Eurasian Family Histories in Colonial Penang

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Intimate Interactions: Eurasian family histories in colonial Penang

KIRSTY WALKER

Modern Asian Studies / Volume 46 / Special Issue 02 / March 2012, pp 303 329DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X1100093X, Published online: 13 February 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0026749X1100093X

How to cite this article:KIRSTY WALKER (2012). Intimate Interactions: Eurasian family histories in colonial Penang. Modern Asian Studies, 46, pp 303329 doi:10.1017/S0026749X1100093X

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Modern Asian Studies 46, 2 (2012) pp. 303–329. C© Cambridge University Press 2012doi:10.1017/S0026749X1100093X First published online 13 February 2012

Intimate Interactions: Eurasian familyhistories in colonial Penang∗

KIRSTY WALKER

Clare College, University of Cambridge, Trinity Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1TLEmail: [email protected]

Abstract

Intimate interactions across ethnic and cultural lines were integral to the archiveof memory within Eurasian families in colonial Penang. Through histories oftheir European and Asian ancestors, Eurasian families inherited a sense of traveland geographical mobility, and complex forms of cultural exchange often shapedtheir everyday lives. Eurasian family histories provide access to the messy, livedinteractions which formed their social and domestic worlds, but they also hint attheir limits. The idea of ‘Eurasian’ in colonial Malaya was a contentious one, asite for debate, as it was experienced by different people in different ways. Duringthe interwar period, members of Penang’s Eurasian elite attempted to define anddiscipline the divided Eurasian communities of Malaya, by purifying Eurasianfamily histories of their unruly diversity. In exploring the Eurasian social worldof colonial Penang, this paper aims to delineate the fragility of such processes ofinteraction and exchange.

Introduction

Eurasian family networks in colonial Penang were a product ofinteractions on a global scale. Mapping their genealogies from thelate eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries reveals migratoryroutes which stretched across Europe, Asia, and beyond: from Calcuttato Hong Kong, Paris to Sydney, and all the countries in between.The archive of memory within Eurasian families was built aroundnarratives of inter-ethnic marriage and migration within, between,and beyond the empires of Southeast Asia. These histories describedlife trajectories lived across vast geographical and temporal spaces,and at the intersection of multiple cultural worlds. By the earlytwentieth century, many Eurasian families continued to live mobile

∗ I would like to thank Tim Harper, Sunil Amrith, and Emma Rothschild for theirinsightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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lives, while others remained resolutely local. However, threads oftheir ancestral journeys were deeply woven into their constructionsof the past and, often, their everyday lives. In challenging ethnic andcultural divisions, Eurasian family histories suggest the existence ofan interstitial space within an apparently rigidly stratified colonialsociety in which ethnicity and cultural practices were blurred: throughthe public and private lives of Eurasian families, a more disordered,creole Southeast Asia comes into view.

On the surface, these histories seem to illustrate that Eurasianfamilies lived lives of cultural syncretism, or an unproblematic andinevitable ‘cosmopolitanism’, but probing more deeply reveals thattheir family lives—like all others—were complex and messy, plaguedby contradictions and lingering tensions, a bewildering combination ofassimilation and rejection of ethnic identities and cultural practices.Although Eurasian family histories tell us much about the processesof cultural exchange, they also hint at their limits. Ideas of what itmeant to be Eurasian in early-twentieth century colonial Malaya werecontentious, and the interstitial Eurasian social world had numerousunwritten rules of entry, many of which were continuously in flux.By the early twentieth century, the many meanings of ‘Eurasian’were becoming increasingly politicized, and members of Penang’sEurasian elite attempted to unify the divided Eurasian communitiesof Malaya by purifying their family histories of their unruly diversity.Historians searching for interaction across ethnic and cultural lineswithin Eurasian family histories quickly discover that this innocuousword signifies something more difficult to describe.

Yet despite the recent proliferation of studies of Asiancosmopolitanisms and transnational movements, historians haverarely tried to conceptualize the interactions that shaped Eurasiancommunities. Eurasians have been largely neglected within SoutheastAsian historiography, and the few studies that have approached thesubject have tended to focus exclusively on the challenges Eurasianspresented to the increasingly rigid ‘race’, class, and gender hierarchiesthat structured colonial governance in the early twentieth century.The Eurasians of colonial Asia, who ‘ambiguously straddled, crossedand threatened’ imperial divides, have been constructed as a problem,a threat to the integrity of ethnic and cultural categories, and astimulant to colonial anxieties.1 This approach has been an influential

1 Ann Stoler, ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and theCultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia’, Comparative Studies in Societyand History, 34, 1992, p. 514.



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one, shaping studies of Anglo-Indian cultural debates in Madras,‘abandoned’ Eurasian children in Indochina, and Eurasian elitesin Hong Kong, among others.2 But in focusing on the position ofEurasians in British, French or Dutch discourses and policies, andtheir effects on the boundaries of white, European identity, this workhas tended to absorb rather than question early twentieth centurycolonial conceptions of Eurasians as marginal, problematic figures.3

Within this small body of work, a growing number of historianshave begun to move beyond European discourses, to examine thedebates that took place within Eurasian communities, exploring, forexample, the ways in which Eurasians themselves articulated theirideas of ‘home’ and national identity.4 This emphasis on the words andactions of Eurasian communities has led to important new insightsinto their complex internal dynamics, cultural practices, economic,and ethnic divisions, as important studies of Malacca and Sri Lankahave illustrated.5 In shifting the focus towards the social world of theethnically mixed family, historians have illustrated how individualsof different ethnicities could occupy the same household, bridgingcultural spaces usually considered to be separate, and, at the sametime, undermining the categories of identity produced by the colonialstate and its laws.6

2 Examples include Lionel Caplan, ‘Creole World, Purist Rhetoric: Anglo-Indian Cultural Debates in Colonial and Contemporary Madras’, Journal of theRoyal Anthropological Institute, 1, 1995, pp. 743–62; Christina E. Firpo, ‘Lost Boys:“Abandoned” Eurasian children and the Management of the Racial Topography inColonial Indochina, 1938–1945’, French Colonial History, 8, 2007, pp. 203–21; DavidM. Pomfret, ‘Raising Eurasia: Race, Class, and Age in French and British Colonies’,Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51, 2009, pp. 314–43.

3 See, for example, H. N. Ridley, ‘The Eurasian Problem’, in H. N. Ridley (ed.)Noctes Orientales: Being a Selection of Essays Read Before the Straits Philosophical SocietyBetween the Years 1893 and 1910 (Singapore: Kelly & Walsh, 1913); and R. Park,‘Human Migration and the Marginal Man’, American Journal of Sociology, 33, 1928, pp.881–93.

4 See Alison Blunt, ‘“Land of our Mothers”: Home, Identity, and Nationalityfor Anglo-Indians in British India, 1919–1947’, History Workshop Journal, 54, 2002,pp. 49–72.

5 See Margaret Sarkissian, D’Albuquerque’s Children: Performing Tradition in Malaysia’sPortuguese Settlement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Dennis B.McGilvray, ‘Dutch Burghers and Portuguese Mechanics: Eurasian Ethnicity in SriLanka’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24, 1982, pp. 235–63.

6 See Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Chandra Mallampalli, ‘Meetthe Abrahams: Colonial Law and a Mixed Race Family from Bellary, South India,1810–63’, Modern Asian Studies, 42, 2008, pp. 929–70.




