Locating Chinese Women: Historical Mobility between China and Australia 9789888528615, 9888528610

Table of contents :
Crossing Seas series
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on Romanization
1. Introduction: Chinese Australian Women, Migration, and Mobility
Part One: Gendering Chinese Australian Histories
2. Reading Gender in Early Chinese Australian Newspapers
3. Chinese Australian Brides, Photography, and the White Wedding
4. The Emergence of Chinese Businesswomen in Darwin, 1910–1940
5. Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Migration and Mobility in White Australia
Part Two: Women’s Lives in China and Australia
6. Exception or Example? Ham Hop’s Challenge to White Australia
7. Missing Ruby
8. Alice Lim Kee: Journalist, Actor, Broadcaster, and Goodwill Ambassador
9. Mary Chong and Gwen Fong: University-Educated Chinese Australian Women
10. Daisy Kwok’s Shanghai: Life in China before and after 1949
Further Reading
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

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C R O S S I N G

LOCATING

Historical Mobility between China and Australia

‘Locating Chinese Women is a path-breaking book. By exploring the experiences of Chinese Australian women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the authors have opened new and compelling avenues of inquiry about the history of Chinese Australian women. In this landmark work, they have brilliantly recast the history of Chinese Australia.’ —Joy Damousi, Australian Catholic University

Moving beyond traditional representations of women as hidden and silent, this book demonstrates that Chinese Australian women in the twentieth century expressed themselves in the public eye, whether through writings, in photographs, or in political and cultural life. Their remarkable stories are often inspiring and sometimes tragic and serve to demonstrate the complexities of navigating female lives in the face of racial politics and imposed categories of gender, culture, and class.

Kate Bagnall is a historian at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. She has published on various aspects of Chinese Australian history, particularly on women and family life. Julia T. Martínez is an associate professor of history at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She has published on the history of northern Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. Gender Studies / History / Migration

Printed and bound in Hong Kong, China

Edited by Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez

Historians of transnational Chinese migration have come to recognize Australia as a crucial site within the ‘Cantonese Pacific’, and this collection provides a new layer of gendered comparison, connecting women’s experiences in Australia with those in Canada, the United States, and New Zealand.

LOCATING

CHINESE WOMEN Historical Mobility between China and Australia

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This ground-breaking edited collection draws together Australian historical scholarship on Chinese women, their gendered migrations, and their mobile lives between China and Australia. It considers different aspects of women’s lives, both as individuals and as the wives and daughters of immigrant men. While the number of Chinese women in Australia before 1950 was relatively small, their presence was significant and often subject to public scrutiny.

CHINESE WOMEN

‘Locating Chinese Women breaks new ground in Australian and transnational Chinese women’s history by making the lives of remarkable Chinese Australian women visible. Photographs, testimonies, Chinese-language newspapers, and digitized archives help document the women’s agency and activities as they navigate public lives between and within Australia and China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.’ —Shirley Hune, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Washington

LOCATING Historical Mobility between China and Australia

CHINESE WOMEN

S E A S

Edited by Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez

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Locating Chinese Women

Crossing Seas Editors: Henry Yu (University of British Columbia) and Elizabeth Sinn (University of Hong Kong) The Crossing Seas series brings together books that investigate Chinese migration from the migrants’ perspective. As migrants travelled from one destination to another throughout their lifetimes, they created and maintained layers of different networks. Along the way these migrants also dispersed, recreated, and adapted their cultural practices. To study these different networks, the series publishes books in disciplines such as history, women’s studies, geography, cultural anthropology, and archaeology, and prominently features publications informed by interdisciplinary approaches that focus on multiple aspects of the migration processes. Books in the series: Chinese Diaspora Charity and the Cantonese Pacific, 1850–1949 Edited by John Fitzgerald and Hon-ming Yip Locating Chinese Women: Historical Mobility between China and Australia Edited by Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villagers around the Pacific, 1849 to 1949 Michael Williams

Locating Chinese Women

Historical Mobility between China and Australia

Edited by Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong https://hkupress.hku.hk

© 2021 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8528-61-5 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Mrs Chan Harr, Marjorie Wong Yee, Annie Kwok, Norma Wong Yee, Ida Kwok, and Patty Wong Yee on their arrival in Sydney from Hong Kong on the SS Changte, March 8, 1938. Source: ACP Magazines Ltd Photographic Archive, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales (ON 388/Box 043/Item 035).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Hang Tai Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements ix Note on Romanization

x

1. Introduction: Chinese Australian Women, Migration, and Mobility Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez

1

Part One: Gendering Chinese Australian Histories 2. Reading Gender in Early Chinese Australian Newspapers Mei-fen Kuo

27

3. Chinese Australian Brides, Photography, and the White Wedding Sophie Couchman

45

4. The Emergence of Chinese Businesswomen in Darwin, 1910–1940 Natalie Fong

76

5. Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Migration and Mobility in White Australia Alanna Kamp

105

Part Two: Women’s Lives in China and Australia 6. Exception or Example? Ham Hop’s Challenge to White Australia Kate Bagnall

129

7. Missing Ruby Antonia Finnane

151

8. Alice Lim Kee: Journalist, Actor, Broadcaster, and Goodwill Ambassador 175 Paul Macgregor 9. Mary Chong and Gwen Fong: University-Educated Chinese Australian Women 204 Julia T. Martínez 10. Daisy Kwok’s Shanghai: Life in China before and after 1949 Sophie Loy-Wilson

230

vi Contents

Further Reading

255

List of Contributors

257

Index 259

Illustrations

Cover Mrs Chan Harr, Marjorie Wong Yee, Annie Kwok, Norma Wong Yee, Ida Kwok, and Patty Wong Yee on their arrival in Sydney from Hong Kong, March 8, 1938

Figures 2.1: Chinese community picnic at Narrandera, 1908 33 2.2: Picnic to celebrate the founding of the Republic of China, Melbourne, 1912 42 3.1: Lily Ah Poo and Henry Fine Chong, 1896 46 3.2: Lydia Chi and Judges Chun Kay, 1902 56 3.3: Tutoy Chinn and Charles Wong Hee with wedding party, 1904 57 3.4: Maud Whay and Fred Sheen with wedding party, 1919 59 3.5: Ellen Laura Lai Fook, Cecil Gilbert Quoy, and bridal party, c. 1921 63 3.6: Violet Tock and Lam Chik Shang with bridal party, c. 1928 67 3.7: Jessie Wong Home, Joe Mah, and bridal party, c. 1936 69 3.8: Norma and Frank Tock with wedding party, 1930s 69 3.9: Dorothy Yuen and Clarence Ng, 1931 72 3.10: Myrtle Fong and Charles Houng On Yee with flower girls and pageboy, 1930 72 4.1–4.4: The evolution of Selina Hassan (née Lee), 1917–1935 78–79 4.5: Group of Darwin ladies, c. 1950 90 4.6: Chin Yam Yan and Lee Hang Gong families 101 4.7: Lee Chow, Yuen Yet Hing, and Chan Fon Yuen families 102 4.8: Chin Mee Leung, Fong How, and Lowe Dep families 103 4.9: Lowe Dep and Fong Ding families 104 6.1: Ham Hop, c. 1911 131 6.2: Proclamation exempting Ham See and Poon Gooey from the Chinese Act 1890, 1900 135 6.3: Ham Hop and her family on their departure for China, 1913 141

viii Illustrations

6.4: Letter from Hop Poon Gooey to the Commissioner of Customs, 1911 7.1: Lin Lee Wood, 1948 7.2: Wedding of Ruby Lee Wood to Leong Yen, 1925 7.3: Heart-shaped stone in Karrakatta Cemetery, marking Ruby Yen’s grave 8.1: Douglas Fairbanks, Alice Lim Kee, and Mary Pickford, Shanghai, 1929 8.2: Alice Lim Kee (Mrs Fabian Chow), 1938 8.3: Mrs Fabian Chow and Mrs Elsie Lee Soong, Melbourne, 1938 8.4: Wu Ai-lien (Alice Lim Kee) in Broken Jade, 1926 9.1: Gwen Fong, head prefect of St Michael’s School, 1938 10.1: Daisy Alma Kwok, Sydney, 1917 10.2: Pearl Kwok, Shanghai, 1927 10.3: The Kwok family in Shanghai, 1931 10.4: Daisy, Pearlie, and Bobby (Pearlie’s grandson), Shanghai, 1967

144 159 163 171 178 179 182 188 224 235 240 242 250

Maps 1.1: Australia, China, and the Pacific 1.2: Emigrant districts of the Pearl River Delta, Kwangtung, China

8 8

Tables 1.1: Chinese female population of Australia, United States, Hawai‘i, and New Zealand, 1861–1921 11 1.2: Chinese population of Australia, 1861–1947 12 4.1: Chinese in the Northern Territory, 1881–1941 82 4.2: Darwin Chinese merchant patriarchs, spouses, and firms, 1880s 86 5.1: ‘Full Chinese’ and ‘mixed Chinese’ in Australia, 1901–1971 112 5.2: Australian-born and foreign-born Chinese females in Australia, 1911–1971 113 5.3: Country of birth of foreign-born Chinese Australian females, 1911–1961 115 9.1: Chinese graduates in medicine at Melbourne University, 1938–1949 216

Acknowledgements

This edited collection arose out of two events hosted by University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, in 2013 and 2014. The first was the Dragon Tails 2013 Third Australasian Conference on Overseas Chinese History and Heritage, convened by Julia T. Martínez, Paul Macgregor, and Jason Lim and titled Tradition and Modernity amongst Overseas Chinese. Also helping with conference organization were Kate Bagnall and Sophie Couchman, the convenors of Dragon Tails 2011. Professor Henry Yu from University of British Columbia was invited as keynote speaker and facilitator. The conference began with two panels on women and gender. Martínez, who had just begun an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship on women’s mobility, was struck by the groundbreaking historical research that was being undertaken in Australia on the topic of Chinese women. The following year, in December 2014, Martínez and Bagnall hosted the Chinese Women in the Southern Diaspora History Symposium. Selected papers from that symposium, along with other invited contributions, have been edited to create this collection, titled Locating Chinese Women.

Note on Romanization

The women we discuss in this volume were mainly Cantonese by birth or heritage, tracing their roots to the rural counties of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province. Historically, the lingua franca of Guangdong was Cantonese, including variants such as those spoken in the Sze Yup counties. Some non-Cantonese languages, such as Hakka and Long Du (a dialect of Southern Min), were also spoken in the emigrant districts. In this volume we have generally written Chinese personal, institutional, and place names in the way they were best known in Australia at the time, in most cases through an English rendering of a Cantonese pronunciation (e.g., Chong Shue Hing and Sze Yup) or an old-style romanization of Mandarin (e.g., Soong May-ling and Kuomintang). Chinese characters are included where these are known. Given the linguistic diversity of Guangdong and the lack of standardized romanization systems for most Cantonese dialects, to facilitate comparative research we have, where possible, also provided standard romanizations using Cantonese Yale and Mandarin pinyin.

1 Introduction: Chinese Australian Women, Migration, and Mobility Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez

As the first edited collection on women’s historical connections between China and Australia, Locating Chinese Women aims to convey a sense of the diverse experiences of Chinese Australian women over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We present studies of women living in, and between, Australia and China and consider how migration and mobility shaped their lives. The global literature on the Chinese diaspora has only recently become aware of Australia’s importance as a site of historical Chinese migration, but Australia is now being considered in the context of entangled Asia Pacific histories, in which local experiences speak to broader regional, oceanic, and global themes.1 As for the experiences of Chinese women in Australia, this history remains largely unknown. We have thus been inspired to compile this collection, which we hope will enrich histories of women in the trans-Pacific world.2 The volume focuses on Chinese women whose lives were connected to Australia, but it moves beyond a national context to trace the movements of bodies, ideas, and cultural practices back and forth across the seas. In so doing, we aim to place Chinese Australian women squarely within, not just on the periphery of, the historical circulations of what Henry Yu terms the ‘Cantonese Pacific’. The title Locating Chinese Women can be read in more than one sense. ‘Locating’ suggests the uncovering or tracking down of women absent from existing histories, as well as the situating or placing of women within national and transnational historiographies. Chinese Australian women have been doubly erased in a gendered and racialized historiography. A masculinist whitewashing process has 1. See, for example, Henry Yu, ‘Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific’, in Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s, ed. Donna R. Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 392–414, and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008). 2. A recent example is Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (eds), Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2017).

2 Introduction

long underplayed the role of both women and Chinese in Australian history. Yet even as scholars of the Chinese diaspora in Australia have sought to address this whitewashing, they have more often brought to the fore the histories of Chinese men rather than women. John Fitzgerald observed in his award-winning history Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia that in 1901, the year Australia became a nation, the Chinese population in Australia totalled 29,627, of whom just 474, or 1.6 percent, were women. Like other historians before him, Fitzgerald recognized the gendered nature of Chinese migration and the numerical dominance of men, and so gave this as his rationale for continuing to write ‘chiefly, albeit not exclusively’, about men.3 Yet, as we argue in this book, that women were a numerical minority does not make their lives less worthy of scholarly attention. The comparatively small number of Chinese women in Australia has made it easy to overlook their presence, and this, combined with the difficulties of locating relevant sources, has contributed to an apparently legitimized acceptance of malecentred history.4 In this collection we seek to challenge that framing. How might tracing the lives of the 474 Chinese women in Australia at the moment of Federation disrupt accepted narratives of Chinese migration and settlement? Furthermore, how might the inclusion of the thousands of women in South China who were connected to those 29,627 Chinese men in Australia—as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters—reshape the telling of Chinese Australian history? This collection offers a place to begin such a reconfiguration.

Writing Chinese Australian Women’s History Chinese Australian history has long been written as a history of genderless men, and so an important aim of Locating Chinese Women is what women’s historians refer to as ‘recovery history’—that is, identifying and researching the lives of individual women with the aim of making their stories and experiences visible and part of the broader history. To emphasize Chinese Australian women as historical actors in their own right, we name their names and explore their unique lived experiences. The task of locating absent Chinese Australian women may seem to hark back to the methodologies of earlier women’s histories, that of ‘discovering women’, but it is an important first step.5 Historian Alice Kessler-Harris has observed how, with the shift from women’s history to gender history in the 1990s, many researchers turned 3. John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007), p. 14. 4. Mainstream Australian histories of women and gender have also largely overlooked the presence of Chinese Australian women. For an overview, see Marilyn Lake, ‘Women’s and Gender History in Australia: A Transformative Practice’, Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 4 (2013), pp. 190–211. 5. Shirley Hune has identified ‘discovering women’ as an early, and ultimately unsatisfactory, approach to the study of Asian/Pacific Islander American women. See Shirley Hune, ‘Introduction—Through “Our” Eyes: Asian/Pacific Islander American Women’s History’, in Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, ed. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura (New York and London: New York University Press, 2003), p. 5.

Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez 3

away from the history of women per se, leading to a diminished emphasis on the lives of individual women.6 But in the case of Chinese Australian women, whose histories are only now being excavated, it is fundamental that we simply document their existence, even as we attempt to assert and understand their place in a wider historiography. With this collection we do not therefore aim to just paste women’s experiences onto mainstream, male-centred histories of Chinese migration. Rather, we hope to shift the narrative from absence to presence, and question fundamental assumptions about family, mobility, gender relations, work, and education. The first challenge in researching Chinese Australian women’s history is the difficulty of locating and accessing historical sources. As practitioners of women’s history have long found, there is a dearth of written evidence left by early Chinese Australian women; however, while letters, diaries, and journals written by them might be scarce, there are historical records that document their presence and tell us something of their lives. Chinese American historian Sucheng Chan has noted that we should not ignore the ‘historical sediments’ left by Chinese women and girls, even if they were not written by the women themselves.7 Instead, the fragmentary records of Chinese Australian women’s lives necessitate different approaches, as can be seen in the contributions to this volume, which use various kinds of sources, including newspapers, private and government archives, oral testimony, and photographs.8 Historians of Chinese Australia have sometimes lamented the difficulties of finding a ‘Chinese perspective’ in Australian sources, yet the chapter by Mei-fen Kuo in this volume suggests possibilities for locating and using Chinese-language sources in Australia and China, whether they be published works like newspapers and qiaokan, or private letters and oral histories.9 The digital revolution has expanded the possibilities for research on Chinese Australian women, most significantly with the digitization of historical newspapers available through the National Library of Australia’s Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/ newspaper). A search of newspapers in Trove for ‘Chinese woman’, for example, brings up some 7,000 Australian articles dated between 1850 and 1950, many of which document the activities of individual Chinese women in Australia. Chapters in this volume by Antonia Finnane and Paul Macgregor demonstrate the fruitfulness of using newspapers for recovering the ordinary and extraordinary lives of Chinese Australian women. Online indexes, digitized archives, and family histories, 6. Alice Kessler-Harris, ‘Do We Still Need Women’s History?’, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 7, 2007. 7. Sucheng Chan, ‘Against All Odds: Chinese Female Migration and Family Formation on American Soil During the Early Twentieth Century’, in Chinese American Transnationalism: The Flow of People, Resources, and Ideas Between China and America During the Exclusion Era, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), pp. 34–35. 8. On the innovative use of sources by women’s historians, see Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (eds), Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010). 9. One interesting historical text that has recently emerged through the research of Mei-Fen Kuo, Ely Finch, and Michael Williams is Wong Shee Ping, The Poison of Polygamy: A Social Novel, trans. Ely Finch (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2019).

4 Introduction

including those available through Ancestry.com, also enable us to trace mobile Chinese Australian women across colonial, state, and national borders in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. As Australian women’s historian Cath Bishop has noted, ‘Women have been present, but buried in mountains of paper. With digitisation, their presence and, in particular, that of ordinary women has been rendered more visible.’10 In Locating Chinese Women we aim to complicate the category of ‘Chinese Australian women’ by suggesting a multiplicity of identities, voices, locations, movements, and mobilities. In so doing, we have allowed as broad a definition of ‘Chinese Australian women’ as possible—that is, women of Chinese or part-Chinese ethnicity, born in Australia, China, Hong Kong, or elsewhere, who lived in Australia for some or all of their lives. These women may have been British subjects, Australian citizens (after 1948), or Chinese nationals by birth or marriage. We use the term ‘Chinese women in Australia’ to refer to these women within Australia, while in an international context the term ‘Chinese Australian women’ differentiates them from Chinese women in China and Hong Kong, and from other ‘overseas Chinese women’, including those from New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. The term ‘Chinese’ requires some comment. The women we discuss in this volume were mainly Cantonese by birth or heritage. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Australia’s Chinese population was predominantly Cantonese, with most migrants arriving via Hong Kong from the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province. Notable exceptions were several thousand men from Amoy (Xiamen) who arrived as indentured labourers in New South Wales in the mid-nineteenth century, and the contracted labourers sent to Western Australia through Singapore in the late nineteenth century, who, along with Cantonese, included men from Hokkien, Hainanese, Teochew, and Hakka-speaking areas of coastal southern China.11 After World War II the make-up of the Chinese Australian population began to diversify with the entry of Chinese students—women as well as men—from Singapore, Malaysia, and other parts of Southeast Asia, as shown in Alanna Kamp’s chapter in this volume. Despite this, Cantonese remained the dominant Chinese language in Australia until after the turn of the twenty-first century. The majority of women discussed in this volume were born in China or Australia to two Chinese parents, yet we also recognize the significance of women of mixed race in the wider history of Chinese Australia. Intimate relationships between nonChinese women—of Indigenous, European, and other Asian heritage—and Chinese men were common in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia, a product 10. Catherine Bishop, ‘The Serendipity of Connectivity: Piecing Together Women’s Lives in the Digital Archive’, Women’s History Review 26, no. 5 (2017), p. 767. 11. Maxine Darnell, ‘Life and Labour for Indentured Chinese Shepherds in New South Wales, 1847–55’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 6 (2004), pp. 137–58; Margaret Slocomb, Among Australia’s Pioneers, Chinese Indentured Pastoral Workers on the Northern Frontier 1848 to c. 1880 (Bloomington, IN: Balboa Press, 2014); Jan Ryan, Ancestors: Chinese in Colonial Australia (South Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995), pp. 22–23.

Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez 5

of the majority-male character of Chinese emigration at the time. The daughters and granddaughters of these unions formed the majority of the early female ‘Chinese’ population in Australia.12 In the ‘polyethnic north’ of Australia, the historiography has recognized how Chinese, Japanese, and Malays widely mixed and intermarried with Indigenous Australians and each other.13 We acknowledge the multiple ways mixed-race women identified themselves as ‘Chinese’, or not, particularly as they partnered and formed families of their own; many married back into the Chinese community, but others partnered men of the same ethnicity as their non-Chinese mothers or from another ethnic group. Less common was the marriage of the Australian-born daughters of two Chinese parents to non-Chinese men, and even more rare before World War II was marriage between migrant Chinese women and non-Chinese men. Our ability to gauge the number of Chinese Australian women who married non-Chinese men presents special difficulties; as sociologist C. Y. Choi noted in his 1968 study of Chinese migration to Australia, Chinese women who married and took the surname of their non-Chinese husband may be ‘no longer recognizable’ as Chinese, at least to those working from written sources.14 One such woman was Dr Gwen Fong, discussed in Julia Martínez’s chapter, who was more difficult to trace after her marriage to Jack Mitchell. Mobility, or rather a lack thereof, has come to be a defining characteristic of women in Chinese Australian histories. We are commonly led to understand that the migration of women and girls to Australia was rarely sanctioned by Cantonese families, a situation that was compounded by anti-Chinese immigration laws. Once in Australia, it is assumed that Chinese women were located mostly in the home, isolated and excluded, consumed by the duties of wife and mother and bound by traditional gender roles. Many of the chapters presented in this volume seek to challenge 12. On Chinese European couples and families, see, for example, Kevin Rains, Cedars of the West: The Ah Foo Family Story (North Melbourne: Chinese Heritage in Northern Australia Inc., 2011); Kate Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land: An Exploration of the Lives of White Women Who Partnered Chinese Men and their Children in Southern Australia, 1855–1915’ (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2007); Pauline Rule, ‘The Chinese Camps in Colonial Victoria: Their Role as Contact Zones’, in After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860–1940, ed. Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald, and Paul Macgregor (Melbourne: Otherland Press, 2004), pp. 119–31, and ‘A Tale of Three Sisters: Australian-Chinese Marriages in Colonial Victoria’, in Chinese in Oceania, ed. Kee Pookong, Ho Chooi-hon, Paul Macgregor, and Gary Presland, pp. 65–76 (Melbourne: ASCADAPI, Chinese Museum and Centre for Asia-Pacific Studies, Victoria University of Technology, 2002); Dinah Hales, ‘Lost Histories: Chinese-European Families of Central Western New South Wales, 1850–80’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 6 (2004), pp. 93–112; Sandi Robb, ‘Myths Lies and Invisible Lives: European Women and Chinese Men in North Queensland 1870–1900’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 12, pp. 95–109; Jan Ryan, ‘“She Lives with a Chinaman”: Orient-ing “White” Women in the Courts of Law’, Journal of Australian Studies 60 (1999), pp. 149–59, 215–17. 13. Regina Ganter (with Julia Martínez and Gary Lee), Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2006); Shen Yuanfang and Penny Edwards (eds), Lost in the Whitewash: Aboriginal-Asian Encounters in Australia, 1901–2001 (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 2003); Guy Ramsay, ‘The Chinese Diaspora in Torres Strait’, in Navigating Boundaries: The Asian Diaspora in Torres Strait, ed. A. Shnukal, G. Ramsay and Y. Nagata (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2004), pp. 53–79, and ‘Cherbourg’s Chinatown: Creating an Identity of Place on an Australian Aboriginal Settlement’, Journal of Historical Geography 29 (2003), pp. 109–122. 14. C. Y. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975), p. 119.

6 Introduction

these assumptions, showing Chinese Australian women to be far more mobile than previously imagined. These women show up in unexpected places—in schools and universities, in business, and in politics—taking advantage of the changing social and political worlds of Australia and China. The collection highlights mobility in all its forms—physical, social, cultural, and economic—something that is particularly apparent in the life stories of individual Chinese Australian women, such as those presented in the chapters by Natalie Fong, Sophie Loy-Wilson, and Julia Martínez.15 Stasis is also an important part of the story of mobility, and it was not just women ‘on the move’ who were affected by the forces of migration from South China to Australia. As Antonia Finnane’s chapter demonstrates, the lives of ‘stationary’ women were entangled with those of mobile men, men whose movements were supported and facilitated by their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters staying put. Women’s lives were therefore shaped, although not necessarily defined, by the contingencies of circumstance, as the daughter of a migrant father, as a gāmsāanpòh (金山婆 M: jīnshānpó; ‘Gold Mountain wife’) or grass widow, as a wife who traveled to join her husband overseas, or as a mui tsai or servant girl (妹仔 C: muihjái, M: mèizǎi) accompanying her mistress overseas. Women’s status and mobility could also change over the course of their lives, as shown in the story of Ham Hop in Kate Bagnall’s chapter. As Chinese American feminist historian Shirley Hune has noted, the lived realities of our subjects are everywhere: ‘private and public spheres; local, regional, national, and global arenas; and in between.’16 In this collection we have sought to consider different aspects of Chinese Australian women’s lives—both as individuals in their own right and as the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of men—and to position them as complex, active subjects in their own histories. Although traditionally thought of as hidden and silent, we show Chinese women whose life stories demonstrate the complexities of navigating female lives in the face of imposed categories of gender, race, culture, and class. Chinese Australian history to date has done much to document the discrimination and oppression that Chinese migrants faced in Australia, but, as Antonia Finnane’s chapter demonstrates, Chinese Australian women confronted further, or different, forms of oppression, including gender-based violence and domestic abuse. That said, the Chinese Australian women discussed in this volume were not just victims of the social, familial, and political structures that framed their lives; they used strategies of accommodation, negotiation, and resistance to challenge traditional patriarchal expectations. In examining both the constraints placed on women and the ways women negotiated them, this volume echoes the work of feminist historians of China and the Chinese diaspora over the past three decades.17 15. For more on Chinese Australian women’s mobility, see Angela Woollacott, Race and the Modern Exotic, Three ‘Australian’ Women on Global Display (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2011). 16. Hune, ‘Introduction—Through “Our” Eyes’, p. 6. 17. See, for example, Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (eds.), Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994).

Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez 7

As Joan Judge has noted, Chinese women’s history has challenged the dominant stereotype of the footbound, oppressed, and voiceless ‘traditional Chinese woman’, and ‘revealed the capaciousness of the “tradition” that allegedly held Chinese women hostage, women’s resourceful deployment of that tradition to their own ends, and the heterogeneity of their historical experience’.18

Chinese Australian Women and the Cantonese Pacific World From an international perspective, the history of the Chinese in Australia, and consequently the history of Chinese women in Australia, has often been framed in the broader and better-known context of Chinese migration to the United States, even though the two nations have distinct immigration histories. Wang Gungwu, whose pioneering work helped to set the Australian research agenda, wrote that after the American and Australasian gold rushes of the mid-nineteenth century there was ‘no alternative to sojourning’ for the Chinese men who remained ‘because exclusionary policies were introduced that kept women out’.19 George Peffer, who has written on Chinese female immigration to the United States before Exclusion, has also suggested a similarity in the histories of the United States and Australia, particularly in comparison with Hawai‘i and sites in Southeast Asia.20 Broadly speaking, the histories of Chinese migration and settlement in Australia and the United States, as well as those of Canada and New Zealand, are similar. Large-scale Cantonese migration began with gold rushes in the mid-nineteenth century, followed by economic diversification into trade and agriculture, and the establishment of communities that were shaped through laws and policies that restricted Chinese immigration and curtailed the rights of Chinese migrants and natural-born citizens of Chinese heritage. Chinese migrants mostly came from the Pearl River Delta counties in Guangdong, were overwhelmingly male, and faced the same set of migratory push and pull factors; as Henry Yu has suggested, Chinese in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada were part of the same historical circulations reaching out from South China across and around the Pacific.21 When we look more closely, however, it is clear that despite these shared characteristics each Pacific destination has its own distinct history, including that of Chinese women’s migration and settlement. There is California, with its substantial mid-nineteenth-century trade in Chinese prostitutes; Hawai‘i, with a greater number of settled family groups; Australia, with small numbers of migrant Chinese 18. Joan Judge, ‘Chinese Women’s History: Global Circuits, Local Meanings’, Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 4 (Winter 2013), p. 227. 19. Wang Gungwu, The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 63. 20. George Anthony Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 22–27. 21. Henry Yu, ‘Mountains of Gold: Canada, North America, and the Cantonese Pacific’, in Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora, ed. Tan Chee-Beng (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 108–21.

Map 1.1:  Australia, China, and the Pacific. Map created by Olivier Rey Lescure

Map 1.2:  Emigrant districts of the Pearl River Delta, Kwangtung, China. Map created by Olivier Rey Lescure

Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez 9

women but many locally born mixed-race daughters; and New Zealand, with tiny numbers of migrant women and families until World War II. Over the past two decades, the transnational turn has demonstrated the utility of looking beyond national borders to understand national stories of migration and settlement, but it has also reminded us of the value of comparative histories.22 Adam McKeown’s Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change, for example, which considers Peru, Chicago and Hawai‘i, compared the different patterns of female migration and family life within the individual contexts of these three locales.23 In the study of overseas Chinese women’s history, tracing both the individual/local/national and interconnected/global/transnational histories of Chinese women’s migration and settlement can help us better understand our own histories, be they in Australia, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Hong Kong, or Guangdong. Understanding the differences, as well as the similarities, leads to a better understanding overall of the lives of women within the Cantonese Pacific world. With this in mind, and to provide context for the women’s lives discussed in this volume, we next sketch a brief outline of the characteristics and constraints of female Chinese migration to Australia between the 1850s and the 1950s. An imbalance in the numbers of women and men was common to Chinese communities around the Pacific, including those in Australia, Hawai‘i, and the United States, as well as those in Southeast Asia such as Singapore, Penang, and Malacca. According to George Peffer, ‘unattached men dominated the initial Chinese population for each of these destinations, and in every instance the female-to-male ratio remained unbalanced between 1861 and 1911’.24 The settlement pattern in Australia and the United States was quite distinct from that in Southeast Asia and Hawai‘i, however, with a consistently low female-to-male ratio. In the United States, by 1910 the female-to-male ratio was only 7:100, while in Australia in 1911 it was 4:100.25 By comparison, in Hawai‘i in 1910 the ratio was 26:100, while in Penang in 1911 it was 42:100.26 When viewed proportionally in this way, Australia and the United States seem not dissimilar; however, the real numbers present a different picture. The earliest, but very scant, records of Chinese women in the Australian colonies date from the mid-1850s. The New South Wales census for 1856, for example, recorded 6 Chinese females among a male population of 1,800, while the Victorian census for 1857 recorded 3 Chinese females among a male population of 25,421.27 22. For example, Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line; Laura Madokoro, Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Michael Williams, Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villagers around the Pacific, 1849 to 1949 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018). 23. Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 26–60. 24. Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here, p. 15. 25. Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here, pp. 23–24. 26. Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here, pp. 18–19. 27. Census of the Colony of New South Wales (Sydney: Government Printer, 1857), p. 4; Kathryn Cronin, Colonial Casualties: Chinese in Early Victoria (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1982), p. 132 (Table 2).

10 Introduction

In 1861, the first year in which the colonies of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland each conducted a population census, there were 11 Chinese females recorded in a male population of 38,247. By comparison, in the United States in 1860 there were 1,784 Chinese women and 33,149 Chinese men.28 A decade later the number of Chinese females in Australia had grown to 51 (among 27,624 males), while the number in the United States had grown to 4,566 (among 58,633 males) (Table 1.1). Over the century to 1950, the number of Chinese women and girls in Australia, as recorded in decennial censuses, continued to increase, while the male Chinese population fluctuated and then decreased each decade from 1881 following the reintroduction of anti-Chinese immigration laws (Table 1.2, see p. 12). Despite this continual increase in female Chinese, however, by 1947 there were still only about 2,500 Chinese women and girls in Australia. Census statistics such as these are useful for considering broad patterns of population change, and as Alanna Kamp has argued in this volume and elsewhere, they can also be read critically to revise gendered understandings of Australia’s Chinese past.29 The numbers of Chinese women and girls in Australia might have been small, but they were not ‘absent’ as previous historiography has suggested. Census statistics can also be used to better understand the make-up of the female Chinese Australian population, for example, by revealing the significant numbers of mixed-race women and girls (Table 1.2). These statistics should, however, be used with some caution. Historian Kathryn Cronin has noted how colonial statistics are not an accurate representation of the Chinese community, ‘for colonial efforts to collect Chinese data were greatly hindered by communication problems, by the migratory nature of the Chinese population and by Chinese suspicion of colonial authorities.’30 Chinese women—who, like their male counterparts, ‘sojourned’ in Australia—would also not have been recorded if they arrived and departed again between decennial censuses. The number of individual Chinese women who lived in Australia between the 1850s and 1940s is likely, therefore, to be greater than the census figures suggest. The number of Chinese women and girls in Australia increased between the 1850s and the 1950s despite anti-Chinese laws and policies, a situation that was mirrored in the United States. In both these sites, as Adam McKeown has noted, ‘the proportion of women actually grew as exclusionary measures took hold’.31 Unlike the United States under the 1875 Page Act, however, anti-Chinese immigration laws in the Australian colonies never specifically targeted women, with some laws even

28. McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change, p. 31 (Table 1). 29. Alanna Kamp, ‘Chinese Australian Women in White Australia: Utilising Available Sources to Overcome the Challenge of “Invisibility” ’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 6 (2013), pp. 80–81, 84–89. 30. Cronin, Colonial Casualties, p. 134. 31. Adam McKeown, ‘Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940’, in Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations: A Global Perspective on Continuities and Discontinuities from the 19th to the 21st Centuries, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Marjit Kaur (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 288.

38 247

27 624

38 274

35 523

29 153

21 856

16 011

1861

1871

1881

1891

1901

1911

1921

%F

0.03

0.18

0.67

0.83

1.6

3.9

6.7

F

11

51

259

298

474

897

1 146

53 891

68 856

85 341

103 620

100 686

58 633

33 149

M

7 748

4 675

4 522

3 868

4 779

4 566

1 784

F

United States

12.5

6.8

5.0

3.7

4.5

7.2

5.1

%F

16 197

17 239

22 301

16 367

17 383

1 937

1 196

M

7 310

4 526

3 466

1 090

871

107

110

F

Hawai‘i

31.1

20.8

13.4

6.2

4.8

5.2

8.4

%F

2 905

2 542

2 825

4 426

4 995

2 637

1 213

M

205

88

32

18

9

4

6

F

New Zealand

6.6

3.3

1.1

0.41

0.17

0.15

0.49

%F

Source: ‘The Chinese in Australia’, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, No. 18, 1925 (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1925); Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, Chinese and Japanese in the United States 1910 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910), p. 8; Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, vol. 2, Population 1920 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922), p. 157; Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2001), p. 36; James Ng, Windows on a Chinese Past, vol. 1 (Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago Heritage Books, n.d.), pp. 209–10 (compiled from New Zealand Census and official yearbook).

Note: The exact years of these population figures vary by location. Figures for Australia and New Zealand are for 1861, 1871, 1881, and so on; figures for the United States are for 1860, 1870, 1880, and so on; figures for Hawai‘i are for 1866, 1872, 1884, 1890, 1900, 1910, 1920. Australian figures for 1861 and 1871 are for New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland only.

M

Year

Australia

Table 1.1:  Estimated Chinese female population of Australia, United States, Hawai‘i, and New Zealand, 1861–1921

Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez 11

16 011

9 311

6 594

1921

1933

1947

2 550

1 535

1 146

897

474

298

259

44

11

Female

Full Chinese

9 144

10 846

17 157

22 753

29 627

35 821

38 533

28 351

38 258

Total

1 599

1 901

1 884

1 518

1 556

657

–

–

–

Male

1 351

1 602

1 771

1 501

1 534

642

–

–

–

Female

Mixed Chinese

2 950

3 503

3 655

3 019

3 090

1 299

–

–

–

Total

8 193

11 212

17 902

23 374

30 709

36 180

–

–

­–

Male

3 901

3 137

2 924

2 398

2 008

940

–

–

–

Female

Total

12 094

14 349

20 826

25 772

32 717

37 120

–

–

–

Total

Source: Statistics compiled from ‘The Chinese in Australia’, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, no. 18, 1925 (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1925); C. Y. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia, p. 22; Alanna Kamp, ‘Chinese Australian Women in White Australia: Utilising Available Sources to Overcome the Challenge of “Invisibility”’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 6 (2013), p. 85.

Note: Figures for 1861 and 1871 include New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland only. Figures for ‘mixed Chinese’ are not available before 1891.

29 153

35 523

1891

21 856

38 274

1881

1901

28 307

1871

1911

38 247

Male

1861

Year

Table 1.2:  Chinese population of Australia, 1861–1947

12 Introduction

Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez 13

defining ‘Chinese’ as ‘male’, thereby allowing women free entry.32 The colonies of Victoria, South Australia, and New South Wales were the first to introduce antiChinese legislation, between 1855 and 1861.33 These laws were repealed by 1867 and, except in Queensland (1877), there were no new restrictions on Chinese immigration until 1881. It was in the 1880s that more consistent laws were introduced across the Australasian colonies that aimed to restrict large-scale immigration of Chinese workers. These and later colonial laws discouraged the migration of both male and female Chinese through poll taxes and tonnage restrictions, but some included exemptions that allowed certain Chinese residents, such as naturalized British subjects and merchants, to bring in their wives and minor children. For example, South Australia’s Coloured Immigration Restriction Act 1896 provided specific exemptions for merchants (among others) and their wives, children, and domestic servants.34 The Immigration Restriction Act, the first national immigration law enacted after the Australian colonies federated in 1901, excluded prostitutes of any race or nationality, but in its first iteration allowed for the unlimited entry of wives and families of Chinese men domiciled in Australia.35 The clause allowing the entry of Chinese wives and families was, however, soon suspended and then repealed with the first amendments to the Act in 1905.36 Thereafter, under the Immigration Restriction Act, which remained in force (with amendments) until 1958, Chinese women and girls could only be granted temporary entry permits, as wives and daughters of resident Chinese or as students, but in some instances these women were eventually allowed to remain permanently. Historians in the United States and Canada have long debated the complex reasons why comparatively few women migrated from South China, often focusing on the impact of anti-Chinese immigration laws.37 In Australia, however, restrictive laws have less often been cited to explain the very small numbers of migrant Chinese women.38 Chinese in Australia certainly named anti-Chinese laws and the colonial poll taxes among the reasons why Chinese women did not migrate in larger numbers, and evidence suggests that greater numbers of women would have 32. Chinese Immigrants Regulation and Restriction Act 1861 (NSW) and Chinese Immigration Act 1887 (Tasmania). 33. For an overview of Australian colonial anti-Chinese immigration laws, see Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia, pp. 18–27. 34. Coloured Immigration Restriction Act 1896 (SA). 35. Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (Cth), ss. 3f and 3m. 36. Immigration Restriction Amendment Act 1905 (Cth), s. 4c; A. T. Yarwood, ‘The “White Australia” Policy: Some Administrative Problems, 1901–1920’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 7, no.  2 (2009), pp. 245–60; A. C. Palfreeman, The Administration of the White Australia Policy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), pp. 13–16. 37. Instructive commentaries on these debates are found in Michael Williams, ‘Anglo-Saxonizing Machines: Exclusion America, White Australia’, Chinese America: History and Perspectives 17 (2003), pp. 23–46; McKeown, ‘Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion’; Woon Yuen-fong, ‘The Voluntary Sojourner among the Overseas Chinese: Myth or Reality?’, Pacific Affairs 56, no. 4 (1983–1984), pp. 673–90. 38. Williams, ‘Anglo-Saxonizing Machines’, p. 29. Williams is one of the few Australian scholars who have ventured into this debate; another is Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, pp. 49–51.

14 Introduction

migrated after the turn of the twentieth century if it were not for the Immigration Restriction Act. However, legislative discrimination was only one of the reasons named by Australian Chinese when they explained the situation to government committees, inquiries, and the newspapers. They also spoke of the importance of women’s role in maintaining the ancestral home and caring for parents-in-law, of women’s reluctance to travel to unfamiliar and uncivilized places, of violence and day-to-day discrimination against the Chinese, and of the cost and trouble in uprooting the family.39 These reasons tally with those noted in the American literature, which include economic considerations such as the cost of passage and limited employment opportunities for women, patriarchal cultural and familial practices, white racism, the difficulties of the physical environment, the maturity of Chinese settlement, and women’s agency in the migration process. Perhaps the most notable difference between Australia and the United States is the absence of any sustained evidence of Chinese women working in prostitution in Australia. In his 1979 comparative history of Chinese in nineteenth-century California and Australia, Andrew Markus noted, ‘The large number of Chinese prostitutes who became a feature of Californian life were absent from the Australian colonies.’40 There were no strong taboos on sexual liaisons between Chinese men and white women in Australia, and so, Markus argued, ‘there was a nearly total absence of Chinese women immigrants in the Australian colonies where European prostitutes catered to the Chinese community’. California was, however, a persistent point of comparison for the Australian colonies and reports on Chinese prostitution in San Francisco appeared in the Australian press. The Californian situation was used as a cautionary tale by white colonists opposed to Chinese immigration, but generally it was acknowledged that the two situations were different.41 Many references to ‘Chinese prostitutes’ and ‘Chinese brothels’ appear in Australian court and police reports in newspapers from the 1860s to the 1930s, but almost all of these referred to white women who lived and worked among the Chinese, sometimes in Chinese-run brothels.42 There is some evidence that one or two Chinese women worked as prostitutes in Melbourne in the early years of the twentieth century,43 but 39. Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land’, pp. 41–44. 40. Andrew Markus, Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California, 1850–1901 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1979), p. 18. 41. See, for example, [No title], Mount Alexander Mail, September 24, 1880, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newsarticle200270886; ‘The Mongolian Invasion’, Sydney Daily Telegraph, May 11, 1881, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article238299678. 42. See, for example, ‘The Evils of Chinese Encampments’, Bendigo Advertiser, December 8, 1868, p. 2, http:// nla.gov.au/nla.news-article87900291; ‘Moral Depravity’, Express and Telegraph (Adelaide), April 15, 1893, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article208385499; ‘A Cosmopolitan Pub’, Truth, March 1, 1903, p. 7, http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article167896679. See also Kate Bagnall, ‘The Petition of Bah Fook of Sofala, 1866’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 6 (2013), pp. 123–28, http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/68741/20140404-0215/chl. anu.edu.au/publications/csds/csds2013/csds2013_12.pdf. 43. C. F. Yong notes that the Chinese Times newspaper reported a Chinese female servant working as a prostitute in Fitzroy in 1906, while ‘Yokohama’ (Tie Gum Ah Chong) was said to have worked in Casselden Place, Melbourne in the 1910s. Chinese Times, April 14, 1906, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article170092402, cited

Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez 15

it is in 1880s Darwin that we find the greatest evidence of Chinese prostitution in Australia.44 Darwin, sometimes described as Australia’s gateway to Asia, had a settlement history quite unlike the cities in southern Australia, being more akin to Southeast Asia in its immigration patterns.45 In the 1870s Chinese men came to work in agriculture and to build the overland telegraph and then, in the late 1880s, the Palmerston and Pine Creek Railway. There were no legal barriers to their arrival at this time, and Darwin was the only Australian port ‘where Chinese were free to land’.46 Reports of the Chinese population in the Northern Territory fluctuated from 3,162 in 1879 to 2,132 in 1880, 4,358 in 1881, 3,237 in 1886, and 6,122 in 1888.47 The 1881 Northern Territory census recorded four Chinese females, but the first known Chinese woman in Darwin was Shung Fong, whose work as a prostitute in 1883 apparently led her to being physically assaulted by some local Chinese men, for which she took them to court.48 In 1888, Darwin, with its population of 1,300 Chinese men, was said to have seven Chinese brothels that employed thirty-four prostitutes; according to Police Inspector Paul Foelsche these were ‘conducted quietly’.49 Brothel keeping was tolerated in Darwin, but not legal.50 Through local police records another three of these women can be identified by name, as Leen Hon, Wong Ang Fit, and Ah You.51 Information about these women is scant, and details such as how and when they came to Australia are as yet unknown.

in C. F. Yong, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia, 1901–1921 (Richmond, South Australia: Raphael Arts, 1977), p. 174; Justin McCarthy, Archaeological Investigations: Commonwealth Offices and Telecom Corporate Building Sites, The Commonwealth Block, Melbourne, Victoria: Historical and Archaeological Report (Melbourne: Austral Archaeology, 1989), p. 95. 44. See Julia Martínez, ‘Chinese Women in Prostitution in the Courts of 1880s Darwin’, Northern Territory Historical Studies 30 (April 2019), pp. 28–42. 45. Claire K. Lowrie, Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 13–28. 46. Timothy G. Jones, The Chinese in the Northern Territory (Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press, 2005), p. 56. The Northern Territory was administered by South Australia until 1911. South Australia’s 1881 Chinese Immigrants Regulation Act specifically excluded the Northern Territory, a situation that changed with the enactment of the Chinese Immigration Restriction Act 1888 (SA). 47. ‘Government Resident’s Reports on the Northern Territory’ (Adelaide, South Australia: Government Printer, 1879, 1880), Northern Territory Library Special Collection; ‘News and Notes’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, January 1, 1881, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article3150397; Jones, Chinese in the Northern Territory, p. 56. 48. ‘The Chinese in Australia’, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, no. 18, 1925 (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1925), p. 955; ‘Law Courts, Police Court Palmerston’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, June 9 and 16, 1883, p. 3. Merchants’ wives, daughters, and servants made up the balance of Chinese female population in the Northern Territory; see Natalie Fong’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 4). 49. ‘The Chinese in the Northern Territory’, South Australian Register, September 17, 1888, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article46874036; Jones, Chinese in the Northern Territory, p. 68. 50. ‘Police Court’, North Australian, July 2, 1887, p. 3. 51. ‘Police Court’, North Australian, March 30, 1889, p. 3; ‘News and Notes’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, January 14, 1888, p. 2.

