Coming Home to a Foreign Country: Xiamen and Returned Overseas Chinese, 1843–1938

By Soon Keong Ong

Ong Soon Keong explores the unique position of the treaty port Xiamen (Amoy) within the China-Southeast Asia migrant circuit and examines its role in the creation of Chinese diasporas. Coming Home to a Foreign Country addresses how migration affected those who moved out of China and later returned to participate in the city's economic revitalization, educational advancement, and urban reconstruction. Ong shows how the mobility of overseas Chinese allowed them to shape their personal and community identities for pragmatic and political gains. This resulted in migrants who returned with new money, knowledge, and visions acquired abroad, which changed the landscape of their homeland and the lives of those who stayed.

Placing late Qing and Republican China in a transnational context, Coming Home to a Foreign Country explores the multilayered social and cultural interactions between China and Southeast Asia. Ong investigates the role of Xiamen in the creation of a China-Southeast Asia migrant circuit; the activities of aspiring and returned migrants in Xiamen; the accumulation and manipulation of multiple identities by Southeast Asian Chinese as political conditions changed; and the motivations behind the return of Southeast Asian Chinese and their continual involvement in mainland Chinese affairs. For Chinese migrants, Ong argues, the idea of "home" was something consciously constructed.

Ong complicates familiar narratives of Chinese history to show how the emigration and return of overseas Chinese helped transform Xiamen from a marginal trading outpost at the edge of the Chinese empire to a modern, prosperous city and one of the most important migration hubs by the 1930s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell East Asia Series
• Release date: Aug 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501756191

Book preview

COMING HOME TO A FOREIGN COUNTRY

Xiamen and Returned Overseas Chinese, 1843–1938

Ong Soon Keong

CORNELL EAST ASIA SERIES

AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

To the memory of my parents

and

our native place

Contents

Measures, Weights, and Currencies

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Defining Xiamen

2. Opening for Business

3. Facilitating Migration

4. Manipulating Identities

5. Transforming Xiamen

6. Making Home

Conclusions

Bibliography

Index

Measures, Weights, and Currencies

Measures

1. 1 li = approximately 1/3 mile

2. 6.6 mu = 1 acre

3. 1 zhang = 3.33 meters

Weights

1. 1 jin (catty) = 1.3158 pounds

2. 100 jin (catties) = 1 dan (picul)

3. 1 shi of rice = 138.75 jin = 182.6 pounds

Currencies

1. Haikwan tael was the unit of value used to reckon custom duties.

1 Haikwan tael = 37.7495 grams

2. 1 liang (tael) = 10 qian (mace)

10 qian = 100 fen (candareen)

100 fen = 1000 li (cash)

Acknowledgments

This book on the history of Chinese migration has a migration history of its own. My initial decision to study Chinese emigrants was made after a conversation with the eminent historian Hsu Cho-yun in Honolulu, Hawaii; I took the embryonic idea to Ithaca, New York, where my mentor Sherman Cochran’s work on commercial networks and Shanghai inspired me to examine Chinese migration from the perspectives of its effects on the business environment and urban development of a Chinese city—Xiamen. Research for the project crossed several national political borders, starting in the United States before progressing to Taiwan, China, and Singapore; while the revision of this manuscript began in Jacksonville, Florida, hit a roadblock in Columbia, Missouri, and was finalized only after I settled back in Singapore.

The writing of this book was also a journey of self-discovery. My family was originally from the Heshan region in rural Xiamen, and they were part of the migration wave that moved from the island to Southeast Asia in the early twentieth century. After settling in Singapore for three generations, I returned home to investigate the circumstances and conditions that led to the exodus of my family and innumerable other Chinese. To be sure, my passage back to Xiamen was a circuitous one, and much like what I have documented in this book, my mobility and the opportunities to travel allowed for the accumulation of new social and cultural capital, and also opened up different perspectives to understand the world around me, which inevitably changed the dynamics of my relationships with home, be it Singapore, Xiamen, or the United States.