This gradual turn towards the intimate spheres of household andfamily has been most marked in histories of Eurasian communities inSoutheast Asia that focus on earlier periods. Scholars of the DutchEast Indies have increasingly drawn on genealogical studies thattrace the life histories of Indische families over several generations, asthe Mestizo society of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Batavia,skilfully reconstructed by Jean Gelman Taylor, illustrates.7 Recentwork has shown that well into the nineteenth century, Indischecommunities in the Dutch empire in Asia were embedded in familynetworks made up of ‘threads stretched out from the Dutch EastIndies’ and ‘spun around the world’.8 This work might be seen as anextension of histories which conceptualize the early modern era as an‘age of commerce’, an era of trade and travel, and the creation of creolediasporas and settled communities.9 These histories focus on the morefluid, family-oriented societies of pre-twentieth century SoutheastAsia, evading the processes of racialization and the spread of modernnationalism that are commonly believed to have destroyed them.But the question of what happened to these Mestizo families in thetwentieth century remains largely unanswered. Although historiansare beginning to speak evocatively of familial connections acrossempires, hinting at global connections and interactions, a history ofthe inner lives of Eurasian families in the twentieth century has yet tobe written.

Studies of the Eurasian communities in colonial Malaya are largelyabsent from this field, and the few local histories that have beenwritten are deeply entangled in post-colonial ethnic politics. AsGoh Beng Lan has observed in her exceptional study of kampongserani, a suburban Eurasian enclave in Penang, in recent years theleaders of the Eurasian community have emphasized the historicaland cultural connections between Penang’s Eurasian communityand the Portuguese-Eurasians of Malacca. This has taken placedespite abundant evidence to suggest that the historical roots ofPenang’s Eurasians lie in northern Malaya and Thailand, and that

7 Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in ColonialIndonesia, 2nd edition (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

8 Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, Being ‘Dutch’ in the Indies: A History of Creolisationand Empire, 1500–1920 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2008), p. 80.

9 Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680. Vol. 1: The LandsBelow the Winds (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 155–56.




the Eurasian community of Penang has always been heterogeneous.10

After ethnic tensions reached a violent climax in Malaysia the late1960s, Portuguese-Eurasian community leaders in Malacca madeconcerted efforts to promote their genealogical, cultural, and linguisticaffinities with the Malay community, tracing their roots back tointermarriage between sixteenth-century Portuguese conquistadorsand local Malay women. By the 1980s, this constructed history hadbecome the basis for lobbying the government for bumiputera privileges,which introduced an economic incentive to claiming an exclusively‘Portuguese’ ancestry.11 This has had repercussions for Penang, whereleaders of the Eurasian community have highlighted their sharedPortuguese heritage in order to strengthen their politically expedientties to bumiputera identity, at the same time establishing a historicallink to the Sultanate of Malacca, which many Malay scholars haveplaced the heart of the nation’s history.

This interweaving of history, myth, and Malaysian ethnic politics isjust one of many rewritings of the history of Eurasian communitiesin Malaya. These different layers of meaning reflect the factthat Eurasian family histories are inherently composite, createdfrom distinct, often contradictory, narratives. Nostalgic storiesof ancestors, related from generation to generation, merge withhistorical narratives that were created in response to the pressuresof contemporary cultural politics. Eurasian histories were sites ofinteraction in themselves, undergoing successive transformations,being remembered, altered or forgotten at different moments. Incolonial Penang, the intimate lives of Eurasian families give untappedaccess to these transformations, as family histories reflect both thechanging dynamics of the Eurasian community and the broaderevolution of Penang’s connective history within the region.

10 This emerged in part from the 14-year conflict over the redevelopment of apredominantly Portuguese-Eurasian village in Pulau Tikus. See Goh Beng Lan, ModernDreams: An Inquiry into Power, Cultural Production, and the Cityscape in Contemporary UrbanPenang, Malaysia (Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2002),pp. 123–43.

11 See, for example, G. Fernandis, ‘The Portuguese Community at the Periphery:A Minority Report on the Portuguese Quest for Bumiputera Status’, Kajian Malaysia,21, 2003, pp. 285–301.




Penang and the Eurasian social world

As Penang became a centre of mercantile and trading interests inthe late eighteenth century, it became a polyglot world of migrantsfrom across the region.12 Eurasians were among the first settlersin Penang, along with Malays, Indians, Arabs, Chinese, Europeans,Armenians, Burmese, and Thais as well as other peoples from theMalay Archipelago. Many were traders, refugees, and migrants fromthe Kedah coast, the Straits of Malacca, Aceh, and Phuket, attractedby Penang’s strategic trading position within the Bay of Bengal,its commercial opportunities, and the refuge it offered from Thaiaggression. Penang quickly became a site of convergence, wheremigrant cultures interacted across ethnic lines every day, and wherefamily genealogies connected the local to the global.13

Intermarriage and sexual encounters across ethnic lines werecommonplace, particularly among the early generations of settlersand migrants. Many prominent European settlers and traders hadrelationships with Asian or Eurasian women, including Francis Light,the founder of Penang.14 When he arrived in Penang in 1800, DavidBrown took a native ‘nonia’ known as Nonia Ennui, later had arelationship with a Eurasian of Portuguese descent known as BarbaraLucy Melang, had a son with a Malay woman named Inghoo, andalso had several children with his Malay housekeeper.15 These oftenstrategic inter-ethnic relationships were not limited to Europeans.Mohamed Merican Noordin, a prominent Indian Muslim shippingmerchant and philanthropist who arrived in Penang around 1820, wasknown to have had several wives—including women who were Malay,

12 Nordin Hussin has estimated that up to 99 per cent of the population of Penangwas made up of immigrants soon after it was established as a British port in 1786.For a discussion of the geography of and early trade in Penang, see Nordin Hussin,Trade and Society in the Straits of Melaka: Dutch Melaka and English Penang, 1780–1830(Singapore: NUS Press, 2007), pp. 69–104.

13 Tan Liok Ee, ‘Conjunctures, Confluences, Contestations: A Perspective onPenang History’, in Yeoh Seng Guan, Loh Wei Leng, Khoo Salma Nasution andNeil Khor (eds) Penang and its Region: The Story of an Asian Entrepôt (Singapore: NUSPress, 2009), pp. 7–29.

14 See H. P. Clodd, Malaya’s First British Pioneer: The Life of Francis Light (London:Luzac and Company Ltd., 1948), pp. 26–28.

15 David Brown came to Penang to join James Scott, Francis Light’s former tradingpartner, in business. He went on to become a large landholder in Penang. See HelenMargaret Brown, ‘A Hundred Years of the Brown Family 1750–1850’. Unpublishedmanuscript, 1935, p. 3, Penang State Library.




European, Indian, and possibly Chinese.16 Syed Alatas, a wealthy Arabmerchant and leader of a Malay secret society in mid-nineteenthcentury Penang, married a Malay woman rumoured to be of royaldescent, and also the daughter of a Chinese pepper trader and secretsociety leader.17 These many individual examples of mixed marriagesand multi-ethnic families signified broader processes at work withinthe diasporic communities of Penang society. By the early nineteenthcentury, descendants of unions between South Indian Muslim andChinese merchants and traders, and local Malay women formeddistinct, identifiable communities.18

Within British colonial discourses, Eurasian communities were oftenpresented as the unwanted, but inevitable, consequences of colonialrule. However, a distinct Eurasian community was part of Penang’shistory from its beginning, and its origins were deeply embedded inPenang’s developing relationships within the region. Historians havetraced its origins to 1786, with the arrival in George Town of a group ofaround 200 Thai-Portuguese Eurasian Catholics from Kuala Kedah,where they had taken refuge from Thai persecution in Ligor andPhuket.19 They were allotted a piece of land in George Town, and soonconstructed their own place of worship, the Church of the Assumption.Some have also identified a second Eurasian migrant group whoarrived in 1809, travelling directly from Phuket to Penang. Led bya Portuguese priest, Father John Baptist Pasqual, these migrantswere believed to have travelled in a boat sent for them by the vicarof the Church of the Assumption.20 This second group was largely

16 Helen Fujimoto, The South Indian Muslim Community and the Evolution of the JawiPeranakan in Penang up to 1948 (Toyko: Tokyo Gaikokugo Daigaku, 1988), p. 45.