16 Introduction

Women, Gender, and the Family in Chinese Australian Histories Scholars of the history of Chinese women and the family in Australia have gained much from the work of our international colleagues, particularly from the United States. There, academic and community historians have been documenting, researching, and writing about the lives of Chinese American women since the 1970s. In addition to major monographs by Judy Yung and Huping Ling, there is now a significant and increasingly diverse body of scholarship which has moved on from the early studies of Chinese prostitutes to encompass a more diverse range of Chinese American women’s experiences.52 More general histories of the Chinese in America have also become attendant to women’s lives, the family, and questions of gender, including major works by Elizabeth Sinn, Wendy Rouse Jorae, Madeline Hsu, and Adam McKeown, as previously mentioned.53 In Canada and New Zealand, too, we see a small number of focused histories on the lives of migrant and localborn Chinese women.54

52. Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Huping Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998). See also, for example, Lucie Cheng Hirata, ‘Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America’,  Signs 5, no. 1 (1979), pp. 3–29; Linking Our Lives: Chinese American Women of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, 1984); Sucheng Chan, ‘The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943’, in Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 94–146; Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Laura A. Lee, ‘History Rewritten: The Story of Quock Mui Jeung’, UCLA Asian Pacific American Law Journal 11 (2006), pp. 75–91; Shauna Lo, ‘Chinese Women Entering New England: Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files, Boston, 1911–1925’, The New England Quarterly 81, no. 3 (September 2008), pp. 383–409; Kathleen S. Yep, ‘Playing Rough and Tough: Chinese American Women Basketball Players in the 1930s and 1940s’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 31, no. 1 (2010), pp. 123–41. 53. See Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013); Wendy Rouse Jorae, The Children of Chinatown: Growing Up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change; Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 54. On Canada, see, for example, Tamara Adilman, ‘A Preliminary Sketch of Chinese Women and Work in British Columbia, 1858–1950’, in British Columbia Reconsidered: Essays on Women, ed. Gillian Creese and Veronica Strong-Boag (Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1992), pp. 309–39; Grace Wong Sneddon, ‘Who Are We—Suzie Wong? Chinese Canadian Women’s Search For Identity’ (PhD diss., University of Victoria, 2015); Vivienne Poy, Passage to Promise Land: Voices of Chinese Immigrant Women to Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013); Enakshi Dua, ‘Exclusion or Inclusion: Female Asian Migration in the Making of Canada as a White Settler Nation’, Gender, Place and Culture 14, no. 4 (August 2007), pp. 445–66; Yuen-Fong Woon, ‘Between South China and British Columbia: Life Trajectories of Chinese Women’, BC Studies 156 (Winter 2007–2008), pp. 83–107, and The Excluded Wife (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998); Alison R. Marshall, Cultivating Connections: The Making of Chinese Prairie Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014); Shelley Ikebuchi, From Slave Girls to Salvation: Gender, Race, and Victoria’s Chinese Rescue Home, 1886–1923 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015). On New Zealand, see Manying Ip, Home Away from Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand (Auckland: New Women’s Press, 1990); James Ng, Windows on a Chinese Past, vols 1–3 (Dunedin: Otago Heritage Books, 1993–1999).

Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez 17

In contrast to the well-developed American literature, Chinese Australian women have only become historical subjects in their own right much more recently. In 1986 public historian and writer Morag Loh and her collaborator Christine Ramsay were the first to bring the history of Chinese Australian women to light with their exhibition and publication Survival and Celebration, while in the 1990s historian Henry Chan called for more scholarly attention to be directed towards the histories of Chinese Australian women and families.55 Decades later, there is a small body of published research but still no monograph on the history of Chinese Australian women or the Chinese Australian family.56 Most Chinese Australian history continues to be written as a history of genderless men, of men’s mobility and men’s activity, particularly histories that look at the colonial gold rushes, mining, business, labour, and politics. In surveying the current state of the field, it is clear that women and gender often remain outside the purview of historians of Chinese Australia, a situation that in turn affects the ways that Chinese Australian history is presented in general Australian histories and popular accounts. That said, over the past two decades the field has moved towards being more inclusive of histories of women and the family. In the discussion that follows we survey this scholarship, focusing on historical and biographical studies that examine the period up to the 1960s. Biographical studies dominate the historical literature on Chinese Australian women. There are a handful of histories concerning the lives of Chinese women in nineteenth-century Australia. For example, Kate Bagnall has written on the life of Kim Linn, who came to the colonial goldfields of New South Wales in 1869 as the wife of storekeeper Ralph Ah How, and Sophie Couchman has written on Kin Foo, who toured Australia in the 1870s as the wife of Chang Woo Gow, ‘the Chinese giant’.57 Julia Martínez has investigated the lives of Chinese prostitutes in Darwin in the 1880s through court records.58 More often it has been the better-documented lives of the modern Chinese woman of the early twentieth century that have caught the eye of historians. Angela Woollacott has written on actor and writer Rose Quong, exploring her expatriate life in London and New York after 1924. Rose Quong was the first Chinese Australian woman to be included in the Australian Dictionary of 55. Morag Loh and Christine Ramsay, Survival and Celebration: An Insight into the Lives of Chinese Immigrant Women, European Women Married to Chinese and Their Female Children in Australia from 1856–1986 (Melbourne: self-published, 1986); Henry Chan, ‘A Decade of Achievement and Future Directions in Research on the History of the Chinese in Australia’, in Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific, ed. Paul Macgregor, pp. 421–22 (Melbourne: Chinese Museum, 1995). 56. Jan Ryan’s monograph Chinese Women and the Global Village (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003) examines the lives of Chinese Australian women but focuses on the 1970s onwards, with only an overview of women’s lives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 57. Kate Bagnall, ‘“To his Home at Jembaicumbene”: Women’s Cross-Cultural Encounters on a Colonial Goldfield’, in Migrant Cross-Cultural Encounters in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Jacqueline Leckie, Angela McCarthy and Angela Wanhalla (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 56–75; Sophie Couchman, ‘Chang Woo Gow: The Man and the Giant’, in An Angel by the Water: Essays in Honour of Dennis Reginald O’Hoy, ed. Mike Butcher (Kensington, Victoria: Holland House Publishing, 2015), pp. 85–101. 58. Martínez, ‘Chinese Women in Prostitution in the Courts of 1880s Darwin’.

18 Introduction

Biography; the only other is restaurateur and businesswoman Margaret Shen, who migrated to Australia in 1969.59 US historian Shirley Jennifer Lim has discussed the interactions of Chinese American actress Anna May Wong with Chinese Australian women during her 1939 visit to Australia.60 Julia Martínez’s work on the Darwin Kuomintang highlighted the role women played in this organization in the 1920s, particularly Lena Lee during her brief time as leader.61 Sophie Loy-Wilson’s monograph Australians in Shanghai tells an expanded version of the story of Sydney-born Daisy Kwok, also the subject of her chapter in this volume.62 Denise Austin, a historian of Australian Pentecostalism, has published on Mary Yeung, a Victorian-born missionary who ran a school in her father’s home village in Xinhui, Guangdong, in the 1930s.63 As well as single biographies, Sophie Couchman has taken a collective biography approach to her research on women in Melbourne’s Chinatown in the early twentieth century, and Veronica Kooyman has written what might be seen as a dual biography of designer and dressmaker Ella Hing and her daughter Vivian Chan Shaw.64 Histories of women and the family in Australia’s early Chinese communities have to date mainly focused on interracial intimacy and mixed-race families, particularly those of white women and Chinese men. Kate Bagnall’s 2006 doctoral thesis, for example, examined Chinese-European families in southern Australia before 1915, and Pauline Rule, Sandi Robb, Dinah Hales, and Jan Ryan have published on interracial relationships in Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales, and Western Australia, respectively.65 While these works do not discuss Chinese 59. Angela Woollacott, ‘Rose Quong Becomes Chinese: An Australian in London and New York’, Australian Historical Studies 38, no. 129 (April 2007), pp. 16–31, and ‘Quong, Rose Maud (1879–1972)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2005), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/quong-rose-maud-13162/text23821; Michelle Cavanagh, ‘Shen, Margaret (1942–1994)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2018), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/shen-margaret-20708/text31504. Sydney-born Irene Moss is also included in Lily Lee’s Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women: The Twentieth Century, 1912–2000 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), pp. 404–406. 60. Shirley Jennifer Lim, ‘Glamorising Racial Modernity’, in Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, ed. David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2012), pp. 145–69. 61. Julia Martínez, ‘Patriotic Chinese Women: Followers of Sun Yat-sen in Darwin, Australia’, in Sun Yat-Sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution, ed. Lee Lai To and Lee Hock Guan (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011) pp. 200–18, and ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin: Interconnections between the Wah On Society and the Kuo Min Tang’, in Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, ed. Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 240–66. 62. Sophie Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), part I. 63. Denise A. Austin, ‘Mary Yeung: The Ordinary Life of an Extraordinary Australian Chinese Pentecostal – Part I and II’, Asian Journal Pentecostal Studies 16, no. 2 (August 2013), pp. 99–137. 64. Sophie Couchman, ‘“Oh, I Would like to See Maggie Moore Again”: Selected Women of Melbourne’s Chinatown’, in After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860–1940, ed. Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald and Paul Macgregor (Melbourne: Otherland Press, 2004), pp. 171–90; Veronica Kooyman, ‘The Family Yarn’, Sydney Living Museums website, https://web.archive.org/ web/20180314020031/https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/stories/family-yarn. 65. Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land’; Rule, ‘The Chinese Camps in Colonial Victoria’ and ‘A Tale of Three Sisters’; Robb, ‘Myths Lies and Invisible Lives’; Hales, ‘Lost Histories’; Ryan, ‘She Lives with a Chinaman’.

Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez 19

Australian women per se, they provide an important context for understanding the lives of the mixed-race Chinese Australian women who constituted the majority of the Australian-born female Chinese population. Bagnall has further demonstrated the ways that interracial couples and their children were part of what Adam McKeown has termed the ‘transnational overseas Chinese family’, while Michael Williams’s work has provided a qiaoxiang-centred approach to the family life of Chinese in Australia.66 Chinese Australian women’s voices emerge through oral histories and memoirs. The twentieth-century lives of migrant and Australian-born women have been documented through significant oral history projects undertaken from the 1990s by Diana Giese, Paul Macgregor, Sophie Couchman, and Janis Wilton.67 Wilton’s doctoral thesis and those by Alanna Kamp and Grace Gassin have also used oral histories and interviews to explore Chinese Australian women’s experiences of cultural change, community participation, belonging, and exclusion over the course of the twentieth century.68 In a similar vein, Tseen Khoo and Rodney Noonan have discussed Chinese Australian women’s increasingly visible role in public fundraising activities during World War I and II, albeit working from archival rather than oral sources.69 A small number of Chinese Australian women have written memoirs and autobiographical accounts, including former ABC journalist Helene Chung and fashion designer Jenny Kee.70 Community projects, particularly From Great 66. Kate Bagnall, ‘A Journey of Love: Agnes Breuer’s Sojourn in 1930s China’, in Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott, pp. 115–34 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2008), and Section 5: ‘Connections’ in ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land’; Williams, Returning Home with Glory. On Chinese Australian families, see also Paul Macgregor, ‘Dreams of Jade and Gold: Chinese Families in Australia’s History’, in Australian Family: Images and Essays, ed. Anna Epstein, pp. 25–36 (Melbourne: Scribe, 1998); and Kate Bagnall, ‘Rewriting the History of Chinese Families in Nineteenth-Century Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (2011), pp. 62–77. 67. See Diana Giese (interviewer), Post-war Chinese Australians Oral History Project, National Library of Australia, 1992, and Chinese Australian Oral History Partnership, National Library of Australia, 1999; and Paul Macgregor (interviewer), Australia-China Council and Museum of Chinese Australian History AustraliaChina Oral History Project, 1993. Oral histories by Sophie Couchman (and others) were commissioned by and are held at the Chinese Museum, Melbourne, while Janis Wilton’s interviews are held in the University of New England Archives. See also Diana Giese, Astronauts, Lost Souls & Dragons: Voices of Today’s Chinese Australians in Conversation with Diana Giese (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997), and Beyond Chinatown: Changing Perspectives on the Top End Chinese Experience (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1995). 68. Janis Wilton, ‘Chinese Voices, Australian Lives: Oral History and the Chinese Contribution to Glen Innes, Inverell, Tenterfield and Surrounding Districts During the First Half of the Twentieth Century’ (PhD diss., University of New England, 1997); Alanna Kamp, ‘Invisible Australians: Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Belonging and Exclusion in the White Australia Policy Era, 1901–1973’ (PhD diss., Western Sydney University, 2014); Grace Gassin, ‘I Was a Good-time Charlie: Social Dance and Chinese Community Life in Sydney and Melbourne, 1850s–1970s’ (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2016). By Alanna Kamp, see also ‘Chinese Australian Women’s “Homemaking” and Contributions to the Family Economy in White Australia’, Australian Geographer 49, no. 1 (2018), pp. 149–65, and ‘Chinese Australian Women in White Australia: Utilising Available Sources to Overcome the Challenge of “Invisibility” ’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 6, 2003, pp. 75–101. 69. Tseen Khoo and Rodney Noonan, ‘Wartime Fundraising by Chinese Australian Communities’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (2011), pp. 92–110. 70. Helene Chung, Ching Chong China Girl (Sydney: ABC Books, 2008), and Shouting from China (Ringwood,

20 Introduction

Grandmothers to Great Granddaughters and Chinese Australian Women’s Stories, have also facilitated women’s telling of their own life and family stories.71 Place-based studies of Chinese communities in Australia have been the most successful at including women’s stories in broader histories. Janis Wilton’s book Golden Threads, drawing on local museum collections from rural New South Wales, is a notable example. Having worked with family members and collection donors, women are seen throughout Wilton’s thematic chapters on work, language, leisure, food, beliefs, and leaving and staying.72 Similarly, individual women are discussed in Shirley Fitzgerald’s history of the Chinese in Sydney; Barry McGowan’s extensive local histories of the Chinese in the Riverina district of New South Wales; Sophie Couchman’s histories of Melbourne’s Chinatown; and Sandi Robb’s heritage study of Cairns Chinatown.73 Women and family formation are also central to Amanda Rasmussen’s discussion of mobility in her doctoral thesis on the Chinese in Bendigo, where she considers the multigenerational O’Hoy family.74 Our knowledge of Chinese Australian women has been greatly enriched by the endeavours of community and family historians.75 Among the many examples are Robyn Ansell, who has written about her great-grandmother, Mary Jane Ah Whay; Annette Shun Wah, whose family history research was inspired by a photograph of her grandmother Sam Moy; and Norma King Koi, whose use of oral history has

Victoria: Penguin, 1989); Jenny Kee, A Big Life (Camberwell, Victoria: Lantern, 2006). See also Pamela Tan, The Chinese Factor (Dural, New South Wales: Rosenberg, 2008); Christine Wu Ramsay, Days Gone By: Growing Up in Penang (South Yarra, Victoria: Macmillan, 2003), and A Meeting of East and West: Days Gone By, Volume Two (Melbourne: Macmillan, 2013). 71. Nikki Loong (ed.), From Great Grandmothers to Great Granddaughters: The Stories of Six Chinese Australian Women (Katoomba, New South Wales: Echo Point Press, 2006); Sybil Jack et al. (eds), Chinese Australian Women’s Stories (Sydney: Jessie Street National Women’s Library and the Chinese Heritage Association of Australia Inc., 2012). See also M ​ avis Moo, ‘I Just Bore It Quietly’, in Plantings in a New Land: Stories of Survival, Endurance and Emancipation, ed. Chek Ling (Brisbane: Society of Chinese Australian Academics in Queensland, 2001), pp. 28–44; and Irene Moss, ‘Chinese or Australian? Growing Up Chinese in a Bicultural Twilight Zone from the 1950s On’, in Survival and Celebration, ed. Morag Loh and Christine Ramsay (Melbourne: self-published, 1986), pp. 11–20. 72. Janis Wilton, Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales (Armidale, New South Wales: New England Regional Art Museum in association with Powerhouse Publishers, Sydney, 2004). 73. Shirley Fitzgerald, Red Tape, Gold Scissors: The Story of Sydney’s Chinese (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1996); Barry McGowan, ‘Transnational Lives: Colonial Immigration Restrictions and the White Australia Policy in the Riverina District of New South Wales, 1860–1960’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 6 (2013), pp. 45–63, and Tracking the Dragon: A History of the Chinese in the Riverina (Wagga Wagga, New South Wales: Museum of the Riverina, 2010); Sophie Couchman, ‘From Mrs Lup Mun, Chinese Herbalist to Yee Joon, Respectable Scholar: A Social History of Melbourne’s Chinatown, 1900–1920’, in The Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, Settlement and Interactions, ed. Henry Chan, Ann Curthoys and Nora Chiang (Taipei and Canberra: National Taiwan University and Australian National University, 2001), and ‘Tong Yun Gai (Street of the Chinese): Investigating Patterns of Work and Social Life in Melbourne’s Chinatown, 1900–1920’ (MA diss., Monash University, 2000); Sandi Robb, Cairns Chinatown: A Heritage Study (Cairns, Queensland: Cairns and District Chinese Association, 2012). 74. Amanda Rasmussen, ‘The Chinese in Nation and Community: Bendigo 1870s–1920s’ (PhD diss., La Trobe University, 2009), especially Chapter 1, ‘Mobility’. 75. The family histories cited below are those that are publicly available, and there are many further examples that have been compiled privately for distribution within families.

Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez 21

allowed her to write a more ‘domestic’ family history.76 Claire Faulkner has documented the families of four Anglo-Chinese sisters, the daughters of John Mann and Ellen Lyons born in New South Wales in the 1840s, who each married migrant Chinese men, while Diann Talbot has written on the women in Chinese families of the Upper Ovens Goldfield in Victoria.77 Much of this family and community history research is undertaken by women, but many histories still focus on the male line and document the activities of male family members, as these are most easy to track in the historical record. Within such androcentric family histories, we can, however, see glimpses of women’s lives when they are mentioned as mothers, wives, and daughters, hinting at the possibilities for further research.78 Grandmothers, mothers, and aunts also appear in the published memoirs of Chinese Australian men.79

Breaking New Ground: This Volume and Beyond The publication of this volume marks a significant point in Chinese Australian women’s history, a beginning that we hope signals a shift in the historiography of Chinese Australia. But as well as reshaping Chinese Australian history through its focus on women and gender, we aim for this volume to further contribute to the broader project of overseas Chinese history by presenting Australia as a valuable case study for comparison with the international literature. The nine chapters that follow explore the history of Chinese Australian women from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, during the era of ‘White Australia’. AntiChinese laws, policies, and sentiment therefore form a background throughout the chapters and are explicitly discussed in some. The contributors have, however, sought to move beyond simply recounting how White Australia discriminated

76. Robyn Ansell, ‘The Wives of Hin Yung and Ah Whay’, in Secrets, Silences and Sources: Five Chinese-Australian Family Histories, ed. Sophie Couchman (Melbourne: Asian Studies Program, La Trobe University, 2005), pp. 31–40; Annette Shun Wah, ‘Grandma’s Chinese Whispers’, in Family Journeys: Stories in the National Archives of Australia (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2008), pp. 19–28; Norma King Koi, ‘Discovering My Heritage: An Oral History of My Maternal Family—The Ah Moons of Townsville’, in Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific, ed. Paul Macgregor (Melbourne: Museum of Chinese Australian History, 1993), pp. 287–95. 77. Claire Faulkner, Conquest: An Inside Story—The Integration of a Colonial Chinese-Australian Family Cluster (self-published, 2013); Diann Talbot, Who Is She?: The Lives and Trials of the Women and Children who Shared their Lives with the Chinese Men Living and Working on the Upper Ovens Goldfields in North East Victoria (Bright, Victoria: self-published, 2016). 78. For example, Veronica Kooyman, ‘King Nam Jang: A Sydney Dynasty’, Sydney Living Museums (website), https://web.archive.org/web/20180314020320/https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/stories/king-nam-jangsydney-dynasty; Alison Choy Flannigan and Malcolm Oakes, Chinese Whispers: In Search of Ivy (Pymble, New South Wales: Black Quill Press, 2017). 79. See, for example, Tom Kwok, Iron Rice Bowl (Pottsville, New South Wales: Rainbow Works, 2017); Stanley Hunt, From Shekki to Sydney: An Autobiography (Broadway, New South Wales: Wild Peony Press, 2009); Thomas Vivian Tim, ‘Surviving, Haphazardly’, in Ling, Plantings in a New Land, pp. 45–52; and Darryl Low Choy, ‘That’s Not a Chinese Name’, in Ling, Plantings in a New Land, pp. 62–78.

22 Introduction

against Chinese Australian women, instead considering the complex ways in which they and their families negotiated both gendered and racialized exclusions. The four chapters that make up the first section, ‘Gendering Chinese Australian Histories’, present thematic accounts and methodological approaches that pave new terrain in researching Chinese Australian history. Mei-fen Kuo, author of the groundbreaking monograph Making Chinese Australia, first examines gender in Australia’s Chinese-language newspapers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.80 Sophie Couchman uses photographs as both source and subject matter in her chapter on Chinese Australian brides, photography, and the phenomenon of the ‘white wedding’, reminding us of the possibilities that come with moving beyond written sources. Natalie Fong presents a collective study of Chinese businesswomen in Darwin, following shifts in their individual lives and the Darwin Chinese community between the 1880s and World War II. Last, historical geographer Alanna Kamp combines statistics and oral testimony to provide an overview of Chinese Australian women’s mobility across the course of the twentieth century. The five chapters in the second section, ‘Women’s Lives in China and Australia’, approach Chinese Australian women’s mobility through the lens of biography. The chapters also consider the familial, social, and political worlds that shaped women’s individual experiences. Kate Bagnall re-examines the well-known Poon Gooey deportation case from the early years of White Australia, placing Ham Hop (Mrs Poon Gooey), a Gold Mountain wife, at the centre of her own story. Antonia Finnane uses microhistory as a means to investigate the life and untimely death of Perth woman Ruby Yen. Paul Macgregor presents the life of Alice Lim Kee, known as Mrs Fabian Chow, an Australian-born journalist and broadcaster in Shanghai and Peking in the 1920s and 1930s. Julia Martínez takes a comparative and international approach in researching the lives of two university-educated Chinese Australian women, Mary Chong and Gwen Fong. Last, Sophie Loy-Wilson follows Daisy Kwok from her childhood in Sydney to her young adult years as a wealthy Shanghai socialite and beyond. The collection does not and cannot reflect every aspect of Chinese Australian women’s history—indeed, there is much work still to be done. The chapters published here reflect the particular research interests of their authors and the biases of the source material we have used, by necessity privileging women whose lives were or can be substantially documented either in written or oral form. The collection also privileges histories of Chinese women within the world of white, British settler-colonial Australia. The relationship between Chinese Australian women and Indigenous Australians remains an important area of research that deserves greater attention, particularly in thinking about how women of mixed descent negotiated their ‘in-between’ place. 80. Mei-fen Kuo, Making Chinese Australia: Urban Elites, Newspapers and the Formation of Chinese-Australian Identity, 1892–1912 (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2013).

Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martínez 23

Much of this collection emphasizes women’s public lives, yet our research suggests that there is still more to be learned about Chinese Australian women’s involvement in social, community, and political organizations, whether Chinese run or mainstream Australian. Chinese women in trade and business is another understudied theme, as highlighted by Natalie Fong’s chapter. As a counterpoint to an emphasis on public lives, there is also a need for more research into the private worlds of women to understand Chinese Australian marriage and family formation in transnational contexts, including how the lives of women in China were affected.81 This research might further investigate the domestic culture and everyday lives of Chinese Australian women, and women in China whose husbands migrated to Australia. Future studies might devote more thought to the gendered impact of restrictive policies regarding immigration, employment, social welfare, and citizenship. And, since readily available sources often lead us to write about adult women’s experiences, Chinese Australian girlhood and the place of daughters within the family are other topics yet to be explored. Exciting scholarship from a new generation of historians has begun even as this volume has been in preparation, and we are pleased to include here the work of both junior and senior scholars. Yet challenges in fostering the study of Chinese Australian women’s history continue. Recently, a (male) elder in the Sydney Chinese community informed one young Chinese Australian woman—a migrant from Guangdong fluent in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin who was interested in pursuing postgraduate research in women’s history—that there was no history to research and no story to tell. We hope that this collection will encourage Chinese Australian women in their efforts at documenting, recording, and writing their own histories, in the community and in academia, for without their stories and their perspectives, the history of the Chinese in Australia can never be complete.

81. For a recent example, see Jin Liu, ‘Sex Scandals, Gold Mountain Guests’ Wives, and Female Roles in the Siyi Qiaoxiang: A Study of the Family Letters of Overseas Chinese in the Republican Era’, in The Qiaopi Trade and Transnational Networks in the Chinese Diaspora, ed. Gregor Benton, Hong Liu and Huimei Zhang (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 145–59.

Part One Gendering Chinese Australian Histories

2 Reading Gender in Early Chinese Australian Newspapers Mei-fen Kuo

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while Australian society dealt with the challenges of transforming from a collection of imperial colonies to a modern federated polity, the Chinese immigrant community concentrated in Sydney and Melbourne also underwent major reforms in its leadership structure and social networks. Chinese women were never a strong force in influencing the leadership structure and social networks of the Chinese Australian community, in part because of their small numbers, but around the turn of the twentieth century urban Chinese women and children began to appear at otherwise male-dominated public events, charitable fairs, and celebratory activities. Previously male-focused, Australia’s Chinese-language newspapers also increased their reporting and discussion of the roles and rights of women in the home and in society more broadly. By examining public views expressed by male writers and reporters in Australia’s Chinese-language newspapers, and by regarding gender as a new social relationship, in this chapter I trace changing perspectives on Chinese womanhood and follow the process undertaken by the Chinese Australian community in adapting to the demands of modern society. It is not my purpose to outline the history of Chinese Australian women’s participation in community building during the early twentieth century; indeed, their small numbers meant that their influence over male-dominated discussions of community affairs and the development of a Chinese national identity in Australia was necessarily limited. Nonetheless, the appearance of female figures in male narratives and at public gatherings provides a window into the ways that gender issues were considered in the predominantly male Chinese Australian community in the early decades of the twentieth century. In this chapter I argue that examining the combined effect of Australia’s transformation into a modern federated Commonwealth and the Chinese Australian populace organizing for political purposes (in defence against the looming White Australia policy) points towards a new research direction that highlights how the settlement of Chinese in Australia was largely in accordance with Australian

28

Reading Gender in Early Chinese Australian Newspapers

society’s concepts of the ideal family and gender relations. Chinese women played a role in this evolution. Public meetings and discussions that had an ostensible political mobilization purpose also offered opportunities for middle-class Chinese Australian families to join in public functions as entertainment, not just as an exercise in leadership. Chinese-language newspapers provided a forum for discussion of women’s roles and gender relations, and displayed the meaning of domesticity and lifestyle changes in the Chinese Australian community.

Publishing Newspapers, Interpreting Lijiao, and Rethinking Gender In the decade straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese newspapers such as the Chinese Australian Herald (1894–1923), the Tung Wah News (1898–1902), and Tung Wah Times (1902–1936), the Chinese Republic News (1913–1937), the Chinese World’s News (1922–1938?), and the Chinese Times (1902– 1949), played an important role in the transformation of Chinese Australians into modern subjects.1 These newspapers not only reported on community events but were also significant agents in their own right in the shaping of communities and patterns of community leadership. The Chinese press included newspapers representing Chinese revolutionary parties, constitutionalists, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the Chinese Nationalist Party, and Masonic networks, each of which sought to influence supportive political constituencies and social networks in Australia.2 In this process, gender formed part of the discussion on the melding of Chinese heritage into modern discourse. The words lijiao (禮教 M: lǐjiào)—literally meaning ‘taught manner’ or ‘the rules of correct orderly behaviour’—as well as the code of Confucian ritualism were highlighted in the Chinese newspapers to assert the rightness of the proposition ‘men deal with the world; women deal with the home’ (男主 外女主內 M: nánzhǔwài nǚzhǔnèi).3 Strongly influenced by its traditional AngloCeltic view of the family and women’s role in it, Australian society considered the ideal gender roles to be that of breadwinner for the man and homemaker for the 1. The major Chinese Australian newspapers in the period from the 1890s to the 1940s were the Chinese Australian Herald (廣益華報 Guangyi huabao, 1894–1923); the Tung Wah News (東華新報 Donghua xinbao, 1898–1902), and its successor, the Tung Wah Times (東華報 Donghua bao, 1902–1936); the Chinese Republic News (民國報 Minguobao, 1914–1937), the Chinese World’s News (澳州雪梨公報 Aozhou Xueli gongbao; 1922–1937?), and the Chinese Times (1902–1949). The Chinese Times changed its Chinese name several times, including to 愛國報 Aiguobao (1902–1905), 警東新報 Jingdong xinbao (1905–1914), 平報 Pingbao (1917), and 民報 Minbao (1919–1922). 2. For further discussion on the role of Chinese Australian newspapers in reshaping the community, see C. F. Yong, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia, 1901–1921 (Richmond, South Australia: Raphael Arts, 1977) and Mei-fen Kuo, Making Chinese Australia: Urban Elites, Newspapers and the Formation of Chinese-Australian Identity, 1892–1912 (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2013). 3. The impact of Confucian ritualism on the social status of Chinese women in late imperial China can be seen in Kai-wing Chow, ‘Ritualism and Gentry Culture: Women and Lineage’, in The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China: Ethics, Classics (Stanford: Stanford University, 1994), pp. 204–22; and Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University, 1997).

Mei-fen Kuo 29

woman, with her model role as wife and mother.4 This latter idea ran parallel to the Australian national identity being constructed at the time. Historian Marilyn Lake has considered how, at the turn of the twentieth century, Australian national identity emphasized the idea of manliness, rather than language or racial background.5 The male strength and mateship apparently possessed by early British pioneers were qualities lauded in Australian society, and women were excluded from this pioneer image. Lake further points out how in this narrative of Australian national identity women should never lead, and that their citizenship status was granted by virtue of their roles as mothers and wives. Diane Kirkby further points to how labour law symbolically defined the boundaries of sexual difference—men as breadwinners and women as carers—in order to gender and racialize citizenship in the early Australian Commonwealth.6 Other scholars have sought to equate ‘mateship’ in the narrative of Australian national identity with the concept of ‘rightful relationships’ that traditionally held sway in Chinese society, on the basis that these two sets of social values emphasize the morality of friendship, trust, and respect.7 In fact, the Australian concept of mateship is based on the idea of men facing a common enemy and fighting together in comradeship.8 This is quite different from the traditional Confucian precept of interpersonal relationships based on harmony and hierarchy.9 In other words, the place of gender relations in the developing Chinese modern identity had nothing in common with the mateship of Australian nation building. What was similar, however, was that both sets of narratives were concerned with the issue of morality in the structuring of society and the forming of relationships between individuals, with special attention paid to ‘new’ forms of appearance and behaviour required to become members of modern society. In this manner, the way the Chinese community in Australia reorganized itself politically not only reflected its developing self-identity but also indicated the growth of new social relations within the community, including the imagining and explaining of gender relations. It is important to keep in mind, too, that while Australian law served as an instrument of ideology, constructing and justifying the reality of social and moral orders to exclude Chinese 4. Renate Howe and Shurlee Swain, ‘Fertile Grounds for Divorce: Sexuality and Reproductive Imperatives’, in Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, ed. Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), pp. 158–61. 5. Marilyn Lake, ‘Women and Nation in Australia: The Politics of Representation’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 43, no. 1 (1997), p. 43. 6. Diane Kirkby, ‘“Honorary Chinese”? Women Citizens, Whiteness and Labour Legislation in the Early Australian Commonwealth’, Social Identities 13, no. 6 (2007), pp. 801–18. 7. Christian Sue-Chan and Marine T. Dasborough, ‘The Influence of Relation- and Rule-Based Regulation on Hiring Decisions in Australia and Hong Kong: Chinese Cultural Contexts’, International Journal of Human Resource Management 17, no. 7 (2006), pp. 1267–92. 8. James Smith Page, ‘Is Mateship a Virtue?’, Australian Journal of Social Issues 37, no. 2 (2002), pp. 193–200. 9. W. K. Gabrenya and K. K. Hwang, ‘Chinese Social Interaction: Harmony and Hierarchy on the Good Earth’, in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Psychology, ed. M. H. Bond (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 309–21; Chinese Cultural Connection, ‘Chinese Values and the Search for Culture-Free Dimensions of Culture’, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 18 (1987), pp. 143–64.

30

Reading Gender in Early Chinese Australian Newspapers

Australians, Chinese Australians sought social recognition in response by embracing Australian customs and lifestyles that they believed would help to improve racial relationships and ensure their inclusion. I argue that in this process discussions of gender relations were linked to the shaping of a modern social identity for Chinese Australians. The exclusively male-edited late nineteenth-century Chinese Australian Herald and Tung Wah News emphasized the homemaker role for women, presenting the family unit as one that was based on the orderly arrangement of ‘men deal with the world; women deal with the home’. This male-dominant view of gender relations was maintained by Confucian principles even in comparison of the relative merits of Chinese and Western cultures in commentaries on changing community attitudes towards family responsibilities and social morality. During the last decade of the nineteenth century lijiao was highlighted in the Chinese newspapers. For instance, both the Chinese Australian Herald and the Tung Wah News took the same conservative position with respect to marriage freedom, claiming that free marriage and marriage between people of the same surname were particularly contrary to lijiao. The Chinese Australian Herald advanced the claim that free marriage was the cause of a rise in the divorce rate, while the Tung Wah News even opposed women remarrying.10 In an article in the Chinese Australian Herald comparing Chinese and Western social and family conventions, the writer listed ten points of difference— all, of course, portraying the traditional Chinese way in the best light.11 The Western way, the writer recounted with a sense of delighted horror, allowed women to sue for divorce, marriage between two people of the same surname (frowned upon according to Chinese patriarchal consanguinity conventions), married children to be free from the duty of looking after their aged parents, freedom for young people to choose whom they wish to marry, men and women of all ages to dance together and share alcoholic drinks, and women to have the vote. Such sets of specific idealized models of social roles and behaviour, although based on certain persistent principles, changed through time. During the 1890s lijiao was emphasized by the Chinese presses to censure the appearance of women in the public sphere. In its news reports, the Chinese Australian Herald looked askance at the appearance of women and children at social events, even going to the point of attributing social ‘problems’—such as women making ostentatious public displays, openly appearing at bars and other public places of entertainment, dancing with their male partners in public, drunkenness, ex-nuptial pregnancies, and abortions—to the negative effects of urbanized Western society’s failure to impose lijiao on its population.12 The Chinese Australian Herald also took a negative view of Western society allowing women to study medicine and law, and 10. Chinese Australian Herald, April 23, 1899, p. 4; Tung Wah News, January 11, 1899, p. 2. 11. Chinese Australian Herald, November 27, 1896, p. 5. 12. Chinese Australian Herald, January 10, 1896, p. 3; November 27, 1896, p. 5; October 21, 1898, p. 4; December 29, 1900, p. 5; March 23, 1901, p. 4; June 8, 1901, p. 5; June 15, 1901, p. 3.

Mei-fen Kuo 31

to take part in politics, on the grounds that women were too emotive to work professionally in law or politics.13 In contrast, the Tung Wah News, the other ‘official’ Chinese Empire Reform Association newspaper, showed little interest in reporting the ‘negatives’ of women in urbanized society; instead, it was keen to report on how women in Shanghai and the United States were taking to education, newspaper publishing, appearing on the stage, and joining the reform movement.14 It also closely followed news that women in Shanghai, Hawai‘i, and other places in the United States were advocating the banning of footbinding and promoting monogamy.15 Although it did not directly disparage urban women’s enjoyment of freedom of marriage and social life, as the Chinese Australian Herald was wont to do, the Tung Wah News nevertheless frequently gave prominent place to stories of ‘virtuous’ women from both Chinese and Western sources, and so obliquely gave emphasis to the importance of lijiao.16 As these discussions of gender relationships unfolded, a consensus gradually appeared in Chinese Australian public opinion as a result of the community’s evaluation of its experience of urbanized and modernized society. It conceded that the appearance of women of the lower social classes in public places was a consequence of social conditions, not an indication of the lower moral standards of the women as individuals. Yuk Lan Poon claimed that the Chinese Australian Herald continued to warn against mixed marriage because of the likelihood of failure owing to differences in cultural backgrounds and personal values.17 This would be misleading, however, as a careful reading of the many salutary news stories published in the Chinese Australian Herald reveals a constant theme reminding its readers that a woman’s social class and her economic circumstances were likely to have a strong bearing on her attitude on emotional feelings and marital relationships in the urban life.18 It is important to note that the shifting interpretations of lijiao reflected the perspectives of the various Chinese presses on emerging class divisions in urban life. The Chinese Australian press did not just report increasing female participation in public life; it also promoted new urban manners and public fashions to its readers. The Chinese Australian Herald proved to be a surprisingly keen observer of the ways white Australian women dressed and their general deportment in comparison with Chinese women, revealing the influence that the urban lifestyle, and the class structures underlying it, had on an individual’s taste in fashion.19 Up to 13. Chinese Australian Herald, November 27, 1896, p. 5. 14. Tung Wah News, September 21, 1898, p. 2; October 22, 1898, p. 4; October 26, 1898, p. 2; February 22, 1899, p. 3; July 1, 1899, p. 2. 15. Tung Wah News, December 23, 1899, p. 2; September 22, 1900, p. 3; October 17, 1900, p. 3. 16. Tung Wah News, November 9, 1898, p. 3. 17. Yuk Lan Poon, ‘Through the Eyes of the Dragon: The Chinese Press in Australia 1901–1911’ (BA Hons thesis, University of Sydney, 1986), p. 66. 18. Chinese Australian Herald, January 24, 1896, p. 3; February 28, 1896, p. 2; March 27, 1896, p. 7; December 24, 1896, p. 4; June 11, 1897, p. 4; July 2, 1897, p. 3. 19. Chinese Australian Herald, April 2, 1896, p. 4; August 31, 1899, p. 5.

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the early years of the twentieth century, the Chinese Australian Herald’s reports on Western dress and fashion appear to urge its readers to pay attention to their appearance because that was the basis on which the white population would judge their worth as citizens.20 Later in the twentieth century the Chinese Australian Herald gradually shifted its editorial emphasis from comparing the differences between Chinese and Western ways to advocating that Chinese should adapt more to the ways of their host country, citing the Chinese proverb that ‘in a new country, ask after the customs’ (入境隨俗 M: rùjìng suísú)—comparable to ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do’—and be properly attired. To do so was not only an expression of an individual’s taste and lifestyle, but more important, it contributed towards the collective public image of Chinese people; and, of course, public image and active participation were strengths the early twentieth-century Chinese Australian elite wished their community to project. For the Chinese Australian community as a whole, an individual’s dress and demeanour took on special importance when placed in the context of the respectability of the general image of the Chinese. Respectability has a special place in the lifestyle of migrant communities as an expression of shared values and morality, then as now. Its pursuit by the Chinese community in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the efforts that different social groups, genders, and organizations (such as church groups) expended to win the regard and acknowledgement of the white community.21 This was one of the more important ways Chinese Australians resisted the White Australia movement, in accordance with the belief held by the Chinese elite that Australian citizenship and identity did not entirely depend on politics and legislation but was as much the outcome of a collective mindset and imagination.22 Diane Kirkby argues that the Australian concept of ‘respectability’ was ‘protective of women’s virtue’ out of employment.23 Class concept and gender relations in an urbanized society were experienced and constructed by Chinese journalists and merchants in a different way. The pursuit of respectability and adaptability to new customs and lifestyle to attract political approval demonstrates the changing balance between traditional Chinese morality precepts such as lijiao and the influence of newly felt external factors, with the ability of the former to dictate behaviour that was gradually being loosened as a result of experience. From the beginning of the twentieth century, to shake off the image of ‘otherness’, Chinese were urged not only to pay attention to their individual presentation through the choice of dress, behaviour, and language, or to collectively celebrate British rule by offering lion dance or dragon dance displays at public events, they also actively formed new 20. Chinese Australian Herald, September 26, 1903, p. 4. 21. John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007), pp. 82–83. 22. Helen Irving, To Constitute a Nation: A Cultural History of Australia’s Constitution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 101. 23. Kirkby, ‘“Honorary Chinese”’.

Mei-fen Kuo 33

Figure 2.1:  Tung Wah Times article about a Chinese community picnic at Narrandera, New South Wales, to celebrate the Emperor’s birthday in August 1908. Tung Wah Times, August 22, 1908, p. 6

associations with political purposes. By holding public functions celebrating the birthday of the Chinese emperor as a pretext and by including women and children, they further sought to create a public image that assimilated into what white society set for itself. This image itself reflects how, for the Chinese in Australia, the individual’s view on political values and approbation, lifestyle, social connections, and family relationships had gradually changed under the influence of class concepts and gender relations in an urbanized society.

Legal Relations, Emerging ‘New Women’, and Urban Family Contrasting with the attitude displayed in Chinese newspapers at the end of the nineteenth century, when urban living was equated with, and blamed for, the breaking down of morality based on lijiao, during the first decade of the twentieth century the Chinese communities of Sydney and Melbourne sought to project an educated middle-class family image. This image was encouraged through participation in public celebrations and outdoor recreation organized by associations set up to exercise community politics. In this section I explore narratives presented by the newspapers on the topics of new women and children to trace changes in Chinese Australian men’s perceptions of the social mode, including a gradual acceptance of the decline of the role of the paterfamilias to be replaced by the idea of individual rights, and the recognition of the family as a new social space where the traditional values of lijiao would be tempered by consideration of the individual’s rights.

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The idea of family to Chinese Australians could not be the same as to white Australians, who regarded the value of family as core to constructing sexual difference through cementing the structural advantage of white race privilege.24 Rather, Chinese journalists and merchants created perspectives on the urban family in order to display a healthy and middle-class Chinese domesticity. They aimed to eliminate prejudiced ideas among the white community which saw Chinese as rough-living, skim-and-save remittance men of the gold rushes. During the early years of the twentieth century, urban life presented Chinese Australians with a new lesson: legal relations between the individual and society. Here the Chinese newspapers offered relevant observations on how Australian society dealt with women’s rights; for example, Australian inheritance laws gave priority to the wife’s and the children’s claims to the deceased estate, not the parents as according to Chinese tradition.25 The Chinese Australian Herald also observed with approval the demand made by urban Australian women for the provision of femaleonly public toilets.26 As women gained the right to vote and to stand for election, more legislation sympathetic to women’s needs was enacted. The Chinese Australian Herald commented on the ban on spitting in public places as one such law, ascribing it to the concern that women’s long dresses were easily soiled. Other observations made by the paper included the Australian women’s antigambling lobby’s demand for strong action against gambling dens and new laws that required men who wished to borrow money from the bank to first obtain their wives’ consent.27 As the Chinese newspapers began to recognize women’s rights to equality, they no longer held fast to the restrictions that traditional lijiao imposed on women’s roles. Criticism of the old idea that men were more important than women became more commonly voiced. Thus, in 1902, the Tung Wah News proposed the abandonment of the three Confucian ‘pillars’ (三綱, M: sān gāng) that required traditional Chinese relationships to be based on the deference demonstrated by the subject to the monarchy, by the son to the father, and by the wife to her husband—since in an advanced society nobody should be subservient to another. These three pillars of relationships should instead be likened to the relationships between friends and brothers, which are free and equitable.28 In another editorial, the Tung Wah News went further and held that the rule of public law contracted between free and equal citizens should be regarded more highly than the rule of traditional paternalistic family or clan law; and the exercise of the law of a nation should be based on written codes, not vested in the decision of one person in the manner of the old family or clan law.29

24. Lake, ‘Women and Nation in Australia’. 25. Chinese Australian Herald, September 23, 1898, p. 3. 26. Chinese Australian Herald, August 31, 1901, p. 5. 27. Chinese Australian Herald, June 4, 1904, p. 2. 28. Tung Wah News, January 22, 1902, p. 3. 29. Tung Wah News, February 22, 1902, p. 2.

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Melbourne’s Chinese Times, first published in 1902, also targeted the conservative ideology of the Confucian school that continued to posit the outdated idea that men should always take precedence over women. For example, it challenged the practice of seeking ‘piety arches’—young Chinese widows who refused to remarry and continued to reside with the parents of their deceased husbands, living what was considered an exemplary life, could have such an arch erected by imperial edict in their honour. Traditionally, it was a much-valued honour, especially for the family and the clan—as a confidence trick played on women to deny them the joy of living.30 In a report of a controversial incident where a woman in China remarried after being widowed for eight years, the Chinese Times criticized the lack of freedom in marriage for women in China.31 It also contrasted the Christian golden rule of ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ favourably with the Confucian parallel ‘do not unto others as you would not have them do unto you’, and urged Chinese men who sought to pursue freedom, education, advancement, and equality to wish for the same opportunities for women.32 Reports by newspapers and magazines in China about the ‘new women’ also had an influence on the Australian Chinese newspapers; both the Tung Wah News and the Chinese Times carried frequent reports on women’s schools and activities of modern Westernized women in Shanghai, Canton, the United States, and Japan. The Tung Wah News paid special attention to reports about the activities of Shanghai’s first woman public speaker, Xue Jinqin (薛錦琴, known as Sieh King King in the United States), following her career closely and reprinting speeches she made in Shanghai and San Francisco that were first published in newspapers in those cities. Xue Jinqin explained her reasons for going to America to further her studies, stating that she believed China’s neglect of women rights was not only part and parcel of China’s lack of regard for people’s rights generally but also because of active repression by men.33 Subsequent issues of the Tung Wah Times reported stories about the activities of Kang Tongbi (康同璧, also known as Kang Tung Pih and Kang Tung-bi), daughter of the monarchist Kang Youwei, in her travels in the United States and Canada establishing women’s branches of the Chinese Empire Reform Association,34 and other news stories about women’s schools in Shanghai, the United States, and Japan; women’s newspapers; and women’s associations.35 In 1904 the Tung Wah Times reported on the closure of the women’s college of Hunan province, forcing students to move overseas or to Shanghai to continue their studies.36 Melbourne’s Chinese Times also paid attention to the activities of the women’s 30. Chinese Times, February 25, 1903, pp. 2 and 4. The citation of Chinese Times in this chapter is dated by the lunar calendar as shown in the newspaper itself. 31. Chinese Times, September 21, 1904, p. 2. 32. Chinese Times, March 23, 1904, supplement. 33. Tung Wah News, November 20, 1901, p. 2; May 18, 1901, p. 3; May 15, 1901, p. 2. Tung Wah Times, December 6, 1902, p. 2; November 23, 1903, p. 3. 34. Tung Wah Times, January 3, 1903, p. 2; October 23, 1903, p. 3; January 4, 1904, p. 3. 35. Tung Wah Times, January 3, 1903, p. 2; October 23, 1903, p. 3; January 4, 1904, p. 3. 36. Tung Wah Times, September 17, 1904, p. 2.