During my sojourn in the United States, I had the good fortune to know and work with an outstanding group of teachers at different institutions who helped me grow as a person and an academic. At the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Daniel Kwok earned a permanent place in my heart with his quick wit and endless supply of personal and historical anecdotes. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I am particularly grateful to Harry Liebersohn who offered me sound advice and encouraged me to persevere when I was at a low point of my academic career. He has since become a treasured friend. At Cornell University, Sherman Cochran, ever so generous with his time and advice, stood behind my research right from the start. His academic excellence and effective pedagogy are what I am still striving to emulate. Eric Tagliacozzo introduced the fascinating world of Southeast Asian history to me and welcomed me so warmly to Ithaca with his kindness and guidance. Viranjini Munasinghe’s study on creolization in the Caribbean spurred my interest in questions of ethnicity, identity, and cultural mixture, which I transplanted to the Southeast Asian context. As mentors, they provided support and encouragement more than they know.

Besides the aforementioned, many friends and colleagues cheered me on and shared their wisdom at various stages of my study and career. My thanks go to all of them, especially Tracy Barrett, Michael Bednar, Dale Clifford, Jerritt Frank, Han Xiaorong, Han Xin, Hou Xiaojia, Amy Pozza Kardos, David Kenley, Peter Lavelle, Lee Seok Won, Masaki Matsubara, Suyapa Portillo, Qian Kun, N. Harry Rothschild, Robert Smale, Karen Thomas, and Kai Wang. During the course of my research, I benefitted greatly from the goodwill of Hsiung Ping-chen and Lin Man-houng in Taiwan, Ng Chin-Keong and Wang Gungwu in Singapore, and Dai Yifeng, Shui Haigang, and Hong Puren in Xiamen. To them, I must express my deep and heartfelt gratitude.

Many institutions and organizations contributed financial support during the research and writing of this work. A Biggerstaff Fellowship from the History Department and a Starr Fellowship from the East Asian Program at Cornell University helped fund my research in Singapore and Xiamen for a year, while a research grant from the Center for Chinese Studies supported my stay in Taiwan for two months. My current institution, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, provided a generous start-up grant for me to make short trips to libraries and archives in China, and a semester teaching relief that allowed me to focus on writing.

I am also grateful to the following facilities and their staff for assisting me in acquiring source materials: in Singapore, the National University of Singapore Library, the National Library of Singapore, and the National Archives of Singapore; in Taiwan, the National Central Library, the Center for Chinese Studies, and the Academia Sinica; in China, the Xiamen University Library, the Xiamen Municipal Archives, and the Fujian Provincial Archives. At Cornell University Press, Mai Shaikhanuar-Cota and Alexis Siemon have been the most encouraging and forgiving of editors, gracefully presiding over the transition from manuscript to book. Parts of chapter 6 originally appeared in Ong Soon Keong, To Save Minnan, to Save Ourselves: The Southeast Asia Overseas Fujianese Home Village Salvation Movement, in China on the Margins, ed. Sherman Cochran and Paul Pickowicz, 243–266 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), and in Ong Soon Keong, Rebuilding Corridor, Preserving Prestige: Lim Boon Keng and Overseas Chinese-China Relations, China and Asia 2, no. 1 (2020): 134–61.

To pursue my education in a faraway country was not an easy decision to make. My parents knew the value of education and their support of my endeavor never faltered even though it took so much longer than they anticipated. Sadly, they did not live to see the completion of this book, but their love has touched every page of my writing. This book is dedicated to their memory.