17 Khoo Su Nin, Streets of George Town, Penang: An Illustrated Guide to Penang’s CityStreets and Historic Attractions, 4th edition (Penang: Areca Books, 2007), p. 35.

18 On the Straits Chinese, see Khoo Joo Ee, The Straits Chinese: A Cultural History(Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur: The Pepin Press, 1996); and on the Jawi Peranakan,see Fujimoto, The South Indian Muslim Community.

19 Figures based on a population count of the town of Penang in 1788. See Hussin,Trade and Society, p. 185. The origins of the Thai-Portuguese community in Phukethave been traced to the mid-sixteenth century when the Portuguese founded a factorythere to trade in elephants, tin, and other produce. After they captured Malacca fromthe Portuguese in 1641, the Dutch established a settlement there in 1656. It lastedonly four years as the island then reverted to the Portuguese settlers who, with theirdescendants, were established on the island and the mainland opposite. See GeorgeBryan Souza, The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the SouthChina Sea 1630–1754 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

20 Fr. Manuel Teixeira, The Portuguese Missions in Malacca and Singapore (1511–1958)(Singapore and Lisboa: Agencia Geral Do, 1963), Vol. III, pp. 328–29.




concentrated around the schools and churches that were built by theCatholic missions, and particularly in Pulau Tikus, a suburb on the out-skirts of George Town. Pasqual established the Church of the Immacu-late Conception in 1810, and the neighbouring land became popularlyknown as kampong serani. From the very beginning of Penang’s historyas a colonial port, distinct geographical areas—roads, churches, andresidential suburbs—were commonly perceived as Eurasian spaces.21

The Penang Eurasian community began with Thai-Portuguese roots,but Eurasian family trees quickly expanded outwards, growing moreand more enmeshed in Penang’s migrant world. By the end of thenineteenth century, Eurasians could name European ancestors ofBritish, Spanish, French, German, and Dutch origins; and Asianancestors including Malays, Burmese, Thai, Javanese, and Chinese,among many others. The Eurasian families of Francis Light, DavidBrown, and others became part of an ethnically mixed European elitewhich included many women of Asian descent, as the presence of localchildbirth and childrearing rituals and superstitions within Europeanfamilies testifies.22 Several Eurasian families rose to prominence inPenang’s administration. William Thomas Lewis, whose father was anofficer in the East India Company and whose mother was Indonesian,had a long and successful career in the Straits Settlements, retiring asresident councillor of Penang in 1860.23 Within community historiesand collective memory, this period was akin to a golden age ofinteraction and opportunities, where the Eurasian ‘proved his worth’as a middleman in business and commerce, and members of thecommunity were accepted as equals by the British colonizers.24 Butthe diaries and personal letters of European residents in Penang revealthat by the mid-nineteenth century, early ideas of racial degenerationwere already beginning to affect attitudes towards the Eurasians intheir midst.25

21 Argus Lane and Love Lane in George Town, and the land between College Laneand Leandro’s Lane, which formed kampong serani in Pulau Tikus, are areas that havebecome associated with Penang’s Eurasian families. See Khoo Su Nin, Streets of GeorgeTown, pp. 30, 57, 118.

22 Christine Doran, ‘“Oddly hybrid”: Childbearing and Childrearing practices inColonial Penang, 1850–1875’, Women’s History Review, 6, 1997, p. 31.

23 John Bastin, The British in West Sumatra (1685–1825) (Kuala Lumpur: Universityof Malaya Press, 1965), p. 177.

24 James F. Augustin, Bygone Eurasia (Kuala Lumpur: Rajiv Printers, 1981), p. 9.25 Evidence can be found in the diary of Dr Francis King, stationed in Penang

between 1857 and 1865. See E. A. Ross, ‘Victorian Medicine in Penang’, Malaysia inHistory, 23, 1980, p. 89.




However, those Eurasians present in European society were justone part of the Eurasian social world in nineteenth century Penang.Many Eurasian women were known to have married Europeans, butmany more married other Eurasians or into Penang’s other Asiancommunities, changing their names and religions, and abandoningthe label ‘Eurasian’ altogether.26 Although there was a sizeableEurasian community in nineteenth century Penang, it was difficultto delineate. There was much movement into and out of it, asillustrated by the case of Petronella Baptist, a Penang EurasianCatholic, who was married four times—three of her husbands wereEurasians, but in 1853 she also became a t’sip, or secondary wifeto Khoo Thean Tek, a Straits-born Chinese.27 Genealogies alsoreflect much intermarriage with Eurasians from elsewhere in theregion. Significant numbers of Eurasians migrated to the islandfrom Singapore and Malacca, and along with Anglo-Indians, CeylonBurghers, and others, were incorporated into Penang family trees.For the largely Christian, English-educated Eurasian communitiesin the region, Penang had many attractions. A seminary, or CollegeGeneral, had been established in Penang since 1809, making it animportant centre of Catholicism within the region, and the foundingof the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus and St Xavier’s Institution in1852 also made Penang an important site for English education. Bythe end of the nineteenth century the Penang Eurasian communitycontained an ethnically and socially diverse collection of people, forwhom being ‘Eurasian’ meant many different things.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the Eurasian communityhad become a highly complex society, with its own rules of entryand its own political concerns. For some Eurasians, particularly thosewho considered themselves to be more European than Asian, thiswas an unsettling time. Many believed that their privileged socialand economic position within colonial society had been brought toan end in 1904 with the introduction of a colour bar, precluding

26 The term ‘Eurasian’ first appeared officially in the 1871 census of the StraitsSettlements, but it had begun to appear in European travel writing on Malaya in the1860s. The British had introduced the term ‘Eurasian’ in India in the 1820s, andfrom the 1870s it was commonly used, from Burma to Hong Kong, to describe peopleof European and Asian descent. See Christopher Hawes, Poor Relations: The Makingof a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996),pp. 89–90.

27 Re Khoo Thean Tek’s Settlements, Straits Settlements Law Reports (1928),pp. 178–87.




Eurasians from entry to the civil service.28 Pervasive ideas aboutthe assumed physical, mental, and moral capabilities of Eurasiansfiltered into colonial discourses, and the European community incolonial Malaya became increasingly hostile to the presence ofEurasians within their social circles.29 But often, Eurasians werepreoccupied with their own internal community politics. In additionto its ethnic diversity, the community was rife with divisions ofclass and status. The 1931 census revealed that most Eurasianswere literate, English-educated, and Christian, tending to clusterin urban administrative, clerical, and technical roles, particularly inschools, in the medical and public works services, and the transportsystem.30 This masked the intricate hierarchies based on wealth,education, religion, and even skin colour which divided Penang’sEurasians. The distinctions made between the lower class, oftenPortuguese, ‘seranis’ and the wealthy, often Anglophile, ‘upper tens’within the Eurasian communities of Singapore and Malacca, alsoreflected social distinctions within Penang society.31 By the interwarperiod, a professional, influential elite monopolized the positions ofpower in civil society, dominating the management committees of civicand sporting associations and Catholic charities, to the occasionallyvocalized resentment of Eurasians outside their social circle.32

Being a member of the Eurasian community in early twentiethcentury Penang seemed in many ways to be cemented by a collectivereligious identity and shared public and social spaces, rather than byany meaningful sense of ethnic unity. The Eurasian social world ofcolonial Penang was bound together through family networks, andthe local schools, churches, and kampongs in which individuals and

28 John Butcher, The British in Malaya 1880–1941: The Social History of a EuropeanCommunity in Colonial South-East Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979),p. 107.

