Schooling Diaspora

Schooling Diaspora relates the previously untold story of twentieth-century female education and Chinese students living overseas in British Malaya and Singapore. Traversing more than a century of British imperialism, Chinese migration, and Southeast Asian nationalism, this book explores the pioneering English- and Chinese-language girls' schools in which these women studied and worked, drawing on school records, missionary annals, colonial reports,periodicals, and oral interviews. The history of educated overseas Chinese girls and women reveals the surprising reach of transnational female affiliations and activities in an age commonly assumed to be male dominated. These women created and joined networks in schools, workplaces, associations, and politics. They influenced notions of labor and social relations in Asian and European societies. They were at the center of political debates over language and ethnicity, and were vital actors in struggles over twentieth-century national belonging. Their education empowered them to defy certain socio-cultural conventions, in ways that school founders and political authorities did not anticipate. At the same time,they contended with an elite male discourse that perpetuated patriarchal views of gender, culture, and nation. Even as their schooling propelled them into a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic public space, Chinese girls and women in diaspora often had to take sides as Malayan and Singaporean society becamepolarized-sometimes falsely-into mutually exclusive groups of British loyalists, pro-China nationalists, and Southeast Asian citizens. They negotiated these constraints to build unique identities, ultimately contributing to the development of a new figure: the educated transnational Chinese woman.

Karen M. Teoh helps readers both visualise and envision, through descriptive and detailed research, the lives, culture, and lived experiences of overseas Chinese women in female schools in British Malaya and Singapore from 1850s to 1960s. The work is a collection of oral histories, shared experiences, and research that presents a remarkable tribute to the collective body of overseas Chinese females whose experiences are represented therein ... [it] ensures that the complicated and winding history of overseas educated Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore is neither overlooked nor forgotten. The work also ensures imagined notions of overseas Chinese and female education in historical British Malaya and Singapore are viewed through their authentic, deeply dynamic realities., Schooling Diaspora is a valuable contribution to our understanding of education as part of the colonial project and competing notions of gender in the Chinese community in Southeast Asia., This book is an important contribution not only to the history of female education in Malaya, it also contributes significantly to our understanding of the experiences of Chinese migrants and the political participation of overseas-Chinese women in Malaya. It demonstrates how the intersections of national, ethnic and gender identities were played out for overseas-Chinese women as well as the convergences and divergences in the educational experiences of Chinese women across English-medium and Chinese-medium schools., Schooling Diaspora...breaks new important ground in the historical study of the overseas Chinese. Not only does this book depart from the conventional focus on male mobility, but it also rejects tired assumptions of in-betweenness or a divided sense of belonging about a diasporic group. Rather, Teoh carefully delineates how different ideologies of colonialism, ethnonationalism, and patriarchy simultaneously lay claim to her subjects' commitments, complicating their identities... By moving beyond the national framework in considering questions of ethnicity and power, Teoh successfully recasts these familiar questions in a wider terrain where identity options were multiple and constantly shifting... The result of Teoh's efforts is a groundbreaking work that deftly brings together a variety of sources and interpretations about the transnational lives of educated Chinese women., Schooling Diaspora successfully depicts how diasporic women's education has been woven into the transnational narratives of modernity and nationalism, and how education and women's self-identity mutually shaped each other. Bridging the gap between Chinese and Southeast Asian history, it provides an important transnational case study of diasporic Chinese women and their educational experience for the global discussion of education, gender and nationalism, and identity.

Karen M. Teoh is Associate Professor of History and Director of Asian Studies at Stonehill College.