Introduction

After … Xiamen was officially opened as a treaty port, it once exported the largest volume of tea in China. But since the trade in tea has slumped, so has its economy. Consequently, vast number of people began to migrate overseas, and Xiamen and the various ports of Nanyang became inextricably linked. Soon Xiamen was transformed into the Nanyang resort where overseas Chinese returned for rest and relaxation, and the consumer center for the whole of South Fujian.… All of [Xiamen’s] imports rely almost exclusively on [overseas Chinese from] Nanyang as their purchasers. It is thus easy to see how crucial overseas Chinese are to the commercial prosperity of Xiamen. No wonder Mr Lou Tongsun would remark: Without Nanyang, we will not have the Xiamen of today.¹

—Zhu Boneng, An Analysis of the Reasons behind Xiamen’s Commercial Decline (1935)

In an essay deliberating the reasons behind Xiamen’s waning fortunes during the Great Depression, the author Zhu Boneng attributed the port city’s susceptibility to regional economic downturn to the distinctiveness of its economy.² According to Zhu, despite being a treaty port, Xiamen had over the years developed into a consumer center that served primarily overseas Chinese who came back with the money they made abroad for rest and relaxation. Xiamen’s economy thus was inextricably tied to the spending power of these emigrants, and its prosperity hinged on the economic well-being of the Southeast Asian cities where they settled. When Southeast Asian cities flourished, so did Xiamen; but when their economies crashed during the Great Depression, Xiamen’s slumped as well.

Notwithstanding some glaring factual errors, Zhu Boneng has astutely captured the peculiarities of Xiamen’s history during its treaty port era. Especially noteworthy are his observations that, first, Xiamen was transformed into a major migration hub and its emigrants became the mainstay of Xiamen’s economy and, second, the city’s economy was tied more to the economies of the wider transoceanic world than to China’s own national economy.³ Indeed, Zhu’s seemingly counterintuitive insights frame some of the major questions asked in this book: Why did Xiamen not develop into an industrial and trading center a la Shanghai after its opening as a treaty port? How did it facilitate the mass movement of people in and out of the country? How were Xiamen’s cityscape and urban development affected by its role in Chinese migration? Why did emigrants return to Xiamen, and how did foreign experience affect their views of and relationships with the city? To answer these questions, it is inevitable that we examine the development of Xiamen, the mobility and identity of the emigrants, and the intricate relationships between the two.

Xiamen and Chinese History

Since the 1980s, the city government and local scholars in Xiamen have expended much effort to document the history of the port city, producing a large number of quality and important studies. Of particular significance are the large-scale collection and preservation of materials related to Xiamen’s education, foreign relations, economy, clan genealogies, stele inscriptions, and overseas Chinese investments.⁴ The city’s local historians have also compiled a host of historical records (zhi) on varied aspects of its development, including emigration, commerce, finance, food supply, transportation, municipal government, and urban development.⁵ Although largely nonacademic in nature, the wealth of information in these publications laid the foundation for academic studies like Zhou Zifeng’s Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 1900–1937 (A study of the urban history of Xiamen, 1900–1937), a comprehensive analysis of the urban development of Xiamen during the Republican era.⁶

By contrast, despite being one of the very first treaty ports, Xiamen has not attracted its due attention from scholars writing in Western languages.⁷ One notable exception is Ng Chin-keong’s excellent Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683–1735. But while Ng masterfully reconstructs the Chinese coastal and maritime trading network centered on Amoy—that is, Xiamen in the local dialect—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he too does not extend his study into Xiamen’s treaty port era. Scholars’ indifference to post‒Opium War Xiamen might be attributed to the fact that Xiamen did not fully meet the preconceived image of a treaty port.