29 See, for example, George Bilainkin, Hail Penang! Being the Narrative of Comedies andTragedies in a Tropical Outpost, Among Europeans, Chinese, Malays, and Indians (London:Samson Low, 1932), p. 16.

30 C. A. Vlieland, British Malaya: A Report on the 1931 Census and on Certain Problems of‘Vital Statistics’ (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1932), p. 120.

31 On Malacca and Singapore, see Margaret Sarkissian, ‘Cultural Chameleons:Portuguese Eurasian Strategies for Survival in Post-Colonial Malaysia’, Journal ofSoutheast Asian Studies, 28, 1997, pp. 249–62; and Myrna Braga-Blake, ‘Please Pass theSalt: Class within the Eurasian Community’, in M. Braga-Blake and A. Oehlers (eds)Singapore Eurasians: Memories and Hopes (Singapore: Times Editions for the EurasianAssociation Singapore, 1992). See also McGilvray, ‘Dutch Burghers’, pp. 235–63.

32 D. Liddhoff, ‘What is wrong with us?’, Eurasian Review, 2 (4), December 1936;and Editor, ‘A Heart to Heart Talk’, Eurasian Review, 2 (4), December 1936.




families invested communal and personal meanings. These were thekey markers around which their family histories were built.

Mapping interactions through family histories

Eurasian family histories are part of an archive of fragmentary,often nostalgic memory. Within them, it is possible to trace severaldiscernable, yet overlapping narratives. They are personal stories ofemotional attachments, but at the same time, they are histories ofPenang’s connections within the region, histories of migration, thedevelopment of business and trading networks, of religious conversion,and cultural exchange. By exploring these interwoven historiesthrough three closely connected Penang Eurasian families, whoselives spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, itis possible to map out the interactions that shaped their lives. Tracingthe interactions across ethnic and cultural lines within Eurasianhomes, reveals the complex interplay of syncretism, assimilation,conflict, and tension that found their way into their family histories.

The history of the Moissinac family has been carefully researchedand written by family members.33 Their lives were situatedbetween the Dutch and British empires of Southeast Asia, withinthe small interconnected sphere of Sumatra, Java, and Malaya.Theodore Moissinac was a Frenchman who came to northern Sumatrato manage tobacco and coffee plantations in the 1880s.34 This wasat a time when the northeast coast of Sumatra was emerging as oneof the most productive plantation districts in the Archipelago, andwhen tobacco cultivation in particular was dramatically expanding.35

The number of tobacco plantations had grown from 22 in 1872to 148 by 1888.36 When this region came under Dutch politicaland economic control in the 1870s, foreign investors from France,Belgium, Germany, Britain, and the United States were encouragedto settle, and were licensed to obtain land and labour, as the colonial

33 Christine Choo, Antoinette Carrier, Clarissa Choo and Simon Choo, ‘BeingEurasian’, in Maureen Perkins (ed.), Visibly Different: Face, Place and Race in Australia(Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 103–25.

34 Choo et al., ‘Being Eurasian’, p. 104.35 Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London: Routledge,

1993), p. 211.36 Karl Josef Pelzer, Planter and Peasant: Colonial Policy and the Agrarian Struggle in East

Sumatra 1863–1947 (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 135.




state lacked the funds and personnel to carry out the task.37 Frenchsettlers were among the first to take advantage of this scheme. In 1876,a group of colon explorateurs formed by the Paris Société de Géographie,arrived in Deli to establish a small, experimental colony containinghalf a dozen self-funded Frenchmen, including a mining engineer, anagriculturalist, a doctor, and a few non-specialists.38

The Sumatran European community that Moissinac joined in the1880s has been described as ‘a motley assortment of inexperiencedpersonnel drawn from the scions of failed business families, runawaysfrom ill-fated love affairs, defunct aristocrats, and adventurersseeking to make their fortunes’, but the majority of early settlers innortheastern Sumatra were lower middle class and middle class men,who came to the Indies in search of new financial opportunities.39

Informal relationships with Javanese women were common withinSumatra’s European community: many believed them to create lessof a financial burden than European marriages, and also enablednewcomers to quickly acquire native languages and customs.40 InSumatra, Moissinac met and married Ponnia who was believed to havebelonged to an aristocratic Javanese family. In one family story passeddown through the generations, Ponnia was believed to have been adancer in the court of Jogjakarta, whose family threatened to throwher off the balcony of the palace unless she ended her relationshipwith Moissinac. In another version of the story, the couple eloped toSumatra because Ponnia’s father was an Islamic religious leader whorefused to give them permission to marry.41 Despite the romanticallusions, the sense of disapproval against their relationship is clearlyevoked.

The Moissinacs lived as a French colonial family, with many Batakservants and plantation workers.42 After she eloped to Sumatra,Ponnia never returned to Java. She was believed to have been aMuslim, and although her children were raised as Catholics, she only

37 Ann Stoler, ‘Perceptions of Protest: Defining the Dangerous in ColonialSumatra’, American Ethnologist, 12, 1985, pp. 644.

38 Anthony Reid, ‘The French in Sumatra and the Malay World’, Bijdragen tot deTaal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 129, 1973, pp. 223–26.

39 Ann Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and theBoundaries of Rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31, 1989, p. 141.

40 Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories’, p. 143.41 Choo et al., ‘Being Eurasian’, p. 104.42 Choo et al., ‘Being Eurasian’, p. 107.




converted to Catholicism later in life.43 Ponnia was remembered byher grandchildren as an aristocratic Indonesian woman: she sang anddanced, she dressed in sarong kebaya, she used Indonesian medicines,and cooked Indonesian food.44 Even though this family history began atsome distance from Penang, it soon became central to their lives. TheMoissinac children were sent to Penang as boarders at the Convent ofthe Holy Infant Jesus, a key site in the Eurasian landscape of Penang.45

They may have been attracted by the strong French Catholic influence.The convent was run by the Dames de Saint Maur, representativesof the Paris Foreign Missions Society. French missionaries had longbeen present in Penang, and in 1809 Penang had been chosen asthe site for the new College General, which at that time was theonly seminary of the society in the Far East.46 At the same time,Sumatra had strong trading, commercial, and transportation linkswith Penang. Parts of Sumatra were considered virtually independentof the Dutch East Indies, and were oriented more towards the StraitsSettlements. The monetary system in Deli, for example, was gearedtoward the international currencies of Singapore and Penang, ratherthan Batavia. For holidays and medical cures, many preferred theMalay Peninsula, rather than the hill stations of Java, making Penangan obvious choice for the Moissinac children’s schooling.47

Through the descendants of Theodore and Ponnia, the breadth ofthe Eurasian network, and the multiple interactions which structuredit, begins to take shape. Several of their children moved away fromPenang. By 1936, Theodore Moissinac had settled in Malacca, wherehe became a teacher at the Tranquerah English School, and aprominent member of the local Eurasian community.48 In 1937, hemarried Iris Westerhout, a member of another affluent and influentialMalacca Eurasian family, with German roots.49 Others became moredeeply rooted in Penang. In 1916, Louise Moissinac, who had alsobecome a teacher, married Charles Reutens at the Church of theAssumption in George Town.50 Charles too was a teacher at St Xavier’sInstitution which, along with the Convent, was another key site in

