewell lunch was held for me yesterday. I had worked there for seven or eight years running, and had also done an earlier stint of about eighteen months. This is clearly the longest that I have worked in any one place, but I felt no regret in leaving. I had been restless in this job for over a year. I think I can say that I have left with no hard feelings. It was a good place to work, and I learned a lot, but it was time to move on to something closer to my interests.

After lunch I went to see my new boss to be briefed on my first set of tasks, which are to try to extract biographical data from an online source, and to search for related primary and secondary sources in libraries and archives. I'm going to be paid to 1) solve problems using computers and 2) do historical research. I can't get over how right this feels for me. I feel I have finally settled in the niche that I was meant to occupy at this stage in my life.

The rest of the afternoon was spent at orientation for the ministry formation programme at Trinity College. I had taken some theology subjects last year but the MFP focuses on a more holistic development for ordained or lay ministry. I am new to this programme but already know about half of the students through study or church connections. I've often felt that Anglican theological students are my 'tribe'.

This is going to be a positive year for me. It will also bring difficult decisions—I'll eventually have to decide whether to direct most of my efforts at academic or ministry formation. But I don't think I am going to be bored or restless this year.

I'm always telling people I'm busy as an excuse for not being able to meet or talk. I've largely brought this on myself.

( life update, long, and if anyone comments I'll get it all back in email! )

My interest in family history actually began with the mystery of my surname’s origin. Through my parents’ and my paternal grandmother’s recollections I was able to trace the Chionh line to my great-grandfather. I was told (in my dreaded childhood Chinese lessons) that the Chinese character for my surname was Jiang. (I can write the character but I don’t know how to input it into Ubuntu/Logjam.) But no one could say how Jiang became Chionh.

Three previously unknown Chionhs have contacted me after finding my public family history web page. One of these is a second cousin -- we have the same great-grandfather -- now living in Australia. She was able to provide some details on my great-great-grandfather. The other two were Singaporean Chionhs for whom we have not been able to establish definite links. While in Singapore my parents and I met with them and their families. One of these men knew of my great-grandfather but wasn’t sure how they were related. The other came up with names that were completely new to me and we couldn’t find a connection, but I took a photo of him and my father side-by-side, and there seems to be a physical resemblance. So the mystery continues.

The main Tan reunion events were a dinner last Saturday and a tour of historic sites on Sunday. The Chinese in general have strong migratory tendencies. While most of the reunion attendees lived in Singapore, there were also English, American and Australian visitors. This was my first opportunity to meet Lawrence Tan, one of my English third cousins, who has overseen the compilation of a genealogical database numbering over 900 individuals. I began trying to compile my own family history about four years ago and, while searching Rootsweb for a different branch, stumbled on Lawrence’s data. I was able to reconcile my mother’s stories and recollections with the hard data that Lawrence had collected.

We were encouraged to wear traditional Peranakan dress to the dinner. I’d seen older women like my grandmother wear the sarong kebaya (tight-fitting sarong and jacket) but neither my mother or I had ever worn this. The authentic outfit requires brooches and a belt (silver, to be really authentic) and small slippers. My grandmother’s jewellery was in Melbourne (oops!) and the sarong and slippers did not seem intended for serious walking or standing. So we compromised and wore kebaya and trousers.

I’d met or been told about many of my mother’s relatives when I was younger but had trouble remembering where they fit into the grand scheme. Lawrence brought along an eight-foot printout of the Tan Tock Seng family tree. The reunion organiser, Roney Tan, presented a talk on Tan Tock Seng and his sons and grandsons, and screened a documentary about Tan Tock Seng. TTS is most famous in Singapore for the hospital that bears his name. My mother has said that when she was young she would tell people that she was one of his descendants and would sometimes be rebuked for being too proud. In Australia I’ve sometimes been accused of crypto-aristocratic behaviour -- and this was before I was fully aware of how much of an impact Tan Tock Seng made on Singapore. But while the reunion might have been mostly about celebrating our ancestors, I also learned that many of my relatives are continuing his example of good works (as well as making money).

On the tour the following day, we visited: Tan Tock Seng’s grave; a temple partly established by him, the Thian Hock Keng; a temple partly established by one of his sons, the Po Chiak Keng Tan Si Chong Su; a huge house built by one of his grandsons; and of course the hospital. The CEO of the hospital took us on a tour of some of the wards and the main building. The Tan Si Chong Su and the hospital treated us like stars, which helped with the ego-swelling.