The treaty ports that began dotting the Chinese coastline and major waterways from the mid-nineteenth century on were, to be sure, a new urban form in China.⁸ As commercial entrepots forcibly opened to foreign trade by unequal treaties, treaty ports differed from traditional Chinese cities not only in that they were primarily oriented toward commerce but also because foreigners were able to exercise a certain degree of judicial and fiscal autonomy—especially in the concession areas—that was not allowed in other Chinese cities.⁹ For foreign officials, businessmen, missionaries, and adventurers, treaty ports were the beachheads in China where they could pursue their commercial activities and other agendas (well meaning or otherwise) unfettered by Chinese restrictions. For Chinese residents, treaty ports not only offered them new economic opportunities, they also provided a window into the world of Western religions, institutions, and culture, since in addition to modern industries and banks, treaty ports housed an assortment of chambers of commerce, newspapers, publishers, churches, and even race courses and dance halls. With such distinctly modern and cosmopolitan flavour, it is no wonder that the historian R. H. Tawney would memorably liken the treaty ports to a modern fringe stitched onto the hem of an ancient garment.¹⁰ And scholars have also tended to look to the treaty ports for evidence of China’s modern transformation against the backdrop of a traditional hinterland or proof that Western imperialism truncated Chinese sovereignty and reduced the country to a semicolonial state. Shanghai—with its two concession areas (the French Concession and International Settlement), highly commercialized and industrialized economy, and modern lifestyle—naturally became the quintessential treaty port that attracted the lion’s share of scholarly attention.

But not all treaty ports were the same. While Xiamen might have housed the only other international settlement outside Shanghai, the number and wealth of foreigners in residence never reached the critical height to dictate the fortune of the port city. And as we shall see, even though the British had high hopes for Xiamen as a trading port, foreign trade through the port dwindled before the end of the nineteenth century despite a promising start. Xiamen also did not develop large-scale industries—compared with Shanghai’s six thousand factories, Xiamen only had a paltry eighty by the 1930s. It is thus understandable that scholars interested in issues regarding modernization and Western impact on China would overlook Xiamen. However, this is not to say that Xiamen remained stagnant and backward during its treaty port era. As a matter of fact, Xiamen underwent a phase of rapid urbanization and growth such that by the 1920s, its land prices and workers’ wages were among the highest in the country. The prosperity of Xiamen even led observers to compare it to Shanghai and nicknamed it Little Shanghai.¹¹

If not through foreign trade and industrialization, how did Xiamen benefit from its treaty port status to prosper? To be sure, the opening of Xiamen as a treaty port embedded it in the transoceanic network spanning South China and Southeast Asia that the British imperial power created. However, with a relatively small and underdeveloped hinterland, Xiamen had little to offer the world except for a vast number of South Fujianese, who had been impoverished and unsettled by long years of overpopulation, destitution, and social and political unrest. Hence, during the treaty port era, Xiamen flourished into the regional migration hub for South Fujianese, channeling a great number of them—almost 390,000 between 1843 and 1890—from villages in South Fujian to European colonies in Southeast Asia and beyond.¹²

The example of Xiamen thus testifies to the limitations of conforming the treaty ports to prescribed normative trajectories of change. It is true that along with the other treaty ports, Xiamen was one of the first places in China to open to Western influence. Nonetheless, its legacy lies not in it being a beachhead for Western imperialism but more in its expanded function as the egress for Chinese extending their fields of activities beyond China. The story of Xiamen’s post‒Opium War development thus cannot simply be told as the history of one place or understood within the context of Chinese national history alone. Rather, we need to situate it at the intersection of Chinese history and the history of Chinese migration, that is, paying attention to how processes and relationships that have transcended the borders of China shaped the history of Xiamen on the one hand and including the contributions of traditionally marginalized people—the overseas Chinese—to Xiamen and China on the other. In a way, Xiamen forces us to examine Chinese history and modernity beyond the boundaries of geopolitical China.