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movement in Guangdong, reporting on the public address by Du Qingchi (杜清 持) advocating the establishment of more women’s schools as an essential condition for promoting women’s rights;37 it also reported on the founding of the Shanghai Women’s Learning Society, the Aiguo Women’s School in Shanghai, and the Guangdong Women’s School.38 Inspired by their counterparts in China, after 1904 Chinese-language newspapers in Australia started to provide supplementary reading materials on modern topics for their female readers. For example, the Chinese Times in 1904 advertised an offer of progressive women’s books and magazines, including the book Legends of National Heroines, and the magazine Women’s Education News for loan to its readers.39 Also starting in 1904, the Tung Wah Times advertised the sale of books and magazines on ‘women’s topics’, such as about women scientists who brought about social reform, and about hygiene.40 It also reviewed popular Chinese women’s reading topics including the ‘legends of national heroines’, ‘women’s Chinese literary readers’, ‘women’s educational discussions’, ‘the world’s twelve greatest women’, and translated novels.41 In addition, the newspapers actively promoted the practice of monogamy to break down the Chinese tradition of discrimination against women. The Chinese Times took note of a recent tragedy when a white Australian girl committed suicide because her Chinese lover was not able to marry her as he already had a wife in China, thereby promoting the virtue of one-man, one-woman monogamy.42 The Tung Wah Times declared, in 1904, that as monogamy was the norm for all modern civil societies, China could never modernize unless it were to enforce the law of monogamy; rich men wishing to have more than one wife was a clear sign of unacceptable greed, so if China was to progress it must learn from the Western nations and practise monogamy.43 It went even further in another article, claiming that the recognition of women’s rights and the practice of monogamy were the distinguishing features of modern Western civilization.44 The Chinese newspapers still had reservations about the Western way, as they saw it, of basing family relations purely on legal rights. An editorial in the Chinese Australian Herald lamented that emotion did not have a place in Australian family relationships and that children showed no appreciation of their parents’ sacrifices in bringing them up.45 The Tung Wah Times also raised questions about the benefits of women’s rights to seek divorce,46 noting that with women experiencing intellectual 37. Chinese Times, September 24, 1902, p. 2; October 15, 1902, p. 2; October 22, 1902, p. 3. 38. Chinese Times, October 8, 1902, p. 4; December 31, 1902, p. 2; March 23, 1904, p. 2. 39. Chinese Times, May 25, 1904, p. 4. 40. Tung Wah Times, October 22, 1904, supplement. 41. Tung Wah Times, November 17, 1906, p. 6. 42. Chinese Times, September 23, 1903, p. 3. 43. Tung Wah Times, December 24, 1904, supplement. 44. Tung Wah Times, September 22, 1905, p. 2. 45. Chinese Australian Herald, June 15, 1907, p. 4. 46. Tung Wah Times, April 28, 1906, p. 6; May 5, 1906, p. 6; May 12, 1906, p. 5; May 19, 1906, p. 6.

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awakening and enjoying greater degree of rights some divorces were inevitable, but had divorce in fact turned out to be a benefit or a bane to women and society?47 But apart from such occasional aberrant comments, on the whole all the Chinese newspapers fell into line and accepted the position that marriage should be free, that men and women should be equal,48 and that in the family the needs of the wife and the children should be given first consideration, especially implicitly in the higher social classes.49 By serializing popular novels and literary articles, the Tung Wah Times championed the cause of free marriage and equal rights for women, reprinting in full the foreword by the Shanghai feminist Li Pingxiang (李蘋香) for the Beijing-based art-and-culture magazine Fengyabao (風雅報, literally ‘Artistic News’), published in that magazine’s second issue; 50 serialized novels written by Mei-an (眉菴 M: méi ān)—a pen name meaning ‘little eyebrow house’, eyebrow being a favourite Chinese metaphor for (young) women, so these novels were purporting to have been written by a woman—expounding equal rights of the man and the woman in the family, and women’s achievements in various fields.51 Articles by Chen Huanzhang (陳煥 章) were reprinted in which the author attacked Confucian schools for refusing to admit women students while admiring Western women’s ability to ‘freely move about seeing sights, attend parties and functions, marry or divorce’; for, according to the author, if China was to be able to compete with other nations and strive for world peace, men must give proper respect to women and treat them as equals.52 Among the Chinese newspapers in Australia, the Tung Wah Times probably had the most open attitude on the issue of women’s participation in public affairs and community politics; indeed, it actively canvassed educating women to give them political knowledge. For instance, in 1905, after reporting on the boycotting of American goods in China led the women of Soochow and Shanghai,53 the Tung Wah Times not only highlighted the importance of women’s schools, but proclaimed women to be the ‘shield of the nation’.54 The wives and daughters of the Chinese merchant class had, with their husbands’ and fathers’ support, enjoyed better opportunities of learning Chinese and participating in public affairs. For example, when the Sydney Chinese Constitutional Society (雪梨憲政會, M: Xuělí xiànzhènghuì) held fundraising functions to raise money for the Chinese navy, Chinese women were invited to speak for the first time.55 The Tung Wah Times reported several of these speeches. About this time, the wife of merchant Ma Zuxing (馬祖星, also known as Ma Joesing) wrote an article for the Tung Wah Times on the topic of women’s 47. Tung Wah Times, July 7, 1906, p. 6. 48. For example, Chinese Australian Herald, February 3, 1906, pp. 2–3; Tung Wah Times, July 27, 1907, p. 7. 49. Chinese Australian Herald, January 12, 1907, p. 3; Tung Wah Times, July 27, 1907, p. 7. 50. Tung Wah Times, March 2, 1907, p. 8. 51. Tung Wah Times, January 5, 1907, p. 8. 52. Tung Wah Times, July 25, 1908, p. 2 and August 1, 1908, p. 2. 53. Tung Wah Times, November 25, 1905, p. 2; August 19, 1905, p. 2. 54. Tung Wah Times, October 13, 1905, p. 2. 55. Tung Wah Times, July 25, 1908, p. 2.

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responsibilities in the nation’s affairs in which she cited an example from the book World’s Twelve Greatest Women, reviewed in the Tung Wah Times, about a French baroness who dared to rebuke Napoleon for opposing women taking part in politics in order to argue that women should have the same right to be involved in political activities.56 Male members of the Chinese Constitutional Society also emphasized in their speeches women’s responsibilities and rights in national affairs, citing as support the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan and Japanese women’s donations of jewellery towards military expenses during the Russo-Japanese war.57 When reporting on the suffrage movement then taking place in England, where women risked jail to claim the right to vote, the Tung Wah Times firmly declared its support, offering as reference the Chinese proverb ‘the willing will succeed’ (有志竟成, M: yǒuzhì jìngchéng).58 Not all the Chinese newspapers were so enthusiastic about women’s wishes to be politically relevant. The Chinese Australian Herald, when commenting on the drive to give women the same rights to vote and to work as men in the new Commonwealth, considered the proposal ‘beyond reasonableness’ because women should focus their attention on the family.59 In 1909, as the suffrage movement was gaining traction in England, the Chinese Australian Herald was unambiguously critical of the movement.60 In fact, on the issues of women’s rights to vote and to participate in politics, the Chinese Australian Herald had consistently taken the opposite view, holding that once women became involved in public affairs they would lose interest in their families and their children’s education and well-being, leading to the disruption of social order.61 The Chinese Times cautioned that girls attending school should learn to be ‘ordinary’ and concentrate on learning simple day-to-day skills, rather than aiming to stand out. Above all, they should avoid following the example of American women.62 Nonetheless, by 1910 all the Chinese newspapers were taking freedom and equal rights in marriage as a matter of course. There was no more discussion equating young people’s free choice of marriage partners with marriage failure; instead, the prevailing topic was how to take care when choosing a partner.63 In 1910, when a young Chinese woman in Australia ran away from home to escape an arranged marriage, tragedy was averted when her parents agreed to her choice of partner.64 In reporting on another case of a runaway bride, the Chinese newspapers showed clearly that the woman’s primary role in the family was still that of guardian of the family’s welfare and morality—women’s desire for love and compassion, if 56. Tung Wah Times, August 1, 1908, p. 7. 57. Tung Wah Times, August 1, 1908, p. 7. 58. Tung Wah Times, February 22, 1908, p. 2. 59. Chinese Australian History, August 31, 1901, p. 5, and August 23, 1902, p. 2. 60. Chinese Australian History, May 29, 1909, p. 4. 61. Chinese Australian Herald, May 11, 1912, supplement. 62. Chinese Times, July 4, 1908, p. 2. 63. Chinese Australian Herald, May 1, 1909, p. 4. 64. Chinese Times, November 2, 1910, p. 7 and November 16, 1910, p. 7.

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considered at all, came a distant second.65 However, in reality, Chinese women who were born in Australia had a much lower likelihood of marrying into white society than Chinese men; most Chinese women either married within the local Chinese community or returned to China to marry.66 An editorial published in the Tung Wah Times in 1909 shows that this limiting perception setting women as housewives was still strongly held. The author of the opinion piece compared the methods used in teaching children in the white Anglo-Saxon community and in the Chinese community, noting the importance of familial guidance of children. The greatest difference between how the Chinese family and the Western family dealt with the teaching of moral principles was seen to be in the attitude towards the child’s rights—Western society would respect the child’s rights, but would not expect the parents to forfeit their own needs in favour of the needs of the child. Western education emphasized self-respect and self-identification of shame, but as the Tung Wah Times pointed out, every society had its own way of developing its moral principles and by understanding how the Western family imbued children with these principles Chinese readers could understand how Western society had developed.67

Modern Model of Domesticity, Racial Harmony, and Family as a New Social Sphere While the Chinese newspapers engaged in these discussions about women’s rights in marriage and other legal matters, the public space open to women remained limited. That said, it is worth noting that in the narratives of the Chinese newspapers consideration was given to the family as a social space, and to how the maintenance of harmony within the family unit could affect the maintenance of social order. From the perspective of the Chinese populace, an emphasis on the importance of the family served to highlight the cruelty of the White Australia policy, which prevented Chinese residents from reuniting with their families. At the first national conference of Chinese Australians (華民大會, M: huámíndàhuì) in 1905, when the decision was made to prepare and present a petition to the Commonwealth Parliament, the first item addressed was a request that merchants be allowed to bring their families to Australia.68 The Tung Wah Times, probably in a deliberate misunderstanding, supported the motion passed by a conference of (white) Australian women demanding that ‘coloured’ people must be accompanied by their families to be allowed to enter Australia.69 The leader of Chinese community’s resistance to the anti-Chinese 65. Tung Wah Times, June 26, 1909, p. 7. 66. Kate Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land: An Exploration of the Lives of White Women who Partnered Chinese Men and Their Children in Southern Australia, 1855–1915’ (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2005), pp. 238–40. 67. Tung Wah Times, November 13, 1909, p. 2; November 20, 1909, p. 2. 68. Tung Wah Times, September 2, 1905, supplement. 69. Tung Wah Times, November 2, 1907, p. 7.

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movement, the prominent Victorian barrister William Ah Ket (麥錫祥, M: mài xíxiáng), writing in rebuttal to a proposal by a Western Australian member of parliament to ban mixed marriages between Chinese and white Australians, forcefully pointed to the respect Chinese had towards women’s rights and freedom of marriage.70 When the first Chinese Consul General arrived in Australia in 1909 he also made the removal of the ban on Chinese residents bringing out their families a priority in his work as China’s representative in Australia.71 These family-related petitions, regulations, and negotiations all point to the fact that by this time to the Chinese community the family was no longer about parents, blood kin, and clan but about wives and children. This change in the focus of family relations from the traditional emphasis of brotherhood and clan lineage for mutual support to the modern nuclear model of husband and wife in harmonious collaboration was described in the first Chineselanguage novel written by a Chinese Australian and published in 1909. Between June 1909 and December 1910 the Chinese Times serialized this in a novel titled The Poison of Polygamy (多妻毒, M: dūoqīdú). The first half of this work told the story of the Chinese in Australia during the gold rushes, about the perilous journeys and difficult living conditions on the goldfields, with much emphasis on the network of support provided by the traditional native-place and clan societies, and the important support that kinship offered to the Chinese immigrants. The second half turned to those who made the transition from battlers to successful merchants trading between Australia and China. Their lives were nevertheless made difficult by the demand of the traditional clan family for heirs to carry on the family name, which served as justification for acquiring secondary wives, a troublesome practice that eventually led to disharmony in the family and business failures. This cautionary tale clearly demonstrates how the fundamental structure of the Chinese Australian community had moved from traditional mutual-aid associations—whether nativeplace or clan or brotherhood based—to the modern nuclear family. About the time of the Chinese Republican Revolution in 1911, the Chinese Times provided a retelling of the history of the ‘Han’ people—as opposed to the ‘Manchu’ ruling class—reaffirming the unity of the Chinese diaspora with the mother country. The newspaper also reported on community events such as annual outdoor gatherings, entertainments, and celebrations that paid attention to how women and children were helping to bring to the population a stronger sense of community. The toppling of the Manchu imperial government encouraged Chinese women to pay attention to political developments occurring in China. In Melbourne women voluntarily donated money to revolutionary army groups,72 and women members joined in events hosted by the Young China League, a political coalition

70. Tung Wah Times, September 24, 1910, p. 7. 71. Tung Wah Times, June 26, 1909, p. 7. 72. Chinese Times, September 21, 1911, p. 6; February 3, 1912, p. 2; July 6, 1912, p. 10.

Mei-fen Kuo 41

representing almost all the groupings of the Chinese community in Australia.73 The Chinese Times boldly stated that its aim was not only to fight for freedom but also to bring women’s rights in China to the level enjoyed by women in England.74 Between 1911 and 1920, the appearance of women participants in community political events became commonplace.75 It is also worth noting that at this time the secretive sworn-brotherhood Hung Men organization (洪門 M: hóngmén) also began to attempt a transformation; after the success of the Republican Revolution it joined with the Young China League to sponsor the formation of the United Chung Wah Association as a vehicle to consolidate community support for the new Republic of China.76 The wives of this leadership group in particular began to attend public meetings on their own, sometimes as organizers of major charity events, confirming the new image of Chinese women in society.77 Another new image was supplied by the new Chinese Consul General, Tseng Tsung-chien (曾宗鑒 M: zēng zōngjìan; also known as T. K. Tseng, 1882–1958), who arrived in Australia in 1914 accompanied by his wife. When Mrs T. K. Tseng was interviewed by Sydney English-language newspapers, she not only impressed the journalists with her fashionable Western dress style and manner but also her emphatic endorsement of the importance that Chinese placed on family values. Consul General Tseng also offered his opinion that women’s role in controlling the day-to-day household expenditure played an important part in the economy and the growth of overseas trade, and that he intended to promote bilateral trade between Australia and China in his portfolio, especially in the introduction of Chinese silk products to the Australian market.78 The first two decades after Federation were apparently a prosperous time for all in Australia, as revealed by a letter sent by Consul General Tseng to Dr George Morrison, adviser to the government of Yuan Shikai in Peking. In this letter he noted that apart from the barriers they faced in bringing out their families from China, the life of Chinese people in Australia was on the whole a satisfactory one.79 This assessment was echoed in the narratives of the Australian Chinese newspapers; isolated from the difficulties of life in war-torn China, the Chinese community was gradually accepting the Australian way of life as the norm. The principal function of the newspapers was no longer that of defender of lijiao, the traditional Chinese way. Instead, with household spending assuming much greater importance in the economy than ever before, the Chinese press had become agents of consumer 73. Chinese Times, March 2, 1912, p. 5. 74. Chinese Times, March 30, 1912, p. 3. 75. Mei-fen Kuo and Judith Brett, Unlocking the History of the Australian Kuo Min Tang, 1911 to 2013 (Kew, Victoria: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013). 76. Chinese Times, February 3, 1912, p. 2. 77. Sydney Morning Herald, December 16, 1911, p. 19; July 10, 1912, p. 20; and Chinese Australian Herald, August 26, 1916, p. 5. 78. Sydney Morning Herald, June 24, 1914, p. 7. 79. ‘Letter from Tseng Tsung-chien to Morrison’, October 12, 1914, Correspondence of G. E. Morrison II, 1912– 1920, ed. Lo Hui-min (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976–1978), pp. 348–49.

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Figure 2.2:  Picnic organized by the United Chung Hwa Association to celebrate the founding of the Republic of China, Melbourne, February 21, 1912. Australasian, February 24, 1912, p. 64

society, with advertisements for perfumes, toothpastes, pianos, and bath soaps, which targeted women customers, crowding their pages. On the eve of World War I, the Chinese family in Australia was no longer a patriarchal symbol, defined by lineage and native-place, but was a social space in its own right, and household spending and education now had another purpose in providing a better and more progressive social lifestyle. From the end of the nineteenth century, the male-dominated Chinese community had forcefully argued for the beneficial political outcomes of participation in public affairs, employing political rhetoric derived from their Australian experience and concepts such as democracy and freedom as a means to reformat their social networks and narrate their national identity. By comparison, women’s participation in political affairs and their influence on matters of public interest were still very limited. Although women exerted little influence in the national identity narrative, their support enabled men to express themselves in that narrative. Under the pressures imposed by White Australia politics, the creation of harmonious family life for a refugee was in itself a beneficial achievement that enabled participation

Mei-fen Kuo 43

in public affairs. This is not just a description of the Chinese Australian political culture of the era of the 1910 and 1920s; it also enables an appreciation of the social relations and moral values that formed the background for the Chinese Australian national identity narrative.

Conclusion Through this overview of male-dominated Chinese Australian public narratives I argue that although women were conspicuously absent from these narratives on issues of national identity building, studying the roles ascribed to women provides an alternative research direction that could better our understanding of the background to these narratives by considering newly arisen social relations and gender concerns. Urbanization forced a reformatting of social networks and relations within the Chinese community in Australia, and resistance to stereotyping as alien ‘others’ and the pursuit of middle-class lifestyles encouraged community acceptance of the appearance of ‘new women’ and their children in public spaces. Chinese press narratives, not just in Australia but across the Pacific, also provided guidance to the Chinese community on how to redefine the requirements of lijiao to explain their diasporic experience, justifying the acceptance of an Australian lifestyle, dress codes, social manners, and law-based social relations, on the basis of the folk wisdom found in the saying ‘in a new country, ask after the customs’. With these changes, for the Chinese Australian population the meaning of the family moved away from old ideas of maintaining family lineage and clan responsibilities and closer to a basic economic and educational social unit. The ideal of the nuclear family of one man and one woman living and working in harmonious collaboration to nurture and educate the next generation also replaced the traditional extended family based on complex filial and kindred obligations. As the twentieth century commenced, Australia’s national identity was being constructed through the ideal of male mateship, which came to symbolize the social values and frontier spirit passed down from Australia’s early white settlement era. The idea of mateship emphasized qualities such as strength of endeavour, capacity for hard work, loyalty, and solidarity, evolving into partisanship and comradeship, which signified Australianness.80 As the ‘others’ at the centre of developing Australian nationalism, the Chinese community in Australia responded by attempting to evolve new social images; the public ceremonies, outdoor recreational activities, and press narratives all indicated that they no longer looked to the traditional lijiao but to new values such as ‘respectability’, participation in public affairs, manners, and trustworthiness as expression of public morality. They also began to appreciate the influence that social environment could have on the individual. Attention for 80. Nick Dyrenfurth, ‘Battles, Refugees and the Republic: John Howard’s Language of Citizenship’, Journal of Australian Studies 84 (2005), pp. 184–85.

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public approbation was the cause for Australian Chinese newspapers—and newspapers in China—to provide a window into community life in their narratives—narratives that now enable us to perceive how the male Chinese population deliberated on women’s changing social roles. These narratives reveal that in the early years of the twentieth century women’s role was still largely limited to the family. The male Chinese population had by and large adopted Australian society’s expectations that marriage was the measure of a man’s respectability and social standing, that the ‘ideal’ role for women was that of homemaker, which naturally then placed them outside public narratives and political affairs. Clearly, this division of gender responsibilities was based on the consideration of men’s pursuit of respectability and social standing. On the other hand, under an official White Australia policy, the effects of the anti-Chinese movement caused the male-dominated Chinese community to create new public forms of celebration of public holidays and outdoor recreational activities that enabled participation by women and children, as a way to highlight how the settlement of the Chinese in Australia was proceeding in accordance with Australian society’s concepts of the ideal family and gender relations. In this way Chinese in Australia sought to counter claims by the anti-Chinese movement that the gender imbalance of the Chinese population was inimical to the good order and well-being of the Australian society. Although women were largely absent from male-dominated Chinese community discussions on democratic values, brotherhood, diaspora unity, and Hanidentity nationalism, they were not absent from Chinese Australians’ modern social life. And while women’s voices remained unheard in the political discussions and activities that engaged the Chinese community, I have sought to uncover, through an investigation of the historic records of these same discussions and activities, how in the social life of Chinese Australians the male-dominated view of gender roles reconciled, on the one hand, the desire to segregate women from public discussions and participation with the need to involve women to demonstrate respectability and social standing to meet Australian social expectations, on the other. As the men formed community groups and held public meetings in the modern style, they were accompanied by their well-groomed partners dressed in Western fashions and graced with Western good manners. It was these women, rather than the men, who exemplified Chinese Australians’ successful adaptation of Western family values and demonstrated that the Chinese had moved beyond their history as the roughliving men of the gold rushes and had become urban Australians committed to the Australian ways of work, leisure, and lifestyle. These narratives of politics and association, social networks, and national identity should not simply be considered as a symptom of network building by the Chinese nationalist movement but rather as a catwalk on which the concepts of the family and gender relations in the modern urbanized society were on display. In this sense they provide a new approach to apprehending the nature and importance of women in Chinese Australian social life.

3 Chinese Australian Brides, Photography, and the White Wedding Sophie Couchman

A trained dress of white China silk, with large sleeves and puffed yoke of white satin, deep lace falling from the shoulders, with spray of orange blossom across the front of the bodice. Full wreath of orange blossom and long tulle veil embroidered in each corner with white silk, fastened to the hair with pearls; shower bouquet of white camellias and ferns.1

When Australian-born Lily Ah Poo (1880–1947) married Chinese-born Henry Fine Chong (鄭番昌 C: jehng fāanchēung, M: zhèng fānchāng) (1870–1944) in St John’s Church, Parramatta, on June 24, 1896, they posed for a formal wedding portrait (Figure 3.1, see p. 46).2 In the portrait Henry sits and Lily stands, which allows us to see her dress, described in the quote above, in full. Lily’s hand rests on his shoulder, perhaps an act of affection, perhaps to steady herself for the photograph. Her orange blossom wreath, tule veil and shower bouquet mark this as a wedding portrait. Her dress, in keeping with fashions of the day, was made of white China silk with a collar that sat high on the neck.3 The shoulders of the gown broadened into generous leg-of-mutton sleeves, a style that reached maximum size between 1895 and 1897, * Author’s note: I would like to thank Amanda Rasmussen, Kate Bagnall, and Margot Harker for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Margot Harker generously shared the contents of her embargoed doctoral thesis with me: ‘“This Radiant Day”: A History of the Wedding in Australia 1788–1960’ (PhD diss., Australian National University, Canberra, 1998). I would also like to thank Mei-fen Kuo and Yanbing Li for assistance with Chinese translation. 1. ‘Fashionable Chinese Wedding at St. Johns’, Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers’ Advocate, June 27, 1896, p. 12, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article85761342. 2. A publicly available microfilm copy of the wedding portrait is available in ‘Brad Powe Family Photographs and Documents, 1862–1931, Relating to Chinese Ancestry’, ML MAV/FM/10576, State Library of New South Wales. On the Fine Chong/Ah Poo family, see New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages (hereafter NSW BDM), marriage registration of Henry Fine Chong and Lily Ah Poo, 1896/3687; NSW BDM, death registration of Lily Fine Chong, 1947/6377; Jack Brook, From Canton with Courage: Parramatta and Beyond Chinese Arrivals, 1800–1900 (Sydney: Jack Brook and Blacktown District Historical Society, 2010), p. 97; Robyn Florance, The Chinese in Shoalhaven (Nowra, New South Wales: Shoalhaven Historical Society, 2004), p. 24. Thanks to Brad Powe for clarifying aspects of the Fine Chong/Ah Poo family history. 3. Lenore Frost, Dating Family Photos, 1850–1920 (Essendon, Victoria: Lenore Frost, 1996), p. 109.

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Figure 3.1: Wedding portrait of Lily Ah Poo and Henry Fine Chong, photographer unknown, Sydney, 1896. Powe Family Collection

just when Lily and Henry’s photograph was taken.4 Lily Ah Poo had been born in Shoalhaven in rural coastal New South Wales to Sydney-born Emma Ann (née Lowe) and Guoc Ah Poo, a successful market gardener, who was naturalized in 1883.5 By the time of Lily’s wedding, the Ah Poo family were living in Paramatta and her father was described as ‘well to do’.6 Henry Fine Chong was born into a wealthy family in Guangdong and, after arriving in Australia in the late nineteenth century, he had become a prominent merchant in his own right.7 By choosing to wear and be photographed in white at her wedding in the 1890s, Lily presented herself as the modern, fashionable, middle-class Australian woman that she was. Wedding photographs provide a valuable historical source to explore the lives of Chinese Australian women and the choices they made about how to marry. Chinese Australian women’s lives often leave little trace in the historical record, and it has only been relatively recently that they have begun to be discussed with any 4. Florance, Chinese in Shoalhaven, p. 24; Rowena Clark, Hatches, Matches and Dispatches: Christening, Bridal and Mourning Fashions (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1987), p. 11. 5. Florance, Chinese in Shoalhaven, p. 24. NSW BDM, birth registration of Emma Ann Lowe, 1937/1857. 6. ‘Family Notices’, Australian Town and Country Journal, July 4, 1896, p. 34, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article71295327. 7. Brook, From Canton with Courage, p. 97.

Sophie Couchman 47

seriousness within Australian and Chinese Australian histories.8 Finding Chinese Australian women’s voices and perspectives can be particularly difficult. As Kate Bagnall has argued, twentieth-century histories of Chinese Australian families have often taken on the biases inherent in the nineteenth-century sources they draw on.9 Chinese Australian wedding photographs depict the bride and groom—sometimes with wedding party, sometimes alone—and, while mostly created by white male photographers, they were created at the instigation of the bride and groom and invite us to ask different kinds of questions about these people’s lives. The mere existence of these photographs challenges two stereotypes that permeate Australia’s Chinese history: first, that Chinese Australian communities consisted of Chinese men living without women; and second, that these communities were stuck in antiquated Chinese ways, unable to embrace new and modern trends like their white Australian compatriots or to share their values.10 These photographs offer evidence of the existence of Chinese Australian women and families and show Chinese Australians engaging in a modern world alongside other Australians.11 Drawing on Chinese Australian wedding photographs taken from the 1890s through to the 1930s, this chapter locates these photographs and the people in them within a broader historical context of marriage, weddings, and photography in Australia, China, and Hong Kong. I am less concerned with whether Chinese Australians were up to the minute with their wedding choices, although some certainly were, or the extent to which Chinese Australians adopted or did not adopt particular kinds of weddings. Rather, my aim is to highlight the diversity and complexity of wedding choices and describe the participation and engagement of individual Chinese Australians in broad wedding trends. By placing Chinese Australian women with the global evolution of white wedding photographs, it is possible to see how they were not simply assimilating into established Western, Christian cultural practices. Instead, alongside women around the world, they were building something new—the global phenomenon of the modern white wedding. There is much about nineteenth and early twentieth century wedding photography that is highly prescribed, but the creation of any photograph is nevertheless a negotiated process between the photographer and the subject, shaped by the visual conventions of the time. Photographs are never benign records of the past but are the product of competing power relations of those involved in creating

8. Kate Bagnall, ‘Rewriting the History of Chinese Families in Nineteenth-Century Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (2011), pp. 73–76. 9. Bagnall, ‘Rewriting the History’, pp. 71–73. 10. Bagnall, ‘Rewriting the History’, p. 64; Ann Curthoys, ‘“Men of All National, Except Chinamen”: Europeans and Chinese on the Goldfields of New South Wales’, in Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, ed. Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook and Andrew Reeves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 103; John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007), pp. 28–29. 11. In order to uniquely identify these women and firmly anchor them in the historical record, I have provided each of their birth and death dates in this chapter.

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the photograph.12 In wedding photographs decisions about how the couple were arranged, the studio furniture, props and backdrops, and the overall composition of the photograph were likely made by the photographer, who was in turn emulating and innovating existing visual trends in wedding photography. There is also a certain prescription to wedding fashions, and while some participants might choose to stand out from the crowd, most aimed to conform with current wedding styles in order to have a ‘proper’ wedding, perhaps with a few more embellishments or a little more luxury.13 The selection of dress worn might have been made by the bride, but it was just as likely to have been a negotiated decision that involved the bride’s mother and dressmaker, subject to the exigencies of cost and the availability of fabrics and patterns. That being said, in deciding to commission wedding photographs and wear a wedding dress the bride and groom show agency by choosing to be part of this process. Couples could, and did, choose not to participate in certain wedding rituals. An analysis of historical Chinese Australian wedding photographs offers an insight into the private lives of Chinese Australians and their place in Australian life. Understanding the nature of Australia’s Chinese Australian photographic archive, both public and private, allows us to critically interrogate pictorial representations of Chinese Australians and their place in Australia’s history.14 The visual history of Chinese in Australia has largely been played out by stealth through the imagery used to illustrate Australia’s published histories rather than through scholarly analysis.15 The prescribed and personal nature of wedding photographs also gives them an invisibility in the historical record. One wedding photograph can look much the same as another. Created for personal commemorative purposes, their meanings are strongest for the family and friends of the bride and groom, and their distribution and display is generally limited to the private realm of friends and family.16 Even at the time of creation, the photographic archive is not representative 12. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: MacMillan Education, 1988); Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1991). 13. Margot Harker, correspondence with author, January 26, 2017. 14. See, for example, Sophie Couchman, ‘Making the “Last Chinaman”: Photography and Chinese as a “Vanishing” People in Australia’s Rural Local Histories’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (2011), pp. 78–91, and ‘“Then in the Distance Quong Tart Did We See”: Quong Tart, Celebrity and Photography’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 8 (2006), pp. 59–182. 15. For a fuller discussion of this, see Sophie Couchman, ‘In and Out of Focus: Chinese and Photography in Australia, 1870s–1940s’ (PhD diss., La Trobe University, Melbourne, 2009), pp. 2–15. 16. Patricia Holland, ‘Introduction’, in Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography, ed. Jo Spence and Patricia Holland (London: Virago Press, 1991), pp. 2–3. The private nature of family photographs has changed dramatically over the last decade with the rise in popularity of social media and genealogical websites which publish digital copies of historical photographs. Museums and public libraries started collecting Chinese Australian family photographs from the 1980s. For example, collections gathered by Morag Loh as part of her research in the 1980s are held by the State Library of Victoria and there are significant family photograph collections in the Museum of Chinese Australian History (Chinese Museum), which opened in Melbourne in 1985; the Golden Dragon Museum, which opened in Bendigo in 1991; and the Northern Territory Chinese Museum, which opened in Darwin in 1997.

Sophie Couchman 49

of the world it purports to capture; over time, photographic prints and negatives are duplicated and culled and circulated unevenly through public and private spaces. Chinese Australian family photographs have often been eclipsed in the public imagination by other sorts of images—images that depict Chinese Australians as different and exotic—which have been circulated more widely and have therefore found greater resonance in the public sphere.17 As a result, Chinese Australians have lost their place in Australia’s historical visual discourse as ‘ordinary’ Australians. That white Anglo-Celtic Australians, who may or may not have been first-generation migrants, would marry in white is not considered exceptional, but there is still a novelty associated with the idea that Chinese Australians might chose to marry in white. As John Fitzgerald has argued, it is important that we ‘embed Chinese Australian stories into Australian history to a point of demonstrating that Chinese Australians were so unequivocally Australian that so-called anti-Chinese attitudes were not anti-Chinese at all but anti-Australian, even in White Australia’.18 An important object of this chapter is to create a space in Australia’s history where Chinese Australians can be unexceptional Australians.19

Early Chinese Australian Marriages (1820s–1880s) As early as the 1820s Chinese men working in the Australian colonies decided to marry and settle in Australia.20 More marriages occurred when larger numbers of Chinese arrived in search of gold and other work from the 1850s onwards.21 Most Chinese immigrants were male, which resulted in a significant gender imbalance in the Chinese Australian community. Up until 1891 there were fewer than 300 ‘Chinese’ women and fewer than 1,000 ‘part Chinese’ women, compared to about 35,000 ‘Chinese’ men and fewer than 1,000 ‘part Chinese’ men.22 After the introduction of federal immigration restrictions in 1901 the number of ‘Chinese’ men in Australia dropped from 29,153 in 1901 to 9,311 in 1933, while the number of

17. Couchman, ‘In and Out of Focus’, pp. 271–76. 18. Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, p. 5. 19. On this theme, see also Sophie Couchman, ‘Chinese Australian Photographers in Australia’s North’, in Rediscovered Past: Chinese Networks (Ipswich, Queensland: Chinese Heritage in Northern Australia, 2016), pp. 7–24. 20. Shirley Fitzgerald, Red Tape, Gold Scissors: The Story of Sydney’s Chinese (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1996), p. 17. 21. Kate Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land: An Exploration of the Lives of White Women Who Partnered Chinese Men and Their Children in Southern Australia, 1855–1915’ (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2006), pp. 95–99; Pauline Rule, ‘The Chinese Camps in Colonial Victoria: Their Role as Contact Zones’, in After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860–1940, ed. Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald, and Paul Macgregor (Kingsbury, Victoria: Otherland Literary Journal, 2004), p. 125; Sandi Robb, ‘Myths, Lies and Invisible Lives: European Women and Chinese Men in North Queensland 1870–1900’, Lilith 12 (2003), p. 97. 22. C. Y. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975), pp. 22 and 50.

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‘Chinese’ women grew from 474 in 1901 to 1,535 in 1933.23 By 1947 women represented about a third of the total ‘Chinese’ and ‘part Chinese’ populations in Australia.24 Once age demographics are taken into consideration, these are relatively small numbers from which to identify marriages in the historical record and draw firm conclusions about the different marriage choices of Chinese Australian women of different socio-economic backgrounds. What we can do is examine the diversity of choices made by these women. In the nineteenth century most Chinese men and the few Chinese women resident in Australia had probably already married in China according to Chinese rites, or else chose to return to China to marry.25 Some men married women in China by proxy.26 The use of proxies was possible as Chinese marriage certificates were agreements between the male heads of the couple’s families rather than the couple themselves. Nineteenth-century Chinese marriages generally followed the six ‘Nuptial Rites’ and three ‘Covenants’ that had evolved in China over hundreds of years.27 There were, however, regional variations in their adoption, and they were at times simplified and varied according to social class.28 As in the West, those without money or an inheritance had little need to marry at all and the less wealthy could not always afford all the trimmings of a full wedding ceremony. Acquiring the bride’s name and birth dates, consulting the couple’s horoscope, and the welcoming of the bride into the groom’s home were key rites that were always followed.29 Polygyny (the marriage of a man to more than one wife) and concubinage were accepted parts of Chinese culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and had their own associated rites. These types of unions are not specifically covered here. Some Chinese Australian brides in this chapter may well have been part of polygynous marriages or considered to be concubines within Chinese society, but this information can be difficult to find and was sometimes hidden, even from the bride and groom.30 There is some suggestion in the historical records that nineteenth-century Chinese marriage rites and customs were adapted for use in Australia. A newspaper report from 1875 states that William Ah Chow of Warrnambool in Victoria ‘married’ 23. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia, p. 42. 24. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia, pp. 42 and 50. 25. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia, pp. 48–49. 26. Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land’, pp. 225–26. 27. Antonia Finnane, ‘Changing Spaces and Civilized Weddings in Republican China’, in New Narratives of Urban Space in Republican Chinese Cities: Emerging Social, Legal and Governance Orders, ed. Billie K. L. So and Madeleine Zelin (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 18–19; Vermier Y. Chiu, Marriage Laws and Customs of China, quoted in Athena Nga Chee Liu, Family Law for the Hong Kong SAR: Theory and Practice with Chinese Families (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1999), pp. 8–10. 28. Finnane, ‘Changing Spaces and Civilized Weddings’, pp. 18–19. 29. Finnane, ‘Changing Spaces and Civilized Weddings’, p. 18; Liu, Family Law for the Hong Kong SAR, p. 11. 30. For example, Mei Weiqiang notes that Quong Tart’s mother married him to a local woman and also adopted sons for him in absentia. Mei Weiqiang, ‘Mei Guangda’s (Quong Tart) Family and his Chinese Sensibility’ (unpublished paper given at the International Conference on Quong Tart and His Time, Powerhouse Museum, July 2004), cited in Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land’, p. 226.

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Martha Hammond of Panmure at the See Yup temple in South Melbourne.31 No details of the event are provided and no evidence of the marriage found in registry records. Holding the ceremony at the temple, however, would have allowed them to pay respects to Ah Chow’s family through the ancestral tablets of See Yup members held there. Newspaper descriptions of Chinese weddings in Australia also suggest that the style of dress worn perhaps varied from that typically worn in China.32 Traditionally, Chinese brides wore a red embroidered jacket (忙澳 M: máng’ào), dragon skirt (蟒裙 M: mǎngqún) with hooped belt (朝帶 M: cháodài), and an imitation phoenix crown gilded in silver and inlaid with kingfisher feathers with strings of pearls covering the face, with the hair on the forehead plucked in the kāimiàn (揩面) style of a married woman.33 Grooms wore a red sash over the shoulder. Hung Fann, however, who married Gee Kee, a ‘wealthy Chinese merchant’, in far north Queensland in 1884 was ‘very handsomely dressed after the style of a Chinese merchant’s wife’ and used a large fan to cover her face.34 The Braidwood and District Historical Society hold a skirt believed to have been worn by Boo Jung (Mary) (c.  1867–1942) when she married Chee Dock Nomchong (1854–1941) in Hong Kong in 1887.35 The base fabric of the skirt is red, but it is trimmed with black and heavily embroidered with butterflies and flowers in different shades of blue. Similar costumes described as wedding dresses held in other museum and private collections also depart from the typical red wedding costume.36 Reports from the 1860s and 1870s also note that the bride or groom wore dress that was ‘the height of European fashion’.37 These appear to have been Chinese rather than civic or church marriages, although there is some ambiguity in the reports. Newspaper accounts of ‘Chinese weddings’ tend to focus on the large, lavish wedding banquets that were held to celebrate the wedding rather than how or where the bride and groom were actually married or what they wore. 31. Warrnambool Standard, September 17, 1875. Newspaper clipping courtesy of Geoff Artso. 32. ‘A Chinese Wedding in Queensland’, The Queenslander, August 23, 1884, p. 298, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article23974543. 33. Valery M. Garrett, Chinese Clothing: An Illustrated Guide (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 133–34; Arthur P. Wolf and Chieh-shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), p. 73. 34. ‘A Chinese Wedding in Queensland’, The Queenslander, August 23, 1884, p. 298, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article23974543. 35. NSW BDM, death registration of Chee Dock Nomchong, 21067/1941; NSW BDM, death registration of Mary Nomchong, 16141/1942; Lionel J. R. Nomchong and Matthew Higgins, ‘Lionel Nomchong Interviewed by Matthew Higgins for the Canberra Region Oral History Project [Sound Recording]’, 1995, National Library of Australia, http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-221816559; Madeline Howe et al., ‘Madeline Howe and Eileen Nomchong Interviewed by Jenny Salmon in the NSW Bicentennial Oral History Collection [Sound Recording]’, 1987, National Library of Australia, http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-216340809. 36. See, for example, the collections of the Chinese Museum in Melbourne, the Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo, the Oxley Museum in Brisbane, and the Queanbeyan and District Historical Society. Information taken from ‘Object: Wedding clothes’, People and Collections, Golden Threads website, accessed September 11, 2009, http://archive.amol.org.au/goldenthreads/collections/recordCObject.asp?ID=503. 37. ‘Chinese Wedding’, Ovens and Murray Advertiser, September 2, 1869, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newsarticle197567939 (groom’s dress); ‘A Celestial Wedding’, Riverine Herald, October 21, 1871, p. 2, http://nla.gov. au/nla.news-article113590133.

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Little is known about the nature of Chinese Australian Christian and civic marriages in the 1870s and earlier. As early as the 1850s newspapers reported that Chinese Australians were married in the Church of England, Roman Catholic, Wesleyan, and Presbyterian churches.38 They probably also married under civil rites, and different marriage rites would also have occurred when Chinese Australians married Indigenous Australians and into the families of other immigrant groups. Some also may have chosen not to go through any form of marriage ceremony. Like the Chinese weddings just discussed, newspapers similarly provide little description about the nature of the wedding or what the bride wore. Weddings were reported as curiosities. In any case, Australian weddings for those in the lower classes tended to be private, simple affairs in which the bride and groom’s dress followed the fashions of the day, with most couples simply wearing their ‘Sunday best’.39 There were many reasons why brides might not wear white.40 The dress worn by Ah Hook’s unnamed Chinese bride at her wedding banquet in rural New South Wales in 1864 when she ‘re-married’ was described as ‘neat, and fashionable—quite in the English style’.41 The ordinary nature of the dress worn also makes these earlier weddings difficult to distinguish from photographic portraits of the young couple that just happen to have been taken around the time of their marriage. Photography was not typically employed by friends or family to commemorate weddings in the early decades of its invention, whether Christian, civil, or traditional Chinese weddings. Wedding photography emerged out of the gradual shift of weddings from intimate family events to public functions designed to display status and wealth. As will be seen later in the chapter, photography also played a role in the emergence of modern Chinese weddings in the early twentieth century. Photographic wedding portraits grew to become an intrinsic part of the modern white wedding in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although photographic technology had been available since the 1840s, only a small proportion of the thousands of extant photographs taken before the 1870s are of couples taken at the time of their marriage.42 This is partly because, during this earlier period, photography and white weddings tended to be more elite activities, but also because weddings were more likely to be considered private affairs. Some scholars have even argued that photographing a bride in her bridal gown was the equivalent of crudely putting 38. ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages’, Gippsland Guardian, January 30, 1857, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newsarticle112487109. 39. Clark, Hatches, Matches and Dispatches, p. 10. For a later example of this see the wedding photograph of Lucy Jong and James Leewood taken in Perth in 1905, where Lucy wears ordinary dress but holds an extravagant bouquet believed to be her wedding bouquet; ‘Wedding Photograph of James Leewood and Lucy Jong’, c. 1901, Chiew Family Collection, in Chinese-Australian Historical Images in Australia (hereafter CHIA) [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D003738.htm. Lucy Jong and James Leewood are discussed in Antonia Finnane’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 7). 40. Wallace, All Dressed in White, p. 38; Shelley Tobin, Marriage à la Mode: Three Centuries of Wedding Dress (London: The National Trust, 2003), pp. 10 and 49; Clark, Hatches, Matches and Dispatches, p. 11. 41. ‘Chinese Marriage’, Newcastle Chronicle and Hunter River District News, September 24, 1864, p. 2, http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article128920990. 42. Barbara Norfleet, Wedding (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), no page number.

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her on public display and might even have been considered ‘bad taste’ or, at worst, the equivalent of earning a living from your looks or body.43 The development of gelatin dry-plate technology in the late 1870s, which resulted in the wider adoption and circulation of photography, also crucially coincided with a period when the middle classes began to want to publicly demonstrate their wealth and standing. There was a corresponding shift at this time towards more public weddings, with photographs, wedding and engagement notices, and detailed descriptions of weddings published in the popular press.44 Photography and white weddings spread from the upper into the middle classes in the late nineteenth century. They formed a symbiotic relationship, with each reinforcing the popularity of the other. The incorporation of photography into white wedding rites promoted photography as an activity to memorialize significant family events. The increasingly public nature of weddings as spectacles was also enhanced by photography, which helped to promote the key features of the white wedding in imagery that could then be emulated.

Emergence of the Chinese Australian White Wedding (1890s–1920s) Despite being popularly constructed as a timeless and unchanging tradition, white weddings have evolved into a global phenomenon. The white wedding grew out of a preference in eighteenth-century Britain for white, or white and silver, wedding dresses.45 In the mid-nineteenth century, following the fashions of the day, the British royal family helped to reinforce popular trends by marrying in white.46 In 1840 Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in white, complete with orange blossom in her hair and a Honiton lace veil, and later her daughters all followed her lead. Her eldest daughter, Victoria, Princess Royal, not only wore white when marrying in 1858 but was also photographed in her white wedding dress.47 News and details of these weddings were promoted widely in the public press. Initially a luxury of the wealthy upper classes in England, the major features of white weddings—the special white dress, veil, floral bouquets, and bridesmaids—were gradually integrated into

43. Carol Wallace, All Dressed in White: The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 117; John Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 29 and 32. 44. Clark, Hatches, Matches and Dispatches, p. 11; Wallace, All Dressed in White, pp. 66 and 68. 45. Edwina Ehrman, The Wedding Dress: 300 Years of Bridal Fashions (Wellington, New Zealand: Te Papa Press, 2011), p. 23. 46. Ehrman, Wedding Dress, p. 56. 47. Clark, Hatches, Matches and Dispatches, p. 49; Tobin, Marriage à la Mode, p. 30; Frost, Dating Family Photos, p. 109; ‘Queen Victoria, the Prince Consort and Victoria, Princess Royal in the Dress They Wore at the Marriage of Princess Royal’, 1858–65, albumen print by Thomas Richard Williams (1825–71), Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 2905593, https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/2905593/queen-victoriathe-prince-consort-and-victoria-princess-royal-in-the-dress-they.