43 Choo et al., ‘Being Eurasian’, p. 106.44 Choo et al., ‘Being Eurasian’, p. 104.45 Choo et al., ‘Being Eurasian’, p. 107.46 Reid, ‘The French in Sumatra’, p. 205.47 Stoler, ‘Perceptions of Protest’, p. 645.48 Sarkissian, D’Albuquerque’s Children, p. 185.49 Straits Times, 14 April 1937, p. 19.50 Straits Times, 10 January 1916, p. 8.




the Penang Eurasian social world. The Reutens family traced theirorigins to a Dutch sailor and trader who had arrived in Penang at itsfoundation in 1786.51 Their family was English-speaking, and tendedto dress in Western clothes. Family members recall that Louise usedto have outfits made for her daughters by a dressmaker using lacesand materials from Europe, with matching hats, gloves, stockings andshoes. Louise’s Javanese mother continued to play a part in theirfamily lives. Ponnia’s grandchildren remembered that she used tofavour her dark-skinned grandchildren, calling them intan manis or‘beautiful jewels’, an intimate inversion of the hierarchies based onskin colour that were present within Penang’s Eurasian community.52

Their social world was a small one, centred on the church, school,and other Eurasian families, but their genealogy reflected broadergeographical and cultural interactions.53

Through marriage, the Moissinacs were connected to anotherPenang Eurasian family—the Foleys—which extended their familyties more deeply into the Malay Peninsula and to the Indiansubcontinent. In 1933, William James Foley granted an interview asthe ‘oldest European in Malaya’ to the Pinang Gazette in which he gavea detailed account of his long career in the Malay Archipelago.54 Hewas born in 1857 and baptized in Madras, where his Irish father wasserving in the Madras Artillery. Penang was, from the beginning, asignificant site within his personal history. According to this account,he arrived in Penang in 1871 to attend the ‘Brothers School’—areference to the De La Salle Brothers, who ran St Xavier’s Institution.Foley then began his career in the army, joining the Royal Artillery,which was then stationed in Penang. Soon after, he fought in the PerakWar, which had followed the murder of the British administratorJames Birch by Malay chiefs in 1875. In 1879, he purchased hisdischarge, and had a brief career in the Straits Settlements policeforce, and then with the British North Borneo Constabulary, wherehe was stationed in Sabah. While engaged in government servicein Singapore in 1885, he elected to join the company of EurasianVolunteers, and was the only European who did so.55

51 Choo et al., ‘Being Eurasian’, p. 108.52 Choo et al., ‘Being Eurasian’, p. 110.53 Choo et al., ‘Being Eurasian’, pp. 110–11.54 ‘The Oldest European in Malaya’, The Pinang Gazette, Centenary Edition, 1933,

pp. 54, 56.55 On the Volunteers, see T. M. Winsley, A History of the Singapore Volunteer Corps,

1854–1937 (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1938), p. 19.




In the same year, Foley joined the Federated Malay States policeforce, and over the next 20 years worked in various districts in Perak,including Taiping, Gopeng, Kinta, and Larut. The development of thetin mining industry as well as large-scale Chinese immigration hadtransformed these frontier societies, and the early police force thatFoley joined encountered conflicts between Chinese secret societies,frequent robberies and murders, as well as problems of sanitationand outbreaks of disease.56 He was of a generation of Malayanold hands whose career, as he saw it, was one of martial victories,capturing villains, and pacifying unruly natives, earning respectfor his benevolence and hard work. After he retired in 1905 assenior chief inspector, Foley continued to work, taking managementpositions on several rubber estates. He later returned to Penangwhere he held a number of civic appointments, including chiefinspector of the Penang Tramways, which were then run by thePenang municipality.57 His last job was at the Eastern Smelting WharfOffice, as superintendent, before he finally retired in 1919, havingparticipated in several of the defining moments in Malaya’s history.The Pinang Gazette reporter described him as ‘a gallant, seasoned, sun-broiled veteran’, who had not been ‘home’ to Europe for more than50 years.58

In fact, Malaya was his home. References to Foley’s ‘large family’are scattered throughout the official records, but none reveal that hisfamily life was deeply rooted in the Eurasian community of Penang.59

Foley’s first marriage was to Alice Nicholson, with whom he had tenchildren. She was believed to have been born in Hong Kong, and was ofChinese descent.60 After her death in 1898, Foley married PhilomenaMagdalene Peterson, a Penang Eurasian whose mother was a memberof a historic Thai-Portuguese family, the Jeremiahs. With Philomena,he had ten more children (see Figure 1).

56 On the development of the police force in Perak, see Patrick Morrah, The Historyof the Malayan Police (Singapore: Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal AsiaticSociety, 1968), pp. 62–66.

57 See Ric Francis and Colin Ganley, Penang Trams, Trolleybuses and Railways:Municipal Transport History 1880s–1963 (Penang: Areca Books, 2006), p. 14.

58 ‘The Oldest European in Malaya’, p. 56.59 Commissioner of Police, Federated Malay States, to Secretary to the Resident,

Selangor, 17 June 1904, 1957/0116804, Arkib Negara Malaysia.60 Information obtained from the private genealogical website, ‘Serani Sembang’

at <www.myfamily.com>, [accessed 19 December 2011].61 Reproduced with permission from Jean and Terrence Scully.




Figure 1. William James Foley, Philomena Peterson, and their family, Penang, circa1920s. Source: Private collection of Jean and Terrence Scully.61

Fragments of birth, marriage, and career records in the pressreveal that Foley’s large family was scattered across Malaya, alongthe winding route through Singapore, Perak, and Penang taken inthe course of his long career.62 Many of his children became serviceprofessionals, in some cases following in the footsteps of their father,working in the F.M.S. railway department,63 in the F.M.S. PoliceForce,64 in the Eastern Smelting Company,65 and as teachers atSt Xavier’s Institution in Penang—alongside Charles Reutens.66 In1908, the Straits Times reported that Foley had been left a significantinheritance by an uncle in Australia, and it seems reasonable to assumethat the family was financially secure.67

62 Straits Times, 18 June 1884, p. 1; 30 July 1902, p. 5; and 29 December 1904,p. 8.

63 Straits Times, 4 June 1918, p. 6.64 Straits Times, 30 June 1902, p. 5.65 Straits Times, 29 March 1933, p. 13.66 Straits Times, 20 July 1925, p. 8.67 Straits Times, 28 October 1908, p. 6.




Although evidence of careers, promotions, marriages, births, deaths,and even family tragedies68 can be traced through the archives, theeveryday domestic world of the Foley family is more difficult to access.Some of Foley’s children felt a deep connection to their British roots.Family portraits and wedding photographs show them in Westerndress. Foley’s eldest son, Michael, won a Queen’s Scholarship at StXavier’s and went on to study at Cambridge University. While inEngland, he volunteered for service in the First World War, andhe died prematurely at Gallipoli in 1915.69 Foley himself had alsovolunteered for service, although he was turned down due to his age.This strong sense of Britishness penetrated culinary practices too,as one family member recalled that the food they ate was mostlyEuropean, including regularly having ham and eggs for breakfast.They ate their meals with knives and forks, not with their fingers.But Eurasian recipes—for devil curry, sugee cake, and others—alsofeatured in family memories, and when they ate out at Penang’s manyfood stalls, they often chose Asian dishes.70

Most of Foley’s children went on to marry into other Eurasianfamilies, strengthening their ties within Penang’s small Eurasiancommunity, at the same time expanding their regional—evenglobal—connections. Marriages connected the family to Saigon, thePhilippines, Hong Kong, Sumatra, the Netherlands, and Thailand. Totake one example: in 1909 Ada Elizabeth Foley married AlphonseBeaumont Carrier, whose family had Thai, Spanish-Philippine, andFrench ancestry, and had been based in Pulau Tikus since thebeginning of the nineteenth century.71 Evidence suggests that theywere deeply involved in each other’s lives. When Edna Foley marriedAlfred Charles Spencer Schmidt at the Church of the ImmaculateConception in Pulau Tikus in 1927, the marriage certificate revealsthat Ada and Alfonse Carrier, Edna’s half-sister and her husband,were witnesses.72

Tracing these intricate marriage ties over several generationsreveals that the Foleys were also connected to the Pasqual family.