Xiamen and Migration

Within the small but growing field of Chinese migration studies, Xiamen has also not been given its deserved attention. This is due mainly to the fact that scholars of Chinese migration have conventionally submitted to a dichotomous homeland-hostland discourse; that is, confining themselves to a narrow and oftentimes isolated focus on either the emigrants’ geographical origins or their places of settlement.¹³ Since Xiamen was not the typical native village where emigrants originated nor the foreign land where they settled, it is not surprising that it has been conveniently overlooked. To be sure, there are a small number of works on returned Chinese emigrants in Xiamen, such as James A. Cook’s dissertation on the impact of overseas Chinese on the city’s modernization and the encyclopedic Xiamen Huaqiaozhi (Records of Xiamen’s Chinese sojourners), a careful compilation of information on Xiamen’s overseas Chinese. But these works have largely taken for granted that Xiamen was the native place of their subjects when in fact many of them hailed from surrounding migrant regions in South Fujian, and they thus failed to recognize the difference between Xiamen and the hinterland, and the unique role the port city played in the migration process.¹⁴ To include Xiamen in the grand narrative of Chinese migration and to make such inclusion meaningful and necessary, it is essential that we reexamine our approaches to the study of the overseas Chinese.

In truth, the bipolar homeland-hostland approach has come under scrutiny in recent years, most specifically by Adam Mckeown, who argues that this type of unilateral perspective would only yield disparate and even competing narratives of Chinese migrants, which could not produce a coherent panorama of the networks and processes of Chinese migration even when taken together.¹⁵ Regrettably, the disjuncture between the homeland and hostlands was further exacerbated with the rise of transnational and cultural studies, as scholars began demanding the decentering of China or even its omission in the study of the overseas Chinese.¹⁶ The real challenge for students of the Chinese émigré then is to buck the trend and to bridge the divide between the homeland and hostland perspectives so as to have a more coherent and comprehensive understanding of the process of Chinese migration.

In his groundbreaking work, the eminent Chinese historian Philip Kuhn provides us with an inspiring example of how this could be accomplished by emphasizing the enduring connections between the Chinese soil and Chinese emigrants worldwide.¹⁷ This is not to say that Kuhn has reverted to the familiar assumption of a primordial tie between the emigrants and China; rather, he proposes that emigrants were still tied to the homeland because such attachment was crucial to their survival and success overseas. Kuhn observes that emigrants brought skills and resources from their native places that they then used to create occupational niches in their settlements abroad. For Kuhn, this extension of the emigrants’ old environment overseas created a corridor that not only kept the emigrants in a meaningful relationship with the home areas but also facilitated the circulation of money, goods, and information. In this way, homeland and hostlands are tightly and purposefully interconnected, and it becomes imperative again to look at China when studying the overseas Chinese.

More recently, Michael Williams has argued even more forcefully for "qiaoxiang (migrant region) perspectives" when studying Chinese migration, one that centers on the home villages or districts of the emigrants.¹⁸ According to Williams, previous studies based on such concepts as nation-state, diaspora, or even transnationalism suffer from similar limitations in that they tend to focus on movement to and outcomes in a specific location, especially the land of settlement.¹⁹ Consequently, various actors, such as returnees and those who remained in the qiaoxiang, and certain actions or choices, including continuing links with places of origins and motivations not centered on one-way migration and settlement, are ignored.²⁰ Williams thus proposes a qiaoxiang perspective that emphasizes the analysis of qiaoxiang links and "qiaoxiang-related motivations—for example, how emigrants affected family life and local economy and society on the one hand and how family, prestige, motivations, and income affected emigrants’ actions and choices in the destinations on the other.²¹ For Williams, such a perspective widens the context of Chinese migration history and allows us to understand the emigrants’ settlement or return as not just a response to destination policies or discriminations but also a conscious choice they made for reasons associated with their qiaoxiang links."²²