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existing wedding rites in other places and classes, as earlier practices were transformed, reinterpreted, and sometimes discarded.48 The white wedding emerged out of a shift in wedding practices from what Vassos Argyrou describes as ‘rites of passage to rites of distinction’.49 They became a way for newly emerging urban middle classes in the mid-nineteenth century to publicly demonstrate their increased wealth by emulating the upper classes, while at the same time distinguishing themselves from members of the rural working classes.50 Upper-class weddings also became more public as they sought to assert their difference from these rising middle classes.51 Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, weddings shifted away from being events organized by parents and held in the family home or local church, with family and the local community in attendance, to become larger events more likely held in ostentatious public spaces such as cathedrals or hotels, with friends and family in attendance.52 They were now public events and, from the mid-nineteenth century, were increasingly photographed, reported in newspapers and journals, and eventually captured in film for general public consumption.53 It is possible to track the participation of Chinese Australians in changing wedding practices in Australia, China, and Hong Kong from the 1890s onwards through wedding photographs and newspaper descriptions. Initially, these weddings were celebrated by the families of the Chinese Australian merchant elite. Lily Ah Poo and Henry Fine Chong, whose 1896 white wedding was described at the start of this chapter, were both members of prosperous Chinese Australian families in Sydney. Lily was the child of a mixed marriage and China-born Henry was politically progressive, actively promoting the modernization of China within Sydney communities—personal circumstances that may have influenced the couple’s decision to marry in white.54 Ten years earlier, in Melbourne in 1885, Agnes Kong Meng (1861–1938)55 wore a ‘princess robe of cream satin, embroidered with scroll patterns in pearl down the front. Her veil of Honiton lace was arranged to give full effect to the coils of dark hair, which were set off with orange blossoms’.56 Agnes was 48. Wallace, All Dressed in White, pp. 25–26. 49. Vassos Argyrou, Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: The Wedding as Symbolic Struggle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 10. 50. Wallace, All Dressed in White, pp. 66 and 68. 51. Ehrman, Wedding Dress, p. 69. 52. Finnane, ‘Changing Spaces and Civilized Weddings’, pp. 15–17; Wallace, All Dressed in White, pp. 23 and 80; Argyrou, Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean, p. 10. 53. Ehrman, Wedding Dress, p. 101. 54. C. F. Yong, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia 1901–1921 (Richmond, South Australia: Raphael Arts Pty Ltd, 1977), p. 121; Mei-fen Kuo, Making Chinese Australia: Urban Elites, Newspapers and the Formation of Chinese-Australian Identity, 1892–1912 (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2013), pp. 127 and 164. 55. Vic BDM, birth registration of Agnes Meng, 1861/498; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Agnes Kong Meng and Charles Pierre Etienne Martin, 1885/2730; Vic BDM, death registration of Agnes Martin, 1938/9963. 56. ‘The Daily Press’, Daily Press (Hong Kong), July 7, 1885, p. 2, in Old Hong Kong Newspapers [online database], https://mmis.hkpl.gov.hk/old-hk-collection. Thanks to Mei-fen Kuo for drawing my attention to this article.

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the eldest daughter of Lowe Kong Meng, an elite and highly successful Malaysian Chinese merchant who arrived in Melbourne in 1853, and his Tasmanian-born wife, Mary Ann Prussia, daughter of William and Ann Prussia.57 No Australian newspaper accounts have been found about Lowe Kong Meng and Mary Ann’s wedding, but their daughter’s wedding, which took place at the Kong Meng residence, was reported in both Australian and Hong Kong newspapers.58 It is not known whether any photographs were taken, but a small head and shoulders sketch accompanied the Sydney Bulletin’s article about the wedding.59 Two years later, in 1898, Marion Ada Wating Pang (1878–?), daughter of prominent Adelaide merchant Chung Pang and his wife, Marion (née Braham), married Looey Toon Yick in Bendigo, Victoria, wearing ‘ivory silk trimmed with Brussels lace with the customary wreath and veil, and carried a lovely bouquet of flowers’.60 In 1899, when Susie Ah Cue (1882–?) married John (or Jahun) Lee in Forbes, New South Wales, she was dressed in ‘a costume of silver grey China silk’ trimmed with ‘white satin and chiffon’, which she wore with a wreath of orange blossoms and a ‘white fancy straw’ hat, ‘trimmed with white chiffon, ribbon, and lilies of the valley’.61 She also carried a bouquet of China lilies specially grown for the occasion. By the early 1900s the number of Chinese Australian white wedding photographs increased alongside the commercialization and broader adoption of white weddings and photography in Australia.62 It was no longer just the families of elite urban Chinese Australian merchants who married in white, but also couples from families of lower wealth and status in both rural and urban Australia. The typical Edwardian wedding dress of the time was ivory or creamy white satin with a trained skirt, a bodice higher than the natural waistline with a high stand-up collar. The hair was worn piled high on the head and bouquets for brides and attendants reached ‘luxurious proportions’.63 Wedding portraits of Lydia Chi (1875–1923), who married in Tingha in northern New South Wales in 1902 (Figure 3.2, see p. 56);64 Sara Mung (c. 1878–1961), who married in rural Victoria in 1903;65 Violet Geechoun 57. Ching Fatt Yong, ‘Lowe Kong Meng (1831–1888)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1974), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ lowe-kong-meng-4043. 58. ‘Melbourne’, Northern Territory Times & Gazette, June 13, 1885, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article3157743; ‘The Daily Press’, Daily Press (Hong Kong), July 7, 1885, p. 2, in Old Hong Kong Newspapers [online database], https://mmis.hkpl.gov.hk/old-hk-collection. 59. ‘Social Page’, Bulletin (Sydney), May 30, 1885, p. 16, http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-239594496. 60. ‘A Chinese Wedding’, Bendigo Advertiser, March 25, 1898, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article89468880; South Australian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, birth registration of Marion Ada Waoling, 208/198, 1878. 61. NSW BDM, birth registration of Susan Ah Cue, 15740/1882; ‘Social Items’, Evening News, February 17, 1899, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article113708476. 62. Tobin, Marriage à la Mode, p. 27; Chrys Ingraham, White Wedding: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999). 63. Tobin, Marriage à la Mode, pp. 66 and 70. 64. NSW BDM, marriage registration of Lydia E. Chi and Judges Kay, 10231/1902; NSW BDM, birth registration of Lydia Elizabeth Chi, 19317/1875; NSW BDM, death registration of Lydia E. Kay, 14217/1923. 65. Diann Tabot, Who Is She?: The Lives and Trials of the Women and Children Who Shared Their Lives with the

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Figure 3.2:  Lydia Chi and Judges Chun Kay, photograph by Tesla Studio, Sydney, 1902. Elaine Herrington Collection (http://chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D002852.htm)

(1888?–1974), who married in Bendigo in central Victoria in 1905;66 and Bertha Hing (1880–1939), who married in Melbourne in 1905,67 show their hair styled in this fashion and that they held generous bouquets. Head-and-shoulders portraits of the bride and groom also became popular at this time, such as the photograph of Ivy Elizabeth Ling (1890–1968) and Percy Esmore (1878–1964), who married in Victoria in 1909.68 Their colour-tinted portrait was printed onto a convex surface before being framed.69 Photographs of the bride and groom with their wedding party in garden and outdoor settings also became more fashionable around the turn of the century in Australia. Examples of bridal parties photographed in outdoor garden settings Chinese Men on the Upper Ovens Goldfields in North East Victoria (Albury, Victoria: Specialty Press, 2016), pp. 181–82. Vic BDM, marriage registration of Sara Mung and Jonathan Cameron, 1903/5324; NSW BDM, death registration of Sara Cameron, 19621/1961. 66. ‘Wedding Photograph of Violet Geechoun and Charles Quon Senior’, c. 1905, Daisy Quon Collection, Chinese Museum, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D000937.htm; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Violet Maud Frances Geochonn and Charlie Sheen/Ah Quon, 1905/2556; Vic BDM, death registration of Violet Maud Frances Quon, 1974/3474. Violet Geechoun is believed to have been seventeen years old when she married, so was probably born around 1888 (no birth record has been located): ‘Geechoun, Violet Maud Frances’, CHIA [online database], http://chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/ biogs/CH00779b.htm. 67. Vic BDM, birth registration of Bertha Ah Hing, 1880/16477; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Bertha Hing and Robert Anguey, 1905/4946; Vic BDM, death registration of Bertha Anguey, 1939/3784. 68. Vic BDM, birth registration of Percy Esmore, 1878/2481; Vic BDM, birth registration of Ivy Elizabeth Ling, 1890/25650; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Ivy Elizabeth Esmore and Percy Esmore, 1909/658; Vic BDM, death registration of Percy Esmore, 1964/17883; Vic BDM, death registration of Ivy Elizabeth Esmore, 1968/4493. 69. Wong Ling Collection, MF0851, Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo.

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Figure 3.3:  Tutoy Chinn and Charles Wong Hee with their wedding party, photographer unknown, Launceston, Tasmania, 1904. Frank Chinn Collection, Chinese Museum (http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/ objects/D000742.htm)

include those of Tutoy Chinn (1888–1922) and Charles Wong Hee (c. 1873–1963), married in Launceston in 1904 (Figure 3.3);70 Ruby Appoo (1883–?) and George Fooke (?–?), married in Bendigo in 1902;71 and the double wedding of the Lepp sisters, Annie (c. 1874–1956) and Rosanna (c. 1872–1937), to Richard Moy (1871– 1955) and Archibald Legoon (c. 1871–1947), in Ballarat in 1902.72 The large frilly hats worn by Tutoy Chinn and her bridesmaid or maid of honour in Launceston 70. Paul Macgregor, ‘Chinn, Tutoy’, in CHIA [online database], http://chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/biogs/ CH00058b.htm; Vic BDM, death registration of Tutoy Wong Hee, 1922/12390; Vic BDM, death registration of Charles Wong Hee, 1963/947. 71. ‘The Fooke–Appoo Wedding Party’, Bendigonian, August 11, 1908, p. 16; Vic BDM, birth registration of Ruby Allison Ah Poo, 1883/13317; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Ruby Allison Appoo and George Fooke, 1908/5482. 72. Photograph Collection, MF0574, Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo; ‘Weddings’, Ballarat Star, July 12, 1902, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article211461334; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Rosanna Lepp and Archibald Legoon, 1902/2463; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Bridget Annie Lepp and Richard Frances Amoy, 1902/2464; Vic BDM, death registration of Bridget Annie Moy, 1956/9047; Vic BDM, death registration of Rosanna Legoon, 1937/17489; Vic BDM, birth registration of Richard Francis Amoy, 1871/5536; Vic BDM, death registration of Richard Francis Moy, 1955/8171; Vic BDM, death registration of Archibald Legoon, 1947/19824.

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(Figure 3.3), and the shepherd’s crooks carried by the bridesmaids at Lim On and his unidentified bride’s wedding, also in Tasmania, were both popular accessories at this time.73 In the 1910s Australian wedding dresses were commonly straight or tubular in shape, often with a tunic overskirt giving a layered effect and often worn shortened with the hem sitting just above the ankle or at mid-calf length.74 Brides who wore tubular-shaped wedding dresses with shorter hemlines included Maud Whay (1885–1965), married in Maryborough, Victoria in 1919 (see Figure 3.4 on p. 59);75 Mary Wong See (1891–1962), married in Sydney in 1913;76 Violet Lee Wah (1892– 1960), married in rural Victoria in 1918;77 Florence Sam (c. 1889–1973), married in rural Victoria in 1916;78 Alice Tock (1899–1982), married in Melbourne in 1918;79 Alberta Mahlook (1898–1962), married in Wangaratta, Victoria in 1919;80 and Olive Gooey (?–?), married in Melbourne in 1919.81 Maud Whay (Figure 3.4)82 and 73. Victorian BDM records suggest this is the wedding of Henry James Lim On and Elizabeth Henrietta Ah Moy, who married in Tasmania before moving to Victoria. No marriage record has been located. Vic BDM, birth registration of Mervyn Oswald Lim On, 1910/4876; Vic BDM, birth registration of Keith Henry Lim On, 1914/14615; Vic BDM, death registration of Henry James Lim-On, 1942/3786; Vic BDM, death registration of Elizabeth Henrietta Lim On, 1955/2520. 74. Frost, Dating Family Photos, pp. 81 and 110. 75. Vic BDM, birth registration of Georgina Ah Whay, 1885/26879; Vic BDM, death registration of Georgina Maud Sheen, 1965/27637. 76. Joanna Boileau, Families of Fortune: Chinese People in the Tweed (Murwillumbah, New South Wales: Tweed River Regional Museum, 2009), p. 67. NSW BDM, birth registration of Mary Wong See 180625/2005; NSW BDM, marriage registration of Mary Wong See and William Tong, 230/1913; NSW BDM, death registration of Mary Tong See, 36111/1962. 77. ‘Wedding Photograph of Violet Ah Gee’, c. 1915, Lee Wah Family Collection, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D001515.htm; Vic BDM, birth registration of Violet Amy Victoria Lee Wah 1892/8909; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Violet Anna Victoria Lee Wah and Francis Archibald James Ah Gee, 1918/282; Vic BDM, death registration of Violet Anna Victoria Ah Gee, 1960/7382. 78. ‘Wedding Party [Picture]’ and ‘Florence May Sam [Picture]’, Federation University, Centre for Gippsland Studies Images, in FedUni ResearchOnline [online database], http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/ vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/83810 and http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/ HandleResolver/1959.17/83818; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Florence May Sam and Thomas Chong, 1916/9344; Vic BDM, death registration of Florence May Chong, 1973/14953. 79. ‘Wedding of Alice Tock and William Gee with Bridal Party’, c. 1918, Shirley Millard Collection, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D002659.htm; ‘Tock, Alice’, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/biogs/CH00976b.htm; Vic BDM, birth registration of Leong Min, 1899/4528. There are two marriage records that might relate to Alice Tock (whose father was Leong Tock), as she married under her Chinese name, which is not now known: Vic BDM, marriage registration of Lin Foong Leong Tock and Gee Yem, 1918/1119; or Vic BDM, marriage registration of Lin Han Leong Tock and Gee Huey, 1918/1920; Vic BDM, death registration of Alice Gee, 1982/11248. 80. ‘Wedding of Alberta Evelyn Mahlook (known as “Bert”) and Tommy Shin’, 1919, Fay Anderson Collection, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D002401.htm; Vic BDM, birth registration of Alberta Eliza Mah Look, 1898/5251; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Alberta Evelyn Mah Look and Thomas Henry Shin, 1919/6515; Vic BDM, death registration of Alberta Evelyn Shin, 1962/17609. 81. ‘A Picturesque Chinese Wedding—Mr. Allan Lim to Miss Olive Gooey’, Table Talk, December 18, 1919, p. 13, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/146473269. Vic BDM, marriage registration of Olive Lew Gooey and Allan Lim, 1919/10302. 82. ‘Fred Sheen and Maud Whay’s Wedding Portrait’ and ‘Fred Sheen & Maud Whay’, c. 1919, Robyn Ansell Collection, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D002774.htm and http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D002775.htm; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Georgina Maud Whay and Frederick Sheen, 1919/9240.

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Figure 3.4:  Maud Whay and Fred Sheen with their wedding party, photographer unknown, Maryborough, Victoria, 1919. Robyn Ansell Collection (http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D000742.htm)

Florence Sam’s dresses both also had overskirts. Light-coloured stockings became fashionable by the mid-teens83 and were worn by both brides and female attendants at the weddings of women such as Maud Whay (Figure 3.4), Florence Sam, Violet Lee Wah, and Elsie Sam (c. 1899–c. 1995) who married in 1920.84 Maud Whay (Figure 3.4); Mary Wong See; Violet Lee Wah; Florence Chong; Mabel Que Fook Carr (1892–1957), who married in Innisfail, Queensland, in 1915;85 and Alberta Mahlook all had their veils pinned back so that the floral wreaths they wore on their heads could be seen. The nature of weddings and wedding dresses changed in Australia with the onset of World War I. As the trauma of the war unfolded frivolity associated with 83. Frost, Dating Family Photos, p. 82. 84. Image Collection, Ah Yee family, f.32, State Library of Victoria; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Elsie Rebecca Sam and Robert Alexander Ah Yee, 1920/11686. 85. Joanna Olsen and Keith Shang, With His Gold in a Little Velvet Bag: The Story of a Chinaman and a Bonnie Lassie from Edinburgh (Lindfield, New South Wales: Joanna Olsen, 2013), p. 156; Queensland Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages (hereafter Qld BDM), birth registration of Mabel Que Fook, 1892/C7546; Qld BDM, marriage registration of Mabel Carr Que Fook and William Henry Kwong Kee (name changed by deed poll to Conkey), 1915/C1085; Qld BDM, death registration of Mabel Conkey, 1957/B18564.

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weddings came to be considered tasteless and insensitive.86 Grooms and their groomsmen who were serving during the war were expected to marry in their military uniforms.87 In the wedding portrait of Queenie Ellen Sing (1897–1971) and Francis George Mills taken in Queensland in 1919, for example, Queenie wears a white wedding dress but the groom and both groomsmen wear military uniforms.88 Some brides also married in their travelling suits.89 In China at the close of the nineteenth century and into the final years of the Qing dynasty, wedding practices were changing alongside changes to the place of women in society and the nature of women’s dress. One of the ways reformers and revolutionaries sought to modernize and strengthen China was by improving women’s rights. Associated with these changes were shifts in Chinese women’s clothing.90 In particular, the abandonment of footbinding created unease about what shoes to wear with large rather than bound feet, which led to an exploration of new kinds of dress to match unbound feet.91 Chinese brides began to wear slimmer, more fitted black satin jackets that buttoned down the front, which were worn with red or pink satin skirts, often embroidered with flowers and birds rather than the traditional dragon and phoenix.92 This mirrored broader changes in women’s dress which had started much earlier but became more popular after the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911. As Antonia Finnane notes, ‘The cut of clothes shifted from wide to narrow, colours changed from brilliant to delicate or dark, gaily embroidered lotus slippers gave way to leather shoes, skirts were abandoned in some cases altogether.’93 Around this period in China and Hong Kong portraits of the couple or the bride alone were created to mark a marriage, but they appear not to be closely linked to the wedding ceremony itself in the way that conventional wedding portraits are. It is not clear, for example, whether the dress worn in these portraits was the actual dress worn at the marriage ceremony. What these photographs do show is how photography was starting to be used to mark marriages, and also how women were shifting out of private domestic spaces into more public ones such as the photographic studio. Each of the women in this type of portrait wears modern Chinese dress typical of the 1910s. According to family lore, Que O’Hoy (1875–1964) chose 86. Margot Harker, communication with author, January 27, 2017. 87. Margot Harker, communication with author, January 27, 2017. 88. ‘Wedding Portrait of Francis George Mills and Queenie Ellen Sing’, c. 1919, Myra Dale Collection, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D003866.htm; Qld BDM, birth registration of Queenie Ellena [sic] Sing 1897/C4984; Qld BDM, marriage registration of Queenie Ellen Sing and Francis George Mills, 1919/C2454; Qld BDM, death registration of Queenie Ellena [sic] Mills, 1971/B24633. 89. Frost, Dating Family Photos, p. 110. 90. Antonia Finnane, ‘What Should Chinese Women Wear? A National Problem’, in Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture, ed. Antonia Finnane and Anne E. McLaren (Clayton, Victoria: Monash Asia Institute, 1999), pp. 3–36. 91. Antonia Finnane, Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2007), pp. 82–85. 92. Garrett, Chinese Clothing, p. 136. 93. Finnane, Changing Clothes in China, p. 92.

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Poon Suey Gook (1896–1961) as his wife from a photograph in a catalogue of prospective brides, and married her in absentia, presumably according to traditional rites, in about 1910, meeting her for the first time in 1912.94 They had a photograph taken around the time they met, and the ceramic plant pots decorated with Chinese floral designs, the card mount decorated with chrysanthemum flowers, and family history suggest that the photograph was taken in Hong Kong. Their pose follows the conventions of a Western wedding portrait, where Suey Gook is standing and Que is seated. Less conventionally, Suey Gook holds a fan in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, while Que wears a three-piece suit and holds a panama hat on his lap. Suey Gook wears a light-coloured long top and narrow trousers, fashionable in China at this time.95 Her feet are not bound. Another photograph, of Sydneyborn Ruby Wong Chee (1897–1945) with Harry Fay (雷妙輝 C: lèuih miuhfāi, M: léi miàohuī; 1892–1974) was, according to the family, also taken ‘at the time of their marriage’ around 1916 in Heungshan (香山 C: hēungsāan, M: xiāngshān; now 中山 C: jūngsāan, M: zhōngshān) in Guangdong.96 Rather than the traditional wedding pose, the couple both stand, arms linked, Ruby in a light-coloured loose-fitting jacket with high collar and skirt and Harry in a light-coloured suit with wing-collared shirt and dark tie. Ruby also holds a handkerchief in one hand and is posed so that her rings and bracelets are visible. Maggie Leong Hong (1866–1938), however, was photographed on her own in a light-coloured three-quarter-length jacket with trousers with a dark trim.97 Her feet are also not bound. The ceramic spittoon at Maggie’s feet and a Chinese vase and Chinese teapot on the table beside her again suggest this photograph was taken in Hong Kong or perhaps China. According to family lore, this photograph was taken around the time Maggie went to live in Cairns, Queensland, as a seventeen-year-old bride in around 1914.98

94. Amanda Rasmussen, ‘Chinese in Nation and Community Bendigo 1970s–1920s’ (PhD diss., La Trobe University, Melbourne, 2009), p. 37; Vic BDM, death registration of Suey Gook O’Hoy, 1961/23357; ‘O’HOY, Suey Gook’ (Department of Immigration, Victorian Branch, 1934–1964), National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA): MT929/2, V1957/61326. There is evidence to suggest that photographs continued to be used in the mid-twentieth century by Chinese Australian men looking for prospective marriage partners in China or Hong Kong. See Rosetta Sung, ‘Rosetta Sung Transcripts of Oral Histories of Australian Chinese, 1984–1986’, MLMSS 5617, State Library of New South Wales; Edmund Chiu, correspondence with author, October 29, 2014; ‘King Fong [Chinese]’, City Historians’ Project Papers, City of Sydney Archives: 188, SF0438 (reference courtesy of Sophie Loy-Wilson). 95. Finnane, Changing Clothes in China, p. 82. 96. ‘Harry Fay and Ruby Wong Chee, Shekki, China’, 1916, Marina Mar Collection, in CHIA [online database], http://chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D002667.htm; ‘Wong Chee, Ruby’, Chinese-Australian Historical Images in Australia, http://chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/biogs/CH00999b.htm. 97. Diana Giese, Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons: Voices of Today’s Chinese Australian in Conversation with Diana Giese (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997), p. 145; Qld BDM, birth registration of Margaret Hong, 11324/1866. 98. Qld BDM, marriage registration of Maggie Leong Hong and Yee Tung Yep, 1914/540.

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White Weddings in Australia and China (1920s–1930s) In Australia many more Chinese Australian white wedding photographs can be found from the 1920s onwards. Tubular-shaped dresses with shorter hemlines and white stockings, introduced in the 1910s, continued to be popular at white weddings into the 1920s, as were wedding caps or bonnets and veils such as that worn by Fannie Louey Yow (?–?) married in Bendigo, Victoria, in 1921.99 Some brides—such as Ruby Whay (1889–1950), married in Maryborough, Victoria, in 1926;100 Mavis Young, married in around 1925;101 and Fannie Louey Yow—wore a silk horseshoe for luck.102 In Ruby Whay and George Tizzard’s 1926 wedding portrait, bridesmaids and matrons of honour wore ‘flapper’-style dresses, as was also fashionable at the time.103 Hems of wedding dresses were often scalloped or ended in handkerchief points, and it was popular to feature young children in ‘picturesque’ costumes—that is, dress inspired by historical costumes.104 The wedding photograph of Ellen Laura Lai Fook (黎月明 C: láih yuhtmìhng, M: lí yuèmíng; 1901–1970) and Cecil Gilbert Quoy (葉悅祖 C: yihp yuhtjóu, M: yè yuèjiē; 1900–1974), taken after their marriage at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney in 1921, shows bridesmaids wearing dresses with scalloped hems and a young flower girl and pageboy in ‘picturesque-style’ matching outfits (Figure 3.5, see p. 63).105 Other brides who married with flower girls and pageboys dressed in ‘picturesque’ outfits were Lucy Edna Goon (1900–?), who married in Sydney in 1921;106 Mary Rosina Victoria Ping Nam (葉玫瑰 C: yihp mùihgwāi, M: yè méiguī; 1900–1976), who married at St Patrick’s Church in Sydney in 1923;107 Elsie Chong (1897–?), who married at St Andrew’s Cathedral in 99. Jack Collection, MF1173, Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Fannie Louey Yow and Joe Sing, 1921/7026. 100. ‘George Tizzard and Ruby Whay’, c. 1919, Robyn Ansell Collection, in CHIA [online database], http:// www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D002776.htm; Vic BDM, birth registration of rule May Rose Ahwhay 1889/5215; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Ruby May Rose Whay and Stephen George Tizzard, 1926/3691; Vic BDM, death registration of Ruby May Rose Tiyard [sic], 1950/17139. 101. Pictures Collection, Ah Yee family, f.17, State Library of Victoria. 102. Clark, Hatches, Matches and Dispatches, p. 48. 103. ‘George Tizzard and Ruby Whay’, http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D002776.htm. 104. Tobin, Marriage à la Mode, p. 88; Clark, Hatches, Matches and Dispatches, p. 75. 105. ‘Huaqiao wenming jiehun zhi he ying 華僑文明結婚之合影 [Modern wedding photograph of overseas Chinese]’, Tung Wah Times (東華報 Donghua bao), January 28, 1922, p. 10, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/24093854; Qld BDM, birth registration of Yet Yung, 1901/C2031; ‘Certificate Exempting from Dictation Test (CEDT) – Name: Yet Yung or Ellen Lai Fook’ (Collector of Customs, Brisbane, 1917–1921), NAA: J2483, 227/3; NSW BDM, marriage registration of Ellen L. Laifook and Cecil G. Quoy, 14622/1921; NSW BDM, death registration of Ellen Laura Quoy, 2764/1970; NSW BDM, birth registration of Cecil C. Ting Quoy, 35132/1900; NSW BDM, death registration of Cecil Gilbert Quoy, 2409/1972. 106. ‘Yesterday’s Chinese Wedding at the Cathedral’, Sunday Times, August 21, 1921, p. 3, http://trove.nla.gov. au/newspaper/article/123243635; Vic BDM, birth registration of Edna Lucy Fong Goon, 1900/16613; NSW BDM, marriage registration of Lucy E. Goon and James P. Chong, 10129/1921. 107. ‘Huaqiao wenming jiehun zhi he ying 華僑文明結婚之合影 [Modern wedding photograph of overseas Chinese]’, Tung Wah Times (東華報 Donghua bao), February 17, 1923, p. 21, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ newspaper/page/24094312; NSW BDM, birth registration of Mary R. V. Ping Nam, 9877/1900; ‘Ping Nam, Mary Rosina Victoria Nam, William Henry Ping Nam, Pearlie Muriel Ping Nam, Sylvia Eveline Ping Nam’ (Collector of Customs, Sydney, 1915–1916), NAA: SP42/1, C1915/8162; NSW BDM, marriage registration

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Figure 3.5:  Ellen Laura Lai Fook and Cecil Gilbert Quoy with their bridal party, photographer unknown, Sydney, c. 1921. Tung Wah Times, January 28, 1922, p. 10

Sydney in 1923;108 Clara May Hong (1892–1948), who married in Queensland in 1924;109 and Vera Quoy (葉足意 C: yihp jeuiyi, M: yè zúyì; 1902–?), who married at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney in 1929.110 A few of the Chinese Australian white weddings in Sydney in the 1920s were reported in the Chinese-language Tung Wah Times newspaper and described in Chinese as 文明 (M: wénmíng) or ‘civilized’ weddings. Civilized or ‘new-style’ (新式 xīnshì) weddings can be traced back to Shanghai around 1905.111 These new forms of Chinese wedding were a significant change from earlier Chinese rites because of Walter Yum and Rosina M. Ping Nam, 90/1923; NSW BDM, death registration of Rosina Mary Yum, 27106/1976. 108. ‘Yesterday’s Chinese Wedding at St. Andrew’s Cathedral’, Sunday Times, August 5, 1923, p. 1, http://trove.nla. gov.au/newspaper/article/120537333. NSW BDM, birth registration of Elsie M. Chong, 2347/1897; NSW BDM, marriage registration of Elsie Chong and Frank Hang Lau, 9377/1923. 109. Olsen and Shang, With His Gold in a Little Velvet Bag, p. 72; Qld BDM, birth registration of Clara May Hong, 1892/C7390; Qld BDM, marriage registration of Clara May Hong and Bertie Clark, 1924/C2935; Qld BDM, death registration of Clara May Clark, 1948/B19100. 110. ‘Hunli jisheng 婚禮紀盛 [Magnificent wedding]’, Tung Wah Times (東華報 Donghua bao), July 13, 1929, p. 8, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/24099285; ‘The Bride, Miss Vera Quoy’, Sun, July 4, 1929, p. 17, http://trove.nla.gov.au/nla.news-article222964263; NSW BDM, birth registration of Vera C. Yet Ting Quoy, 35697/1902; NSW BDM, marriage registration of Vera C. Quoy and Cecil Lo, 1929/10102. 111. Finnane, ‘Changing Spaces and Civilized Weddings’, p. 22; Charlotte Lucia Cowden, ‘Balancing Rites and Rights: The Social and Cultural Politics of New-Style Weddings in Republican Shanghai, 1898–1953’ (PhD diss., University of California, Berkley, 2011), p. 11.

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the marriage contract was signed by the couple rather than by the heads of the two families as was the case for traditional Chinese weddings.112 Sydney’s Tung Wah newspaper, which supported the monarchist cause in China and promoted reforms within the Qing dynasty system, reported on a number of these new kinds of weddings when they were held in China, including in Guangdong Province, between 1907 and 1912.113 Civilized or new-style weddings were a mix of both earlier Chinese and Christian rites which were both undergoing change.114 In fact, it is not always clear what distinguished a Christian church wedding from a civilized wedding held in a church. Civilized weddings were, however, viewed as different. Shanghai almanacs, for example, listed church and civilized weddings under separate categories.115 Perhaps the significant characteristic of civilized weddings was that they were fluid and allowed the blending of different features, something that made them distinct from the more rigidly defined Chinese wedding ceremonies. According to Antonia Finnane, some of the features of civilized weddings included the sharing of space by males and females, attendance at the wedding of both sides of the family, the relatively equal importance given to men and women, celebrations in shared public spaces rather than private homes, and changes in clothing, including the bride’s dress, which was white (or sometimes pale pink) with a tulle veil.116 As with Western white weddings, photography played a significant role in the evolution and promotion of these modern and more public weddings.117 The publication of details about Chinese Australian versions of these weddings, including photographs of them, in the Tung Wah Times was a way of encouraging Australia’s Chinese communities to aspire to these modern wedding practices. While it is difficult to know whether the Sydney weddings strictly conformed to understandings of civilized weddings in China, by labelling them as ‘civilized weddings’ the Tung Wah Times intended them to be understood as modern Chinese weddings taking place in Sydney. In China civilized weddings were largely an urban phenomenon and participants were often students, who may have studied abroad in England, Japan, or the United States or had connections with Westerners in China.118 Others were people with higher profiles, particularly those engaged in artistic endeavours or wellknown political figures and their children. In Australia they were more directly 112. Liu, Family Law for the Hong Kong SAR, p. 7. 113. ‘Wenming jiehun 文明結婚 [Civic wedding]’, Tung Wah Times (東華報 Donghua bao), April 13, 1907, p. 6; ‘Xin hunli xin yanlian 新婚禮新眼簾 [New style wedding opens people’s eyes]’, Tung Wah Times (東華 報 Donghua bao), April 6, 1912, p. 3 http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/24092191; ‘Jiehun zhi wenming re 結婚之文明熱 [Hits of the new style wedding]’, Tung Wah Times (東華報 Donghua bao), May 18, 1912, p. 3, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/24092239. 114. Finnane, ‘Changing Spaces and Civilized Weddings’, pp. 27 and 30. 115. Charlotte Cowden, ‘Wedding Culture in 1930s Shanghai: Consumerism, Ritual, and the Municipality’, Frontiers of History in China 7, no. 1 (2012), p. 63. 116. Finnane, ‘Changing Spaces and Civilized Weddings’, p. 24. 117. Cowden, ‘Balancing Rites and Rights’, pp. 89–91. 118. Cowden, ‘Balancing Rites and Rights’, pp. 29–32; Cowden, ‘Wedding Culture in 1930s Shanghai’, p. 62.

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linked to Sydney’s conservative reformists. Either one or both of the bride and groom in these Australian weddings were children of prominent Sydney merchants who were politically active in reformist activities. Ellen Laura Lai Fook, mentioned above, was the daughter of parents from Cooktown and Hong Kong and was an educated woman who had just finished her studies in Hong Kong. She married Cecil Quoy, the eldest son of Gilbert Yet Ting Quoy (葉同貴 C: yihp tùhnggwai, M: yè tóngguì) in 1921. The 1929 wedding of Vera Quoy, one of Gilbert Yet Ting Quoy’s daughters, also featured in the Tung Wah Times, although not all of his children’s weddings did.119 Mary Rosina Victoria Ping Nam was the daughter of William Ping Nam (葉炳南 C: yihp bíngnàahm, M: yè bǐngnán), and her marriage to Walter Yum in 1923 also featured in the Tung Wah Times. Both Gilbert Quoy and Ping Nam were high-profile conservative Chinese merchants in Sydney. They were leading members of the New South Wales Chinese Empire Reform Association and the New South Wales Chinese Chamber of Commerce, controlling the Tung Wah Times and serving on the advisory board of the China-Australia Steamship Company in the 1920s. Ping Nam was also selected to attend the first Republican parliament in 1911.120 From at least the 1920s there were Chinese Australian brides in Britishcontrolled Hong Kong wearing similar styles of white wedding dress to brides in Australia, although dresses were more likely to be influenced by Chinese dress design. The Hong Kong Daily Press noted that Melbourne-born Violet Tock’s (1889– ?) dress was a ‘compromise between the fashions of the East and West being made in semi-Chinese fashion out of silver lace over white satin’.121 Violet married Lam Chik Shang, the eldest son of one of Hong Kong’s ‘foremost contractors and a prominent member of the Chinese Anglican Church’ at St Paul’s Church on Glenealy in the Mid-Levels district in 1928.122 She wore a fashionable knee-length white dress with scalloped hem and white stockings with a ‘graceful shower bouquet of white and pale pink flowers’ (Figure 3.6, see p. 67). Her bridesmaids and flower girls wore outfits to complement hers. As part of her wedding celebrations, Violet attended three dinners where she changed into a Chinese outfit, which, according to reports, was similar to that worn by the other married women—‘heavily embroidered black satin with scarlet fringed skirts’.123 Even though the Chinese Civil Code of the Republic of China was not part of Hong Kong law, civilized marriages also occurred

119. See, for example, Ivy Quoy who married Sidney Lee at St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney in 1922. ‘Chinese Wedding’, Sun (Sydney), July 8, 1922, p. 2, http://nla.gov.u/nla.news-article221511037. 120. Yong, New Gold Mountain, p. 229; Kuo, Making Chinese Australia, pp. 127, 181–82, 229 and 236; Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, pp. 138 and 182. 121. ‘Big Chinese Wedding’, Hong Kong Daily Press, August 9, 1928, p. 6, in Old Hong Kong Newspapers [online database], https://mmis.hkpl.gov.hk/old-hk-collection. Newspaper clipping courtesy of Mei-Ling Neil. Vic BDM, birth registration of Violet Maud Florence Ah Tock, 17423/1889. 122. ‘Tock, Violet’, in CHIA [online database], http://chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/biogs/CH00659b.htm. 123. ‘Big Chinese Wedding’, Hong Kong Daily Press, August 9, 1928, p. 6, in Old Hong Kong Newspapers [online database], https://mmis.hkpl.gov.hk/old-hk-collection. Newspaper clipping courtesy of Mei-Ling Neil.

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in Hong Kong.124 It is not clear yet whether these were Christian church weddings or civilized weddings. Hong Kong Chinese Australian weddings identified to date were those of welleducated couples connected to the merchant elite of Hong Kong, and they all appear to have been married in Anglican ceremonies at St John’s Cathedral (聖約翰座堂 C: sing yuekhohn johtòhng, M: shèng yuēhàn zuòtáng). The wedding of Sydney-born Dorothy May Choy (1900–?), daughter of James Choy Hing (蔡興 C: choi hīng, M: cài xīng), one of the founders of the Sun Company (大新公司 C: daaihsān gūngsī, M: dàxīn gōngsī), and Dr Arthur Wai Tuk Woo at St John’s Cathedral in 1920 was attended by prominent members of the Chinese community in Hong Kong.125 Dorothy wore a ‘dress of silver brocaded net over white French crepe, and a veil of silk net trimmed with orange blossoms’.126 Emma Chong (1896–?) of Tingha, New South Wales, married Dr Frederick S. W. Poon, a graduate of Hongkong University and doctor at the Ho Miu Ling and Nethersole Hospitals, at St John’s Cathedral in 1923.127 She wore ‘a charming creation of ivory duchesse satin with silver lace, trimmed with pearls and orange blossoms, with satin train being embroidered with pearls’, with a veil ‘arranged with a coronet of orange blossoms and pearls’.128 Cairnsborn Phyllis Grace Jan See Chin (1904–?) married Shiu-pun Preston Wong at St John’s Cathedral in 1925.129 Both came from well-known families in Hong Kong. Grace wore a dress of ‘white brocade charmeuse, trimmed with white charmeuse, with an embroidered veil and silver brocade shoes’. She carried a bouquet of ‘pink and white roses set off with maiden-hair fern and matched with pink ribbon’.130 These unillustrated newspaper reports do not describe the style of dress but do note that they were made from fabrics such as French crepe, charmeuse and duchesse satin, all popular wedding dress fabrics at the time. Wedding dresses in Australia from the 1930s onwards were less likely to follow the fashions of the day and since the Edwardian period had been shifting gradually from day to evening wear.131 From the mid-1930s, many were influenced by the glamorous evening dresses worn by Hollywood film stars, which were typically made from fluid, slippery, high-sheen fabrics such as silk and rayon satins.132 This style of dress continued to be favoured until well into the 1940s.133 Brides who wore 124. Liu, Family Law for the Hong Kong SAR, p. 39. 125. NSW BDM, birth registration of Dorothy M. Choy Hing, 18580/1900. 126. ‘Wedding Bells’, South China Morning Post, June 7, 1920, p. 8. Courtesy Howard Wilson. 127. NSW BDM, birth registration of Emma C. Chong, 2170/1896. 128. ‘Orange Blossoms’, Tingha Advocate and North-Western Journal, February 9, 1923, p. 2, http://trove.nla.gov. au/newspaper/article/176517123. 129. Qld BDM, birth registration of Phillis Grace See Chin, 1904/C1454. 130. ‘Wedding: Well Known Chinese Married’, Hong Kong Daily Press, December 29, 1925, p. 6, in Old Hong Kong Newspapers [online database], https://mmis.hkpl.gov.hk/old-hk-collection. Wedding identified in Carl Smith Collection Card Index [online database], http://www.grs.gov.hk/PRO/srch/english/sys_carlsmith.jsp. Thanks to Pauline Rule for following up these references in Hong Kong. 131. Clark, Hatches, Matches and Dispatches, p. 12; Ehrman, The Wedding Dress, p. 101. 132. Tobin, Marriage à la Mode, pp. 98 and 102. 133. For example, ‘Wedding Portrait of Cedric Wong Hee and Edna Ah Gee Kong’ and ‘Wedding Portrait of

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Figure 3.6:  Violet Tock and Lam Chik Shang with their bridal party, Ming Yuen Studio, Hong Kong, c. 1928. Shirley Millard Collection (http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D002579.htm)

long flowing gowns with extravagant veils were: Iris Kay (1905–?), who married in Sydney in 1932, with her wedding photograph taken a year later in Warwick, Queensland;134 Sylvia Chew (1909–2013), who married in Shepparton, Victoria, in 1935;135 Dorothy Ethel Chung (1905–1998), who married in Melbourne in 1935;136 Cedric Wong Hee and Edna (“Gee”) Ah Gee Kong’, c. 1940s, Frank Chinn Collection, Chinese Museum, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D000998.htm and http:// www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D000949.htm; ‘Ray Chin’s Wedding’ (Darwina & William Fong Collection, Northern Territory Library), in Northern Territory Stories [online database], http://www.territorystories.nt.gov.au/handle/10070/36664. 134. ‘Wedding Portrait of Thomas Daniells and Iris Kay’, c. 1933, Elaine Herrington Collection, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D002853.htm; NSW BDM, birth registration of Iris M. Kay 38325/1905; NSW BDM, marriage registration of Iris M. Kay and Thomas W. Daniells, 9537/1932. 135. ‘Wedding Portrait of Sylvia Chew and Roy Lee Dow’, c. 1935, Frank Chinn Collection, Chinese Museum, CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D000954.htm; Vic BDM, birth registration of Sylvia Jingee Chew 1909/19076; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Sylvia Jingee Chew and Roy Lee Dow, 1935/11692; death notice for Sylvia Jingee Lee Dow, September 8, 2013, in Ryerson Index [online database], http://ryersonindex.org. 136. ‘Wong Hee-Chung’, Table Talk, March 14, 1935, p. 37, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/149586349; Vic BDM, birth registration of Ethel Dorothy Chong, 27940/1905; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Dorothy Ethel Chung and Norman Charles Wong Hee, 1935/2019; death notice for Dorothy Wong Hee, October 11, 1998, in Ryerson Index [online database], http://ryersonindex.org.

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Jessie Wong Home (?–1977), who married in rural New South Wales in 1936 (Figure 3.7, see p. 69);137 Dorothy Goong (1910–1983), who married in Brisbane in 1938;138 and Florence May Ke Young (c. 1913–2015), who married in Bendigo, Victoria, in 1938.139 Similarly, Frank Tock’s bride, Norma (maiden name unknown), who married in Hong Kong (exact date unknown), wore a shimmering, fulllength flowing gown typical of 1930s wedding gowns (Figure 3.8, see p. 69), as did Melbourne-born Ruby (Tue Gnoak) Chinn when she married in Hong Kong in the 1930s,140 and Dorothy Young when she married William Ng at the Chinese Christian Church (富吉堂 C: fu gāt tòhng, M: fù jítáng) in 1930 in Shanghai.141 Although civilized weddings were occurring in China and Hong Kong from before the declaration of the Chinese Republic, with the fall of the Qing government in 1911 and subsequent civil war it was not until 1931 that these new forms of marriage were formally codified.142 From around 1927 guidelines were set out for civilized weddings in Shanghai almanacs.143 By this time civilized weddings in urban China had become the mark of the modern, urban couple, particularly for students who had studied overseas or had some contact with foreigners through their work.144 Four weddings, held between 1930 and 1932, in Darwin, in remote northern Australia, show how legal practices associated with modern Chinese weddings in China were brought to Australia and operated alongside modern Australian wedding practices. Myrtle Fong and Charles Houng On’s wedding in 1930 was reported by the Northern Territory Times as the first to be celebrated in Darwin under new laws regulating marriages in Republican China.145 Given that the Civil Code the newspaper refers to was not officially promulgated until December 1930 and was not effective until May 1931, the Chinese Australian community in

137. NSW BDM, marriage registration of Jessie Wong Home and Joseph Mah, 117/1936; NSW BDM, death registration of Jessie Wong Mah, 101151/1977. 138. ‘Two Members of Chinese Community to be Married at St. Andrew’s To-night’, Telegraph, April 16, 1938, p. 23, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article184366017; Qld BDM, birth registration of Dorothy May Goong (to William and Margaret Louisa Wong Hing), 1910/ B23780; Qld BDM, marriage registration of Dorothy May Goong and William Yoeo (James) Leong, 1938/ B31525; Qld BDM, death registration of Dorothy Leong, 1983/ 54650. 139. Picture Collection, AP0398, Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo; Vic BDM, marriage registration of Florence May Ke Young and Joseph Henry Ah Dore, 1938/8060; death notice for Florence May (Floss) Ah Dore, December 1, 2015, in Ryerson Index [online database], http://ryersonindex.org. 140. ‘Wedding of Ruby (Tue Gnoak) Chinn, and Husband Harry Wong’ and ‘Wedding Portrait of Ruby (Tue Gnoak) Chinn and Harry Wong in Hong Kong’, 1930s, Frank Chinn Collection, Chinese Museum, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D000946.htm and http://www.chia. chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D001009.htm. 141. ‘Wedding of Dorothy (Daughter of Mr and Mrs Davey Young) to William Ng with Wedding Party’, 1930, Marina Mar Collection, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/ D003214.htm. 142. Liu, Family Law for the Hong Kong SAR, p. 38. 143. Finnane, Changing Clothes in China, pp. 24–26. 144. Cowden, ‘Balancing Rites and Rights’, p. 9; Cowden, ‘Wedding Culture in 1930s Shanghai’, p. 62; Finnane, ‘Changing Spaces and Civilized Weddings’, pp. 17–18. 145. ‘Wedding Bells’, Northern Territory Times, May 13, 1930, p. 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/4528727.