68 In 1927, Patricia Foley (pictured on her father’s lap in Figure 1) was killed ina car crash in Penang. See Straits Times, 28 March 1927, p. 11; and 27 April 1927,p. 10.

69 Straits Times, 26 April 1900, p. 2; and 20 September 1915, p. 8.70 Email conversations with Avril Pasqual, January 2008.71 Straits Times, 30 April 1909, p. 6. On the Carriers, see Christine Choo, ‘Eurasians:

Celebrating Survival’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 28, 2007, p. 133.72 ‘Serani Sembang’.




Joseph Christopher Pasqual was a Thai-Portuguese Eurasian born in1865 to a Catholic family in Pulau Tikus, whose ancestors stretchedback to the second migrant group of Eurasian Catholics from Phuket.Pasqual joined the Land Office in Kuala Lumpur around 1885,and moved between government departments for several years. Hedistinguished himself, showing that he had ‘abilities far above theordinary standard of Clerks’.73 But in 1889, he decided to give up hisclerical career, stating that he was ‘physically unfit for a sedentarycalling’.74 He went into coffee planting and tin mining in Selangorand Negri Sembilan and, in later years, in Perlis.75 In the historyof tin mining in Malaya, Pasqual was a significant figure. In 1902he served as president of the Miners’ Association in the FederatedMalay States.76 Pasqual’s career spanned a period of major structuralchanges within the industry, technical innovations, and changeablemarket conditions.77 But success in tin mining made him an influentialand affluent figure. Older residents of Malaya reflecting on the‘good old times’ in 1952 remembered that he owned one of thefirst motorcars—an Alldays and Onions model—seen in Penang.78

Pasqual was also a prolific writer, publishing books and articles ona vast number of topics, from Chinese tin mining, rice cultivation,and sugar-cane growing in Malaya, to Malay customs and traditions,and the history of Penang.79 He had a long-held interest in Thailand,where he had travelled extensively, and published several articles onhis train journeys from Perlis to Patani, and Malayan-Thai relations.80

73 Auditor, Audit Office, to British Resident, Selangor, 18 July 1888,1957/0011788, Arkib Negara Malaysia.

74 Joseph Pasqual to Acting Collector and Magistrate, Ulu Langat, 18 November1889, 1957/0017687, Arkib Negara Malaysia.

75 Stanley Musgrave Middlebrook, Yap Ah Loy, 1837–1885 (Kuala Lumpur: Journalof the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1983), p. 126. See also ‘A ModelCoffee Planter’, Straits Observer, 23 July 1897, p. 3; and Petition from Towkay’s AhYeok Lok Chen, Ah Peng and J. C. Pasqual, 27 July 1892, 1957/0032174, ArkibNegara Malaysia.

76 Straits Times, 18 December 1902, p. 4.77 J. M. Gullick, A History of Selangor (1766–1939) (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Branch

of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1998), pp. 150–53. See also Wong Lin Ken, The MalayanTin Industry to 1914 (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1965).

78 Straits Times, 30 November 1952, p. 4.79 His writings include ‘One Hundred Years of Penang’, The Pinang Gazette,

Centenary Edition, 1933, pp. 9–10, 73; ‘Chinese Tin Mining in Selangor’, SelangorJournal, 4, 1896, pp. 25–29; ‘The Limestone Caves of Perlis’, Singapore Free Press andMercantile Advertiser, 30 August 1921, p. 1; ‘A Trip to Patani’, Straits Times, 2 August1923, p. 10; ‘The Mayong Play’, Straits Times, 16 May 1937, p. 10.

80 Straits Times, 19 June 1913, p. 11; and 2 August 1923, p. 10.




In 1916, Pasqual married Ong Kim Choo, born of Teochewparentage in Trang in southern Thailand, a trading port with well-established commercial tin mining and familial links with Penang.81

It was only during the second decade of the twentieth centurythat Teochews began to arrive in Trang in significant numbers,many coming as workers on the construction of the Southern Lineof the Thai State Railway.82 By the early twentieth century, theChinese community in Thailand was large and complex, and adominant force in Thai commercial life. Many Chinese families hadassimilated into Thai society. Others maintained a distinct Chineseidentity, institutionalized in language group associations, schools, andnewspapers, and, by the 1910s, a growing Chinese nationalism.83

When Pasqual met Ong Kim Choo, the Chinese presence in Thailandwas becoming increasingly politicized. Family members rememberOng Kim Choo telling them that she was just 15 when she marriedthe then middle-aged Pasqual in a Chinese ceremony, a relationshipher parents had forced her into (see Figure 2).84

After they married, Ong Kim Choo changed her name to RosaPasqual, but retained many of her Thai nyonya traditions, continuingto wear a baju and sarong, and chew betel nut.85 Like Ponnia Moissinac,she only converted to Catholicism later in life. Although she sharedmany Western customs with her grandchildren, including celebratingChristmas with them, they remember that she ate with her fingers,and enjoyed eating spicy sambal belachan on a lettuce leaf, which sherolled up and chewed.86 This was a multilingual household, as shespoke Thai with her children; Malay with her Tamil servant, and alsowith her grandchildren who replied to her in English or Hokkien; andHokkien with other Chinese. Pasqual’s writings were peppered with

81 Email conversations with Avril Pasqual. On the familial and commercialconnections between southern Thailand and Malaya, see Jennifer Cushman, Familyand State: The Formation of a Sino-Thai Tin-Mining Dynasty, 1797–1932 (New York:Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 14.

82 Tong Chee Kiong and Chan Kwok Bun, Alternate Identities: The Chinese ofContemporary Thailand (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 149–50; and G. William Skinner,Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UniversityPress, 1957), pp. 178–79.

83 Christopher John Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Thailand(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 95–96.

84 Email conversations with Avril Pasqual.85 Email conversations with Avril Pasqual.86 Email conversations with Avril Pasqual.




Figure 2. Rosa Pasqual with her children, 1920. Source: Private collection of AvrilPasqual.87

Malay and Chinese words, and he was known to speak Thai, English,possibly a Chinese dialect, and read Jawi, a script of spoken Malay.88

From his writings, a flavour of the domestic life in the Pasqualhousehold emerges. In an article about the Ma’yong, a form of ancientMalay theatre native to the northern Malay States, Pasqual revealedthat he had personally tried to revive its popularity by financing atroupe of Ma’yong players from Kedah to play in his compound inProvince Wellesley, and had invited all the villagers to watch.89 Butalthough ethnic, linguistic, and cultural pluralism emerge stronglyfrom the archive of memory within this Eurasian family, Joseph

87 Reproduced with permission from Avril Pasqual.88 See, for example, J. C. Pasqual, ‘Chinese Tin Mining in Selangor’, Selangor Journal,

4, 1895, pp. 25–29.89 Straits Times, 16 May 1937, p. 10.