Kuhn’s and Williams’s works are invaluable in that they allow us to bring together both ends of the migration process into a meaningful dialogue; moreover, Kuhn’s emphasis on the values of the cultural and historical capital emigrants acquired from their native places and Williams’s focus on the returnees and the agency of the emigrants are also perspectives explored in this book. Nonetheless, their schemes still do not take into account the places in between, especially the transition hubs. As the historian Elizabeth Sinn reminds us, migration is seldom a simple, direct process of moving from Place A to Place B but rather involves frequent transits and detours, zigzags and crisscrosses, with migrants often going from locality to locality before finally settling down.²³ Migration hubs thus play an important role in deciding the trajectory of the migration process and the contour of Chinese dispersal. The lacuna in both Kuhn’s and William’s works is filled by Sinn in her own study on Hong Kong.²⁴ According to Sinn, Hong Kong was the migration hub par excellence. Although it did not send any emigrants of its own, Hong Kong witnessed the constant coming and going of persons between its hinterlands in the Pearl River delta region and California, across the Pacific, and was soon transformed from a small-scale entrepot of goods into a large-scale entrepot of people.²⁵ The increased cross-Pacific traffic not only led to the growth of shipping activities in the British colony but also spurred the formation of a corridor where people, letters, money, goods, and even the dead flowed. As Sinn sees it, Hong Kong was not simply the beneficiary of human movements. Possessing both centripetal and centrifugal forces, Hong Kong was central in determining the map of Chinese migration; or in Philip Kuhn’s imagery, Hong Kong was the nexus of hundreds of thousands of ‘corridors’ that reached back to hometowns in China while extending to destination countries around the world.²⁶

Sinn coins a new term, in-between place, to describe migration hubs like Hong Kong and to accentuate the sense of mobility they embody.²⁷ Although Sinn recognizes that locations such as San Francisco, Singapore, Bangkok, and Sydney might also qualify as in-between places, she has curiously overlooked the fact that there could be other in-between places in China. This book argues that Xiamen was another such in-between place. As a matter of fact, in the nineteenth century, Xiamen shared many similarities with Hong Kong: Both were islands located at the mouths of busy and prosperous rivers (the Jiulong River and the Pearl River) with populous hinterlands; both possessed deep and sheltered harbors and were strategically located along coastal and oceanic trade routes;²⁸ and as colonial port and treaty port, Hong Kong and Xiamen existed at the margins of the Chinese empire and were thus less fettered by imperial regulations. More importantly, both became the embarkation point of choice for emigrants wanting to leave China and were also their first stop in China on their return home.²⁹

For South Fujianese in search of a brighter future abroad, Xiamen provided them with the resources and mechanism to leave China. At the same time, the city also furnished emigrants with a variety of means to maintain ties to their home villages. Products from South Fujian, or Minnan, such as joss sticks, paper, hemp bags, Dehua porcelain, and oolong tea (a Fujianese favorite), moved through Xiamen’s port into the welcoming hands of overseas Fujianese; in return, messages, letters, and remittances from afar were funneled through Xiamen before they were disseminated to their grateful recipients in the hinterlands. For many of the returned overseas Fujianese who made it abroad and looked to settle back in China, Xiamen became the destination of choice because of its proximity to their home villages and the relative safety, urban conveniences, and economic opportunities it offered.

For Xiamen, the impacts of overseas migration on its development were many. It is true that traditionally Chinese emigration had followed trade routes because there was money to be made at the destinations.³⁰ What has often been overlooked is the fact that there was also money to be made in almost every step of the migration process. In Xiamen, the movement of people spurred the growth of a host of migration-related industries, including passenger shipping, lodging, remittances, lighterage, and the semilegal space dividing on steamship decks. In addition, returned overseas Chinese also made significant contributions to the city’s economy, since the majority of Xiamen’s businesses were either financed by overseas Fujianese (according to one estimate, at least 60–70 percent³¹) or established to cater to the needs of returned migrants with extra cash to spend.³² The most important public utilities in the city—the water supply, electric light, and telephone companies—were entirely owned and managed by overseas Chinese. In addition, with overseas funds pouring in to pave roads and erect buildings, overseas Chinese visions also helped shape Xiamen’s urban landscape and influenced its city life. And to meet the needs of mobile Chinese, Xiamen was transformed into a consumer city, and its imports always outstripped its exports. However, the unfavorable trade balance had minimal adverse effect on Xiamen, as overseas remittances were usually more than enough to offset the difference. This embeddedness in the Chinese migration network that Xiamen helped to create and define gives credence to the bold remark in the epigraph that without Southeast Asia (more specifically, the overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia), Xiamen would not have developed and prospered.