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Figure 3.7:  Jessie Wong Home and Joe Mah with their bridal party, photographer unknown, New South Wales, c. 1936. Marina Mar Collection (http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D003132.htm)

Figure 3.8:  Norma and Frank Tock with their wedding party, Tiffany Studio, Kowloon, 1930s. Shirley Millard Collection (http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D002656.htm)

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Darwin, via their branch of the Kuomintang (KMT), pre-empted its formal introduction in China.146 Darwin’s KMT had also been progressive in opening up their committee membership to women in 1921 and was one of the few in the world to appoint women to executive positions.147 It is possible that the presence of women on the Darwin KMT committee pushed forward the formal adoption of these new styles of weddings. Selina Yuen and Lena Lee (also known as Chong Shue Hing, 鍾少卿 C: jūng síuhīng, M: zhōng shǎoqīng) were both female members of the Darwin branch of the KMT committee in 1927, and in 1929 Lena attended a conference of the Australasian KMT in Sydney as acting secretary.148 Tragically, Lena Lee committed suicide at the beginning of 1930, so we do not know what role, if any, she may have played in encouraging the adoption of these modern wedding practices within the Darwin KMT. No further references to Selina Yuen have been found, but Selina Hassan (née Lee Hang Gong), who took over the role of secretary of the Darwin branch of the KMT after Lena Lee’s death, features in some of the group wedding photographs, as do her daughters. The Darwin ceremonies had a particularly patriotic and political tone. The Darwin branch of the KMT saw itself as being legal representatives of China’s KMT at this time. Charles Huong On and Myrtle Fong (married May 1930);149 Willie Lee and Lucy Yuen (married October 1930);150 Clarence Ng and Dorothy Yuen (married April 1931);151 and Charlie On and Lily Chin (married November 1932),152 all had dual marriage ceremonies. The modern Chinese ceremonies were officiated either by Chin Mon Dai or Tommy Ming Ket from the KMT, while the Western ceremonies, Christian or civic, were conducted by either the Darwin registrar of marriages or a local reverend. Tommy Ming Ket attended two of the weddings as president of the Darwin branch of the KMT, and Chin Mon Dai, who was secretary in 1930 146. Republic of China, Annotated Republic of China Laws, Civil Code, Part IV, Wikibooks [online database], https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Annotated_Republic_of_China_Laws/Civil_Code/Part_IV. 147. Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, p. 130; Julia Martínez, ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin: Interconnections Between the Wah On Society and the Kuo Min Tang’, in Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, ed. Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 252. 148. Martínez, ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin’, pp. 252–55. 149. ‘Wedding Bells’, Northern Territory Times, May 13, 1930, p. 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/4528727; ‘Round about’, Northern Standard, May 13, 1930, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article48047940. Julia Martínez has also written about these weddings in the context of changing Chinese politics in Darwin in the 1920s and 1930s in Martínez, ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin’. 150. ‘Wedding Bells’, Northern Standard, October 14, 1930, p. 2, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/48050167; ‘Wedding Bells’, Northern Territory Times, October 14, 1930, p. 3, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/ article/4530549. 151. ‘Wedding Bells’, Northern Standard, April 17, 1931, p. 1, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/48044621; ‘Wedding Bells’, Northern Territory Times, April 17, 1931, p. 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/ article/4532645; ‘Wedding Bells’, Northern Territory Times, April 17, 1931, p. 1, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/ del/article/4532617; ‘Chinese Wedding at Darwin’, Brisbane Courier, April 17, 1931, p. 20, http://trove.nla. gov.au/ndp/del/article/21688345; ‘Darwin Notes’, Northern Miner, May 9, 1931, p. 3, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ ndp/del/article/80614741. 152. ‘Chinese Wedding’, Northern Standard, November 15, 1932, p. 1, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/ article/48047023.

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and president in 1931 and 1932, was present at all the weddings. The KMT hall in Darwin was used for the Chinese marriage ceremony and was the location for wedding photographs—both events taking place in front of the ‘white sun on the blue sky’ flag of the Republic of China. The weddings varied slightly, but at the start of most ceremonies the couples bowed to show respect to a statue or portrait of Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese National anthem was sung, and among the various toasts and speeches at least one was given by a KMT member, often Chin Mon Dai, who would speak about the importance of modernizing China. These couples were being self-consciously modern and Chinese in the way they chose to celebrate their weddings in Australia, as well as participating in Australian wedding customs. Weddings were attended by the families of both the bride and groom, friends of the couple, and local dignitaries. Most also had a cake-cutting ceremony and ended with the room being cleared for dancing. At least one photograph was taken of the bride and groom, often with their wedding party.153 The public hall, bowing ritual, flower girls, officials, national flag, Sun Yat-sen, mixed company, and music were all features identified with civilized weddings in China during the Republican period.154 In Darwin the grooms all wore Western-style suits, but the brides chose to fuse Chinese and Western elements in the design of their wedding dresses, in the same way that brides in Hong Kong weddings did. The Darwin brides’ dresses were fashioned from pale-pink crêpe de Chine, brocade, or silk, rather than white fabric. Dorothy Yuen wore a ‘beautiful dress of pink Chinese brocaded silk made in Chinese style and trimmed at neck and sleeves with gold and green brocade. Her embroidered veil was of palest pink and was draped from a pink silk lace cap while she carried a bouquet of white flowers with long pink streamers’ (Figure 3.9, see p. 72).155 There is no description of Myrtle Fong’s dress, but it did have a short hem and raised Chinese-style collar (Figure 3.10, see p. 72). Lily Chin wore a ‘dress of heliotrope Chinese floral silk, cut in Chinese fashion with coat and skirt, displaying a high collar’.156 As already noted, both pink and white were associated with Chinese civilized weddings, but it is also worth noting that there was a move towards pastel colours for Western wedding dresses in the latter half of the 1930s.157 Here we see a convenient confluence of wedding fashions in both Australia and China, but with different cultural origins such that these brides could be modern in both China and Australia. 153. Spillett Collection, PH0238/2055, Northern Territory Library; Gladys Burlinson Collection, 1997.13.6, Chung Wah Society, Darwin; Glenice Yee Collection, 1997.11.2, Chung Wah Society, Darwin; Ivor Lee Collection, 1997.53.11, Chung Wah Society, Darwin; R. Brian W. Browning Papers, Pic Acc 3557, PXA 1501, State Library of New South Wales. 154. Finnane, ‘Changing Spaces and Civilized Weddings’, pp. 20–21 and 25–28. 155. ‘Wedding Bells’, Northern Territory Times, April 17, 1931, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4532617. 156. ‘Chinese Wedding’, Northern Standard, November 15, 1932, p. 1, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/ article/48047023. 157. Ehrman, The Wedding Dress, p. 101.

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Chinese Australian Brides, Photography, and the White Wedding

Figure 3.9:  Dorothy Yuen and Clarence Ng, photographer unknown, Darwin, 1931. R. Brian W. Browning Papers, PXA 1501, State Library of New South Wales

Figure 3.10:  Myrtle Fong and Charles Houng On Yee with Ruby Hassan and Maude Yuen (standing left to right) and William Fong and Connie Hassan (seated left to right), photo­ grapher unknown, Darwin, 1930. Fong Family Collection

Sophie Couchman 73

These KMT-endorsed weddings in Darwin were abandoned just as abruptly as they started. The next Chinese weddings reported in Northern Territory newspapers were not until 1937. Two were civil marriages conducted by Darwin’s registrar, one in the registry and one at the home of KMT member Albert Fong.158 A third wedding, between Albert Chin and Fook Kee, was reportedly ‘performed in the picturesque manner of the Orient, despite the fact that the contracting parties are Australian-born’, suggesting a more traditional Chinese marriage ceremony was performed.159 Julia Martínez identifies 1932, the year of the final wedding, as a year of heightened conflict in Darwin between the older and generally more conservative Wah On Society and the generally younger and more progressive KMT, who were associated with these weddings.160 This conflict descended into a brawl and court case at which the judge specifically named Chin Mon Dai, the KMT dignitary at each of the earlier weddings, as the source of the trouble.161 The disagreement centred around the KMT setting itself up as Darwin’s primary Chinese community organization representing and setting the agenda for all Chinese in Darwin. The KMT-officiated weddings that occurred between 1930 and 1932 might well have been considered an example of this. There are no other references to Chin Mon Dai in relation to the KMT after 1932. Perhaps Chin Mon Dai’s public shaming or the events leading up to the dispute itself may have resulted in the Darwin Chinese community abandoning these new-style weddings. There is currently no evidence that any other KMT-sanctioned weddings, such as the ones that took place in Darwin, were staged anywhere else in Australia.

Conclusion Chinese Australians were an integral part of the global spread of the white wedding in Australia, Hong Kong, and China. One feature that has made the white wedding so influential has been its broad adoption around the world by all kinds of people and cultures.162 The timing of when white wedding practices were adopted and how they were expressed varied across the globe and between and among different classes. British white wedding practices spread around the world from the eighteenth century alongside British imperialism, Christianity, and fashion. British wedding fashions also, from the very early days, were influenced by international 158. ‘Wedding Bells’, Northern Standard, June 22, 1937, p. 10, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article49441062. 159. ‘Chinese Wedding’, Northern Standard, November 26, 1937, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article49444546. 160. Martínez, ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin’, pp. 241–42. 161. Martínez, ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin’, p. 259. 162. Na Young Hong, ‘Korean Wedding Dress from the Chosun Dynasty (1392–1910) to the Present’, in Wedding Dress Across Cultures, ed. Helen Bradley Foster and Donald Clay Johnson (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 63; Bonnie Adrian, Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 43–45; Cyd Martin, ‘Satin Dresses and Caribou Kamiks: Negotiation of Tradition in Northern Alaskan Inupiaq Weddings’, in Wedding Dress Across Cultures, ed. Helen Bradley Foster and Donald Clay Johnson (Oxford: Berg, 2003), p. 29–31.

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Chinese Australian Brides, Photography, and the White Wedding

fashions such as luxury wear in France.163 With a dominant British cultural heritage, the white wedding was quickly adopted in Australia, but Australian white weddings were further shaped by changing fashions from America and Europe, as well as those from Britain, and by the ways in which other ethnic groups, such as Chinese Australians, adopted the white wedding. White wedding practices were brought to China and Hong Kong from the eighteenth century by missionaries and their converts,164 foreigners living in the foreign concessions in China such as Shanghai and Canton city, and Chinese nationals returning to China after working or studying abroad. At the start of the twentieth century, civilized or new-style weddings emerged in China and Hong Kong, alongside church weddings, as a new Chinese way to marry. Civilized weddings often incorporated the tropes of the white wedding; they were a part of being modern and urban in China and were associated with reformist and revolutionary movements to modernize and strengthen China. Overseas Chinese, including Chinese Australians, were actively engaged with these political movements and, as shown in this chapter, some families in Sydney embraced the idea of civilized weddings while families in the Darwin extended the powers of the local branch of the KMT to cover marriage rites prescribed under the Republican-era Civic Code. The process of mapping the clothing worn by Chinese Australian brides in wedding photographs against changing wedding fashions in Australia, China, and Hong Kong that I have undertaken in this chapter demonstrates that Chinese Australians could be up to date in how they married and what they chose to wear, regardless of where they lived. Photographs of Chinese Australian weddings in Hong Kong and China are few in number but nevertheless suggest that adopting white wedding practices was not something confined to living in Australia or the West but was part of the global spread of the white wedding. It shows that when Chinese Australians participated in white weddings in Australia, China, or Hong Kong, they were not assimilating into something already existing and fully formed but that along with other Australians and couples around the world, they were together building something new. The dynamic, evolving phenomenon of the ‘white wedding’, which took different forms in different places, came to epitomize the modern way of getting married across the globe. Investigating Chinese Australian wedding practices further offers us a more complex understanding of what it meant to be ‘Australian’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and raises the question as to what role Chinese Australians might have played in shaping wedding culture in places such as Hong Kong and Shanghai. It allows us to move beyond simple dichotomies of East and West, Australian and Chinese, to highlight the integral role Chinese and their descendants have had participating in and contributing to the culture of the places they lived 163. Ehrman, The Wedding Dress, p. 41. 164. Patrick Fuliang Shan, ‘Triumph after Catastrophe: Church, State and Society in Post-Boxer China, 1900– 1937’, Peace and Conflict Studies 16, no. 2 (2009), pp. 33–34.

Sophie Couchman 75

through their participation in a range of wedding ceremonies. This is not to suggest that Chinese Australians, through their participation in white weddings, were the same as white Australians, or even that they were fully accepted into broader Australian society. Instead we see the Chinese Australians in this chapter being Australian in diverse ways, just as Australians of British or European heritage were. In doing so, we adopt a wider perspective of what it means to be Australian, one that embraces as ‘Australian’ Chinese Australians wearing white wedding dresses, white wedding dresses with Chinese design influences, and also perhaps most important, Chinese-style wedding dresses. Wedding photographs such as the ones described in this chapter, including family and wedding photographs, have tended to be overlooked in our analysis of Australia’s Chinese history. This is partly because these photographs derive their deepest meanings from the families who create them, and so most remain concealed within private collections. Such photographs are also overlooked because they do not fit neatly into the dominant narratives used to tell Australia’s Chinese history. These historical narratives focus on the Chinese participation in Australia’s gold rushes and the rise of White Australia in response to Chinese immigration. The very ‘ordinariness’ of these photographs also means that they are less likely to circulate publicly than images that represent Chinese Australians as exotic and different, such as those where people wear Chinese-style garments or are participating in dragon parades. Making visible this more hidden aspect of the Chinese Australian visual record helps to redress this unbalance and gives Chinese Australians space to be unexceptional. Similarly, they also help to make visible the history of Chinese Australian women. Typically viewed as ‘feminine’, family photograph collections, and wedding portraits in particular, therefore offer a different reflection on Australia’s Chinese history.

4 The Emergence of Chinese Businesswomen in Darwin, 1910–1940 Natalie Fong

In a portrait taken in 1917, Selina Lee, the sixteen-year-old granddaughter of Northern Territory midwife Sarah Bowman and her merchant husband, Lee Hang Gong, poses somewhat awkwardly in traditional Chinese tunic and trousers, hair pulled back neatly (Figure 4.1, see p. 78).1 A portrait of Selina in a similar pose taken in the 1920s shows a more mature, pensive woman wearing a Western-style ankle-length dress (Figure 4.2).2 A decade later still, Selina has blossomed into Mrs Selina Hassan, who—wearing fashionable ‘flapper’ dresses, modern cheongsam and a permed bob—was now a widow, businesswoman, and secretary of the Darwin Kuomintang (KMT), supporters of the Chinese Republic and women’s rights (Figure 4.3).3 The short hair (and unbound feet) of Chinese women of this time was, as historian Antonia Finnane has remarked, a visible ‘symbol of liberation from the past and the patriarchy’.4 In 1930 Selina was pictured alongside fellow KMT members congratulating English aviatrix Amy Johnson on her extraordinary solo flight from London to Darwin (Figure 4.4). Two years later, in a photograph taken at a KMT banquet to * Author’s note: Thanks to the following for their assistance in the preparation of this chapter: Kate Bagnall, Julia Martínez, Fiona Paisley, Regina Ganter, Sophie Couchman, the Darwin Chung Wah Society, and the Northern Territory Archives Service. This chapter is based on two papers: ‘The Emergence of Chinese Women as Entrepreneurs in the Northern Territory, 1920–1950’, 2018 Asia Pacific Economic and Business History Conference, University of Tasmania; and ‘Finding Her Story in History: The Emergence of Chinese Women Entrepreneurs in the Northern Territory, 1920–1950’, 2018 International Australian Studies Association Conference, University of Queensland. 1. ‘Selina Lee in Chinese Dress, 1917’ (Selina Hassan Collection), in Chinese-Australian Historical Images in Australia (CHIA) [online database], Chinese Museum Collection, http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/ objects/D001057.htm. 2. ‘Selina Lee in Western Dress’ (Selina Hassan Collection), in CHIA [online database], Chinese Museum Collection, http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D001058.htm. 3. ‘Presenting Address’ (Chan Collection), in Northern Territory Library PictureNT [online database], http:// www.territorystories.nt.gov.au/jspui/handle/10070/3408; ‘Darwin Ladies, 1935’ (Cheong Family Archives), in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D003684.htm. 4. Antonia Finnane, ‘What Should Chinese Women Wear?: A National Problem’, Modern China 22, no. 2 (1996), p. 114.

Natalie Fong 77

commemorate the Darwin visit of the Chinese Consul General to Australia, Dr W. P. (Weiping) Chen, Selina is seated beside Dr Chen.5 She was given the distinction of delivering an address at the banquet in which she praised Chen and the KMT for promoting ‘equality of opportunity’ for Chinese women.6 The evolution of Selina Hassan between the 1910s and 1930s was emblematic of the modernization of Chinese women, particularly those in merchant families in early twentieth-century China and diasporic communities like Australia. Despite cultural expectations of being neither seen nor heard, some women became public figures, and some became businesswomen. Selina Hassan is among several remarkable Chinese businesswomen in the Northern Territory (hereafter ‘the Territory’) whose lives form the subject of this chapter. Alanna Kamp, Kate Bagnall and Jan Ryan have all called for further examination of Chinese women’s involvement in businesses in Australian history.7 This call is supported by historical statistics, earlier histories of Chinese Australian women, and the findings of this study, which demonstrate that Chinese Australian women were more actively involved in business than current scholarship suggests. Historian Catherine Bishop has written extensively about businesswomen in colonial Sydney, New South Wales, concluding that they were predominantly white.8 In considering Chinese businesses, Bishop noted that Chinese men ‘were rarely accompanied by wives and families’, and that non-European businesswomen are difficult to locate in records.9 In the early to mid-1900s, however, we see the emergence of Chinese businesswomen in Australia, particularly in the Territory. There were few Chinese women in Australia during the colonial period, and thus few Chinese businesswomen. Many of the Chinese women who were in Australia had entered as wives, daughters, and servants of merchants, or were Australian-born daughters raised in merchant households. By the 1933 Commonwealth census, there were 3,137 Chinese or part-Chinese women in Australia.10 Their status as dependent females was not reflected in the census data. Of the 543 Chinese or part-Chinese women in Australia in employment (about 17 percent of Chinese or part-Chinese women in Australia), thirty-six stated they were employers.11 Elsewhere in the census, 773 Chinese women (or 24 percent of Chinese or part-Chinese women in 5. Julia Martínez, ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin: Interconnections between the Wah on Society and the Kuo Min Tang’, in Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, ed. Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 258. 6. ‘Banquet by Kuo Min Tang’, Northern Territory Times, January 19, 1932, p. 5. 7. Alanna Kamp, ‘Chinese Australian Women’s “Homemaking” and Contributions to the Family Economy in White Australia’, Australian Geographer 49, no. 1 (2017), p. 17; Kate Bagnall, ‘Rewriting the History of Chinese Families in Nineteenth-Century Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (2011), pp. 62–77; Jan Ryan, Chinese Women and the Global Village (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2003), p. 27. 8. Catherine Bishop, Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney (Sydney: NewSouth, 2015), p. 19. 9. Bishop, Minding Her Own Business, pp. 19–20. 10. Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 30th June, 1933, part 12, Race (Canberra: Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, 1933), p. 901. 11. Census of Australia 1933, Race, p. 949.

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The Emergence of Chinese Businesswomen in Darwin, 1910–1940

Figures 4.1–4.4:  The evolution of Selina Hassan (née Lee), 1917–1935.

4.1: Selina Lee, 1917.

4.2: Selina Lee, c. 1920s.

4.3: (left to right) Selina Hassan (née Lee), Ethel (Goot Ying) Cheong (née Lee; front), Ruby Hassan, Myrtle Houng On Yee (née Fong), unidentified, Pauline Chin (front), Mabel Ma (née Lee), c. 1935.

Natalie Fong 79

4.4: (left to right) Dolly Yuen, Selina Hassan (née Lee), Amy Johnson, Gee Ming Ket, Arthur Lee, 1930.

Australia) were identified as breadwinners.12 I would argue that Australian Chinese businesswomen are present in the archives and need unearthing. Alanna Kamp, Sophie Couchman, and Patricia Sumerling have identified Chinese Australian businesswomen in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, respectively, using sources such as newspapers, oral histories, immigration documents, and land ownership.13 As Kamp has noted, Chinese Australian wives were more than just ‘crucial contributors’ to family businesses; they may have been critical to businesses’ survival, particularly after their husbands’ deaths.14 Previous histories have drawn attention to ‘noteworthy’ Chinese women in the Territory as part of wider surveys on women (by Diana Giese and Barbara James) and Chinese (by Morag Loh, Glenice Yee, Regina Ganter, and Timothy Jones); Julia Martínez and Sophie Couchman have also discussed the politicizing of Territory Chinese women through the KMT.15 The significant role of Chinese women in busi12. Census of Australia 1933, part 28, Income, p. 1927. 13. Kamp, ‘Chinese Australian Women’s “Homemaking”’; Sophie Couchman, ‘“Oh, I Would Like to See Maggie Moore Again!”: Selected Women of Melbourne’s Chinatown’, in After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia, 1860–1940, ed. Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald, and Paul Macgregor (Kingsbury, Victoria: Otherland Literary Journal, 2004), pp. 171–90; Patricia Sumerling, ‘The Sym Choons of Rundle Street’, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia 41 (2013), pp. 81–88. 14. Kamp, ‘Chinese Australian Women’s “Homemaking”’, p. 13. 15. Diana Giese, Beyond Chinatown: Changing Perspectives on the Top End Chinese Experience (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1995); Barbara James, No Man’s Land: Women of the Northern Territory (Sydney: Collins, 1989); Morag Loh, ‘Testimonies from White Australia: Oral History Interviews with Chinese Immigrants and Their Descendants’, La Trobe Journal 90 (2012), pp. 112–24; Glenice Yee, Through Chinese Eyes: The Chinese Experience in the Northern Territory, 1874–2004 (Parap, Northern Territory: Glenice Yee, 2006); Regina Ganter, Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia (Crawley: University of Western

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The Emergence of Chinese Businesswomen in Darwin, 1910–1940

ness in the Territory has, until now, remained unexplored. As this chapter demonstrates, closer examination of archival material reveals the considerable involvement of Territory Chinese women in business, a traditionally patriarchal domain. Various factors contributed to Chinese women’s involvement in business in the Territory. Chinese merchants’ wives and daughters were expected to assist in family businesses in domestic or manual roles. European businesswomen were active in the Territory when Chinese women arrived in the late nineteenth century, thus women running businesses was not an uncommon sight. In many cases the deaths of husbands and economic depression left wives with little choice but to work to support their families. Some Chinese merchants’ widows were left with multiple children, including sons too young to manage family businesses, so widows became custodians of businesses or started businesses. In China, Sun Yat-sen, the KMT, and feminist movements promoted progressive attitudes towards women from the 1910s onwards. The involvement of young Darwin Chinese in the KMT may have encouraged couples to form business partnerships and women to register and run businesses in their own names. Some women ran businesses named after themselves. When Australia is considered alongside China, America, Canada, New Zealand, and the Philippines, it is apparent that there were common socio-economic, cultural, and political factors that facilitated Chinese women’s independence and involvement in business.16 Through collective biography, using ‘ individual lives to explore collective experiences’ in a community, this chapter builds on existing studies by demonstrating the considerable documented participation of Chinese

Australia Press, 2006); Timothy G. Jones, The Chinese in the Northern Territory (Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press, 2005); Julia Martínez, ‘Patriotic Chinese Women: Followers of Sun Yat-Sen in Darwin, Australia’, in Sun Yat-Sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution, ed. Lai To Lee and Hock Guan Lee (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), pp. 200–18; Martínez, ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin’, pp. 240–66; Sophie Couchman, ‘Chinese Australian Brides, Photography and the White Wedding’ (Chapter 3 in this volume). 16. See, for example, Chi-cheung Choi, ‘Stepping Out? Women in the Chaoshan Emigrant Communities, 1850– 1950’, in Merchants’ Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China, ed. Helen F. Siu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), pp. 105–27; Angelina Chin, Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012); Huping Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998); Vivienne Poy, Passage to Promise Land: Voices of Chinese Immigrant Women to Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013); Manying Ip, Home Away from Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand (Auckland: New Women’s Press, 1990); Ip, ‘From Gold Mountain Women to Astronauts’ Wives—Challenges to New Zealand Chinese Women’, in Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific, ed. Paul Macgregor (Melbourne: Museum of Chinese Australian History, 1993), pp. 274–86; John T. Omohundro, Chinese Merchant Families in Iloilo (Quezon City, Metro Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1981); Richard T. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity, and Culture, 1860s–1930s (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Ruth Lam, Beverly Lowe, Helen Wong, Michael Wong, and Carolyn King, The Fruits of Our Labours: Chinese Fruit Shops in New Zealand (Wellington: Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust, 2018); Theresa C. Cariño, ‘Chinese Women in Manila’, in More Tsinoy than We Admit: Chinese-Filipine Interactions over the Centuries, ed. Richard T. Chu (Quezon City: Vibal Foundation, 2015), pp. 463–77.

Natalie Fong 81

women in business in the Territory, and the influence of circumstantial and contextual factors.17 As Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers comment: The once ubiquitous stereotype of the long-suffering, meek, submissive Chinese woman as simply a victim of family interests, a vision of compliance and selfsacrifice, stands thus revealed for what it is—a stereotype in need of reappraisal and an empirical context.18

Chinese Women in the Northern Territory: On Record The first major arrival of Chinese immigrants in the Territory occurred in 1874, two years after the first significant gold discovery at Pine Creek in 1872. The challenging climate and demand for cheap labour prompted South Australian authorities, who administered the Territory from 1863 until 1911, to contract 187 Chinese miners from Singapore in 1874.19 As news spread, more Chinese arrived via the credit-ticket system facilitated by Chinese merchants. The majority came from Guangdong, albeit from different dialect groups—Sze Yup (the majority), Heungshan, and Hakka.20 By 1881 the ratio of Chinese to Europeans in the Territory was reportedly six to one.21 Census data suggests that from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s the number of Chinese females in the Territory remained small, but the proportion of Chinese females to males increased over time. Table 4.1 (see p. 82) contains official figures for the Chinese population of the Northern Territory from 1881 to 1947. According to these figures, the population of Chinese females (classified by race not birthplace) grew significantly in the decades between 1881 and 1901 and between 1921 and 1933, then declined between 1933 and 1947. The population of Chinese males halved each decade between 1901 and 1947, contributing to the growing proportion of Chinese females to Chinese males. By 1947 the Chinese population in the Territory was about 60 percent male and 40 percent female—this proportion of Chinese females was higher than that in other Australian states.22 Legislative and economic factors contributed to the fluctuating numbers of Chinese in the Territory and the increasing proportion of Chinese females to males. 17. Krista Cowman, ‘Collective Biography’, in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), p. 85. 18. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, ‘Women in the Chinese Patriarchal System: Submission, Servitude, Escape and Collusion’, in Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude and Escape, ed. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994), p. 9. 19. Kathy De La Rue, ‘Ruled by Remote Control: The Commonwealth’s Role in the History of Darwin, 1911–1978’ (PhD diss., Charles Darwin University, 2014), p. 63. 20. Agnes F. Hannan, ‘All Out!: The Effects of Evacuation and Land Acquisition on the Darwin Chinese, 1941– 1954’ (BA Hons diss., Monash University, 1985), p. 17; Martínez, ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin’, p. 242. 21. Shane Stone and Roger Steele, ‘Progress of the Chinese Community of the Northern Territory’, Northern Perspective 18, no. 1 (1995), p. 28. 22. In the other Australian states, the percentage of females in the Chinese population in 1947 was between 23.3 percent (South Australia, the lowest percentage) and 35.5 percent (Queensland, the highest percentage) (Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 30th June, 1947, part 15, Race [Canberra: Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, 1947], pp. 826–27).

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Table 4.1:  Chinese in the Northern Territory, 1881–1941 Year

Total No. Total Chinese NT Population (Full and Part)

Chinese Males and Percentage of Total Chinese Population

Chinese Females and Percentage of Total Chinese Population

‘Full-Blood’

‘Half-Caste’

‘Full-Blood’

‘Half-Caste’

1881

4 521a

3 804a

3 800 (99.9%)

b

4 (0.1%)

b

1891

4 898

3 704

3 598 (97.1%)

46 (1.2%)

15 (0.4%)

45 (1.2%)

1901

4 811

3 120

2 962 (94.9%)

24b (0.8%)

110 (3.5%)

24b (0.8%)

1911

3 310

1 339

1 224 (91.4%)

4 (0.3%)

107 (8%)

4 (0.3%)

1921

3 867

730

609 (83.4%)

5 (0.7%)

113 (15.5%)

3 (0.4%)

1933

4 850

480

313 (65.2%)

13 (2.7%)

149 (31%)

5 (1%)

1947

10 868

318

154 (48.4%)

38 (11.9%)

96 (30.2%)

30 (9.4%)

Notes: a = Includes 1,070 Chinese, in transitu, on board vessels at Port Darwin; b = Not available Source: Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Census (1933, 1947); Official Year Book (1925, 1973); Australian Data Archive, South Australia 1881 Census

South Australian and later Commonwealth legislation that regulated Chinese immigration did not specifically forbid the entry of Chinese women to the Territory. These laws also made exceptions for those who were economically desirable to authorities, particularly merchants, who facilitated trade between Asia and Australia, and their households.23 The earliest documented Chinese woman in the Territory that I have located is my great-grandmother Lie See (1874–1962).24 According to her World War II alien registration record, Lie See arrived in Australia in 1879 at age five, and 23. Sucheng Chan, ‘The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943’, in Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), p. 138; Madeline Yuan-yin Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 95; Poy, Passage to Promise Land, p. 4; ‘Sun Kwong Sing and Company – Part 2’ (Department of Immigration, 1947–1950), National Archives of Australia (NAA): A2998, 1952/871. 24. ‘Lie, See [Alien Registration File]’ (Department of Immigration, Northern Territory Branch, 1942–1953), NAA: E40, Q2787.

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she is believed to have come to Australia as a mui tsai (妹仔 M: mèizǎi).25 Mui tsai were ‘little sisters’ bought from poor families to serve as maids who, in the best of circumstances, were considered ‘adopted daughters’; their masters usually arranged marriages for them when they were old enough. If these accounts and the census data are accurate, Lie See was one of the four Chinese females in the Territory in 1881. Historian Claire Lowrie notes that of the few early Chinese women in the Territory, some may have been mui tsai for merchants’ families.26 Thus, in a sense, some of the earliest Chinese women in the Territory were employees. The first law restricting the immigration of Chinese into the Territory was the South Australian Chinese Immigration Restriction Act 1888, which limited the number of Chinese passengers arriving by ship to one per 500 tonnes of shipping. While provision was made for resident Chinese to apply for exemption certificates, the South Australian parliament reserved the right to declare at any time which people or classes were exempted.27 Exemption categories were defined clearly in the later Coloured Immigration Restriction Act 1896 as including merchants, their families, and domestic servants.28 After Federation the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 introduced the notorious Dictation Test, with exemptions granted in the form of a Certificate of Domicile, a Certificate Exempting from the Dictation Test (CEDT), or a Certificate of Exemption.29 Exemptions again favoured merchants and their households, being primarily granted to those already ‘domiciled’ in Australia—for example, those who were Australian-born, owned land and property in Australia, had a permanent business address in Australia, or a wife and children resident there.30 The authorities’ privileging of merchants and their households meant that the early Chinese women in the Territory, as in many overseas communities, were typically merchants’ wives, daughters, or servants.31 Legislation regarding immigration and other matters such as employment disadvantaged labourers, who made up the bulk of the Chinese population, and many left the Territory (some were even repatriated to China).32 This contributed to the declining population of Chinese males from 1891 onwards, and the increasing percentage of Chinese females.

25. Barbara Fong, ‘The Life and Times of Mary Sue Yook Fong nee Low’ (unpublished manuscript in possession of the author, 2007). 26. Claire Lowrie, Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), p. 157. 27. Chinese Immigration Restriction Act 1888 (SA). 28. Coloured Immigration Restriction Act 1896 (SA). 29. Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (Cth). 30. Kate Bagnall, ‘Anglo-Chinese and the Politics of Overseas Travel from New South Wales, 1898 to 1925’, in Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, ed. Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 208. 31. Cariño, ‘Chinese Women in Manila’, p. 463. 32. For a fuller discussion of how legislation affected the Chinese in the Northern Territory, see Natalie Fong, ‘“Your Petitioners Will Ever Pray”: Chinese Merchants and Organised Protest in the Northern Territory, 1880–1920’, Limina 22, no. 2 (2017), pp. 31–47.

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Documenting Chinese Women in Business Sources relating to Chinese women in the Territory demonstrate the significant involvement of at least several Chinese women in business. Chinese businesswomen feature in newspapers, land and business records, immigration documents, oral histories, wills, and photographs, and many of the richest sources are the result of events in the Territory during and after World War II. In 1942 and 1943 Darwin was bombed by Japanese forces, most brutally on February 19, 1942. Anticipating an attack, the government had evacuated women and children from Darwin from December 1941 to February 1942, which may explain the corresponding decline in the number of Chinese females. Businesses in the once-thriving Chinatown in central Darwin were badly damaged by bombs, looting, and fire.33 The federal government made rebuilding Darwin a major focus, acquiring all freehold land. Landholders could apply for compensation based on 1946 valuations, and buildings and improvements that existed before the bombings. Historian Michael Christie notes that of 491 town blocks acquired 106 were owned by Chinese.34 Federal authorities used acquisition to minimize Chinese economic domination, with Territory Administrator Aubrey Abbott praising it as a means to ‘entirely prevent the Chinese quarter from forming again’.35 With authorities reclaiming prime commercial land and offering low amounts of compensation, many Chinese businesses closed or moved. Of twenty-five compensation claims made by Chinese that I have examined, fourteen involved women applicants, eight regarding businesses.36 Applicants contested the low compensation, involving much correspondence and taking years to reach unsatisfactory resolutions, but also leaving behind valuable sources regarding Chinese women and their business activities.

Separate Spheres One way in which early Chinese women in the Territory were involved in business was behind the scenes of family firms. Chinese businesses began to be established in the 1880s in Palmerston (as Darwin was called until 1911) and elsewhere in the Territory. Typically, these businesses were headed by patriarchs, with male relatives as managers and shop staff—the public faces of businesses. By 1888 the overall Territory business landscape was dominated by Chinese merchants, and immigration concessions, technology (steamships, telegraphs), and transnational, transfamilial business networks allowed them to create ‘Chinatown’ in Cavenagh Street in central Palmerston. In 1888 Territory Police Inspector Paul Foelsche compiled a report on the Territory, an excerpt of which was published in the South Australian 33. Michael F. Christie, ‘The End of Darwin’s Chinatown’, Northern Perspective 18, no. 2 (1995), p. 48. 34. Christie, ‘End of Darwin’s Chinatown’, p. 49. 35. Christie, ‘End of Darwin’s Chinatown’, p. 49. 36. NT Darwin Freehold Acquisitions (Property and Survey Branch, 1932–1949), NAA: A877.

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Register. Foelsche noted at least fifty-six Chinese businesses in Palmerston, including stores, carpenters, shoemakers, laundries, tailors, and eating houses; many imported goods and offered services for Chinese and European customers.37 The Chinese community was led and organized by merchant patriarchs who were often known by their business, rather than personal, names. These patriarchs had wives in the Territory, all Chinese with the exception of Sarah Bowman. Some key merchant patriarchs, their firms, and their spouses are outlined in Table 4.2 (see p. 86) and select family trees are provided in the Appendix. Key women discussed in the remainder of this study feature in these ‘merchant bloodlines’. Most of these women had entered Australia as the wives of these merchant patriarchs. In Chinese culture, men having more than one wife, or wives and concubines, was accepted, and it was not uncommon for men in overseas communities such as Palmerston to have their first or principal wife in China in the ancestral village, and subsequent wives or concubines with them overseas. Territory-based merchants’ wives were typically ten to thirty years younger than their husbands, which makes sense if they were subsequent wives. Like Chinese merchants’ wives in other overseas communities, public perceptions of the early Chinese women in the Territory were that they were sequestered in the private sphere of the home as housewives and mothers.38 Australian journalist Ernestine Hill visited Darwin in the 1930s and described Chinese women as having ‘little freedom, spending their lives at the back of the shops and behind high tin walls, rearing innumerable babies’, ‘look[ing] out from behind barred windows’, and being ‘well-guarded’.39 An obituary published in the Northern Standard in 1930 for Kim Que Chin, first wife of merchant Chin Gong, described how, ‘like most of the Chinese women in Darwin, [she] was very retiring and seldom seen away from home’.40 The seclusion of Territory Chinese women reflected customs in nineteenthcentury China, where Confucianism and feudalism bolstered patriarchy. In Chinese society, women were considered inferior to men. The Confucian ideal was that women followed the Three Obediences and Four Virtues: obedience to fathers, then husbands, then sons; and to ‘know her place in the universe, be reticent in words, be clean of person and habits . . . , and fulfill her household duties’.41 Thus women needed little education. Many women, particularly of the upper class, were physically restricted by bound feet (although footbinding was not practised by the 37. ‘The Chinese in the Northern Territory’, South Australian Register, September 17, 1888, p. 1. 38. In Manila, merchants’ wives were said to be ‘hidden behind the windows of half-closed carriages’ (Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, p. 200). In America, mission workers described merchants’ wives as ‘hemmed in by cultural prescriptions and by their own bound feet . . . “very few of them are allowed to go on the streets”’ (Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain, p. 61). 39. Ernestine Hill, The Great Australian Loneliness (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1940), p. 147; ‘Aliens in Australia: How Chinese Live in Darwin’, Advertiser, April 13, 1935, p. 16. 40. ‘Death of Mrs Chin Gong’, Northern Standard, June 13, 1930, p. 3. 41. Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain, p. 100.

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The Emergence of Chinese Businesswomen in Darwin, 1910–1940

Table 4.2:  Darwin Chinese merchant patriarchs, spouses, and firms, 1880s Merchant Patriarch and Date of Arrival

Territory-Based Spouse, Rank Number and Date of Arrival (If Known)

Name of Firm and Main Business, Date Established

Chin Mee Leung (陳美良 M: chén měiliáng), 1882

Lum See Wong See, 1893

Wing Cheong Sing (榮昌盛 M: róng chāng shèng), tailors and drapers, 1883

(Chin) Ah Cheong (陳龍祥 M: chén lóngxiáng), 1882

Wong See, 1887

Sun Hing Kee (新錦記 M: xīn jǐn jì), merchants, grocers, c. 1885

Chin Yam Yan (陳炎賢 M: chén yánxián), c. 1879

Ah Ngoi

C. Yam Yan and Company, merchants and importers, 1892

Chin Toy (陳飬宜 M: chén juànyí), 1883

Liew/Lew See

Fang Cheong Loong (宏昌隆 M: hóng chāng lóng), tailors, drapers, goods, 1886

Fong How (鄺修榮 M: kuàng xiūróng), 1882

Young See (揚氏 M: yáng shì) Wing Wah Loong (永和隆 (2nd wife), 1895 M: yǒng hé lóng), storekeepers, importers, 1882

Lee Chow (李就 M: lǐ jiù), c. 1879

Violet Fung (馮氏 C: fong see, M: féng shì) (2nd wife), 1902

Man Fong Lau (萬芳樓 M: wàn fāng lóu), grocers, storekeepers, importers 1886

Lee Lim (李霖 M: lǐ lín), 1884

Moo Sue Quen (巫瑞群 M: wū ruìqún), Australian-born

Wing Sang Tong (永生堂 M: yǒng shēng táng), importers, storekeepers, c. 1891

Yuen Yet Hing (阮溢卿 M: ruǎn yìqīng), c. 1877–78

Low See (3rd wife, replacement for 1st wife)

Yet Loong (溢隆 M: yì lóng), storekeepers, c. 1888

Source: Compiled from Glenice Yee, Through Chinese Eyes: The Chinese Experience in the Northern Territory, 1874–2004 (Parap, Northern Territory: Glenice Yee, 2006); Sub-Collector of Customs, Darwin, National Archives of Australia: E752; Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography, revised edition (Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press, 2008); Shui Kwong Lo, From My Darwin Notebook and Chinese Temple or Joss House (Darwin: Northern Territory Archives Service Oral History Unit, 1989); ‘Folder Containing (1) Index to Immigration Files (2) Miscellaneous Unregistered Correspondence’ (Sub-Collector of Customs, Darwin, 1938), NAA: E758, INDEX ETC.

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Hakka) and thus more limited in the work they could do.42 In the Territory, Low See (1880–1950), third wife of merchant Yuen Yet Hing, had bound feet.43 According to her youngest daughter Lilyan Chan (née Yuen, 1916–2006), who was born in Darwin, ‘she couldn’t do anything’ except embroidery, so Yuen Yet Hing brought two mui tsai from China to do the housework.44 Young See (1879–1929), also my great-grandmother and wife of Fong How, arrived in Palmerston in 1895 with two mui tsai—Leung Tem Choy (1891–1938) and Lee Toy Kim (later known as ‘Granny Lum Loy’, 1891–1980). This suggests Young See also had bound feet.45 Despite bound feet, Young See travelled overseas three times between 1903 and 1920, for periods of one to three years, and both Low See and Young See became actively involved in businesses after the deaths of their husbands, as will be seen later in this chapter.46 And, although they began as mui tsai, Leung Tem Choy and Lee Toy Kim went on to run businesses and become matriarchs of well-known families.47 Chinese traditions did not prevent women from gaining agency. Similar patriarchal limitations that kept Territory Chinese daughters at home suggest the guarding of sexual purity. Lilyan Chan reminisced that even until the 1920s and 1930s girls ‘were not allowed to go out anywhere’; they stayed inside and did needlework, with exceptions being Chinese New Year or if they were accompanied by their brothers.48 Nellie Fong (1916–1998) was the Darwin-born second daughter of Wong Quee and Chan Fon Yuen, a partner in Fang Cheong Loong. Her brother Harry married Lilyan Yuen and was elected Mayor of Darwin in 1966. As a young girl, Nellie delivered orders for Fang Cheong Loong and ran errands, but always accompanied by a male Aboriginal servant, Dilly.49 When Nellie turned thirteen, her mother told her to stay at home and work in the shop, ‘because anything could happen to a girl’.50 Nellie was still expected to contribute to Fang Cheong Loong by cleaning the shop and serving tea to the men, while her mother and aunts cooked for the men.51 The men ate in the shop, but the women had their meals 42. Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain, pp. 18–19. 43. Yee, Through Chinese Eyes, p. 12. 44. Lilyan Chan, interview by Diana Giese in the Post-war Chinese Australians Oral History Project [transcript], 1998, National Library of Australia: TRC 3684, p. 10. 45. Lyn Fong, ‘Fong Family Chronology’ (unpublished manuscript in possession of the author, 2000), p. 24. 46. ‘Fong How and Family – Chinese’ (Northern Territory Branch Department of Immigration, 1917–1930), NAA: E37, 1967/265. 47. After Lee Toy Kim’s husband died, she leased four hectares of land in Darwin in 1920, establishing a mango plantation and exporting produce to Western Australia (Agnes F. Hannan, ‘Lee Toy Kim [Mrs Lum Loy]’, in Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography, revised edition [Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press, 2008], p. 338). When Leung Tem Choy’s husband contracted tuberculosis in the mid-1920s, she ran the family’s store in Pine Creek and learned to bake bread and brew hop beer to sell. This business was continued by son Jimmy Ah Toy and his wife, Lily, and their descendants until 2015 (Ellen Cramond, interview by Margaret Gillespie, 1986, NTAS Oral History Unit: NTRS 226/P0001/33, TS 483). 48. Lilyan Chan, interview by Diana Giese, pp. 8, 12. 49. Nellie Fong, interview by Diana Giese in the Post-war Chinese Australians Oral History Project [transcript], 1996, National Library of Australia: TRC 3543, p. 5. 50. N. Fong, interview, p. 4. 51. N. Fong, interview, p. 14.

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at home.52 Chinese women in Sydney and Canada had similar supporting roles in family businesses.53 Chinese traditions and customs did not preclude women from the world of work. While Hill’s observation of Territory Chinese women being kept at the back of shops may have been accurate, her remark that the Chinese women were just ‘rearing innumerable babies’ was not.54 In the Territory, as in other Chinese communities, residences were typically behind or above businesses, thus women could move between the private sphere of the home and the public sphere of the business unobserved from the street.55 Hence the perception that they rarely left home. Scholars have found that in China in the early twentieth century women worked to contribute to household economies in various ways. In certain communities in southern China, for example, women who worked as silk labourers went through a ‘delayed transfer marriage’ because of the value of their labour outside the family.56 Even women with bound feet could work from home to support their families—for example, by weaving.57 Sewing was a flexible form of employment for immigrant women, allowing them to fulfil domestic duties while contributing to the family’s income.58 When Nellie Fong’s father died, she and her mother learned to sew trousers, buttonholes, and buttons as further assistance to the business and to earn money. Nellie was paid ten shillings per week.59 Mrs Sue Wah Chin (1901–2000), daughter-in-law of Chin Toy, sewed up to six pairs of shorts or trousers a day for Fang Cheong Loong, for which she was paid fifteen shillings—more than the general manager. This encouraged other women to take up sewing work.60 American and Canadian Chinese women also earned incomes by working in family businesses or starting home-based businesses.61 52. N. Fong, interview, p. 14. 53. Kamp, ‘Chinese Australian Women’s “Homemaking”’, pp. 8–9; Yuen-Fong Woon, ‘Between South China and British Columbia: Life Trajectories of Chinese Women’, BC Studies 156/157 (2007/2008), p. 87. 54. Hill, ‘Aliens in Australia’, p. 16. 55. See, for example, maps in acquisition compensation claims: ‘NT Darwin – Freehold Acquisition 17 January 1946 – Claim of Chin Gong – Holding No 97, 253, 330’ (Property and Survey Branch, 1946–1952), NAA: A877, CL24151; ‘NT Darwin Freehold Acquisition 17 January 1946 – Claim of Chin Loong Pak – Holding No 91, 101, 133, 173, 249, 335’ (Property and Survey Branch, 1946–1956), NAA: A877, CL24272. 56. Adam McKeown, ‘Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusions, 1875–1943’, Journal of American Ethnic History 18, no. 2 (1999), pp. 99–100. 57. Melissa J. Brown, Laurel Bossen, Hill Gates, and Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips, ‘Marriage, Mobility and Footbinding in Pre-1949 Rural China: A Reconsideration of Gender, Economics, and Meaning in Social Causation, Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 4 (2012), p. 1041. 58. Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain, pp. 70–71. 59. N. Fong, interview by Giese, pp. 8, 17. 60. Raymond Chin, interview by Diana Giese in the Post-war Chinese Australians Oral History Project [transcript], 1996, National Library of Australia: TRC 3542. 61. Early Chinese women immigrants in America worked in laundries, restaurants, and grocery stores (Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain, p. 51). So did Chinese Canadian women, often living in the same building, or working from home doing baking and sewing (Multicultural History Society of Ontario, ‘School and Work’, Chinese Canadian Women, 1923–1967: Inspiration – Innovation – Ingenuity, accessed February 26, 2018, http://www.mhso.ca/chinesecanadianwomen/en/exhibit.php?e=59).