Pasqual remained in many ways an elusive figure. Family membersdiscovered later that Pasqual was actually already married when hemet Ong Kim Choo. His first and only legal wife was an Australianwoman called Victoria Keaughran, with whom he had three childrenwho were brought up as Europeans and were educated in Englandand Scotland.90 After ‘marrying’ Ong Kim Choo, he was marriedtwice more, to another Sino-Thai woman, and then to a Chinesewoman. His demise is equally mysterious. Within the family’s history,several contradictory stories about his death have come to light; inone, he died, along with his first wife, in a ship that sank off thecoast of Singapore; in another he was murdered by communists afterthe war for collaborating with the Japanese.91 The enquiries of thecolonial government in 1947 revealed that Victoria Keaughran hadbeen evacuated from Penang to Singapore in February 1942, and wasbelieved to have died on the Gian Bee, an evacuation ship which wasbombed by the Japanese. It was gathered that J. C. Pasqual had beenliving in Thailand before the war, and was separated from his wife. Hetoo was evacuated to Singapore, where he died at some point duringthe Japanese occupation.92

The fragments of Eurasian family histories collected here reveal askein of interconnected lives, rooted simultaneously in Penang andthe wider world. These Eurasian families were involved in manyof the key moments and movements within Southeast Asian history. Atthe same time, in continually crossing national, ethnic, and linguisticborders, they carved out an interstitial space which often cut across theBritish, French, and Dutch empires of colonial Asia, and penetrateddeeply into areas beyond imperial control. Their family trees spreadout across Europe and Asia, lining the routes carved out by tradeand commerce as well as creating new, unexpected itineraries. Yetthey remained intimately bound together, cemented by marriage andkinship, and the shared social and religious spaces of George Townand Pulau Tikus. Through these family narratives, we can begin tosee that the interactions that shaped Eurasian lives were complex andunruly. Within them, we can trace the syncretism of cultural practices,alongside the quiet disapproval of inter-racial marriage, the rejectionof previous identities, and cutting of ties.

90 Email conversations with Avril Pasqual.91 ‘Serani Sembang’.92 Memorandum from O i/c V.F.R.O., Peel Avenue, Penang to O.C., CRO, VFRO

(Malaya), Kuala Lumpur, 8 July 1947, 1957/0472465, Arkib Negara Malaysia.




Reinventing ‘Eurasian’ in interwar Penang

These family histories spanned a deeply reflective interlude forPenang’s Eurasian community. Over the course of the early twentiethcentury, Eurasians in Malaya were increasingly forced to confrontforms of political engagement defined by ethnic nationalism anda growing colonial obsession with racial categories. The growth ofassertive Malay, Chinese, and Indian associations,93 alongside theadvancement of Malays into the civil service and moves towardsdecentralization in the early 1930s were perceived by many Eurasianelites to pose a threat to the social and economic security of Eurasiancommunities, whose position in Malaya was believed to depend onBritish patronage. Confronting the unstable conceptions of theirethnicity and nationality became unavoidable, as race became theprimary category of social analysis in Southeast Asia, governingemployment opportunities and public space. Mirroring developmentswithin other creole communities in Southeast Asia,94 the interwarperiod witnessed efforts to purify and redefine Eurasian identity andhistory in order to secure the position of Eurasians within this changingworld.

In 1919, a Penang Eurasian Association was formed to representEurasian interests, aiming to improve the political as well as the socialand economic status of the Eurasian community.95 The committeecomprised an affluent and influential Eurasian elite, accustomed toassociational life and activity in the public sphere. Several committeemembers also served as municipal commissioners and legislativecouncillors, and also ran the Eurasian sports club and local Catholiccharities. This small group of doctors, lawyers, and other eliteprofessionals overlapped with the Eurasian families described here:Henry Foley, for example, served as secretary to the EurasianAssociation in the years before the Japanese occupation.96 By themid-1930s, several contemporaries observed that there was a new‘virile spirit’ emanating from the Eurasian associations, which by this

93 See William Roff, The Origins of Malay Nationalism (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1967), pp. 178–247; Diana Tan, ‘Some Activities of the Straits Chinese BritishAssociation in Penang, 1920–1939’, Peninjau Sejarah, 2, 1967, pp. 30–40; Khoo KayKim, ‘The “Indian Association Movement” in Peninsular Malaysia: The Early Years’,Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 65, 1992, pp. 3–24.

94 Fujimoto, South Indian Muslim Community, pp. 144–52.95 Straits Times, 5 November 1919, p. 8.96 Straits Times, 19 January 1946, p. 3.




time had a pan-Malayan reach, with active associations in Singapore,Selangor, Negri Sembilan, Malacca, and Kedah.97 This new energywas in part a response to fears that that the position of Eurasians inMalayan society was in danger of declining rather than improving. Asmore Asians were taking advantage of English education, many fearedthat Eurasians were gradually being squeezed out of their traditionalemployment niche in the government and municipal departments.

In 1934 the Penang Eurasian Association began to produce aquarterly journal—the Eurasian Review—which styled itself the ‘officialorgan of the Eurasian Associations of British Malaya’.98 This littlejournal had big ambitions, as Dr James Emile Smith, the president ofthe Association, acknowledged in the very first issue of July 1934. Hehoped that it would ‘act as a valuable medium for the expression ofwell informed Eurasian opinion’, that it would ‘engender unanimity ofoutlook and solidarity of purpose in all matters affecting the welfareof the community’, and that it would instigate a ‘co-ordination ofeffort’ among Eurasians throughout Malaya.99 This was a publicationwritten by Eurasians, for a Eurasian readership. Eurasians writingfrom Penang, Singapore, Malacca, Seremban, Perak, Selangor, Kedah,Johore, and Negri Sembilan, as well as India, Burma, and Englandall contributed articles to the publication. Malayan readers sentcopies abroad to their friends and family, and as a result the journalwas read by Eurasians in India, Burma, Indo-China, Hong Kong,Shanghai, and England. The journal created an arena of discussionfor Eurasian communities, already connected by family and kinship,all over Malaya, Southeast Asia, and beyond.

The writers for the Eurasian Review envisaged a morally,intellectually, and socially improved Eurasian community. Eurasianparents were advised to instil in their children ‘self-control, piety,kindliness, self-sacrifice, honesty, industry and general uprightness ofcharacter’, virtues that would raise the status of the community.100

Articles dwelt at length on the importance of ‘Concentration’,‘Ambition’, and ‘Thrift’, characteristics which Eurasians were deemedto lack. In particular, improvidence was believed to be a worryingvice in the community, and Eurasians were implored to stop livingbeyond their means, and save for the future. As one writer put

97 R. V. Chapman, ‘What’s in a Name?’, Eurasian Review, 1 (1), July 1934.98 Chapman, ‘What’s in a Name?’.99 J. E. Smith, ‘President’s Message’, Eurasian Review, 1 (1), July 1934.100 James F. Augustin, ‘Eurasian Education’, Eurasian Review, 2 (1), March 1936.




it, ‘it is impossible to live a champagne-and-caviar existence onwhat is not even a curry-and-rice income’.101 In another article, theextravagance of Eurasian weddings was castigated as an exampleof the senselessness of the typically thriftless Eurasian, desperateto emulate the European. To the critical mind of ‘Scrutator’ inPenang, lavish expenditure on weddings originated from the fact that‘Eurasians are fond of asserting that they are as nearly Europeanizedas can be’.102

