Hybrid culture in a red dot

The early textbook collection in the Chinese Heritage Center. [Photo by Wang Chao/China Daily]

As someone who has lived in China for nearly 30 years, the country gives me a strange feeling of dejavu: there are Chinese faces everywhere, but they don't speak Chinese very well; there are Chinese characters carved on the wall, but they are ancient words that modern Chinese don't use any more.

The head of the center, Zhou Min, told us this is "frozen culture in time", a theory that the genuine culture of a certain nation exists only overseas, "because the culture in the home country is so dynamic," she said.

After generations of marriage between these ethnic groups, their boundary got ambiguous and there came a unique group called Peranakan Chinese, the descendants of Chinese and Malays.

For those who came to the "South sea", it was a wild bet on the unpredictable future and nobody knew whether they could make a living in the faraway land. So most Chinese men married local women and started a new family, meanwhile sending remittances to their old families. This is how Peranakan Chinese were born.

At the time, there were no visa systems so it was easy for people to immigrate. Some Chinese immigrants made a fortune in trading grain or operating a rubber plantation, but more were at the edge of surviving. The library keeps the lyrics of one song from 100 years ago that says "I have a fruit stand on the street, day and night I sell fruits; I make pennies and save them, then I send them back to my family in China."

The photo gallery has a good collection of old photos, mostly of the early Chinese immigrants. One shows a man posing for a picture with rented outfits. The outfits were actually a working uniform worn by high-profile Chinese officials. Apparently he had no idea what officials the uniform represented as the decorations were all wrong. The guide told us the man took the picture to tell his family back in China that he was living a prosperous and decent life.

The next day I visited the Peranakan Museum, where I was bedazzled by the traditional Peranakan wedding tradition. Getting married was such a huge event in the family that the wedding would last for 12 days. Every day there were rituals and banquets, starting from exchanging gifts between husband and wife's families. The gifts included food, gold, clothes and other "meaningful" stuff. The bizarre thing is that the girl's family had to include a raw pig leg in the gifts to indicate the girl was still a virgin.