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Entering the Public Domain: Merchant Widows By the 1930s several Chinese businessmen’s wives and daughters had fully emerged into the sphere of work in public positions. The photograph Group of Darwin Ladies, taken around the late 1940s to early 1950s, depicts two generations of these Chinese women (Figure 4.5, see p. 90).62 In the front row are four matriarchs who had outlived their businessmen husbands, including Chin Wong See, who had owned and managed a business herself. Behind them stand Myrtle Houng On Yee and the Selina Hassan mentioned at the beginning of this chapter—both of whom ran businesses in Darwin. Freed from some Chinese cultural restrictions by the deaths of husbands and with evolving attitudes towards women, from the late 1910s wives and daughters became more actively involved in business as custodians of family businesses, co-workers with husbands, or heads of their own businesses.63 In China and diasporic Chinese communities such as Darwin, Chinese wives experienced increasing independence and involvement in businesses owing to the absences of their merchant husbands. Merchants’ absences, whether temporary (due to business) or permanent (due to death), left their wives to oversee households and family businesses. In Guangdong, wives were involved in the buying and selling of land using remittances from husbands or sons abroad.64 Thus, the absence of emigrant husbands may have ‘sparked the inevitable rise of female power in China’ as women assumed headship of households.65 In Canada, and in the Philippines from around the 1950s, an increasing number of Chinese women outlived their husbands and took the reins of their husbands’ businesses, ensuring continuity.66 John Omohundro has commented that in Iloilo in the Philippines, Chinese business matriarchs were thus able to gain agency both in the business arena and in the home, helping to raise the status of women.67 A similar argument can be made about Northern Territory Chinese widows. Territory Chinese women were able to become more actively involved in business in an environment generally conducive to the involvement of women in business. Historic trade between Indigenous people in the Territory’s north, Chinese, and Southeast Asians, together with initially relaxed immigration regulations, resulted in polyethnic communities. Morag Loh has suggested that the ‘flexible and pragmatic’ society of Darwin allowed women greater independence.68 Women 62. ‘Group of Darwin Ladies’ (Shu Ack Fong Collection), in PictureNT [online database], Northern Territory Library, http://hdl.handle.net/10070/35560. 63. To date, Sarah Bowman is the earliest Chinese merchant’s wife known to have worked, and she did so while her husband was alive. She was a well-known midwife and advertised herself as a stewardess or lady’s maid for steamship travellers (Yee, Through Chinese Eyes, p. 7; ‘Notice’, Northern Territory Times and Gazette, March 18, 1882, p. 2). 64. Choi, ‘Stepping Out?’, pp. 108–10; Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, p. 118; Michael Williams, ‘In the Tang Mountains We Have a Big House’, East Asian History 25/26 (2003), p. 92. 65. Choi, ‘Stepping Out?’, p. 112. 66. Woon, ‘Between South China and British Columbia’, p. 88. 67. Omohundro, Chinese Merchant Families in Iloilo, p. 145. 68. Loh, ‘Testimonies from White Australia’, p. 119.

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The Emergence of Chinese Businesswomen in Darwin, 1910–1940

Figure 4.5:  ‘Group of Darwin Ladies’, c. 1950. Back row (left to right): Chan Fon / Chin Fong, Myrtle Houng On Yee (née Fong), Selina Hassan (née Lee). Front row (left to right): Mrs Fong Ding (Wong See), Mrs Chin Toy (‘Granny Quong’), Mrs Lowe Dep (Lie See), Mrs Chin Mee Leung (Wong See). Shu Ack Fong Collection, Northern Territory Library (PH0497/0020)

also gained financial independence and protection with the 1883 South Australian Married Women’s Property Act. From the 1870s Territory women were working as hoteliers and publicans, conducting educational establishments, managing cattle properties, and running stores, boarding houses, and eateries.69 Women were accepted, even respected, as owners and managers of businesses. So when Chinese women began arriving in the Territory from the 1880s, businesswomen were already a familiar sight. From the 1910s to the 1940s several key Chinese merchant patriarchs in the Territory died, some unexpectedly. The age gap between merchants and their younger Territory-based wives made it likely that women would outlive their husbands. These widows were often left with a number of children in a country whose 69. ‘Opposite the Bank, Palmerston’, NTTAG, April 17, 1874, p. 2; ‘British & Foreign Hotel’, NTTAG, November 17, 1874, p. 1; Barbara James, ‘Ryan, Ellen’, in Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography, p. 510; ‘Victoria Hotel, Darwin’, Northern Standard, December 30, 1921, p. 4; ‘Victoria Hotel, Darwin’, NTTAG, November 30, 1926, p. 4; ‘Palmerston Academy, Cavenagh Street’, NTTAG, May 8, 1874, p. 1; ‘Northern Territory Times’, NTTAG, April 10, 1874, p. 2; Helen J. Wilson, ‘Cox, Matthew Dillon’, in Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography, p. 118; ‘The Cafe Canberra’, NTTAG, July 10, 1928, p. 3; ‘Francesca Bleeser’, Northern Standard, January 6, 1928, p. 5; ‘Pioneer Store and Eating House, Union’, North Australian, July 28, 1888, p. 2.

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language they might not have spoken fluently. In many cases their sons were too young to inherit, or were absent on war service or for education in China. Some widows became custodians of businesses and properties until their sons could assume responsibility. Some were appointed by their husbands as executrices of estates, suggesting their husbands recognized their financial and business skills. Some widows even started their own businesses. These women overcame various challenges in order to provide for their families, legacies sadly reduced by the bombing of Darwin and consequent compulsory acquisition. Chin Wong See (1875–1960) was the wife of Chin Mee Leung (Chin June) of Wing Cheong Sing. When Chin Mee Leung died in 1914, he left a shop on Cavenagh Street to his widow to be held in trust by the executor of his estate.70 In Chin Ark Hen’s 1947 claim for compensation for the Commonwealth acquisition of the land on which this shop stood, it was noted that the shop had been let as a dwelling to a Filipino, Kanada, who was killed during an air raid in 1942.71 In addition to deriving rental income from this property, Ivan Simon, Darwin Sub-Collector of Customs, reported in 1938 to the Department of the Interior that Chin Wong See was the owner, and for some years the manager, of Sun Hing Kee, a business established by her husband on the corner of Cavenagh and Bennett Streets.72 She had passed the management of the business to her son, Chin Loong Pak.73 When Low See’s husband, Yuen Yet Hing of Yet Loong, died suddenly in 1916, she was left with seven children. The eldest, Ernest, was seven. From February 1918 Yet Loong began advertising as ‘Yet Loong & Sons’, but it is not known what involvement Low See had in this business.74 She certainly had business interests, in spite of her bound feet. Low See owned a business managed by Moo Fatt, probably the ‘shop of Mrs Yet Loong’s’ advertised in the Northern Standard as the retailer of E. Verberg’s produce.75 She also owned property, including a lot on Cavenagh Street, renting out a shop and a house on this land; in 1933 she successfully sued Charlie Ack Fun for non-payment of rent.76 According to her 1946 compensation claim for land on Cavenagh Street, there had been five businesses on the lot, including Yean Ying & Co., Bakers; Edwin Verburg [sic], grocers; and Mrs Yet Loong.77 As an estimation of the lot’s value, the compensation applied for was £10,980, but 70. ‘NT Darwin – Freehold Acquisition 17-1-1946 – Claim of Chin Pound Nam and Estate of Chin June – Holding No 251’ (Property and Survey Branch, 1946–1953), NAA: A877, CL24250. 71. NAA: A877, CL24250. 72. ‘Folder Containing (1) Index to Immigration Files (2) Miscellaneous Unregistered Correspondence’ (SubCollector of Customs, Darwin, 1938), NAA: E758, INDEX ETC. 73. NAA: E758, INDEX ETC. 74. ‘Yet Loong & Sons’, NTTAG, February 2, 1918, p. 16. 75. ‘A Peculiar Case’, Northern Standard, September 26, 1930, p. 1; ‘E. Verberg’, Northern Standard, October 16, 1934, p. 9. 76. ‘Local Court’, NTTAG, June 8, 1929, p. 8; ‘The Federal Parliament to Reassemble on September 27’, Northern Standard, September 22, 1933, p. 1. 77. ‘NT Darwin – Freehold Acquisition 17-1-1946 – Claim of Mrs Low See – Holding No 282, 358’ (Property and Survey Branch, 1946–1954), NAA: A877, CL24147.

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three years later Low See was awarded £3,800.78 She passed away the following year (1950), having appointed daughters Lucy Lee and Rose Moo Fatt as executrices of her estate—recognition of the worth of daughters.79 Like Low See, Young See’s husband, Fong How of Wing Wah Loong, died unexpectedly while in China in 1920, leaving her with eleven children.80 Albert, the eldest male child then in Darwin, was twelve. Young See, as ‘Mrs Wing Wah Loong’, seems to have assumed leadership of her family and providing for her children, even though she may have had bound feet and was literate only in Chinese (she signed documents in Chinese characters—揚氏).81 In 1923 she placed a newspaper advertisement offering lot 564 on Mitchell Street for lease—‘for particulars, apply Mrs Wing Wah Loong’.82 This would later be the site of her sons’ Fong Yuen Kee cordial factory. Young See purchased the lot next to Wing Wah Loong and set up a general store, Fong Yuen Kee, in 1924.83 She moved her family into the residence at the store’s rear.84 Young See reportedly established this business as an inheritance for her sons.85 Soo Kee stated after Young See’s death that she had told him she was the registered owner of Fong Yuen Kee and her son, Albert, was managing it for her.86 In 1946, Albert Fong, now a leading member of the KMT and Chinese Commercial Society and the first president of the Chung Wah Society, submitted compensation claims estimating the value of the land on which stood Fong Yuen Kee Brothers and Bakers and Wing Wah Loong as £25,550, and lot 564 Mitchell Street (Fong Yuen Kee cordial factory) as £5,620.87 He was awarded £10,957 in total for these claims.88 In 1925 Violet Fung (1886–1958) also lost her husband, Lee Chow of Man Fong Lau, to a sudden illness, leaving her with eight children. The business, Man Fong Lau, was £25,000 in debt at the time.89 A decade later, in 1935, ‘Mrs Lee Chow’ remained the proprietress of Man Fong Lau, with her sons assisting. She depended on the living from the business; selling fruit and sweets brought in thirty to fifty

78. NAA: A877, CL24147. 79. NAA: A877, CL24147. 80. ‘Certificate of Exemption from Dictation Test – Fong How’ (Sub-Collector of Customs, Darwin, 1919–1920), NAA: E752, 1919/50). 81. NAA: E37, 1967/265. 82. ‘To Let on Lease’, NTTAG, October 27, 1923, p. 5. 83. ‘Leung Kee – Application to Enter Commonwealth Assistance Fong Yuen Kee Bros’ (Sub-Collector of Customs, Darwin, 1940–1941), NAA: E756, 63. 84. Edward Fong, ‘My Autobiography’ (unpublished manuscript in possession of the author, 1985), p. 3. 85. Lyn Fong, ‘Chinese Merchants and Matriarchs of Colonial Australia’ (unpublished manuscript in possession of the author, 2004), p. 12. 86. ‘See, Youn’ [probate file] (Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, 1929), Northern Territory Archives Service (NTAS): NTRS 3623/P0001/1, 21/1929. 87. ‘NT Darwin – Freehold Acquisition 17 January 1946 – Claim of Albert Fong Goon – Holding No 167 and 359’ (Property and Survey Branch, 1946–1957), NAA: A877, CL24238; ‘NT Darwin – Freehold Acquisition 17 January 1946 – Claim of Fong Kam Lam, Albert Fong Goon and Fong Gang Ming – Holding No 420’ (Property and Survey Branch, 1946–1957), NAA: A877, CL24328. 88. NAA: A877, CL24238; NAA: A877, CL24328. 89. ‘Death of Lee Chow’, NTTAG, May 29, 1925, p. 3.

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shillings gross per week.90 Like other widows, she took in a boarder at ten shillings per month.91 In 1935 Mrs Lee Chow was charged with selling liquor without a licence. In the court case, it was noted that she did not have a good command of English; she testified through an interpreter.92 Mrs Lee Chow gave several justifiable reasons as to why she had alcohol on her premises.93 Despite witnesses also stating that she did not sell them liquor, Mrs Lee Chow was fined £50 in default of imprisonment.94 The stewardship of Man Fong Lau by Mrs Lee Chow and her sons ensured its survival until the bombing of Darwin in 1942. Mrs Moo Sue Quen (1898–1963), widow of Lee Lim of herbalists Wing Sang Tong, was the executrix of his estate when he died in 1940.95 He gave her his ‘right title and interest as a partner in the firm of Wing Sang Tong’ and the land on which the shop was built. After the settling of debts, however, his estate was only valued at £441.96 Moo Sue Quen had advantages over other merchants’ wives: she was Australian-born and educated in English, signing documents with an English signature (‘Moo Sue Quen’).97 Her stewardship of the estate is evident in her applications for compensation for the acquisition of Lee Lim’s properties. On these holdings had been several businesses in addition to Wing Sang Tong. The total amount requested, the largest of the claims by Chinese women I have examined so far, was £44,180. The government offered £8,136. After three years and much correspondence, the claims were settled for £13,250.98 Moo Sue Quen pleaded for quicker processing as she was in ‘urgent need of the advances to finance her ex-servicemen sons in business in Darwin’.99 When she died in 1963 she left an estate worth almost £7,000; she left her interest as a partner in the family’s Lee Transport Company worth £3,733 to one son, Lee Bing Chow.100

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

‘Appeal Case – Koop v. Lee Chow’ (Northern Territory Crown Law Office, 1935), NAA: E72, DL494, p. 24. NAA: E72, DL494, p. 25. NAA: E72, DL494, p. 8. NAA: E72, DL494, pp. 21–22. ‘Police Court’, Northern Standard, April 26, 1935, p. 9. ‘NT Darwin Freehold Acquisition 17 January 1946 – Claim of Estate of Lee Lim – Executor Mrs Moo Sue Quen – Holding No 252, 357, 362’ (Property and Survey Branch, 1946–1949), NAA: A877, CL24316; ‘NT Darwin Freehold Acquisition 17 January 1946 – Claim of Estate of Lee Lim – Executor of Estate Mrs Moo Sue Quen – Holding No 291 and 362’ (Property and Survey Branch, 1947–1950), NAA: A877, CL24315. 96. ‘Lee Lim’ [probate file] (Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, 1965), NTAS: NTRS 3624/P0001/7, 39/1940. 97. NAA: A877, CL24315; NAA: A877, CL24316; ‘Certificate of Exemption from Dictation Test – Moo Sue Quen’ (Sub-Collector of Customs, Darwin, 1938), NAA: E752, 1938/5. 98. NAA: A877, CL24315; NAA: A877, CL24316. 99. NAA: A877, CL24316. 100. ‘Sue Quen Lee’ [probate file] (Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, 1965), NTAS: NTRS 3624/P0001/19, 2515; ‘Firm Registration File, Lee Transport Coy [General Carriers, Haulage Contractors and Forwarding Agents]’ (Register of Companies, c. 1950–1964), NTAS: NTRS 245/P0019/8, Firm 490.

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Thoroughly Modern ‘Missus’: Merchant Daughters Evolving attitudes towards women worldwide from the late 1800s meant that subsequent generations of women had greater access to education and work than their forebears. In China the early 1900s saw the rise of the anti-imperialist, modernizing Republican movement and the KMT, and the formation of women’s rights groups, but also the beginning of the Great Depression. Revolutionaries believed the evolution of society depended on improving the position of women.101 Dr Sun Yat-sen’s call for equality for all, jiěfàng (解放, ‘emancipation’) and particularly fùnǚ jiěfàng (婦女解放, ‘emancipation of women’), emphasized by the May Fourth Movement (1917–1921), spawned campaigns in China such as anti–mui tsai protests, education for women, and the end of footbinding.102 The Chinese in Darwin kept abreast of Chinese politics and the majority of business owners appears to have been proRepublican. In 1911, when news broke of the Republicans’ triumph in China, the Republican flag appeared in ‘all the Chinese business premises’.103 This pro-Republicanism meant that some Territory Chinese families were supportive of women being educated; legislation also mandated schooling for children. The South Australian Education Act 1875 and Northern Territory Education Ordinance 1917 made schooling compulsory for children aged seven to thirteen and six to fourteen, respectively, so merchants’ daughters attended local schools and were instructed in English.104 In 1927 at Darwin Convent School, Dolly Yuen came second in the sixth class, while Sarah Fong topped the fourth class; in 1940, Mavis Moo was the dux of Darwin Public School.105 Education enabled women to gain clerical work in Darwin.106 Lena Pak Fong (1902–1930), daughter of Ah Ngoi and Chin Yam Yan, was Australian-born but educated in Hong Kong.107 At the time of her death, she had been working as a bookkeeper at Yuen See Kee’s.108 Alice Gum, daughter of San She (Ah Gow) (1873–1931) and Gum Fong Sing of the Sun Hop Lee laundry and store, was working as a bookkeeper at Carey and Company (once

101. Maria Jaschok, ‘Chinese “Slave” Girls in Yunnan-Fu: Saving (Chinese) Womanhood and (Western) Souls, 1930–1991’, in Women and Chinese Patriarchy, ed. Jaschok and Miers, p. 172. 102. Ibid. 103. ‘The Chinese Revolution’, NTTAG, November 24, 1911, p. 2. 104. Education Act 1875 (SA); under the Education Ordinance Act 1917 (NT), children aged six to nine had to attend school if schools were within two miles of their residence, and between nine and fourteen years if schools were within three miles of their residence. A secondary school operated in Darwin from 1921 to 1925 (the only one in the Territory), but closed owing to low enrolments; secondary schools began operating again in the Territory from 1948 (Ted Ling, ‘Education’, Commonwealth Government Records about the Northern Territory (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2011), http://guides.naa.gov.au/ records-about-northern-territory/part2/chapter13/13.2.aspx). 105. ‘Convent School’, Northern Standard, December 16, 1927, p. 2; ‘Peace in Pacific: Friendly Trade Essential’, Northern Standard, January 26, 1940, p. 8. 106. For examples of daughters working for family businesses, see: Ip, Home Away from Home, p. 57; Kamp, ‘Chinese Australian Women’s “Homemaking”’, p. 11. 107. Martínez, ‘Patriotic Chinese Women’, p. 204. 108. ‘Inquest on Mrs Lena Lee’, Northern Territory Times, January 24, 1930, p. 6.

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owned by her sister, Mary Yamamoto, discussed below) in 1939, and lived on site.109 Similarly, in New Zealand in the 1940s and 1950s, Chinese daughters who excelled academically worked in administrative roles in businesses.110 One of the earliest documented Territory Chinese businesswomen is Mary Yamamoto (Mao Chun Gum, 1899–?). Mary was Australian-born and married to Japanese storekeeper Tsunematsu Yamamoto. In her 1918 CEDT, she gave her occupation as ‘storekeeper and housewife’; it is not known what business she was operating at that time.111 In 1924 Mary purchased the Kwong Tung Café in Cavenagh Street, and in 1927 she acquired Carey and Company, Bakers, also in Cavenagh Street.112 Her 1935 CEDT stated that her husband and children were domiciled on Thursday Island.113 The reason for this domestic situation and its influence on Mary’s business operations or vice versa is unclear. Founded in 1924, the Darwin KMT put into practice new ideas about women and many of the young Chinese in Darwin were active members; according to Martínez, by 1925 its executive members were all aged between twenty and thirty.114 They advocated the participation of women, and in 1927 Lena Pak Fong, now Lena Lee after her marriage to Willie Lee (brother of Selina Hassan), and Selina Yuen (daughter of Yuen See Kee) were members of the KMT committee that welcomed a Prince of Siam to Darwin. This was reportedly the first time Chinese women participated in an Australian public function.115 In 1929 Lena became secretary of the KMT and attended the KMT conference in Sydney as a Darwin delegate.116 Tragically, she took her own life in 1930. Lena’s sister-in-law Selina Hassan (1901– 1996), who was featured at the beginning of this chapter, served as KMT secretary from 1931 to 1932. In Selina Hassan’s aforementioned speech to the Chinese Consul General to Australia, Dr W. P. Chen, at a KMT banquet in 1932, she proclaimed: Equality of opportunity is all China wants . . . China with her great natural wealth and her countless patriotic men and beautiful women will very quickly take her rightful place as the greatest power in the world . . . The Chinese women are even more patriotic than the men.117

109. ‘Firm Registration File, Carey and Co. [Bakers]’ (Register of Companies, 1935–1944), NTAS: NTRS 245/ P0019/1, Firm 24; ‘Indecent Assault: Aboriginal Charged’, Northern Standard, November 7, 1939, p. 12. 110. Ip, ‘From Gold Mountain Women to Astronauts’ Wives’, p. 279. 111. ‘Certificate of Exemption from Dictation Test – Mary Yamamoto’ (Sub-Collector of Customs, Darwin, 1918–1919), NAA: E752, 1918/17. 112. ‘Notice’, NTTAG, April 8, 1924, p. 3; ‘Carey and Co – Application Admission of Chinese Assistant [George Gum]’ (Sub-Collector of Customs, Darwin, 1941), NAA: E757, 1. 113. ‘Certificate of Exemption from Dictation Test – Mary Yamamoto’ (Sub-Collector of Customs, Darwin, 1935), NAA: E752, 1935/8. 114. Martínez, ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin’, p. 240; Martínez, ‘Patriotic Chinese Women’, p. 200. 115. ‘Darwin Kuo Min Tang’s Welcome to Prince of Siam’, Northern Territory Times, July 12, 1927, p. 1. 116. Martínez, ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin’, p. 251. 117. ‘Banquet by Kuo Min Tang’, p. 5.

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Perhaps reflecting the KMT’s egalitarianism, some young KMT couples formed business partnerships.118 Before her marriage to Charlie Houng On Yee, Myrtle Fong (1914–1997), daughter of Wong See (1880–1961) and miner Fong Ding, worked for her brother George Lim in his store in Emungalan, and operated a store and bakery in Mataranka with another brother, Charlie On.119 Together Myrtle and Charlie Houng On Yee ran a laundry and sold bicycles as ‘M. Houng-On’ in Cavenagh Street, Darwin.120 When Lucy Lee (née Yuen, 1909–1986, daughter of the aforementioned Low See and Yuen Yet Hing) and her husband, Willie, made a claim for compensation for the government’s acquisition of their Cavenagh Street land in 1946, Willie was described as a ‘merchant’, with Lucy as joint tenant. At the time of their claim they were proprietors of a café in Maroubra, Sydney.121 Lily Chin (1912–1981, daughter of Chin Kwong-Leung of Kwong Hai laundry) married Charlie On in 1932.122 In 1946 she made a claim for compensation for land in Parap, Darwin, where there had been a shop, office, and residence. While the claim was made by Lily because the title was in her name, the business was called ‘Charlie On: Draper, Tailer, Grocer’.123 There were two Territory women with KMT affiliations who, like Adelaide’s Gladys Sym Choon (described as ‘the first woman importer in Adelaide’), had their own businesses in their own names and styled themselves as merchants.124 Thus, they heralded themselves as successors to merchant patriarchs even though they were daughters, not sons. One of these women was Lorna Lim, the other was Selina Hassan.

Selina Hassan Family circumstances may have contributed to Selina Hassan’s independence and interest in the KMT. Selina was born in 1901 in Darwin, the daughter of Hong Kong–born Emily Louie (1868–1935) and businessman, police constable, and interpreter Arthur Lee Hang Gong (born to Sarah Bowman and Lee Hang Gong when they resided in Creswick, Victoria). In 1904 Arthur, Emily, and their family moved to Hong Kong, where Arthur Lee Hang Gong died in 1906. In 1908 Emily returned 118. These couples had ‘KMT weddings’—see Sophie Couchman’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 3). They also have the KMT twelve-point star on their headstones in Darwin General Cemetery (photographs held by the author). 119. ‘Wedding Bells’, Northern Territory Times, May 13, 1930, p. 5; Glenice Yee, ‘Houng On Yee, Myrtle (Kim Lan)’, in Northern Territory Dictionary of Biography, p. 293. 120. Yee, ‘Houng On Yee, Myrtle’, p. 294; ‘The Famous “Malvern Star” Bicycles’, Northern Standard, January 29, 1941, p. 9. 121. ‘NT Darwin Freehold Acquisition 17 January 1946 – Claim of Willie Lee, Lucy Lee (as Joint Tenants) – Holding No 283’ (Property and Survery Branch, 1946–1950), NAA: A877, CL24231. 122. ‘Chinese Wedding: On–Chin’, Northern Standard, November 15, 1932, p. 1. 123. ‘NT Darwin Freehold Acquisition 17 January 1946 – Claim of Lily On – Holding No 575’ (Property and Survey Branch, 1946–1954), NAA: A877, CL24334; ‘Charlie On’, Northern Standard, December 31, 1940, p. 8. 124. Sumerling, ‘The Sym Choons of Rundle Street’, p. 86.

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to Darwin with one son; Selina and two of her brothers went to live in Guangdong with their father’s second wife, reuniting with their mother in Darwin in 1910, when Selina was around nine. Selina attended her ailing grandmother, Sarah Bowman, until Sarah’s death in 1911, after which Selina attended school. Emily set up a tripe soup business with another Chinese woman and also sold snacks and soft drinks to support her family.125 Selina returned to China when she was eighteen to marry businessman Ali Hassan, a Chinese Indian Muslim born in Hong Kong who had gone to Australia as a crew member of a pearl lugger. The couple settled in Darwin. When Ali Hassan died suddenly in 1929, leaving Selina with three young children, she worked to support her family. Ali Hassan had, however, left Selina the bulk of his estate, about £1,000, and in 1927 and 1928 he had transferred ownership to her of two lots on Cavenagh Street, on which stood their residence and several businesses.126 Widowed Selina was therefore not without resources, but in an interview in 1979 she said she had to work because the Depression hit and there was no rent coming in, and they did not already have a family business for her to work in or manage.127 She set up a tailoring and car hire business with Charlie Houng On Yee; Selina recalls, ‘I was the leader.’128 Like other (male) Chinese business owners, in 1930 she placed a notice in the Northern Territory Times advising that she would soon be absent from Darwin; her brother, Willie, would ‘receive all moneys owing and payable’, accounts for car hire were to be paid to Alfred Jan.129 In 1932 she opened her own store, S. Hassan and Co., registered as ‘tailors and merchants’, in Cavenagh Street.130 It presented as mercantile, advertising as ‘Denizens of the Jungle’, as they imported rubber goods from Singapore.131 The business was unsuccessful.132 Selina Hassan also had mining interests—in 1934 she was approved for a gold-mining lease for twenty acres in Fletchers Gully in the Territory.133 In 1938 Selina married Hamdan Bin Mahomed Amid, a Malayan indentured pearling seaman, in Darwin. At the completion of her husband’s indenture, he was ordered to leave Australia, so he moved to Singapore. He was joined there in 1940 by Selina and her children by Ali Hassan, Allan and Connie. During the Japanese occupation, they were compulsorily domiciled in a Malayan kampong. Daughter Connie married Malayan-born Omar Jauhari in 1944. After the war, with the help of her solicitor in Australia, Selina applied for compensation for the acquisition 125. Selina Hassan, interview by Barabara James [transcript], 1979, NTAS: NTRS 226/P0001/14, TS 236, pp. 3–7. 126. ‘Hassan, Ally (Ali)’ [probate file] (Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, 1929) NTAS: NTRS 3623/ P0001/1, 23/1929. 127. Selina Hassan, interview by Barbara James [transcript], p. 15. 128. Hassan, interview, p. 22. 129. ‘Notice’, Northern Territory Times, December 9, 1930, p. 3. For similar notices of other Chinese storekeepers, see, for example, Wee Wat Lew, ‘Public Notice’, NTTAG, January 31, 1896, p. 2; Lee Cheong Quong, ‘Public Notice’, NTTAG, April 20, 1906, p. 2. 130. ‘S. Hassan & Co.’, Northern Standard, July 22, 1932, p. 7; ‘Firm Registration File, S Hassan and Company [Tailors and merchants]’ (Register of Companies, 1935–1963), NTAS: NTRS 245/P0019/1, Firm 27. 131. ‘Denizens of the Jungle: At Home at Hassans’, Northern Standard, February 17, 1933, p. 9. 132. Hassan, interview, p. 23. 133. ‘Mining Leases’, Northern Standard, November 9, 1934, p. 10.

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of her Darwin land, estimating its value as £13,450, including several businesses and her residence.134 She was offered £3,575. In the ensuing negotiations, Selina explained that the property had been her ‘only means of livelihood . . . [assuring her] of a regular rental income of £51 per month’. Having been compulsorily domiciled, she was in financial difficulties and poor health.135 The claim was eventually settled in 1949 for £5,292.136 In 1947 Selina applied for the entire family to be allowed to settle in Australia, which authorities permitted with the exception of Hamdan Bin Mahomed Amid and Omar Jauhari, fearing it would set a precedent. Jauhari was admitted temporarily on a student visa, as he and Connie had a child, with another on the way. Selina then tried another approach—in 1936 she had proposed a live-cattle export scheme between Darwin and Singapore, with the assistance of a pastoralist and the support of the then Acting Minister for the Interior.137 Now that the war was over, and with her husband unable to return to Australia, she asked whether she could at least have her son-in-law assist her in establishing this scheme? MP for the Northern Territory Macalister Blain wrote to the Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, urging him to consider Selina’s proposal and making reference to historical precedent—that is, the administration of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which frequently made exceptions for Chinese merchants, who facilitated trade between Asia and Australia, and their staff. The minister was unmoved.138 Jauhari did end up residing permanently in Australia, but Selina and Amid divorced in Singapore, and Amid remained there while the rest of the family returned to Australia.139 Selina continued to support herself and her family through businesses and other means in Victoria. She died in 1996.

Lorna Lim Lorna Lim (née Lowe, 1904–1982) was the Territory-born daughter of Lie See and market gardener and blacksmith Lowe Dep. In 1921 she married tailor George Lim, son of Wong See and miner Fong Ding, in Pine Creek. George and Lorna’s exact involvement in the KMT is not known; however, both have the KMT star on their headstones, as does Wong See, George’s mother.140 Historian Mei-fen Kuo notes that this was generally an honour bestowed with Party approval.141 In 1926 they moved to Katherine, where they and their family, which eventually included 134. ‘NT Darwin Freehold Acquisition 17 January 1946 – Claim of Selina Hassan – Holding No 244’ (Property and Suvery Branch, 1946–1949), NAA: A877, CL24137. 135. NAA: A877, CL24137. 136. NAA: A877, CL24137. 137. NAA: A877, CL24137. 138. ‘Hassan – Selina and Others’ (Department of Immigration, 1946–1957), NAA: A446, 1954/61282. 139. Suzette Pedersen, correspondence with the author, August 27, 2019. 140. Photographs held by the author. 141. Mei-fen Kuo, correspondence with the author, June 15, 2018.

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five daughters and four sons, ran a store, bakery, and peanut farm.142 In 1938 they moved to Darwin, and that year Lorna purchased Jessop and Company, tailors and general storekeepers, and was advertised as proprietress.143 This was the first Chinese business in Smith Street, the European economic area of Darwin.144 The business imported fresh fruit and vegetables and was granted the tender to supply produce to hospitals and other government institutions in Darwin.145 From 1940 the company traded as ‘Lorna Lims’, although the West Australian newspaper reported that it was George Lim ‘trading as Lorna Lim’.146 George and Lorna’s son, Alec Fong Lim (who was elected Mayor of Darwin in 1984), said that George was assisted by his wife and children in building a ‘thriving business’.147 In Lorna Lim’s compensation claim for the acquisition of their Smith Street property, she stated that she was the title holder because ‘she had previously conducted the business’, and in the claim she listed her occupation as ‘merchant’.148 The amount of compensation she requested was £8,900; she was initially only offered £5,935. The claim was settled in 1949 for £6,700.149 During the war, the Lim family was evacuated to Alice Springs where they ran a shop, tailoring business, and tearoom with a gross annual income of over £7,000.150 The Lims returned to Darwin in 1946, and again established a store in Smith Street—‘Lorna Lim and Sons’; ‘Lorna Lim and Sons’ also became proprietors of the Victoria Hotel.151 According to Alec Fong Lim, the store was actually run by Lorna and her daughters and ‘could not have survived without them’, while George and his sons ran the Victoria Hotel.152 The Lims’ daughters registered their own business in 1958—Lim Sisters, storekeepers in Smith Street.153 The Lims sold the Victoria Hotel to Carlton and United Breweries in 1965 for £400,000.

142. Alec Fong Lim, interview by Sandra Saunders [transcript], 1981, NTAS Oral History Unit: NTRS 226/ P0001/13, TS 211, p. 2. 143. ‘Notice’, Northern Standard, August 5, 1938, p. 11; ‘Firm Registration File, Jessop and Company [Storekeeper]’ (Register of Companies, 1937–1938), NTAS: NTRS 245/P0019/1, Firm 61. 144. Alec Fong Lim, interview by Sandra Saunders [transcript], p. 4. 145. ‘Jessop & Company’, Northern Standard, August 9, 1938, p. 9; ‘Acceptance of Tender’, Northern Standard, July 29, 1938, p. 8. 146. ‘Lorna Lims’, Northern Standard, May 17, 1940, p. 9; ‘Darwin Melee: AIF Men in Riot’, West Australian, September 3, 1941, p. 5. 147. Alec Fong Lim, interview by Sandra Saunders [transcript], p. 5. 148. ‘NT Darwin Freehold Acquisition 17 January 1946 – Claim of Lorna Lim – Holding No 275, 324, 349’ (Property and Suvery Branch, 1946–1949), NAA: A877, CL24359. 149. NAA: A877, CL24359. 150. ‘Trading Results – Lorna LIM & George LIM, Alice Springs – Tailors and Drapers’ (State Deputy Prices Commissioner, South Australia, 1942–1946), NAA: AP5/1, 1944/3662. 151. ‘Firm Registration File, Lorna Lim and Sons [Drapers, grocers and hotelkeeper]’ (Register of Companies, 1946–1963), NTAS: NTRS 245/P0019/4, Firm 220; ‘Hotel Victoria’, Northern Standard, November 29, 1946, p. 3. 152. Alec Fong Lim, interview by Sandra Saunders [transcript], p. 11. 153. Firm Registration File, Lim Sisters [Storekeepers]’ (Register of Companies, 1958–1963), NTAS: NTRS 245/ P0019/17, Firm 1092.

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Conclusion The Australian Chinese women in this study traversed the boundaries of separate spheres—public and private, work and home—as they had increasing opportunities to work in business over the first half of the twentieth century. The proliferation of women entrepreneurs in the Northern Territory in the late nineteenth century had set a precedent for Chinese women, creating an environment in which businesswomen were a common sight. While most of the earliest Chinese women in Darwin were members of merchant households and were largely confined to the home, they contributed to family businesses and earned incomes through their unseen labour in sewing and undertaking domestic tasks such as cooking and cleaning. Despite Chinese businesses being traditionally patriarchal, as merchants died widows became heads of families and businesses. Economic necessity, exacerbated by the Depression in the late 1920s, was a common motivation for Chinese women’s involvement in business in the Territory. In the early twentieth century, increased access to education in English and modern attitudes towards women promoted by the Chinese Republican movement, and the KMT further enabled and encouraged Territory women to become employees and employers in their own right. Merchant daughters were able to leave the domestic sphere to work in family businesses or to set up their own. By naming businesses after themselves and calling themselves merchants, Selina Hassan and Lorna Lim represented a new generation of Chinese women, revolutionizing centuries-old trades previously the preserve of men and ushering in an era of greater gender equality. As the approach of collective biography taken by this study and others mentioned reveals, there are common patterns of Chinese women’s growing participation in business in China, Australia, New Zealand, and America in the early twentieth century, and Canada and the Philippines in later decades. This study contributes to this broader scholarship and to recent work on Australian Chinese women in business, such as that by Alanna Kamp and Sophie Couchman, by drawing on a range of archival materials to demonstrate the nature and extent of Chinese women’s business involvement in the Northern Territory. This study also provides examples of the kinds of documentary evidence in which overseas Chinese businesswomen may be found. Hopefully, it will prompt more sources to be located and further studies to be conducted of Chinese businesswomen in Australia and overseas, continuing to challenge understandings about racialized and gendered spaces of home and work, and including more enterprising Chinese women in history.

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Appendix: Selected Darwin Family Trees Chinese wives were often known by their maiden family surname + 氏 (C: sih; M: shì), meaning ‘clan’ or ‘family’. Women’s names in bold indicate those discussed in this chapter. An ordinal number (e.g. 2nd, 3rd) in front of a woman’s name indicates her position as second or subsequent wife. Names marked with an asterisk (*) indicate those with known Kuomintang (KMT) affiliation.

Figure 4.6:  The families of Chin Yam Yan and Lee Hang Gong.

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Figure 4.7:  The families of Lee Chow (of Man Fong Lau), Yuen Yet Hing (of Yet Loong), and Chan Fon Yuen (of Fang Cheong Loong).

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Figure 4.8:  The families of Chin Mee Leung (of Wing Cheong Sing), Fong How (of Wing Wah Loong), and Lowe Dep.

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Figure 4.9:  The families of Lowe Dep and Fong Ding.

5 Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Migration and Mobility in White Australia Alanna Kamp

This chapter gives voice to Chinese Australian women’s experience of migration and mobility in the White Australia policy era (1901–1973). Chinese Australians and their communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have, and continue to be, the focus of much important research. However, as this volume highlights, much is still unknown about Chinese Australian women’s lives in the White Australia policy era.1 Given that the policy was only formally abandoned forty years ago, Chinese Australian women who lived through this period of time—as immigrants or Australian-born citizens—are important sources of information regarding their own lived realties in this historical and geographical context. The valuable insights Chinese Australian women can provide has been highlighted in the work of Carole Tan, Diana Giese, Janis Wilton, and Shen Yuanfang.2 Alongside the work of Manying Ip in New Zealand, and Huping Ling and Judy Yung in Canada and the United States, this body of research has also illustrated that the voices of Chinese ‘Gold Mountain’ women are invaluable in providing nuanced and inclusive insights into nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese migration and settlement experiences in the ‘West’.3 1. An in-depth review of this scholarship is provided in Alanna Kamp, ‘Invisible Australians: Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Belonging and Exclusion in the White Australia Policy Era, 1901–1973’ (PhD diss., Western Sydney University, 2014). 2. Carole Tan, ‘Living with “Difference”: Growing up “Chinese” in White Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 77 (2003), pp. 101–108, 195–97; Diana Giese, Astronauts, Lost Souls & Dragons: Voices of Today’s Chinese Australians in Conversation with Diana Giese (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997); Janis Wilton, Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales (Armidale, New South Wales: New England Regional Art Museum in association with Powerhouse Publishers, Sydney, 2004); Yuanfang Shen, Dragon Seed in the Antipodes: Chinese-Australian Autobiographies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001). 3. See, for example, Manying Ip, Home Away from Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand (Auckland: New Women’s Press, 1990); Huping Ling, ‘A History of Chinese Female Students in the United States, 1880s–1990s’, Journal of American Ethnic History 16, no. 3 (1997), pp. 81–109; Huping Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain: A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998); Judy Yung, ‘Giving Voice to Chinese American Women’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 19, no. 3 (1998), pp. 130–56; and Judy Yung, Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

106 Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Migration and Mobility in White Australia

In recent decades, historians and other social researchers have made calls to utilize ‘research from below’ approaches in order to uncover the lived realities and diversity of experience of ‘subaltern’4 or ‘Other’ groups such as Chinese Australians.5 By placing a subaltern group at the centre of research and providing a space for their voices to be heard, researchers aim to allow previously silenced groups to be ‘the subjects of their own history’.6 Feminist researchers, in particular, have moved towards strategies that ensure colonialist and patriarchal tendencies are not perpetuated, including the provision of a space in which previously (or continually) silenced women (and men) can have their own voices heard.7 For example, within migration research in the discipline of geography, feminist geographers have increasingly placed marginalized women at the centre of research, and have included the voices of subaltern women in the telling of their own experiences. This has been particularly important as the gendered nature of migration and women’s positions and experiences in migration processes are increasingly considered.8 In keeping with postcolonial and feminist calls for more inclusive social research, in this chapter I draw upon qualitative material obtained from in-depth interviews with Chinese Australian women. While a re-examination of historical census data is a valuable means of reconsidering the twentieth-century presence and mobility of Chinese Australian women on a national scale (and is included in my discussion), interviews with Chinese Australian women provide alternative views from the official government record and provide nuanced and textured insights into individual lives during the White Australia policy era. Women’s voices are not used in this chapter to accompany recollections of men, or as a means to further uncover the experiences of their male counterparts—be they husbands, fathers, or brothers—but rather to examine individual women’s own lived experiences and those 4. For a definition of ‘subaltern’ see Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar, Women and the Politics of Place (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2005), pp. 2–3. 5. See Jennifer Cushman, ‘A “Colonial Casualty”: The Chinese Community in Australian Historiography’, Asian Studies Association of Australia Review 7, no. 3 (1984) and Henry Chan, ‘A Decade of Achievement and Future Directions in Research on the History of the Chinese in Australia’, in Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific: Proceedings of an International Public Conference Held at the Museum of Chinese Australian History, Melbourne, 8–10 October 1993, ed. Paul Macgregor (Melbourne: Chinese Museum, 1995), pp. 419–23. 6. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘A Small History of Subaltern Studies’, in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwartz and Sangeeta Ray (Carlton, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 472. 7. Sarah A. Radcliffe, ‘(Representing) Post-Colonial Women: Authority, Difference and Feminisms’, Area (1994), pp. 25–32; Louise Johnson, Placebound: Australian Feminist Geographies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 8. See for example, Brenda Yeoh and Shirlena Huang, ‘“Home” and “Away”: Foreign Domestic Workers and Negotiations of Diasporic Identity in Singapore’, Women’s Studies International Forum 23, no. 4 (2000), pp. 413–29; Jan Ryan, Chinese Women and the Global Village (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003); Louise Ryan, ‘Who Do You Think You Are? Irish Nurses Encountering Ethnicity and Constructing Identity in Britain’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 3 (2007), pp. 416–38; Isabel Dyck and Arlene McLaren, ‘Telling It Like It Is? Constructing Accounts of Settlement with Immigrant and Refugee Women in Canada’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 11, no. 4 (2004), pp. 513–34; Louise Ryan and Wendy Webster (eds), Gendering Migration: Masculinity, Femininity and Ethnicity in Post-War Britain (Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2008); and Gail Hopkins, ‘A Changing Sense of Somaliness: Somali Women in London and Toronto’, Gender, Place & Culture 17, no. 4 (2010), pp. 519–38.

Alanna Kamp 107

of their female forebears. By shifting the focus away from the authoritative frameworks and views of the dominant ‘White’ society and instead allowing previously ‘invisible’ Chinese Australian women a space to speak for themselves, hegemony is acknowledged and anti-elitist approaches are privileged. The voices I present in this chapter are excerpts from a series of in-depth semistructured interviews I conducted with nineteen Chinese Australian women who are resident in the greater Sydney region.9 The interviews were carried out over a period of one year (from April 2010 to April 2011), and the interview questions focused on information about personal background, family migration history, transnational linkages, continued cultural traditions, experiences of work/family life, experiences of racism and exclusion (or inclusion), and feelings of identity and belonging in the White Australia policy period. Given the length of the White Australia period and the diasporic history of Chinese immigration and settlement, the basic criterion for interview participation was quite broad. Interview participants simply had to be women who identify as being ‘Chinese’ and who were resident in Australia before 1973 (whether Australian-born or migrant). Interview participants could be ‘full’ or ‘mixed’ Chinese. Potential participants were recruited at various Chinese Australian community events and via cooperative relationships with Chinese Australian community organizations (such as the Chinese Heritage Association of Australia, the Chinese Women’s Association, and various clan and native place associations). Potential participants were also recruited via word of mouth. This dual recruitment strategy aimed to diversify the sample by including women who were not necessarily active in the Sydney Chinese community. Interview participants’ year of birth ranged from around 1920 to 1952. As such, participants were between fifty-seven years of age and approximately eighty years of age at the time of interviewing. In addition, six of the interview participants were foreign-born, with the remaining thirteen being Australian-born. Of the six migrant participants, three were born in Hong Kong, two in mainland China, and one in New Zealand. All migrant participants arrived in the post-war period—between 1947 and 1971. Australian-born participants included second- and third-generation Australians, with some having forebears (male and female) who migrated to Australia as early as the 1860s. Their places of birth (including Sydney, towns in rural New South Wales and Queensland, and Thursday Island) give some indication of the geographical reach of their (and their families’) previous locations in Australia. While this group of participants is relatively diverse, the limitations of this sample must be acknowledged. Women who migrated in the first half of the twentieth century are under-represented as no females who migrated in the pre-war period were interviewed, and only one participant, Patricia,10 migrated before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Qualitative information 9. Narrowing my sample by geographical location was necessary because of time and funding restrictions. Limiting recruitment to Sydney was an obvious choice given its long history of Chinese settlement. 10. Participants’ names are used with consent. Where consent was not granted, pseudonyms have been used.

108 Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Migration and Mobility in White Australia

regarding the migrations of older-generation women was obtained in the form of Australian-born participants recalling the migration stories of their mother or grandmothers. This chapter focuses on interviewee recollections of their own migration and the migration histories of their female forebears in Australia. I illustrate that, when combined with census data, their stories paint a picture of Chinese Australian female presence and international mobility in the White Australia policy period. This history of movement challenges general assumptions of female immobility in global migration patterns and understandings of female Chinese migration. By combining birthplace information recorded in the censuses and interview participants’ accounts of their migration history—as children, migrant wives, or students—I uncover various reasons and motivations for this movement across international boundaries and highlight the diversity of the migration experience. This chapter begins with an overview of Chinese migrations to Australia in the White Australia policy era, with particular focus on the restrictions of Chinese women’s movements at this time. Drawing upon government statistics (in the form of census birthplace records), I then go on to provide quantitative evidence of Chinese Australian female international mobility as a contextual basis to analyze women’s own accounts of their migration histories. From there, I move on to present the women’s voices: first, accounts of mobility as migrant wives (either their own experiences in this position or that of their mother/grandmothers); and then, as foreign-born participants’ accounts of migrating to Australia as students. I analyze these accounts with regard to patriarchal Confucian ideals and dominant understandings of gendered migration. Last, I shift attention to the Australian-born interview participants to discuss their diverse experiences of international mobility as told in their own words.

Australian Immigration Law and the Entry and Residence of Chinese Females In 1901 ‘survivalist anxiety’ about Australia’s geographical proximity to ‘land hungry’11 Asia culminated in the Immigration Restriction Act 1901—one of the first pieces of legislation to be passed by the newly federated nation and the cornerstone of the White Australia policy.12 Via the Dictation Test the Act unified colonial attempts to exclude Chinese (and other ‘coloured races’) from entering the nation and thus aimed to prevent an ‘invasion’ from the ‘East’.13 In the two decades after 11. David Walker, ‘Australia’s Asian Futures’, in Australia’s History: Themes and Debates, ed. Martyn Lyons and Penny Russell (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005), p. 71. 12. A. T. Yarwood, Attitudes to Non-European Immigration (Sydney: Cassell, 1968), pp. 80–81; Herbert I. London, Non-white Immigration and the ‘White Australia’ Policy (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1970), p. 9. 13. Catriona Elder, ‘Invaders, Illegals and Aliens: Imagining Exclusion in a White Australia’, Law Text Culture 7 (2003), pp. 221–50.