The articles in the Eurasian Review had much to say about howEurasians should purify their domestic family lives. ‘Jill’ of Singaporeurged Eurasians not to marry Europeans, but to marry within theircommunity, using her own marriage as an example. ‘I have marriedone of my own kind, one of my own understanding and mentality,’she wrote.103 Similarly, ‘Poco’ urged Eurasian women to ‘lead a happydomestic life, to bring up your children to be true and loyal citizens,and models to other Eurasians of what Eurasians should be’.104 Yet,what a Eurasian should be remained deeply unclear. Several articleswere devoted to instilling a sense of pride in being Eurasian, urgingthe community to ‘gather and embody in it the best qualities of theEuropean and Asiatic races from which we originate’,105 but at thesame time contained the subtle message that a ‘good’ Eurasian wasan entirely Westernized one. The Eurasian Review never strayed fromits pro-British outlook. One editorial even zealously defended theirBritish rulers against criticism. While admitting that the subordinatestatus their colonial rulers had allocated to non-Europeans wasobjectionable, the editor declared that ‘the Eurasians can not be drawnto any scheme, however seductive, to impair British influence. Alwaysshall the Eurasians Cry Loyalty!’106

Despite the huge variety in European and Asian ancestry withinthe Eurasian community, the only hint of diversity included in theEurasian Review lay in the surnames of its writers and correspondents:da Silva, Jansen, d’Souza, Carlos, Leicester, Reutens, Baptist, Liddhoff,to name a few. A minority of Penang Eurasians were so intent onfirming up their connection with Britain, that they even suggested

101 James F. Augustin, ‘Eurasian Education Part I – The Home’, Eurasian Review, 1(5), September 1935.

102 Scrutator, ‘Eurasian Weddings’, Eurasian Review, 1 (2), October 1934.103 Jill, ‘The Colour Question’, Eurasian Review, 2 (1), March 1936, p. 2.104 Poco, ‘Be a Credit!’, Eurasian Review, 1 (4), May 1935.105 Centurion, ‘Race Prejudice’, Eurasian Review, 1 (3), January 1935.106 ‘Cry Loyalty’, Eurasian Review, 1 (2), October 1934.




in the local press that Malaya’s Eurasians change their name to‘Anglo-Malayan’.107 This was a publication which claimed to speakfor all Malayan Eurasians, but in reality, it was the mouthpiece ofa privileged few. However, their leadership of the community wasnot universally accepted. Association presidents frequently bemoanedtheir low membership numbers, and with good reason. Based onthe figures from the 1931 census, probably no more than 30 percent of those eligible joined the Penang Eurasian Association.108 Infact, noticeable tensions between different sections of the Eurasiancommunity emerge from several articles, based in part on perceiveddifferences in wealth and education. One correspondent complainedbitterly about the dominance of professional men in leading thecommunity.109 Another bullishly commented on the ‘sycophanticattitude’ of the Review, while another asked simply, ‘What right haveyou to speak on behalf of the community?’110

The journal established a dialogue which connected the diverseEurasian communities of Malaya and beyond, but at the same time itprojected the image of an insular, Anglophile community, attemptingto form a single, ‘pure’ Eurasian culture. As Eurasian elites attemptedto define and discipline unruly Eurasian family histories, this strugglebecame submerged within the complex divisions of class, education,and occupation within the community.

Conclusion

Penang Eurasian family histories reveal lives shaped by interactionsacross ethnic and cultural lines. At particular moments, interactionswere clearly inscribed into their everyday lives—the languages theyspoke, the food they ate and how they ate it, the clothes they wore.But these interactions were not unbounded, and these narratives alsohint at the tensions that emerge from the lived experience of culturalexchange. In interwar Penang, this was made manifestly clear, as

107 ‘Anglo-Malayan or Eurasian? A Symposium’, Eurasian Review, 1 (2), October1934.

108 Estimate based on statistics from C. A. Vlieland, British Malaya: A Report on the1931 Census and on Certain Problems of ‘Vital Statistics’ (London: Crown Agents for theColonies 1932) p. 236–37; and ‘Penang Eurasian Association – The Annual Report’,Eurasian Review, 1 (3), January, 1935.

109 D. Liddhoff, ‘What is Wrong With Us?’ Eurasian Review, 2 (4), December 1936.110 The Editor, ‘A Heart to Heart Talk’, Eurasian Review, 2 (4), December 1936.




Eurasian elites attempted to conceal their family histories behind anexclusively British culture in order to manoeuvre themselves into amore secure position within the structures of colonial rule.

Although we leave the Penang Eurasian community on the eve ofwar, this was not an end to their story. The Eurasian Review ceasedpublication in the late 1930s, but the leaders of the communitycontinued to monopolize discussions of Eurasian identity in the publicsphere, to the virulent criticism of many.111 They soon entered whatwas to become a troubling and traumatic period for many PenangEurasian families. During the Japanese Occupation, their Europeanconnections made Eurasians a suspect people. The same group ofPenang elites who had urged Eurasians to ‘Cry Loyalty’ to the British,severed this connection, redefining their community as authentically‘Asian’, by arguing that they had been born, educated, and had livedin Malaya all their lives.112 Many of the family histories exploredhere were marked indelibly and tragically by the war. Mervyn Foleyand A. Carrier were tortured by a Eurasian attached to the specialbranch under the Japanese regime, who took the opportunity to enacthis grudges.113 Both Henry Foley and James Emile Smith were killedduring the Occupation: Smith was executed not long after the warbegan.114

After 1945, the pre-war divisions within the Eurasian communitybecame even more sharply defined. All communities were forcedto state their national loyalties, and the pre-war debates about theanomalous position of the Eurasian community were reopened witha new sense of urgency. In June 1946, one Eurasian writer observedthat, ‘when nationalism is forcing the pace everywhere, the statusand existence of the Eurasian is very much at stake’, and with ‘nocountry to be called his own’ the Eurasian was ‘helpless in the worldof politics’.115 Under the Federation of Malaya, which granted thespecial rights of the Malay people, the status of Eurasians becamemore insecure than ever. The newly re-formed Eurasian associationscombined to create the Eurasian Union in 1947, and petitioned forEurasians to be recognized as ‘sons of the soil’, setting a precedent

111 Straits Times, 1 March 1939, p. 10; and 4 March 1939, p. 14.112 Certificate of Eurasian Identity, Logbook for the Eurasian Community for the Period

December 1941 to March 1942, Microfilm, Perpustakaan Universiti Sains Malaysia.113 Straits Times, 18 January 1946, p. 3; and 7 February 1946.114 Straits Times, 29 January 1946, p. 3.115 Straits Times, 21 June 1946, p. 4.




for future appeals for bumiputera status.116 However, many Eurasianfamilies were deeply disturbed by Malaya’s rapidly changing politicaland social scene, and a significant number left Malaya in a steadystream after 1945. Many were drawn to the United Kingdom, whileothers opted for New Zealand, Canada, and Australia. The softeningof Australia’s immigration policy towards people with a non-Europeanbackground in the 1960s facilitated emigration from Southeast Asia,and several members of the Carrier family were among those whoemigrated to Western Australia in the 1960s.117 The geographicalbreadth of Eurasian networks expanded still further.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Eurasian family historiescontinued to complicate assumptions of easy movement betweencultures, as the interconnected narratives of the Moissinacs, Foleys,and Pasquals, and the efforts of Eurasian elites in interwar Penanghave illustrated. Although interactions across ethnic and cultural lineswere inscribed into their everyday lives, they were fragile, limited toparticular spheres within their lives—they were not unbounded. Theseinteractions could be ignored, their histories could be rewritten, andidentities redefined. Eurasian family histories were in a constant stateof flux, subject to successive, often politically expedient, reinventions.Indeed, these Eurasian family histories are evolving still. Withinhomes, the stories that made up their histories often change witheach telling. At the same time, they are ascribed with new meanings,influenced by contemporary cultural politics and academic enquiries.

116 Malaya Tribune, 28 November 1947.117 Choo et al., ‘Being Eurasian’, p. 113.


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Eurasian Family Histories in Colonial Penang

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