Overall the weekend was packed with meeting relatives and hearing lots of different people praise Tan Tock Seng. I don’t cope with large groups of people very well, and it would have been easier on my nerves to have had all this in smaller doses; but still it felt good to be part of a great and continuing family tradition.

I’ve recently returned from eleven days in Singapore. One of the main reasons for going this time was to attend a reunion of descendants of Tan Tock Seng, a pioneering Singaporean businessman and philanthropist. Tan Tock Seng was born in Malacca, moved to Singapore soon after the colony’s establishment in 1819, made a lot of money and helped build a hospital and a Chinese temple in Singapore.

Some of Singapore’s old families (such as the Tans) identify as Peranakan or “Straits Chinese”, used to distinguish the Chinese who settled in the colonies around the Straits of Malacca from those who have arrived from China more recently. The Straits Chinese have a distinctive culture which borrows from our Malay and European contacts as well as Chinese tradition. It can be easy to identify Peranakan architecture, traditional costume and food, and while they may speak the Queen’s English when it suits them, Straits Chinese tend to casually drop some Malay or Hokkien into their conversation.

My parents both speak English and Malay and only limited Hokkien or other Chinese dialects. When I was at school, twenty years ago, children were required to learn, in addition to English, the language that belonged to their official ethnic background -- Chinese, Malay or Indian. There was no acknowledgement of the kind of cultural subtlety and mixture that characterises the Straits Chinese. I was forced to learn Mandarin, effectively a foreign language to my family, but it never sunk in.

Peranakan culture may have been neglected but is now being recognised by younger Singaporeans. Singaporean builders are a bit demolition-crazy but a few Peranakan buildings are being earmarked for heritage protection. There is a Peranakan museum which seems to have a lot of support. And on flicking through a Rough Guide to Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei I found an entry on the Straits Chinese in the “People” section, so hopefully we’re not about to be written off as a dying culture yet.

The name of this film comes from a Berlin street on which stood a prison where Jews were held in 1943. Many of these prisoners were married to Gentiles or were the children of such “mixed marriages”. The film’s central characters are Lena, an aristocratic German married to a Jewish musician, and Ruth, the young Jewish girl whom she adopted. The film shifts between the days following the imprisonment of Jews in Rosenstrasse, and the present day when Ruth’s daughter searches for the history that her mother has kept from her family.

While the individual characters are presumably fictional, we are told at the start of the film that the prison and the nature of the prisoners are historical facts. The film focuses on just one of the many horrible policies of the Nazi regime: a policy which condemned mixed marriages, encouraged the Gentile partners to seek divorce, and sought to punish those who stayed loyal to their spouses. The film concentrates on Lena’s and Ruth’s stories while also highlighting some of the other families affected. One of the film’s powerful dramatic devices is the gradual accumulation, over a few days, of women who crowd outside the prison to demand their husbands’ release.

Rosenstrasse makes emotional appeals to family loyalty, contrasting the behaviour of the women gathered outside the prison with those men and women who abandoned their Jewish families. The story of Ruth’s later life is also, ultimately, an argument in favour of a generous acceptance of family ties. I sometimes feel uncomfortable when apparently historical or political stories (whether fictional or documentary) turn out to be more focused on personal relationships. My mistake here is to think that grand historical narratives are more important than individuals and their relationships. Many of the films I have seen about the Holocaust are about families and relationships, precisely because these are examples of how a political ideology had such a devastating impact on people’s personal lives.

I couldn’t help drawing comparisons between the Holocaust and the Australian government’s contemporary treatment of refugees. I wouldn’t claim that Australia’s asylum seeker policy is of the same nature or scope as the Holocaust. The Australian government and its representatives do not deliberately murder refugees, and while it is shameful that thousands have been detained in harsh desert prisons, this still does not come close to the six million Jews and thousands of Romany, homosexuals and other minorities who were imprisoned and killed during the Holocaust. Yet it doesn’t make sense to me to compare one atrocious regime with another: cruelty towards other people is cruelty. Sixty after Hitler, I think it is pretty well accepted by people in general that the Holocaust did occur and that it was unbelievably monstrous. But in Australia at least, compassion towards asylum seekers still seems to be a minority position, even if the minority is large and includes government backbenchers and businessmen. The literature of the Holocaust began in the concentration camps, and its cinema followed soon after. Many Australian artists and writers have taken up the cause of asylum seekers, but will it take fifty or sixty years for the general Australian public to take notice?