Alanna Kamp 109

the passing of the Act, departures of Chinese immigrants exceeded arrivals almost every year, so that at the close of the 1930s there were no more than 15,000 Chinese resident on the continent—down from almost 30,000 in 1901.14 In its original and later amended forms, the Immigration Restriction Act remained the fundamental means of fulfilling the immigration objectives of the White Australia policy until its abandonment by the Whitlam Labor government in the early 1970s.15 It must be noted that the objectives of the White Australia policy, as operationalized by the Immigration Restriction Act, among other articles of legislation, were never fully realized—the ongoing presence of non-European immigrants and Indigenous Australian populations throughout the period continued to challenge the ‘fantasy’ of White Australia.16 In its initial form, the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 did permit the entry of wives and minor children of Chinese men resident in Australia. However, two years after its inception, the clause concerning the entry of wives and dependents was suspended and finally repealed in 1905.17 Thus, despite the fact that Chinese families were more willing to allow women, particularly those who were married, to emigrate owing to cultural and social changes in Republican China in the 1920s and 1930s, Australian immigration law continued to restrict female Chinese presence in the nation.18 These restrictions on the entry of Chinese wives have reinforced general assertions that Chinese women were absent from Australia throughout the White Australia period. There were, however, means by which Chinese females were able to enter Australia in the first half of the twentieth century. The wives and children of wellestablished, respectable merchants and clergymen were permitted temporary entry (usually six months) with extensions often granted and temporary permits, in some cases, being converted into permanent ones.19 Sponsored students were also allowed temporary entry on Chinese passports.20 Illegal dealings were another possible avenue for entry. Cases have been noted of corrupt officials supplying false identities that allowed entry into Australia, but more common was the trade in identities 14. C. Y. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975); John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007). 15. Anthony Palfreeman, The Administration of the White Australia Policy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967); Sean Brawley, The White Peril: Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australasia and North America, 1919–78 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995); Walker, ‘Asian Futures’. 16. Elder, ‘Invaders, Illegals and Aliens’, p. 223; Laura Madokoro, Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 104. 17. Choi, Chinese Migration, p. 39. 18. Choi, Chinese Migration; Morag Loh, ‘Celebrating Survival—An Overview, 1856–1986’, in Survival and Celebration: An Insight into the Lives of Chinese Immigrant Women, European Women Married to Chinese and Their Female Children in Australia from 1856–1986, ed. Morag Loh and Christine Ramsay (Melbourne: self-published, 1986), pp. 1–10. 19. Kate Bagnall, ‘Finding Chinese Family Connections in the National Archives’, National Archives of Australia, https://web.archive.org/web/20170201010918/http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/publications/papers-andpodcasts/family-history/chinese-family-connections.aspx. 20. Mei-Fen Kuo and John Fitzgerald, ‘Chinese Students in White Australia: State, Community, and Individual Responses to the Student Visa Program, 1920–25’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 2 (2016), pp. 259–77.

110 Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Migration and Mobility in White Australia

facilitated by brokers connected to companies with Chinese and Australian branches.21 It was through such connections that the purchase of birth and naturalization certificates or Certificates Exempting from the Dictation Test (CEDTs) of deceased Australian-born Chinese or non-returning migrants was made possible.22 It must also be remembered that females who had entered Australia before 1901 would have been considered ‘domiciled’, particularly those married to men who were longterm residents or naturalized British subjects; such women were free to remain in Australia throughout the White Australia policy period. There were also a growing number of Australian-born Chinese females who were a product of migrant Chinese parents, Australian-born Chinese parents or Anglo-Chinese relationships and who were, by legal right, British subjects or, later, Australian citizens. While the White Australia policy was still formally in operation until 1973, the post-war abandonment of many overtly racist policies and practices saw gradual changes in the Australian government’s views of Chinese immigration and, in particular, the entry of females. In 1950 the Colombo Plan was introduced and allowed the large-scale entry of assisted female (and male) tertiary students from the Asian region—most of whom were of ethnic Chinese origin.23 From the late 1950s, immigration legislation pertaining to the entry and settlement of non-Europeans was also relaxed and had major implications on Chinese entries. For example, in reaction to non-European war refugees and displaced persons who had arrived in Australia, provisions for some non-Europeans already in Australia to remain on humanitarian grounds were made.24 Additionally, ‘distinguished and highly qualified non-Europeans [were] admitted for indefinite stay’, and ‘the conditions for the admission of persons of mixed descent [were] clarified and eased’.25 There were also changes to naturalization laws. Chinese who had been resident in Australia for fifteen years or more were now able to apply for naturalization. Furthermore, Chinese spouses of Australian citizens were able to apply for naturalization (on the same basis as European spouses), and naturalized Chinese were able to bring their families to Australia.26 21. Michael Williams, Chinese Settlement in NSW: A Thematic History / A Report for the NSW Heritage Office (Parramatta: NSW Heritage Office, 1999). See also Barry McGowan, ‘Transnational Lives: Colonial Immigration Restrictions and the White Australia Policy in the Riverina District of New South Wales, 1860– 1960’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies 6 (2013), pp. 45–63 for a discussion of the entry of Florrie Ching and Esther Doon using Australian birth certificates that were potentially not their own. 22. A phenomenon discussed at length in Kate Bagnall, ‘Anglo-Chinese and the Politics of Overseas Travel from New South Wales, 1898 to 1925’, in Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, ed. Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (Leiden: Brill 2015), pp. 203–39; and briefly noted in Paul Macgregor, ‘Dreams of Jade and Gold: Chinese Families in Australia’s History’, in Australian Family: Images and Essays, ed. Anna Epstein (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1998), and Williams, Chinese Settlement, p. 32. 23. Williams, Chinese Settlement. 24. Although it has been argued that government efforts to deport wartime refugees were strident and it was only a change in government that saved wartime evacuees and refugees from deportation. See Madokoro, Elusive Refuge, p. 105. 25. London, Non-white Immigration, p. 26. 26. London, Non-white Immigration, p. 26.; see also Ryan, Chinese Women, p. 41.

Alanna Kamp 111

Statistical Evidence of International Migration and Mobility The decline of the Chinese population in Australia in the decades after the introduction of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 has been well documented in the literature.27 Census statistics collected between 1901 and 1971 of so-called ‘full’ Chinese indicate that the Chinese population decreased from 29,627 Chinese in 1901 to 9,144 in 1947. In the post-war period, however, calls to abandon discriminatory legislation, moves towards more open immigration policy and ‘unfavourable conditions’28 in China saw the quick recovery of the Chinese Australian population, with 20,382 ‘full’ Chinese documented in the 1961 census. Women have often been rendered absent in considerations of the sex ratio of the Chinese Australian population, which seemingly supports the idea of the Chinese ‘bachelor society’. However, as illustrated in Table 5.1 (see p. 112), despite the declining Chinese Australian population as a whole between 1901 and 1947, the number of ‘full’ Chinese females steadily increased. In 1901 females numbered 474 (1.6 percent) compared to 29,153 males. By 1947 the female population had increased to 2,550 (27.9 percent), and in 1961 had reached 6,145—almost one-third of the total Chinese population. More information can be uncovered when we consider the birthplace of those Chinese Australian females present in Australia on census nights during the White Australia period. As illustrated in Table 5.2 (see p. 113), the majority of the ‘mixed’ Chinese female population were Australian-born—99.1 percent (n: 1488) in 1921 and 80 percent (n: 1390) by 1961. This reflects the many unions between Chinese and White Australians in the colonial and White Australia period, as noted by Kate Bagnall.29 In the period before World War II the majority of ‘full’ Chinese females were also Australian-born. For example, in 1911, 632 of the 892 (70.9 percent) ‘full’ Chinese females were Australian-born, and by 1933 this increased to 1,316 of 1,535 (85.7 percent). Given that the number of foreign-born ‘full’ Chinese population decreased in that same period (from 260 individuals in 1911 to 219 in 1933), as Christine Inglis and C. Y. Choi have argued, we could speculate that the overall

27. See, for example, Arthur Huck, The Chinese in Australia (Croydon, Victoria: Longmans, 1968); Inglis, ‘Chinese in Australia’, International Migration Review 6, no. 3 (1972), pp. 266–81; Choi, Chinese Migration; Williams, Chinese Settlement; and Paul Jones, Chinese-Australian Journeys: Records on Travel, Migration and Settlement (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, 2005). 28. For example, after the Communist takeover and establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Land Reform Act 1950–1953 not only eliminated large land ownership but confiscated land owned by overseas Chinese families. These factors weakened family lineage systems and made the desirability of return migration minimal. Return migration itself was made difficult due to stricter immigration–emigration controls; see Choi, Chinese Migration, p. 57. 29. Kate Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land: An Exploration of the Lives of White Women Who Partnered Chinese Men and Their Children in Southern Australia, 1855–1915’ (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2006); Kate Bagnall, ‘Rewriting the History of Chinese Families in Nineteenth-Century Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (2011), pp. 62–77.

112 Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Migration and Mobility in White Australia Table 5.1:  ‘Full Chinese’ and ‘mixed Chinese’ in Australia, 1901–1971i Year

Full Chinese (%)

1901 1911 1921 1933 1947 1954 1961 1966

ii

Mixed Chinese (%)

Total (%)

Male

Female

Total

Male

Female

Total

Male

Female

Total

29 153

474

29 627

1 556

1 534

3 090

30 709

2 008

32 717

(98.4)

(1.6)

(100)

(50.4)

(49.6)

(100)

(93.9)

(6.1)

(100)

21 856

897

22 753

1 518

1 501

3 019

23 374

2 398

25 772

(96.1)

(3.9)

(100)

(50.3)

(49.7)

(100)

(90.7)

(9.3)

(100)

16 011

1 146

17 157

1 891

1 778

3 655

17 902

2 924

20 826

(93.3)

(6.7)

(100)

(51.4)

(48.6)

(100)

(86.0)

(14.0

(100)

9 311

1 535

10 846

1 901

1 602

3 503

11 212

3 137

14 349

(85.8)

(14.2)

(100)

(54.3)

(45.7)

(100)

(78.1)

(21.9)

(100)

6 594

2 550

9 144

1 599

1 351

2 950

8 193

3 901

12 094

(72.1)

(27.9)

(100)

(54.2)

(45.8)

(100)

(67.7)

(32.3)

(100)

9 150

3 728

12 878

1 404

1 276

2 680

10 554

5 004

15 558

(71.1)

(28.9)

(100)

(52.4)

(47.6)

(100)

(67.8)

(32.2)

(100)

14 237

6 145

20 382

1 648

1 538

3 186

15 885

7 683

23 568

(69.9)

(30.1)

(100)

(51.7)

(48.3)

(100)

(67.4)

(32.6)

(100)

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

17 131

9 592

26 723

(64.1)

(35.9)

(100)

Source: C. Y. Choi, Chinese Migration, and Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia (Melbourne/Canberra: 1917, 1927, 1940, 1952, 1962, 1965, 1971). Notes: i. For the years 1901 to 1954, figures for ‘full Chinese’ have been appropriated from the category ‘full-blood Chinese’, and ‘mixed Chinese’ from the category ‘halfcaste Chinese’, as defined by the Commonwealth (later Australian) Bureau of Statistics. ii. 1966 census data is not available for the subcategories ‘full Chinese’ and ‘mixed Chinese’.

Alanna Kamp 113 Table 5.2:  Australian-born and foreign-born Chinese females in Australia, 1911–1971 Year

Full Chinese Australian- Foreignborn born (%) (%)

1911 1921 1933 1947 1954 1961

1966

ii

Mixed Chinese

Total i

Total full Australian- Foreign- Total mixed Chinese born born Chinese (%) (%) (%) (%)

632

260

892

1 488

8

1 496

(70.9)

(29.1)

(100)

(99.5)

(0.5)

(100)

906

237

1 143

1 755

16

1 771

(79.3)

(20.7)

(100)

(99.1)

(0.9)

(100)

1 316

219

1 535

1 588

14

1 602

(85.7)

(14.3)

(100)

(99.1)

(0.9)

(100)

1 804

746

2 550

1 296

55

1 351

(70.7)

(29.3)

(100)

(95.9)

(4.1)

(100)

2 222

1 506

3 728

1 199

77

1 276

(59.6)

(40.4)

(100)

(94)

(6)

(100)

2 600

3 545

6 145

1 390

148

1 538

(42.3)

(57.6)

(100)

(90.4)

(9.6)

(100)

2 388 2 914 3 137 3 901 5 004 7 683

Australian-born

Foreign-born

4 463

5 129

9 592

(46.5)

(53.5)

(100)

Source: Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Census (1917, 1927, 1940, 1952, 1962, 1965, 1971). Notes: i. The number of individuals that did not specify their place of birth in the censuses has not been included in this table. Discrepancies in ‘Totals’ therefore occur between Table 5.1 and Table 5.2. ii. 1966 census data is not available for the sub-categories ‘Full Chinese’ and ‘Mixed Chinese’.

114 Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Migration and Mobility in White Australia

increase in the Chinese female population between 1911 and 1933 was primarily attributed to the birth of Australian-born females rather than immigration.30 The census statistics presented in Table 5.2 also indicate that between 1933 and 1947, the ‘full’ Chinese female population increased by 1,015 individuals with an increase of 527 ‘full’ Chinese foreign-born females and an increase of 488 ‘full’ Chinese Australian-born females. Thus, for the first time since 1911, Australia not only experienced a net gain of foreign-born females but a gain that marginally outnumbered the increase of the Australian-born cohort. In the post-war decades that followed, the impact of immigration on the female population was even greater. Between 1954 and 1961, the number of Australian-born ‘full’ Chinese females increased by 378. In comparison, the foreign-born ‘full’ Chinese population increased by 2039. Unlike the pre-war years, we can assume from this information that the large increases in the ‘full’ Chinese female population from 1954 was primarily owing to the migration of foreign-born females. The presence and diversity of the female Chinese Australian population must therefore be acknowledged. Census reports for the years between 1911 and 1961 documented the places of birth of female Chinese—both ‘full’ and ‘mixed’. In these reports, at least thirtythree countries besides Australia were represented as the places of birth of female Chinese Australians (Table 5.3, see p. 115). These included countries in Australasia (such as New Zealand and New Guinea), Asia (such as China and Southeast Asian countries commonly associated with the Chinese diaspora, particularly Malaya, as well as India and Arabia), the Americas (including the United States and British West Indies), Polynesia, Africa, and Europe (including England, Norway, Italy, and the USSR). The breadth of countries documented in the censuses indicates a diversity of migrant ‘Chinese’ females present in Australia in the period. While we cannot know when using this data if birthplaces were indeed places of migrant departure, by tracking changes in birthplace over time we can make tentative connections between country of birth and context of migration. For example, the position of Hong Kong as a British colony and migrant node is most likely reflected in the consistent presence of Hong Kong–born females between 1911 and 1954. The large number of China-born females counted in the 1954 census is perhaps associated with the mass emigration of mainland Chinese during the Chinese civil war and Communist takeover of China in 1949. While India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Indonesia were member countries of the Colombo Plan in 1954 (Malaysia and Singapore entering agreements in 1957 and 1966, respectively), it is difficult to make connections between the Colombo Plan and female immigration from 1954 birthplace statistics. Given the presence of foreign-born females in White Australia and the flows of Chinese females in and out of the country between 1914 and 1965, interesting and important questions emerge regarding the nature of mobility and migrations of 30. Inglis, ‘Chinese in Australia’ and Choi, Chinese Migration.

Alanna Kamp 115 Table 5.3:  Country of birth of foreign-born Chinese Australian females, 1911–1961 Country of birth

1911

1947

1954

1961

AUSTRALASIA New Zealand New Guinea Papua Unspecified

1 – – –

6 61 – –

7 97 5 –

– – – 215

EUROPE England Ireland France Germany Norway Italy USSR Unspecified

2 – – – – – – –

1 1 – 2 – – – –

3 – 1 1 1 1 3 –

– – – – – – – 14

– 12 – 2 – 250 – – – – – – – – – –

29 95 – 26 3 532 1 2 1 2 – 3 – – 3 –

122 246 52 – – 952 – – 2 28 – – 1 1 21 –

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – 3 359

AMERICAS USA British West Indies Other Unspecified

1 – – –

1 1 3 –

5 2 – –

– – – 15

AFRICA Unspecified

–

–

–

4

POLYNESIA Fiji Solomon Islands New Caledonia New Hebrides Other Unspecified

– – – – – –

2 11 3 2 – –

13 – 2 4 13 –

– – – – – 86

ASIA Malaya Hong Kong Singapore Straits settlements Other British possessions China Japan Timor Philippines Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) Arabia India Ceylon (Sri Lanka) Other Unspecified

UNSPECIFIED

10

–

–

–

Total

278

801

1 583

3 693

Source:  Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Census (1917, 1952, 1962, 1965).

116 Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Migration and Mobility in White Australia

Chinese women to Australia. For example, did entries into the nation reflect temporary settlements? Did the experiences of Chinese women who migrated to Australia follow dominant understandings of wives following their husbands abroad? Or did their movements challenge patriarchal power structures within family systems? Census and migration data are limited in their ability to give insight into these questions as motivations and reasons for migration have not been officially documented. As I will detail below, first-hand accounts shine some light on the nature of female Chinese mobility in the White Australia period and the complexity of the female migrant experience.

Migrant Wives Like several of the New Zealand Chinese women interviewed by Manying Ip for Home Away from Home,31 it was common for mothers or grandmothers of Australianborn Chinese to have arrived in Australia as migrant wives. For example, in her autobiographical recollections at the ‘Survival and Celebration’ seminar, Irene Moss described two generations of women in her family who migrated to Australia from China in the position of dependant wife. First, Irene’s paternal grandmother came to Australia in the nineteenth century with her husband ‘to find gold’.32 Second, Irene’s father, who was subsequently born in Australia, ‘returned to Hong Kong to make his fortune and to marry a Chinese woman’.33 Many years after his return to Australia, that woman, Irene’s mother, moved to Australia with her four children to reunite with her husband. Similar to the migration of Irene Moss’ paternal grandmother and mother, Australian-born interview participants’ mothers had commonly migrated to Australia in the period before World War II as dependants—being married in China and then migrating to Australia with their husbands, or following them later. Nancy’s and Stella’s family histories provide pertinent illustrations of this type of movement: [Dad] never actually lived in China. He commuted. He would come to Sydney to work and then go back to visit and that’s how he met Mum. And after they were married she went to live with his family . . . In one of his trips back to her, she pleaded with him to take her to Australia with him. . . . So I think it was about 1932. (Nancy) . . . My grandmother came out to be the concubine for a general merchant and pearl dealer and she had no background material of her own. . . . She and some other 31. Ip, Home Away from Home. 32. Irene Moss, ‘Chinese or Australian? Growing Up Chinese in a Bicultural Twilight Zone from the 1950s On’, in Survival and Celebration: An Insight into the Lives of Chinese Immigrant Women, European Women Married to Chinese and Their Female Children in Australian from 1856–1986, ed. Morag Loh and Christine Ramsay (Melbourne: self-published, 1986), p. 12. 33. Moss, ‘Chinese or Australian?’.

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Unlike Nancy and Stella, Patricia was not Australian-born but a migrant herself, having arrived in Surry Hills, Sydney, with her family at the age of six in 1947 after the end of World War II and just before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Patricia’s father had arrived years earlier, being sponsored by his brotherin-law to help in their restaurant, the Nanking Café in Campbell Street. This type of sponsored migration of Chinese men by Chinese Australian entrepreneurs (to whom they were often connected by kinship, village, or clan ties) was common in the White Australia policy period, particularly after legislation reforms in 1934.34 According to Patricia, the earlier migration of her father was also influenced by the patriarchal Confucian family system. She explained: In those days, being the eldest son, if you had a job, you had to help the family. So of course his father had other sons and daughters and needed help as the business back home wasn’t doing well. (Patricia)

It seems that Patricia’s father’s migration was first and foremost rooted in his sense of Confucian ‘family duty’ and need to financially support his family in China—a common practice among Chinese men in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Patricia went on to explain that once in Australia, ‘He missed the family, so we came out. That’s why I came.’ After a long and strenuous boat trip from Dongguan in Guangdong Province to Australia, Patricia’s family settled in a rented house in inner-city Sydney—a ‘big house’ that Patricia described as ‘wonderful compared to what I lived in back in China’. Thus, while Patricia’s migration story reveals the entry of female Chinese into White Australia, Patricia and her mother’s movement was dependent on Patricia’s father—Patricia was positioned as a dependant child while her mother, having stayed in China to care for the family, later followed her husband. In this way, Patricia’s migration story closely follows gendered understandings of migration and parallels the migration experiences of many overseas Chinese women in other ‘Gold Mountain’ countries.35 Often precariously positioned as temporary entrants, relaxations to naturalization and immigration restrictions after 1956 allowed many of these migrant wives to settle permanently in Australia. For example, Eileen’s mother, Fong See Lee Yan (née Wai Hing), migrated from Canton to Australia in the early decades of the twentieth century as the wife of a Chinese herbalist. After her first husband’s death, she married Eileen’s Australian-born father, Frederick Lee Yan, in 1945. Despite this marriage, Eileen’s mother lived under the continual threat of deportation until her naturalization in the early 1960s. Eileen recalled: 34. Choi, Chinese Migration, p. 41. 35. See for example, Ip, Home Away from Home and Huping Ling, ‘Family and Marriage of Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Chinese Immigrant Women’, Journal of American Ethnic History 19, no. 2 (2000), pp. 43–63.

118 Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Migration and Mobility in White Australia Mum was naturalized on the 1st of March 1963. Then that gave her the right to stay. That’s what I couldn’t understand, because Dad being born here and he’s got papers to say he’s an Aussie. . . . I thought, ‘Well how come Dad being an Aussie didn’t give Mum the right to stay?’ They said no. So back in those days they were still going to send my mother back to China, even though she married an Australian-born Chinese. (Eileen)

Australian-born Doreen similarly recalled the circumstances that allowed her Chinese mother to stay in Australia despite strict immigration restrictions. Remaining in China as the second wife of a sojourning market gardener, Doreen’s mother managed to obtain a one-year temporary entry visa for herself and her firstborn child, Doreen’s elder brother, to reunite with her husband in Australia in the late 1930s: So after the child was born, my mother decided that she would come and visit my father because that was all the White Australia policy allowed them. Again, she had bought somebody’s papers because those immigration documents put her about ten years older than what she actually is. So then, she comes out here, becomes pregnant with me, World War II Pacific action flares up, and she can’t get back to China. (Doreen)

Given the unstable political situation and the outbreak of civil war in China after World War II, Doreen’s father, who had always thought he and his family would return to China, decided that ‘there was a better life for his children here’ and consequently gave up his plight to return ‘home’. In Doreen’s memory, however, this time was always marked by uncertainty as her parents were unable to be naturalized: Well, I mean it was very difficult because I can remember, as I said, my mother came out here on just obviously a temporary entry and she had to stay because she couldn’t get back to China, and having to go into immigration every year to get the extension, and even my father had to do that but my mother more so because she was supposed to be on a more temporary status than what my father was. So there was a period where they kept being frightened they would be forced to return to China. (Doreen)

Despite the uncertain situation Doreen’s family found themselves in as a consequence of immigration restrictions, their experiences highlight an important form of agency that much of the existing literature has overlooked. First, Doreen’s mother ‘decided’ that she would visit her husband in Australia. This active decision challenges dominant assumptions of women as passive migrants. Second, by purchasing documents and claiming another identity, Doreen’s mother ‘worked the system’ and found a weakness in the restrictive immigration legislation, an initiative that was not uncommon. It was through this scheme that she was able to enter Australia and, with changes to naturalization legislation in the 1950s, eventually become an Australian citizen along with her husband and son (who was born in China) in 1958–1959. In this way, Doreen’s mother’s experience indicates that some Chinese

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women occupied more empowered positions in the migration process—being able to negotiate and work around immigration restrictions rather than being passive victims of discriminatory policy. Two of the interview participants—Lily and Daphne—were themselves ‘migrant wives’; however, their experiences, as recalled in their own words, did not follow the traditional or expected route of passive or dependant housewife following their migrant husband. For example, Lily was the most recent arrival of the six migrant participants, having arrived in Australia from Hong Kong with her husband and children at the age of thirty-two in 1971. Both Lily and her husband wished to leave Hong Kong because of the impacts of the Cultural Revolution in China and the possibility of a better life and education for their children. She explained: I was in Hong Kong working at the Hong Kong University Library then. Even Hong Kong was affected [by the Cultural Revolution in China], and so we were thinking of leaving Hong Kong, not just because of the political situation but also my husband and I felt that Hong Kong was not an ideal place to raise children because, you know, of the educational system and the crowded sort of living quarters. (Lily)

On her and her family’s arrival in Sydney, Lily quickly obtained professional employment with the help of her master’s degree and specialized training: I actually got two offers when I started to look for jobs: one is just librarian and the other one was the Oriental Librarian at the University of Sydney. They had a special collection of Chinese and Japanese [texts] and they needed someone with library qualifications as well as, you know, able to read Chinese, so I fitted in.

Lily’s recollections indicated that she was not positioned as a passive wife following her husband abroad but was actively involved in the migration process—from the initial decision to migrate to the maintenance of the economic stability of her family in their new home. This position challenged Confucian expectations of the submissive wife and mother and her experiences of mobility and contribution to Australia’s cultural diversity deviate from male-oriented understandings of migration as well as androcentric (and ethnocentric) assumptions of Australian national development. Indicating further diversity of female migrant experience in the post-war period, New Zealand–born Daphne migrated to Australia from New Zealand in 1964 at the age of twenty-five. Her move across the Tasman Sea was a result of her marriage to a Chinese Australian resident in Sydney: ‘I got married and then came here because my first husband was from here’. Unlike Lily, who seemed to have quite a problem-free entry into Australia, Daphne had first-hand experience of the discriminatory practices associated with Australian immigration policy at the time. She recalled the measures she had to go to in order to be permitted into the country in 1964 despite her New Zealand citizenship:

120 Chinese Australian Women’s Experiences of Migration and Mobility in White Australia Would you believe, the day I was to fly out of Wellington to come to Australia I got a call from the airline to say, ‘Oh, look we’ve just realised you need a visa.’ And I said, ‘Oh, well . . . I checked. I didn’t need one; I’m on a New Zealand passport.’ . . . This is White Australia policy, right? . . . I’d travelled . . . been back to China and everything, done all these things and never ever had it hit me, but it really hit me when I came. . . . Anyhow, I needed a visa and I only found out the reason I needed the visa was because I was Chinese. (Daphne)

Daphne’s experiences of the Australian immigration system can be read as reflecting the contested nature of her right to ‘belong’ in New Zealand as well as Australia on account of her ‘Chineseness’. Daphne was not alone in experiencing this type of discrimination. In her autobiography, A Stranger No More, Hong Kong–born Jean Gittins described the way in which the ‘fifty percent of Asian blood’ in her veins meant that her ‘irregular entry’ into Australia was reported to the Immigration Department and she was required to report to them at regular intervals. Such an encounter with an immigration official on her landing in Australia from Hong Kong made her ‘feel like a common criminal on parole’, despite the fact that she held a British passport all her life.36

Student Migration While traditional ‘Chinese’ or ‘Confucian’ culture does not encourage the educational achievement of female members of the family who, by virtue of their sex, should ‘defer to their husbands in decision-making, to put their husbands’ career development ahead of their own needs, to be responsible for all the household chores, to nurture and care for their children and to look after elderly parents’,37 research is slowly emerging that indicates that such ideologies were not evenly or strictly adhered to in the post–World War II period as young Chinese females (and males) emigrated to the ‘West’ for educational purposes.38 Unfortunately, however, very little is known of the female Chinese students who arrived in Australia in this period under exemptions from immigration restrictions.39 In his early demographic study, Arthur Huck indicated that one-third of the Chinese Australian population in 1964 were students—the majority private students rather than students sponsored under the Colombo Plan or other government schemes.40 First-hand accounts provided by Chinese Australian women 36. Jean Gittins, A Stranger No More (Hong Kong: self-published, 1987), pp. 113–14. 37. Ryan, Chinese Women, p. 61. 38. See for example, Ling, ‘Chinese Female Students’. 39. See Choi, Chinese Migration for an outline of changes to student entry provisions, and Kuo and Fitzgerald, ‘Chinese Students’. For further first-hand accounts of female student migration see Christine Ramsay, ‘Mostly Celebration—A Student Who Stayed’, in Survival and Celebration: An Insight into the Lives of Chinese Immigrant Women, European Women Married to Chinese and Their Female Children in Australia from 1856–1986, ed. Morag Loh and Christine Ramsay (Melbourne: self-published, 1986), pp. 29–33; and Giese, Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons, pp. 29, 153–55. 40. Huck, Chinese in Australia, p. 46.

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indicate that females were part of this post-war privately funded student cohort. For example, in her presentation at the ‘Survival and Celebration’ seminar, Christine Ramsay recalled her migration from Singapore to Australia in 1958 at the age of seventeen to complete her matriculation at Adelaide High School and enter Adelaide University. In her recollections, she described the movement as a usual part of her socio-economic and cultural context: ‘It was the done thing for people of that socioeconomic group to send their children to overseas universities. . . . To the Chinese, right across the board, scholastic achievement is of great importance.’41 After her studies, Christine returned to Singapore and spent time in London and the United States with her Anglo-Australian husband. In 1967 Christine was able to re-enter Australia owing to her marital status in what she remembers as a context of ‘strict immigration restrictions for Asians’.42 Thus, experiencing migration as a student and a wife, Christine describes herself as ‘a student who stayed’.43 In a similar way, Moni Lai Storz moved to Melbourne from Malaysia in the 1960s as a young adult to attend university. Her recollections were documented by Diana Giese in Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons and tell of her arrival in Melbourne in 1963, her experiences of identity negotiation at Monash University, and subsequent intercultural experiences.44 Alongside these published first-hand accounts, the recollections of Helen, Sandy, and Mary—interview participants in this project who were students who arrived in Australia from Hong Kong in the 1960s—are extremely valuable. Helen left Hong Kong in 1961 to join her brother and complete her high school education in Australia before going on to university study. While both her parents highly valued education for all their children, boys and girls, the decision for Helen to come to Australia was made by her mother: She [Mother] was the one who actually encouraged me at that time, not only to finish high school—she didn’t finish high school herself—but go to university if I can because she said, ‘You’ll have nothing, because without education you wouldn’t climb the ladder at all, your ability will be stagnated.’ (Helen)

Helen successfully completed her high school education in Australia and went on to obtain two university degrees in Arts and Law before becoming a practising lawyer and member of parliament. Helen’s educational and professional achievements, her parents’ pro-education stance, and her mother’s active role in the migration decision-making process are pertinent as they challenged patriarchal Confucian ideologies characteristic of ‘traditional’ Chinese family structures.

41. Ramsay, ‘Mostly Celebration’, p. 29. 42. Ramsay, ‘Mostly Celebration’, p. 32. 43. Ramsay, ‘Mostly Celebration’, p. 29. 44. Giese, Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons.

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In a similar way, Sandy arrived in 1962 to join her sister and complete her high school education in Melbourne. She described her position as a foreign student as a privilege: I came as a student, so I was very lucky. . . . I started my leaving certificate, which is year ten .  .  . year eleven, sorry. And then I did year twelve, which was called matriculation in those days, and then I went and studied at university. . . . After that, I went and did a Diploma of Mathematics at RMIT. (Sandy)

While Sandy and Helen arrived in Australia during their later years of high school, Mary left Hong Kong in 1967 with her half-sister at age fourteen to restart her high school education at a boarding school in Maitland, New South Wales. Unlike Helen and Sandy, Mary did not view her arrival in Australia as a student in a positive light. She explained: I didn’t want to leave Hong Kong. I had friends; I was starting to do well at school. I had a very unhappy childhood and didn’t do well at school to start off with. . . . But by the time I started high school [in Hong Kong] I was happier, having more friends, doing well at school. . . . So I didn’t want to come here. (Mary)

While their experiences as foreign students differed in many ways, as dependant children or adolescents at the time of migration, the decision for Helen, Sandy, and Mary to move to Australia was similarly made by their parents. In addition, as noted above, in all three cases the participants did not settle in Australia alone but were accompanied by or were reunited with siblings in Australia. These experiences shed some light on the female Chinese student experience in post-war Australia.

Mobility of Australian-Born Women Interviews with Chinese Australian women also indicated that foreign-born females were not the only females who were internationally mobile. The Australianborn mothers of Marina and Stella travelled to and from Hong Kong or China on multiple occasions. Marina’s mother, Ruby Wong Chee, was born in Sydney to an English mother and Chinese father and, after being adopted into a Chinese family and spending some time in Glen Innes, New South Wales, was sent to China, where she later married a Chinese Australian, Harry Fay. Marina explained: He married my mother in 1916. He had to go to China and I think they married in Zhongshan somewhere, in the Canton area. Then they came back to Australia, and they came on the boat three months—because she’d had a bit of smallpox before she’d arrived—so when they got here they had to go to the quarantine station for so many months, I suppose. Then they went straight to Inverell, and they lived on top of the shop.

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Therefore, as explained by oral historian Janis Wilton, although Ruby Wong Chee and Harry Fay travelled to China to marry, their future was in Australia.45 Stella’s Australian-born mother was also sent back ‘home’ to be married: [My mother] didn’t get married until she was about twenty-one and they decided that she was getting really old, so they arranged for her to go to Hong Kong and marry a friend’s son, which she did. (Stella)

Unlike Ruby Fay, however, Stella’s mother returned to Australia alone: ‘She left him to come back to Thursday Island to have me after her first baby died.’ Stella’s mother also made an additional two trips back to Hong Kong, the first time to search for her estranged husband—‘When she went back to find him, my father, he was gone and she never found out where he went to’—and the second time to obtain medical treatment for her son—‘When she met another man and had my first half-brother, she went back to Hong Kong with him because he was sick and he wanted some traditional Chinese medicine.’ Historian Manying Ip has argued that the repatriation of young overseas Chinese females to China was quite a common experience in the early decades of the twentieth century.46 While boys were sent back to China to receive a ‘proper Chinese education’, girls were sent ‘home’ to find ‘proper marriage partners’,47 as was the case for Marina’s and Stella’s mothers. Many of the interview participants explained that marriage to a non-Chinese was totally discouraged by parents. As Ina recalled, ‘I remember most of our parents would say, “Marry a Chinese. Don’t marry an Australian.” ’ Such recollections echo researchers’ assertions of endogamy within Chinese Australian communities.48 Marriages were often arranged between locally born individuals, and the repatriation of Chinese Australian men for the purpose of marrying back in their home village was common.49 Sending daughters back to China was perhaps another way of ensuring the continuation of endogamy in the Chinese Australian context. It is interesting to note that Marina’s mother and father were both Australian-born yet their marriage took place in China. In the New Zealand context, these types of marriages between two local-born Chinese back in China were common.50 More research is needed to further examine the extent of these unions among early twentieth-century Chinese Australians. Two of the Australian-born interview participants were themselves internationally mobile in the White Australia period, leaving Australia to live abroad for some 45. See Wilton, Golden Threads, p. 113. 46. Manying Ip, ‘Redefining Chinese Female Migration: From Exclusion to Transnationalism’, in Shifting Centres: Women and Migration in New Zealand History, ed. Lyndon Fraser and Katie Pickles (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2002). 47. Ip, ‘Redefining Chinese Female Migration’, p. 155. 48. See for example, Macgregor, ‘Dreams of Jade’. 49. Macgregor, ‘Dreams of Jade’. 50. Ip, ‘Redefining Chinese Female Migration’.

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time. Ina left Australia in 1968 with her husband and did not return to Australia until 1989, well after the official abandonment of the White Australia policy. Her life abroad was anything but static, comprising several international relocations over the twenty-one-year period. She explained her mobility thus: Now, the thing in those days was to go overseas for a couple of years. . . . I think we had three years in Amsterdam, and then stayed in London for six years and the children were born there. And after six years, London was in the pits of depression and a friend of ours . . . said, ‘Oh, you know you can go and be an architect in Hong Kong. They are looking for expatriate architects.’ And so we applied for that and it took a year to come through. And we got through to Hong Kong and we lived there for twelve years. (Ina)

While Ina and her husband’s eventual settlement in Hong Kong was driven by her husband’s profession as an architect, it cannot be argued that Ina’s entire migration experience was shaped by her position as a ‘dependant wife’. Their time spent in Amsterdam was, in fact, largely shaped by Ina’s employment: [My husband’s] Sydney degree wasn’t recognised in Holland, and he worked as a draftsman . . . so [in the summer holidays] he would leave his job, and I would keep my job at the International School and come back in September when the term opens. (Ina)

While Ina moved abroad with her husband, Nancy, on the other hand, set sail to Canada independently after completing her nursing qualifications in 1963. She explained: I did my four years nursing at Royal Prince Alfred. Did a year over in Queen Elizabeth in Adelaide—my midwifery—and then about six weeks later I was on the ship going to Canada. (Nancy)

It was in Canada that she met her Australian husband and lived for two years before settling in London for an additional year and returning to Australia in 1966. Once again, further investigation is needed to determine whether Nancy’s initial independent travel was unique among her cohort. What can be said, however, is that her mobility illustrates deviance from the female ‘norm’ of dependence or immobility perpetuated by male-centred migration paradigms.

Conclusion This chapter has explored Chinese Australian women’s mobility throughout the White Australia period. By combining official birthplace statistics and migration data with qualitative accounts of migration to and from Australia, as told by Chinese Australian women themselves, we can not only see the presence of Chinese Australian women in this historical and geographical context but also the diversity of movements of foreign and Australian-born participants. Women migrated as

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dependant children, students, and wives, and did not always follow the traditional or expected route of the passive or dependant wife following a migrant husband. An analysis of the women’s accounts of their own lives show that some Chinese women occupied empowered positions in the migration process—being able to negotiate and work around immigration restrictions rather than being passive victims of discriminatory policy. Their motivations for this movement across international boundaries also varied—including study, economic opportunity, and marriage—highlighting the diversity of the migration experience. The migration experiences recalled by the foreign-born interview participants, and those recalled by Australian-born participants of their female forebears, clearly indicate differences between early twentieth century female migrations and those that occurred in the post-war period. Many of the migrant participants experienced mobility as children or students, while the mobility of the female forebears of the Australianborn participants was predominantly defined by their role as wives. Despite these differences, evidence of Chinese Australian females’ international migration presented through these women’s accounts further challenges assumptions of females’ positions in patrilineal Chinese traditions and broader assumptions of female immobility in global migration patterns. Building on earlier work conducted by historians and other social researchers, which has begun to document Chinese Australian women’s lives and the lives of Chinese women in other White-settler contexts, this chapter has highlighted the utility of using women’s voices in research. By combining first-hand accounts of the migration experience during the White Australia policy era with official documented information, this chapter presents a three-dimensional picture of who these women really were—not simply numbers on census forms or the ‘monolithic other’ but real people with individual lives and migration histories. In this way, this research gives voice to Chinese Australian women and contributes to postcolonial feminist revisions of White Australia literature, migration research, and the historical geography of Chinese migration and settlement in Australia.

Part Two Women’s Lives in China and Australia

6 Exception or Example? Ham Hop’s Challenge to White Australia Kate Bagnall

In November 1910 Ham Hop arrived in Melbourne on the Japanese steamer Nikko Maru.1 The only Chinese woman on board and in the early stages of pregnancy, she had travelled down from Hong Kong with her husband, Poon Gooey, a produce merchant from country Victoria.2 Although the couple had married ten years before, in effect they were just beginning their life together as husband and wife. Poon Gooey had lived in Victoria for seven years before going home to China in 1900 to be married, returning alone to Victoria some months later. The couple then spent the intervening decade apart, with Ham Hop living the life of a gāmsāanpòh (金山婆 M: jīnshānpó), a Gold Mountain wife, one of many women who remained in South China while their husbands lived and worked overseas. Ham Hop was unusual in coming to join her husband in Australia—one of fewer than 150 Chinese women to do so between 1902 and 19203—and by the time she returned to China in 1913 she and her husband had become household names in Australia. Ham Hop had entered Australia on a temporary permit for six months, the most the Australian government would allow her under the Immigration Restriction Act, but once she arrived Poon Gooey mounted a determined and sustained campaign for her to be allowed to remain permanently. While ultimately 1. Australian records use various names for Ham Hop, including Mrs Poon Gooey, Mrs Hop Poon Gooey, Hope Poon Gooey, and Ham See. In his first request to bring his wife from China, Poon Gooey referred to her as ‘Ham See’ (譚氏), meaning ‘married woman originally of the Ham clan’. On the birth registrations of her daughters, her name was given as ‘Hop Poon Gooey formerly Ham’, and it is based on this version of her name that I have chosen to refer to her as Ham Hop—Ham being her surname and Hop her given name. 2. Two versions of Poon Gooey’s name in Chinese characters appear in the records: 潘巍 (C: pūn ngàih, M: pān wēi) and 潘如 (C: pūn yùh, M: pān rú). See Tung Wah Times (東華報 Donghua bao), August 17, 1912, and March 1, 1913, and list of exemptions under the Chinese Act 1890, February 8, 1900, NAA: MP56/12, 6. 3. Between 1902 and 1904, 103 Chinese wives of domiciled Chinese men were admitted to Australia under section 3(m) of the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. See Barry York, Exclusions and Admissions: The Chinese in Australia, 1901–1946 (Canberra: Centre for Immigration & Multicultural Studies, Australian National University, 1994), p. 7. This provision was first suspended in March 1903 and then repealed in December 1905, after which date Chinese wives could only be admitted by special authority of the minister. The figure of fewer than 150 Chinese wives admitted to Australia in the first two decades of the twentieth century is an estimate based on annual immigration returns and individual case files.

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unsuccessful, Poon Gooey’s campaign found widespread public support and was an ongoing embarrassment to the Fisher Labor government and especially to the Minister for External Affairs, E. L. Batchelor, and his successor, Josiah Thomas. The Poon Gooey case, as it became known, was the first serious public challenge to the White Australia policy, and today it remains one of the best-known cases in twentieth-century Australian migration history. Historian A. T. Yarwood first directed scholarly attention to the case after half a century had passed, in an article published in the Australian Journal of Politics and History in 1961 and then in his groundbreaking monograph Asian Migration to Australia three years later.4 His analysis of the case has formed the basis for subsequent tellings of the Poon Gooey story over the past five decades.5 Only C. F. Yong’s short 1977 discussion has provided something of an alternative perspective by considering the attitudes and actions of Chinese Australian community leaders during the case.6 Yarwood framed his 1961 article as a study of difficulties with the administration of the White Australia policy, particularly concerning the wives of domiciled Chinese residents. He stated that: The Poon Gooey case provides an unrivalled opportunity for analysing public opinion on the question of Chinese wives, and of studying its impact on policy. The value of the case stems from the fact that it is typical and illuminates important problems.7

Yarwood’s work on the case remains significant in three particular ways: in its use of individual case files to understand how the White Australia policy was administered on the ground; in its sensitive reading of the fraught dynamics between Poon Gooey and the government, and between the government and the Australian people; and in its understanding of the peculiar double standard of Australian public opinion. In Yarwood’s words, ‘[White Australians] supported the principle of exclusion as applied to Chinese in general, [but] showed the greatest tenderness for the welfare of particular, favourably known Chinese residents.’8 Another half-century on, the story of Ham Hop and Poon Gooey needs revisiting. Yarwood based his study almost entirely on one source, the substantial 350page Department of External Affairs file that contains the administrative paper

4. A. T. Yarwood, ‘The “White Australia” Policy: Some Administrative Problems, 1901–1920’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 7, no. 2 (2009), pp. 245–60, and Asian Migration to Australia: The Background to Exclusion 1896–1923 (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1964). 5. See, for example, Eric Rolls, Citizens: Flowers and the Wide Sea (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996), pp. 419–20; and Ian Welch, ‘Alien Son: The Life and Times of Cheok Hong Cheong (Zhang Zhuoxiong) 1851–1928’ (PhD diss., Australian National University, Canberra, 2009), http://hdl.handle.net/1885/49261, pp. 296–99. 6. C. F. Yong, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia 1901–1921 (Richmond, South Australia: Raphael Arts, 1977), pp. 26–28. 7. Yarwood, ‘The “White Australia” Policy’, p. 249. 8. Yarwood, ‘The “White Australia” Policy’, p. 249.

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trail surrounding Ham Hop’s stay in Australia between 1910 and 1913.9 With access today to a range of other official records about Ham Hop and Poon Gooey, especially those concerning Poon Gooey’s own travels between Australia and China, it is clear that a number of Yarwood’s conclusions were wrong. Further, recent scholarship on the history of Chinese Australian politics and community organization offers the possibility of a better understanding of the social and political worlds in which Poon Gooey operated as an English-speaking Christian member of the Chinese Australian merchant elite.10

Figure 6.1:  Photograph of Ham Hop by Yeoman & Co., Melbourne, c. 1911. National Archives of Australia (NAA: A1, 1913/9139)

Yet as a feminist historian something more has troubled me about the way the story of the Poon Gooey case has been told. The case is framed around some of the most personal and intimate moments in a woman’s life—Ham Hop’s betrothal and marriage to Poon Gooey, her reunion with her migrant husband, her pregnancies, the births of two babies, her postnatal health, breastfeeding, and the health of her young daughters. Despite this, Ham Hop’s own experiences have been marginalized and overlooked. This comes, in part, from the sources. In the hundreds of articles 9. ‘Mrs Poon Gooey. Exemption Certificate’ (Department of External Affairs, 1910–1914), National Archives of Australia (NAA): A1, 1913/9139. 10. See, in particular, Mei-fen Kuo, Making Chinese Australia: Urban Elites, Newspapers and the Formation of Chinese-Australian Identity, 1892–1912 (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2013).