Emigrants and Home

In a thought-provoking new book on the overseas Chinese, Shelly Chan poses an important but hitherto unasked question: How did Chinese migration change China?³³ For Chan, even though overseas Chinese have been conveniently marginalized in Chinese history, they played a part in framing Chinese modernity and the processes of nation building in China. To demonstrate her claim, Chan argues for a temporal approach to Chinese migration. Specifically, she sees Chinese migration as a proliferation of diaspora times; and when these diaspora times intersected with other major historical trajectories, diaspora moments emerged. According to Chan, as political leaders and Chinese institutions were forced to respond to these diaspora moments, resulting in long-term consequences, Chinese migration had decisively affected and changed modern China.³⁴

Contrary to Chan, whose focus is on overseas Chinese participation in Chinese history and the narrative of the nation, this book is more concerned with the material contributions of returned overseas Chinese to the transformation of one city. Here, I tell the story of Xiamen and the Chinese who migrated out of China through its port and then returned to participate in the city’s economic revitalization, educational advancement, and urban reconstruction. Compared to outward migration, the role of returned overseas Chinese is a much less studied topic in Chinese migration studies, and the reasons are twofold: Firstly, because the transplantations of Chinese from their native homes to foreign lands are often considered a dramatic and even traumatic experience, scholars are thus more concerned with why they were pushed out of China and how they adapted to their new environments than with their less impressive return. Secondly, because many emigrants left China due to economic hardships at home and were largely engaged in backbreaking jobs with meager pay abroad, the common impression is that most emigrants were too poor to ever return to China. For example, Siah U Chin, an early emigrant who arrived in Singapore not long after its founding, lamented that only one or two out of ten of his fellow Chinese emigrants were able to return home after three or four years as originally planned, and a significant number of them ended up toiling for decades in the British colony without ever returning.³⁵

While Siah U Chin might have correctly depicted the situations of Chinese emigrants in the mid-nineteenth century, he certainly did not foresee that the advent of the steamship would make travel between China and Southeast Asia so easy and economical that a return trip, or even multiple voyages, would become a reality for the everyman. Data from the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and other administrative reports confirm large-scale to-and-fro movements of people between Xiamen and Southeast Asia from the late nineteenth century onward. In 1890, for example, 54,085 persons departed for Southeast Asia via Xiamen while 35,964 returned to it. The same figures for 1900 were 90,358 and 26,225; for 1910, 80,071 and 14,590; and for 1920, 62,419 and 37,693.³⁶ Between 1873 and 1939, the Japanese scholar Kaoru Sugihara estimates, the percentage of total emigrants returning to China was 80 percent.³⁷ The sheer size of returned overseas Chinese in itself makes them a worthy subject of study.

Return needs to be taken seriously as well because not only is it an integral part of the Chinese emigrants’ migration experience; it is also an important element in the migration process—return makes the perpetuation of further migration possible since returnees provide useful information regarding destination countries and even help lead aspiring emigrants abroad (see chapter 3).³⁸ Moreover, return reflects the returnees’ particular historical, social, and personal circumstances, and their actions back in China have real political, social, and economic consequences for themselves and for those who do not move.³⁹ Return thus provides a unique window for us to investigate the emigrants’ relationship with the homeland (and the land of settlement) and their own value system and identity creation.

Traditionally, the Chinese identity of the emigrants and their emotional attachment to China are never in question. This is because Chinese are not expected to settle in foreign lands since to leave China permanently would be to leave their duties as sons and subjects undone; hence, all good men must come home eventually. The traditional image of the