Gifts to the Sad Country

This book is a study of an ethnic-Chinese family in Malaysia as it struggled with the upheavals in China during the Land Reform (1945-1953) and the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962). Based on fieldwork in Malaysia and in a village in Dabu County, Southern China, it tells a story of a family whose existence straddled two nations, two political systems. Emigration is shown to be both a positive experience and a source of despair. The study redefines the conventional narrative about the Chinese diaspora as economically driven and politically expedient; mobility, personal freedom and transnational journeying were a part of their cultural history. The book highlights the fact that Chinese homeland, even under communist rule, offered the people a means of identification under difficult circumstances. During the time of radical reform, the diaspora adapted themselves to the conditions in the homeland, and for some China remained a place of longing and emotional attachment.

Souchou Yao is a writer and a former staff member of the Department of Anthropology, the University of Sydney, Australia. Among his publications are Singapore: The State and the culture of excess (2007), The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a small distant war (2016), The Shop on High Street: At home with petite capitalism (2020), Doing Lifework in Malaysia (2020). He lives with his wife, the artist Simryn Gill, in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and Sydney, Australia.