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about her case that appeared in the Australian press, and in that 350-page government file, barely a word is her own. We see her life mediated through the words of her husband, of government officials, of journalists, and of an outraged public. In such a case it is easy to fall into the trap of writing about a woman as an adjunct to the lives of others, and as an object of the actions of others. This chapter retells the story of Ham Hop and the Poon Gooey case, with two main aims: to correct Yarwood’s factual mistakes and to present a personal and intimate history of the case in which Ham Hop is more central to the narrative.11 Ideally, I would make it her story alone, not one about her husband, or the bureaucrats, or the law, or public opinion, although it is all those things, too. In reality, I can only tell Ham Hop’s story using the records I have, and I can only understand what happened to her by following events in the life of her husband and by listening to his voice. Ham Hop’s very presence in Australia depended on Poon Gooey, and through his actions her life became emblematic of a wider quest by the Chinese Australian community for equality and fair treatment in the face of the White Australia policy. Unfortunately, though, while Poon Gooey pushed for Ham Hop to be made an exception to this discriminatory policy, she was instead made an example.

From Ham Hop to Mrs Poon Gooey Ham Hop was born in China around 1883, most likely in a rural village in the Sze Yup (四邑 C: seiyāp, M: sìyì) region in the west of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province. Details of her early life are unknown, but at some point arrangements were made for her betrothal and marriage to Poon Gooey. She was about seventeen years old when they married in 1900. Ham Hop would likely have had little or no say in her choice of husband, and the couple probably never met before they married. Poon Gooey left China for Victoria in 1893 at age eighteen, when Ham Hop was only ten years old. But he offered good prospects—he was educated, literate in English, and making a decent living in Victoria, where he built on the successes of close family members and fellow clansmen who had arrived in Australia before him. The Poons (潘 C: pūn, M: pān, also written in Australian records as Pon and Pong) were from a cluster of villages at Qiaotou (橋頭 C: kìuhtàuh) near the market town of Yueshan (月山 C: yuhtsāan) in Kaiping (開平 C: hōipèhng), one of the Sze Yup counties. Poon clansmen had settled in Melbourne, centred around the Leong Lee (兩利 C: léuhngleih, M: liànglì) store in Little Bourke Street; in western Victorian towns like Horsham, Hamilton, Warrnambool, and Warracknabeal; and in Tasmania, South Australia, 11. Research for this chapter was supported by an Early Career Summer Fellowship in the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia in 2009 and an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship in 2015. I would also like to thank Dr Amanda Rasmussen, Dr Sophie Couchman, and Dr Selia Tan for their assistance during my research.

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and Western Australia.12 The Poons were also associated with the Geraldton Fruit Company, wholesale and retail fruit and produce merchants, which operated in Geraldton (now Innisfail) in Queensland and in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and Perth. When Poon Gooey arrived in Australia in 1893 he went to live at Warrnambool, on Victoria’s west coast, and then at Horsham, in western Victoria, where he worked as a gardener. Six years after arriving in the colony, he unsuccessfully applied to be naturalized, using the name John Poon Gooey.13 Although Chinese migrants had earlier been able to be naturalized in Victoria—including Poon Gooey’s uncle James Pon Hap in 188314—in 1885 the Victorian government decided to no longer naturalize Chinese ‘unless a sufficient reason was assigned’.15 This decision came after an increase in the numbers of Chinese applying for naturalization in the mid-1880s. Thereafter, 173 naturalization certificates were issued to Chinese in 1886, then 16 in 1887, and after that none at all.16 When Poon Gooey lodged his naturalization application in July 1899, more than a decade had passed since the last Chinese naturalization had been granted in Victoria. It is not clear what Poon Gooey’s reasoning was in applying for naturalization when he did. Was he simply unaware of the government’s policy of not naturalizing Chinese? Or perhaps, because it was a matter of administrative practice rather than law, he thought it was worth a try since the advantages of being a naturalized British subject were very clear. Among other things, naturalized Chinese were able to travel back into the colony without penalty under Victoria’s Chinese Act 1890, which restricted the entry of Chinese to one per 500 tons of tonnage for each vessel arriving in Victoria. The Act covered every person of ‘Chinese race’ other than those who had been exempted, and exemptions were automatically granted to Chinese officials, members of ships’ crews, and those who had been naturalized. After being refused naturalization, Poon Gooey took another course of action to fulfil his aim of returning to China to be married. He applied in January 1900 to the Victorian Commissioner of Trade and Customs for a special exemption from the Chinese Act so that he could go home to China and then return to Victoria without penalty.17 From time to time the Governor of Victoria personally granted such exemptions, as stipulated in the Chinese Act 1890. 12. Sophie Couchman, ‘Tong Yun Gai (Street of the Chinese): Investigating Patterns of Work and Social Life in Melbourne’s Chinatown 1900–1920’ (MA (Public History) diss., Monash University, Melbourne, 2000), pp. 116–20; Registers of Certificates Exempting from the Dictation Test (Departures), Melbourne (Collector of Customs, Melbourne, 1904–1959), NAA: B6003. 13. ‘Gooey, John Poon – Naturalisation’ (Chief Secretary’s Office, Victoria, 1899), NAA: A712, 1899/J6454. 14. ‘James Pon Hap – Naturalisation’ (Chief Secretary’s Office, Victoria, 1883), NAA: A712, 1883/Z7328; ‘Letters of Naturalization – James Pon Hap’ (Chief Secretary’s Office, Victoria, 1883), NAA: A801, 2251. 15. James Jemison Fenton (Government Statist of Victoria), ‘Naturalization of Chinese’ (Paragraph 200), Victorian Year-Book, 1895–8 (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1901), p. 114. 16. Fenton, ‘Naturalization of Chinese’, p. 114. 17. ‘Various Documents Relating to Late 1880 to Early 1900 Migrants’ (Department of Home and Territories, Central Office (Records and Passports Branch), 1892–1921), NAA: MP56/12, 6.

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To apply for an exemption, Poon Gooey supplied basic information about the six years he had been in Victoria, his age, the places in the colony he had lived, and the names of respectable white residents who knew him. Two letters of reference accompanying his application stated that he was anxious to make the arrangements perfect so that there should be no difficulties on his return to Australia with his wife. A police report from Horsham revealed further details of Poon Gooey’s life.18 He was one of eight Chinese who had fruit and vegetable gardens at Green Park, Horsham, and he was a self-professed Christian who attended the Bible Christian Church. According to the police report, the church’s pastor stated that Poon Gooey read and wrote English well and was ‘a superior Chinese of excellent character’. His application was approved, and Poon Gooey was free to depart and return to Victoria within three years. Shortly after his own exemption was approved, Poon Gooey wrote again to the Commissioner of Trade and Customs applying for permission for his betrothed, whom he referred to as Ham See (譚氏 C: tàahm sih, M: tán shì), to enter Victoria. In a statutory declaration he stated: I am a gardener and have resided in Victoria for the last six years: That I am leaving the colony for the purpose of marrying Ham See and returning to this colony with her as my wife.19

Earlier precedent had been set for the admission of Chinese wives under the Chinese Act 1890; in 1891, for example, two Geelong merchants had been granted permission for their wives to enter ‘on the ground of morality’.20 Poon Gooey was similarly granted permission, with a notification published in the Government Gazette on February 16, 1900, stating that Ham See, wife of Poon Gooey, resident in China, was exempt for a period of six months from February 8, 1900.21 In his account of the Poon Gooey case, A. T. Yarwood questioned whether this earlier permission had, in fact, ever been granted. Yarwood noted that Poon Gooey raised the matter in correspondence to the government in April 1910, but concluded that there was no evidence in support of his claim. In a statement that perhaps underestimated Poon Gooey’s successful integration into colonial life, Yarwood wrote, ‘It would have been most unusual for such a concession to have been made to a recent arrival who was in 1900 a market garden employee.’22 In fact, Poon Gooey travelled to China with exemptions for himself and his future wife, departing at the end of January 1900 and returning in December the 18. Andrew Kennealy (Senior Constable, Horsham Police) to the Commissioner of Trade and Customs, report on the character of Poon Gooey, January 18, 1900, NAA: MP56/12, 6. 19. Statutory Declaration by Poon Gooey, Melbourne, January 25, 1900, NAA: MP56/12, 6. 20. ‘Our Melbourne Letter’, Gippsland Times, May 15, 1891, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article65302977. Most newspaper articles cited in this chapter are available online through the National Library of Australia’s Trove newspaper database (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/). 21. ‘Chinese Act 1890 Exemptions’, Government Gazette (Victoria), February 16, 1900, p. 662. 22. Yarwood, ‘The “White Australia” Policy’, p. 253.

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Figure 6.2:  Proclamation exempting Ham See and Poon Gooey from the provisions of the Chinese Act 1890, February 8, 1900. National Archives of Australia (NAA: A1, 1913/9139)

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same year. No wife returned with him, though, and he worked his return passage on the SS Eastern as a stevedore.23 The six-month period in which Ham Hop could enter Victoria soon passed, and a later press report stated that Ham Hop did not accompany Poon Gooey to Australia at this time because of ‘the Chinese revolution’, meaning the Boxer Rebellion.24 Whatever the precise reason for her remaining in China, it would seem that Ham Hop and Poon Gooey were probably married according to Chinese custom during his visit home.

A Decade Apart Where Ham Hop spent the decade between 1900 and 1910 is not recorded, but she most likely lived in Poon Gooey’s family home in Kaiping, perhaps with his parents and extended family, attending to the duties that befell a Cantonese daughter-inlaw. The family may well have lived in relative material comfort, as Poon Gooey had the financial means to send money home to support Ham Hop and his parents. With many other Poon relatives living in Australia, Ham Hop was probably not the only wife in the village separated from her overseas husband. Such wives were known in Cantonese as gāmsāanpòh (金山婆 M: jīnshānpó), ‘Gold Mountain wives’, and their husbands as gāmsāanhaak (金山客 M: jīnshānkè), ‘Gold Mountain guests’. Some Pearl River Delta women might have dreamed of marrying a gāmsāanhaak, with the potential of wealth and prestige that could eventuate for them and their children. However, for most gāmsāanpòh, the reality was long periods of separation and time on their own, caring for their husbands’ parents, tending their families’ ancestral shrines, and raising any children they had before their husbands went overseas. If lucky, their husbands would regularly send money home and visit every few years, which might result in another baby. If unlucky, they may never see their husbands again, perhaps not ever knowing his fate. Such women were expected, however, to remain chaste and alone, and were largely dependent on their husbands’ families to survive.25 While we know nothing concrete of Ham Hop’s life in these intervening years, in one romanticized telling of the story she and Poon Gooey corresponded regularly and dreamed of the time they could live together at last. In May 1913, as Ham Hop and Poon Gooey left Australia, the Sydney Sun newspaper recounted their story thus:

23. ‘Eastern, 6 December 1900’, New South Wales, Australia, Unassisted Immigrant Passenger Lists, 1826–1922, in Ancestry.com [online database] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2007). 24. ‘An Alien Wife’, Register (Adelaide), July 22, 1912, p. 9, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article59233198. 25. Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 90–123; Michael Williams, ‘In the Tang Mountains We Have a Big House’, East Asian History 25/26 (June/December 2003), pp. 85–112; Huifen Shen, China’s Left-Behind Wives: Families of Migrants from Fujian to Southeast Asia, 1930s–1950s (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012).

Kate Bagnall 137 [Poon Gooey] met his wife in Canton in 1899, and proposed marriage. Then he started off for Australia to make a home . . . Australia held for him the opportunities he had dreamt of. He was a successful Australianised Chinese before he had been in Victoria 12 months . . . He had what he calls, in his Anglicised manner, ‘the sweetest little love-letters’ from his betrothed, and in his thoughts the satisfaction of life with her amidst the bounties of Australian society were foremost.26

In this and other press accounts, their ‘marriage’ was only deemed to have begun after they were legally wed in British Hong Kong in 1910; however, as Poon Gooey had named Ham Hop as his wife in the exemption application a decade earlier, it is likely this later Hong Kong marriage confirmed their already-existing Chinese arrangement. Poon Gooey spent the decade from 1900 to 1910 developing his business acumen and finances, as well as his social and political networks. After a couple of years in Melbourne, he moved to Sydney where he worked for the Geraldton Fruit Company for about three years. In around 1906 he moved to Adelaide, where he continued working for the Geraldton Fruit Company. It appears to have been in Adelaide that Poon Gooey first took on an active role in Chinese community activities, as a member of the Grote Street Church of Christ Chinese Mission and with the Chinese Empire Reform Association of South Australia. His cousins William Pack Queen and Daniel Poon Num were similarly involved, as were Adelaide merchants Way Lee and Stephen Lum, who later managed the Chinese Times newspaper in Melbourne.27 Late in 1907 Poon Gooey returned to live in Horsham. There he went into business with Poon Choy and Poon See (his brothers) and Poon Lee, together running Poon Gooey and Co., wholesale and retail fruit and produce merchants and general commission agents.28 With Poon See and his uncle James Pon Hap he purchased a brick building and large piece of land in Firebrace Street, Horsham, and he also owned a house and allotment of land in Dimboola Street.29 He became a leader in the Horsham Chinese community, representing their interests to the local council, working to raise money for local charities, and attending the Horsham Church of Christ.30 26. ‘Mrs Poon Gooey’, Sun (Sydney), May 7, 1913, p. 9, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article229840924. 27. ‘The Shipwrecked Chinese’, Advertiser (Adelaide), December 4, 1906, p. 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5117721; ‘Chinese Reform Association’, Advertiser (Adelaide), February 18, 1907, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article5056078; ‘The Chinese Famine’, Advertiser (Adelaide), March 15, 1907, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article5058796. 28. ‘Poon Gooey’, Horsham Times, December 20, 1907, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article72805929; ‘Sale of Business’, Horsham Times, April 8, 1910, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article73124433. 29. Andrew Kennealy (Sergeant, Horsham Police) to Collector of Customs, Melbourne, report on Poon Gooey, March 18, 1910, NAA: A1, 1913/9139. 30. ‘Hospital Ball’, Horsham Times, August 11, 1908, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article72821749; ‘Horsham District Hospital’, Horsham Times, July 14, 1908, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article72810801; ‘Chinese Boycott’, Horsham Times, May 21, 1909, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article72829025; Cora Num, correspondence with author, November 21, 2010.

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A Wife and Mother in Geelong In March 1910 Poon Gooey wrote to the Department of External Affairs asking for permission for his wife to visit him in Australia. In the decade since Ham Hop and Poon Gooey had last seen each other, the situation had changed for wives wishing to join their husbands in Australia. The federal Immigration Restriction Act 1901 had briefly permitted the entry of wives and children of domiciled Chinese men, but owing to the numbers of Chinese availing themselves of this concession in 1902 and 1903, the provision was suspended in March 1903 and then repealed in December 1905. From 1906 there was no legal provision for the permanent entry of Chinese wives of resident Chinese, resulting instead in an ad hoc system where temporary exemption certificates of no more than six months could be issued to the wives of long-standing residents of good character.31 As time went on, enforcement of the six months’ time limit became less strict, and in later years exemptions were issued for twelve months or longer; repeated extensions over a number of years also became more common in later decades. Poon Gooey initially asked for a twelve-month visit but was informed that ‘a period of six months is the utmost concession the Department allows in such cases’.32 In considering his application, the department assessed information provided by several referees, the police at Horsham, and Poon Gooey himself about his residence in Australia, his business, and his family connections. After some confusion arising from an incorrect date provided by the Horsham police, the Minister for External Affairs approved Ham Hop’s visit to Australia for a period of six months on condition of ‘an approved bond being furnished . . . and on the understanding that no extension of the period named will be granted or applied for’.33 It seems Poon Gooey was fortunate to win even a six-month concession. The press reported in early May 1910 that a large number of Chinese residents had applied to bring out their wives after South Australian Labor MP E. L. Batchelor became Minister for External Affairs following the April federal election, but Batchelor had refused most of them.34 Ham Hop’s bond of £100 was paid by Leong Lee, herbalist and general merchant at 199 Little Bourke Street, which was run by a Poon clansman, Pon Check Tan. Once permission for Ham Hop’s entry was granted, Poon Gooey prepared an application for a Certificate Exempting from the Dictation Test (CEDT) to enable him to travel to China and return again to Australia.35 The previous month, in April 1910, he and his partners had sold Poon Gooey and Co., and the letters of reference he provided with his CEDT application suggest that he had made a solid place 31. Yarwood, Asian Migration to Australia, pp. 80–81; A. C. Palfreeman, The Administration of the White Australia Policy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), pp. 13–14. 32. Atlee Hunt (Secretary, Department of External Affairs) to Poon Gooey, March 10, 1910, NAA: A1, 1913/9139. 33. Collector of Customs, Melbourne to Poon Gooey, June 18, 1910, NAA: A1, 1913/9139. 34. ‘Wives of Chinese’, Advertiser (Adelaide), May 6, 1910, p. 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5235768. 35. NAA: MP56/12, 6; NAA: B6003.

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for himself in the Horsham community.36 James Millar, JP, who had known Poon Gooey for ‘a considerable time’, described him as ‘a good useful citizen, law abiding, sober, honest and industrious’, while Horsham ironmonger James Berry, who had known Poon Gooey for about twelve years, declared he was ‘a desirable citizen and an upright honourable man’.37 Poon Gooey was granted his CEDT and he left Melbourne for China on the SS Seydlitz on June 1, 1910, changing to the SS Coblenz when he arrived in Sydney.38 The Coblenz left Sydney on June 4, and arrived in Hong Kong twenty-one days later on June 25, 1910.39 A. T. Yarwood saw duplicitous behaviour in Poon Gooey’s return to China, believing that Poon Gooey had made no application for a CEDT in his own name. Yarwood’s error arose from the fact that Poon Gooey’s CEDT documentation was not held in the large External Affairs file containing Ham Hop’s paperwork, but in a separate Customs file; Poon Gooey’s CEDT application was a routine matter dealt with by local Customs officers, while Ham Hop’s application for a Certificate of Exemption was a more complex matter dealt with by the Department of External Affairs. To Yarwood, Poon Gooey’s departure to be with Ham Hop on her journey from Hong Kong was a secretive action, planned and executed on the sly to ensure the necessity of an extension to her six-month exemption because of pregnancy and childbirth. For if Ham Hop had not fallen pregnant until after she was in Australia, she would still have been able to return to China to have the baby before the sixmonth exemption expired. In believing that Poon Gooey had rendered his departure from Australia invisible to officials, Yarwood further concluded that Poon Gooey had resorted to fraud or bribery to secure his readmission—either by using a certificate in an assumed name or by bribing the Customs officer who examined him on his arrival.40 This was simply not true. Poon Gooey re-entered legally on his CEDT. Poon Gooey and Ham Hop were married in Hong Kong on August 5, 1910; according to Poon Gooey, their marriage took place ‘under British rule’ before the Registrar General, a move that legitimized their relationship under British law.41 Ham Hop and Poon Gooey spent almost three more months together in Hong Kong before setting off in late October for the month-long sea voyage to Melbourne on the Nikko Maru. They arrived on November 21, 1910, and Ham Hop was issued Exemption Certificate No. 10/45. By the time they reached Melbourne Ham Hop 36. ‘Sale of Business’, Horsham Times, April 8, 1910, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article73124433. 37. James Millar to the Commissioner of Customs, May 12, 1910, and James Berry to the Commissioner of Customs, Melbourne, May 12, 1910, NAA: MP56/12, 6. 38. ‘Seydlitz, 3 June 1910’, New South Wales, Australia, Unassisted Immigrant Passenger Lists, 1826–1922, in Ancestry.com [online database] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2007); ‘Coblenz, 4 June 1910’, New South Wales, Australia, Departing Crew and Passenger Lists, 1816–1825, 1898–1911, in Ancestry.com [online database] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2007). 39. ‘Shipping: Arrivals’, Hong Kong Telegraph, June 25, 1910, p. 7, in Old HK Newspapers [online database], http:// mmis.hkpl.gov.hk/old-hk-collection. 40. Yarwood, ‘The “White Australia” Policy’, pp. 250–51; A. T. Yarwood and M. J. Knowling, Race Relations in Australia: A History (Sydney: Methuen Australia, 1982), p. 239. 41. Petition from the Residents of Geelong to the Minister of External Affairs, July 24, 1911, and Poon Gooey to Frederick Haglethorn MLC, July 18, 1911, NAA: A1, 1913/9139.

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was about two months pregnant, meaning that she could have known she was pregnant at the time of their departure. So did they do as Yarwood suspected and wait to leave Hong Kong until they knew of the pregnancy, thereby ensuring the baby would be born in Australia? There is no conclusive evidence one way or the other. Although Poon Gooey had most recently been in business at Horsham, he and Ham Hop set up their home in Geelong, on the western side of Port Philip Bay about seventy-five kilometres from Melbourne. There, Poon Gooey established Poon Bros, general commission agents, and wholesale fruit and vegetable merchants, in Geelong’s Market Square.42 He and Ham Hop first lived at 268 Moorabool Street, but later moved to Minerva Street, Herne Hill. Their Herne Hill property comprised a six-room house, stable, cowshed, pigsty, and ten acres of land that was used for market gardening.43 With Ham Hop’s arrival, Poon Gooey became one of about 800 Chinese-born men whose wives (Chinese or otherwise) lived with them in Australia, and Ham Hop became one of fewer than 200 Chinese-born wives in the country.44 In the state of Victoria Ham Hop was one of about forty-five foreign-born Chinese wives out of a population of 216 ‘full’ Chinese women and girls.45 She was not the first Chinese woman to live in Geelong, though—that honour appears to have gone to Woung Shee, wife of Teare Ah Dun, who arrived in 1879. But Ham Hop was still one of no more than two or three Chinese women living in the town at that time, part of a small Chinese population of around sixty.46 Ham Hop’s first baby, named Queenie Hop Poon Gooey on her birth certificate, was born at the family’s home in Moorabool Street on June 5, 1911.47 Ham Hop was attended by Geelong doctor R. T. Fetherstonhaugh and a Mrs Betts, most likely Mary Helen Betts, a local midwife.48 Ham Hop’s second baby, Lena Hop Poon Gooey, was born at their new home at Herne Hill on February 4, 1913.49 No doctor attended the second birth, just Mrs Betts. Poon Gooey promptly registered both births with the local registrar, ensuring his daughters had proof of their Australian births. 42. ‘Advertising’, Geelong Advertiser, February 21, 1911, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article149035495. 43. ‘Wednesday 16th April’, Geelong Advertiser, April 5, 1913, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article150677809. 44. Atlee Hunt (Secretary, Department of External Affairs) to the Minister for External Affairs, memorandum, April 11, 1918, NAA: A1, 1923/14120. 45. Census of the Commonwealth of Australia (Melbourne: Bureau of Census and Statistics, 1911), pp. 199 and 996. 46. On Woung Shee, see ‘Miscellaneous’, Riverine Herald, July 28, 1879, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article115124175; and Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, birth registration of Mary Ah Dun, 1880/22845, Geelong, 1880. On the Chinese population of Geelong, see Census of Victoria (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1901), p. 36, in Historical Census and Colonial Data Archive [online database], http:// hccda.ada.edu.au/pages/VIC-1901-census-03_36. 47. Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, birth registration of Queenie Hop Poon Gooey, 1911/11794, Geelong, 1911. 48. ‘Register of Midwives’, Victoria Government Gazette, February 15, 1918, p. 805, in Victoria Government Gazette: Online Archive 1836–1997 [online database], http://gazette.slv.vic.gov.au. 49. Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, birth registration of Lena Hop Poon Gooey, 1913/4094, Geelong, 1913.

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Figure 6.3:  Photograph of Ham Hop, Poon Gooey, and their daughters on their departure for China in May 1913, reproduced in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on May 12, 1913. National Archives of Australia (NAA: A1, 1913/9139)

In September 1912 Ham Hop was examined by a government medical officer, Dr. T. J. M. Kennedy, who noted that she was about six months pregnant with her second child, but ‘as she does not speak English, and her husband has to interpret, it was difficult to get the exact date’.50 If indeed she spoke no, or only a little, English, where did Ham Hop find advice, help, and companionship during her pregnancies, confinements, and as she raised her two young daughters? In Cantonese culture a new mother would traditionally spend the first month of her baby’s life at home, mostly confined to bed, and she did not bathe—a practice called chóh yuht (‘sitting the month’, 坐月 M: zuòyuè). The mother and baby were cared for by extended family, who took care of cleaning, washing clothes, and cooking meals—including special dishes designed to restore strength and health after childbirth, and promote the production of breast milk. How did Ham Hop cope with the day-to-day household chores, as well as the physical and emotional changes that new motherhood brought? Poon Gooey stated that the family had many friends in Geelong who were good to them. He, and perhaps Ham Hop, too, attended church regularly (Methodist 50. Dr T. J. M. Kennedy (Commonwealth Medical Officer) to the Minister for Foreign [External] Affairs, September 18, 1912, NAA: A1: 1913/9139.

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or Church of Christ) and many in the town actively supported his efforts to have Ham Hop remain in Australia. It seems likely that some of the women of Geelong befriended Ham Hop and that the family would have employed local domestic help. Poon Gooey might also have sought the help of his kinsmen’s wives. Pon Check Tan, who ran the Leong Lee store in Little Bourke Street, lived with his Chinese wife, Sue Han, and their numerous children in Melbourne’s Chinatown.51 Two of Poon Gooey’s Adelaide cousins also had large families: William Pack Queen and Emily Bawden had nine children born over the first two decades of the new century, while Daniel Poon Num and Gertrude Smith had eight children born in the 1910s and 1920s.52 His brother Poon See also married an Australian woman, AngloChinese Ada Wing Yen (née Siakew), in 1915, with whom he had several children.53 Whatever help might have eventuated, it seems that Ham Hop would probably have been without a close network of female family and friends in Geelong with whom she could freely communicate in her native tongue, something that would have been particularly hard at a time of life when women usually sought each other’s comfort and support.

The Fight to Remain The births of Poon Gooey’s two little girls, Queenie and Lena, were central to his argument that Ham Hop should be allowed to remain in Australia, and between June 1911 and April 1913 he succeeded in having her original six-month exemption extended on five occasions.54 Ham Hop’s first exemption certificate, issued in November 1910, expired in May 1911, when she was eight months’ pregnant. Baby Queenie was born on June 5, and the exemption was extended for three months. It was at this time that Poon Gooey started his campaigning. In September 1911 he won a short reprieve of three months ‘in order that arrangements may be made for [Ham Hop’s] departure from the Commonwealth’, which was extended for another six months in November 1911 in view of ‘the disturbed condition of affairs at present existing in China’.55 Ham Hop’s exemption expired on May 22, 1912, but after further lobbying, in early July the government responded with a new proposal for Poon Gooey. Ham Hop would be allowed to remain in the Commonwealth in the short term provided that Poon Gooey gave an undertaking that he, Ham Hop, and the children would leave 51. Couchman, ‘Tong Yun Gai’, pp. 116–18; Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, birth registration of Toon Tuck Tan, 1908/28557, Melbourne East, 1908; ‘Ying Lan Pon, Nan Han Pon – re Birth Certificate’ (Collector of Customs, Melbourne, 1916), NAA: B13, 1916/18083. 52. Cora Num, ‘A Chinese Family in South Australia’ (unpublished manuscript in possession of the author, 2010). 53. Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, marriage registration of Poon See and Ada Wing Yen, 1915/1119, Ballarat East, 1915. 54. The following chronology is based on correspondence, memoranda, and other documents in NAA: A1, 1913/9139. 55. Minister for External Affairs to A. T. Ozanne MP, September 5, 1911 and November 29, 1911, NAA: A1, 1913/9139.

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Australia within six months ‘without any intention of returning’.56 This undertaking had to be supported by three citizens of Geelong, whose names were approved by the minister, who would ensure that Poon Gooey carried out the undertaking. The government received no such commitment and so a deportation order was issued on July 29, 1912. On August 13, the Chinese Consul General informed the Minister for External Affairs that Ham Hop was not in a position to travel because she was expecting an offspring in three or four months’ time. They assured him, however, that Poon Gooey was prepared to send Ham Hop home after her confinement, once she was properly fit. The government’s response was that Ham Hop would be exempted for an indefinite period, until the government medical officer said she was well enough to travel. Ham Hop was examined by Dr T. J. M. Kennedy on September 18, 1912, who reported that she would be confined in December. ‘She seems a healthy woman,’ he wrote, ‘but I should say a voyage to China within six weeks of the time of her confinement is not desirable as it would tend to cause a premature labour.’57 Baby Lena was born on February 4, 1913, and a month later Dr Kennedy examined Ham Hop and Lena, noting that Ham Hop was breastfeeding Lena and that she should not be made to leave the country lest it adversely affect the baby’s feeding. Lena was not a robust infant, and on February 14 Ham Hop was granted a further exemption of eight weeks until Lena was strong enough to travel. One final short exemption was granted on April 4, 1913, because young Queenie, who was not yet two, was being treated for gastroenteritis and dentition (teething) and was not fit to travel. This last concession was negotiated through the Chinese Consul General and was only granted after they had provided proof that Poon Gooey had booked and paid for steamer tickets to Hong Kong for Ham Hop and the children. The Australian government had been reluctant to set a precedent by allowing Ham Hop to remain in Australia permanently, fearing that such action would lead to an increase in the Chinese population. But many ordinary white Australians felt that their case was exceptional and that an injustice was being perpetrated by not allowing the family of this respectable Christian businessman to live with him in Australia. Both white Australians and Chinese argued that allowing Chinese men to bring their wives to Australia was better than the racial mixing that occurred when they came alone. Many also believed (erroneously) that Poon Gooey was a naturalized British subject, while his two children were certainly British subjects of Australian birth, with all the rights and privileges that should have brought. The Protestant Christian churches vocally supported Poon Gooey’s efforts to keep his family with him, as did various other social and political groups. Petitions were signed, meetings were held, deputations were sent, letters were written, and over a

56. Handwritten file note by Atlee Hunt (Secretary, Department of External Affairs), July 2, 1912, NAA: A1, 1913/9139. 57. Dr T. J. M. Kennedy to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, September 18, 1912, NAA: A1: 1913/9139.

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thousand articles about the case appeared in the Australian press in the two and a half years Ham Hop was in Victoria.58 In all of this it is hard to know how much Ham Hop was aware of the whirlwind of activity and protest stirred up by her situation, or of the efforts of so many strangers to keep her family together in Australia. How much might she and Poon Gooey have talked together as husband and wife, weighing up the pros and cons at each step along the way? The Department of External Affairs addressed correspondence to Ham Hop and requested her signature on various forms, but most of the time Poon Gooey was the one who responded and signed.59 It seems that Ham Hop did not speak or read English and may not have been literate in Chinese either—when asked to sign her name on paperwork, she made her mark with an X rather than writing her name in English or in Chinese characters.60 So Poon Gooey clearly dealt with the paperwork, but was this because of Ham Hop’s illiteracy, because she and her children were unwell, or because in essence this was a matter he controlled and was pursuing for aims larger than just his own family?

Figure 6.4: Letter from Hop Poon Gooey (per Poon Gooey) to the Commissioner of Customs, Melbourne, June 28, 1911. National Archives of Australia (NAA: A1, 1913/9139) 58. A search of news articles for the term ‘Poon Gooey’ in the Trove newspaper database (http://trove.nla.gov. au/newspaper/) for the years 1910 to 1913 (inclusive) on November 7, 2016 resulted in over 1,200 articles. A survey of these results showed that almost all related to Ham Hop’s case. 59. See, for example, Poon Gooey to the Collector of Customs, Melbourne (Form No. 17), July 1, 1911, NAA: A1, 1913/9139. On this form, despite the handwritten instruction that ‘Hop Poon Gooey must sign here’, Poon Gooey has signed in her place: ‘Hop Poon Gooey per PG’. 60. Hop Poon Gooey to the Collector of Customs, Melbourne (Form No. 16), November 21, 1910, NAA: A1, 1913/9139; Hop Poon Gooey to the Collector of Customs, Melbourne (Form No. 17), September 14, 1911, NAA: A1, 1913/9139; Hope Poon Gooey to the Collector of Customs, Melbourne (Form No. 17), December 29, 1911, NAA: A1, 1913/9139.

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Exception or Example? The Immigration Restriction Act gave Australian government officials the power to make seemingly arbitrary decisions about Chinese Australians, decisions that could affect one of the most fundamental parts of their lives—their families. Most Chinese Australians worked within the discriminatory laws as they applied for permission to travel overseas and return or as they sought the entry of overseas relatives to Australia. They complied with the rigours of the administrative process in filling in forms, paying fees, providing photographs and handprints, submitting letters of reference, and so on. There was a long history, however, of Chinese trying to circumvent discriminatory restrictions, through both legal and illegal means, and officials were highly suspicious of the means by which Chinese sought entry and re-entry to Australia. Within this system, officials relied on personal knowledge of the Chinese community, as well as markers of status and respectability, in assessing the bona fides of immigration cases concerning Chinese. Poon Gooey had many of the qualities that usually weighed in favour of Chinese Australians in their dealings with the government. He was known to be a respectable, honest, Christian businessman; he was a long-term resident who was well-regarded by both white and Chinese residents; and he actively worked with church and charitable organizations to better the lives of his Chinese neighbours and others. Among his community activities in Geelong, for example, was volunteering his time at the King Edward Sailors’ Rest, a temperance organization where he helped out when Chinese crews were in town by ‘entertaining the men in the Sailors’ Rest and in conducting [religious] services there and on board vessels’.61 He also supported various Chinese church services and religious education classes held by the Geelong Chinese Mission.62 Yarwood noted that despite officials’ fear of establishing precedents, ‘There was room . . . for variation between the extremes of tough and generous interpretation of the policy of temporary entry for wives.’63 The wives of other Chinese men, who on paper looked a lot like Poon Gooey, were allowed to come and to stay.64 What then caused officials to choose to make an example of Ham Hop, rather than an exception? By the time Ham Hop’s case blew up in 1911, Poon Gooey had been in Australia for nearly twenty years, during which time he had gained experience in dealing 61. ‘Poon Gooey Family’, Mount Alexander Mail, May 3, 1913, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article200464750. 62. ‘A Picnic to Sailors’, Geelong Advertiser, April 26, 1911, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article149205691; ‘Entertainment by Chinese’, Geelong Advertiser, October 11, 1911, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article 150094234. 63. Yarwood, ‘The “White Australia” Policy’, p. 257. 64. For comparable cases involving Chinese wives see, for example, ‘Application of James O’Young Ping for permission for his wife and son to return after visiting China’ (Department of External Affairs, 1905–1914), NAA: A1, 1914/2493; ‘William Yinson Lee – Exemption Certificates for Family’ (Department of External Affairs, 1916), NAA: A1, 1916/31599; ‘Mrs C. Loquat Ex/c’ (Department of External Affairs, 1906–1922), NAA: A1, 1922/505; ‘Mason, Young – Admittance of Wife (Mrs James Yeoung Gogg)’ (Department of External Affairs, 1913–1923), NAA: A1, 1923/14120.

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with Australia’s restrictive anti-Chinese laws, both those of colonial Victoria and those of the new Commonwealth. His knowledge and experience of Australian life were backed not only by a strong sense of social justice and a Christian belief in equality of the races but also by a growing political sensibility. During his Adelaide years Poon Gooey was actively involved in the Chinese Empire Reform Association, an organization that concerned itself with the situation of Chinese in Australia alongside its primary interest in political, social, and educational reform in China.65 Then, after he moved to Horsham, Poon Gooey became a spokesman for the local Chinese community and was in contact with the newly appointed Chinese Consul General in Melbourne.66 The issue of the entry and residence of wives was a grievance repeatedly raised by the Chinese Australian community, including in an official memorandum on relations between China and Australia issued by the Chinese Consul General issued in November 1910—just at the same time that Ham Hop arrived in Australia.67 The Australian Chinese-language press commented on the case, and although not all in the Chinese community agreed with his methods, it seems clear that Poon Gooey and his supporters were actively using the family’s situation to agitate for changes to Australia’s discriminatory anti-Chinese policies.68 Journalist John Sleeman remarked in his 1933 book White China that Poon Gooey had been ‘good on the stump’, and it was Poon Gooey’s presumptuous attitude and his determined public campaign that really put the government offside.69 Their frustration with him was evident from comments made in the press. Responding to a similar case in August 1912, the Minister for External Affairs, Josiah Thomas, granted a Chinese wife living in Bendigo an extension to her exemption, stating: They had put the matter very nicely, and had said they would not plead that the woman had the right to reside in Australia permanently. They had in this connection deprecated the agitation in the Poon Gooey case.70

This family, unlike Poon Gooey, had appeared to know their place and so were treated with some leniency. Within a few months, however, Minister Thomas’s patience had worn through, as he dealt with not only a further extension request 65. On the Chinese Empire Reform Association (CERA) see Kuo, Making Chinese Australia and Yong, The New Gold Mountain. On Poon Gooey’s involvement with CERA see, for example, ‘Chinese Reform Association’, Advertiser (Adelaide) August 6, 1907, p. 10, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5081515. 66. See, for example, ‘Chinese Boycott’, Horsham Times, May 21, 1909, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article 72829025. 67. ‘China and Australia’, Brisbane Courier, November 22, 1910, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article1967881. 68. C. F. Yong provides a discussion of the case in the context of Chinese Australians’ responses to the White Australia policy in New Gold Mountain, pp. 26–28. For articles on the case in the Chinese press see, for example, Tung Wah Times (東華報 Donghua bao), August 17 and 24, 1912, September 14, 1912, March 1 and 22, 1913, April 12, 1913, May 10, 1913; Chinese Australian Herald (廣益華報 Guangyi huabao), May 31, 1913; various articles in the Chinese Times (警東新報 Jingdong xinbao) from May 11, 1912 to August 2, 1913 (cited in Morag Loh, ‘The Chinese Times 1902–1922’, La Trobe Journal 53 (October 1994), accessed January 16, 2017, http://latrobejournal.slv.vic.gov.au/latrobejournal/issue/latrobe-53/t1-g-t2.html, p. 15). 69. John H. C. Sleeman, White China: An Austral-Asian Sensation (Sydney: self-published, 1933), p. 255. 70. ‘Another Chinese Wife’, Register (Adelaide), August 14, 1912, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article59237034.

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from the Bendigo woman after she had fallen pregnant but with a similar request from a woman in Sydney. In November 1912 Thomas declared that ‘no more permits will be granted to Chinese to bring wives here while he is Minister, and that it will be of no use solicitors or anybody else asking for such permits’.71 His term as minister ended following Labor’s loss to the Liberal Party coalition at the May 31, 1913, general election, which came only days after Ham Hop and her family had finally departed Australian shores. From the beginning, the government had maintained, in the words of Senator Edward Findlay, Acting Minister for External Affairs in 1911, ‘If an exception were made in Gooey’s case the door would be opened to other similar applications, and it would be difficult to close it.’72 Poon Gooey’s supporters argued against this, saying that Ham Hop’s case was clearly exceptional and that the family deserved special treatment; they had some ground to stand on, too, as Prime Minister Alfred Deakin had made an assurance in parliament in 1905 that special cases would be fairly handled.73 But with the publicity surrounding the case, and with the absolutist line they had consistently taken, the government could not quietly compromise and allow Ham Hop to remain, as it might do with other Chinese Australian families, without even greater political embarrassment and without a firm precedent being publicly set. Writer Eric Rolls concluded that Poon Gooey had acted wholly in his own interests, and so made it more difficult for other Chinese trying to bring in their wives.74 A less harsh assessment might be that it was a personal and political gamble that did not pay off—neither for the family of Ham Hop and Poon Gooey nor for the Chinese Australian community at large.

Return to China Forced to abandon their fight, in the autumn of 1913 Poon Gooey and Ham Hop prepared to return to China. Their little daughters, Queenie and Lena, were aged twenty-two months and five months, respectively, and Ham Hop had been in Australia for a total of two and a half years. Poon Gooey leased out the family home at Herne Hill, sold his Poon Bros business in Market Square, and was formally

71. ‘Imitating Poon Gooey’, Geelong Advertiser, November 12, 1912, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article 150783043. 72. ‘A Chinese Scheme that Failed’, Worker (Wagga Wagga), August 10, 1911, p. 27, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newsarticle145717689. 73. Commonwealth of Australia, House of Representatives, Parliamentary Debates, December 6, 1905, second reading of the Immigration Restriction Bill (Alfred Deakin, Prime Minister), in ParlInfo [online database], http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au. 74. Eric Rolls, Citizens: Flowers and the Wide Sea (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996), p. 149.

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farewelled by his Geelong friends.75 In Melbourne the family said more goodbyes before leaving for Hong Kong on the Yawata Maru on May 7, 1913.76 Their departure was widely reported in the press. Poon Gooey and Ham Hop were interviewed while the Yawata Maru was stopped in Sydney on her way north, and several newspapers, including the Chinese Australian Herald (廣益華報 C: gwóngyikfābou, M: guǎngyì huábào), published a formal photographic portrait of the family, portraying them as the picture of perfect middle-class respectability.77 The family and their travelling companion, Poon Gooey’s brother Poon Choy, arrived in Hong Kong on June 2, 1913, after a journey of twenty-six days.78 No records document where they went from there, but it is likely that they returned to Poon Gooey’s ancestral home in Kaiping. In a letter to his friends at the Sailors’ Rest in Geelong, Poon Gooey wrote that they had a good trip and noticed great changes in China after the establishment of the Republic.79 The closest we have to knowing Ham Hop’s thoughts on her time in Australia come from the press interviews given in Sydney, in the second-class saloon on the Yawata Maru. ‘What does Mrs Poon Gooey think of her eviction from Australia?’ asked the Sydney Morning Herald reporter as the couple stood, each with a daughter in their arms: Her husband answered the question. ‘She is very glad to go back to China. She doesn’t feel very sad. No; she doesn’t understand English, and she was not interested enough to learn when she knew we were to go.’80

The Sydney Sun noted that ‘as she stepped on to the Yawata Maru, she was one of the happiest women in Australia’, her husband commenting that ‘the worry has been bad for her’.81 One can imagine that Ham Hop may well have been relieved to be taking her young daughters back to the familiarity of China, a change that might have led to a more settled and stable situation. Living with the ongoing uncertainty of whether she would be permitted to stay in Australia could not have been easy; one letter of support from the Victorian Council of Churches in August 1912 had

75. ‘Advertising’, Geelong Advertiser, May 1, 1913, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article150680953; ‘Poon’s Business Sold’, Geelong Advertiser, April 12, 1913, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article150678668; ‘Geelong’, Age (Melbourne), May 3, 1913, p. 14, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article199444925. 76. ‘News of the Day’, Age (Melbourne), May 8, 1913, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article199445753. 77. For example, ‘The Law Carried Out’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney), May 12, 1913, in NAA: 1913/9139; ‘Mr. and Mrs. Hop Poon Gooey and Family’, Telegraph (Brisbane), May 17, 1913, p. 16, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newsarticle176120579; ‘Mr. and Mrs. Hop Poon Gooey and Family’, Week (Brisbane), May 23, 1913, p. 21, http:// nla.gov.au/nla.news-article201062549; ‘Ku po li bu 苦迫離埠’ [Forced to leave]’, Chinese Australian Herald (廣益華報 Guangyi huabao), May 31, 1913, supplement, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article168789551. 78. ‘Shipping’, China Mail (Hong Kong), June 2, 1913, p. 10, in Old HK Newspapers [online database], http:// mmis.hkpl.gov.hk/old-hk-collection. 79. ‘Poon Gooey’, Horsham Times, July 15, 1913, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article72885093. 80. ‘Returning to China’, Sydney Morning Herald, May 12, 1913, p. 9, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article15419547. 81. ‘Mrs. Poon Gooey’, Evening Telegraph (Charters Towers), reprinted from Sun (Sydney), May 17, 1913, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article214340513.

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noted that she was ‘of a delicate constitution’ and ‘in a highly nervous condition’.82 As for their young daughters, Poon Gooey commented that ‘it is good for them to go back to China. There they will have many other Chinese children to play with, and it will be much better for them.’83 Poon Gooey told the press that he was not sure if he would ever return to Australia again: first, because it had been necessary for him to give up his business; and second, and most important, because of the way the Australian government had treated him.84 As he told the Evening News: It is hard, you know, particularly as I have lived 22 years in Australia. I made money, I spent it. It is my intention to start business in Canton, and make a fresh start. This means hard work, for the reason that I have been so long from my own country.85

Whatever he said publicly, however, before his departure he made sure that he would be allowed to return to Australia should he want to, applying for and being granted a CEDT in May 1913.86 After a year together in China, Ham Hop became a gāmsāanpòh once more when Poon Gooey returned to Victoria. The funds they had taken with them to China had been stolen and Poon Gooey needed to return to Australia to make money.87 At this time bandits were active in the overseas Chinese home counties of the Pearl River Delta, and returned overseas Chinese and their families were particular targets, with bandits raiding villages, robbing and looting, and sometimes kidnapping and holding children for ransom. Back in Geelong, Poon Gooey reestablished his greengrocer business in Market Square in July 1914.88 He made a trip back to China between April 1916 and March 1917, presumably visiting Ham Hop and the girls (might their family have grown larger, too, since Ham Hop had left Australia?), returning to live in Geelong until December 1918. Poon Gooey—‘turning grey’ and ‘slightly bald’ at age forty-two—applied for one more CEDT before departing Victoria in 1918, but there is no record of him ever returning to Australia.89 Correspondence with Australian officials in the early 1920s

82. Walter J. Eddy (Secretary, Council of Churches, Victoria) to Josiah Thomas (Minister for External Affairs), August 13, 1912, NAA: A1, 1913/9139. 83. ‘Returning to China’, Sydney Morning Herald, May 12, 1913, p. 9, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article15419547. 84. ‘Returning to China’, Sydney Morning Herald, May 12, 1913, p. 9, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article15419547. 85. ‘Poon Gooey Family’, Clarence and Richmond Examiner, May 13, 1913, p. 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article62062820. 86. ‘Poon Gooey – Application for Certificate of Exemption from Dictation Test’ (Collector of Customs, Melbourne, 1918–25), NAA: B13, 1918/25405. 87. ‘Local and General News’, Camperdown Chronicle, June 25, 1914, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article 22975697. 88. ‘Poon Gooey’, Horsham Times, July 17, 1914, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article72905144. 89. Certificate Exempting from the Dictation Test (Poon Gooey), Book No. 235, No. 6, December 2, 1918, NAA: B13, 1918/25405.

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shows that he was living and working in Shanghai,90 one of the many Cantonese who pursued business interests there after returning from Australia. There is nothing in this correspondence to indicate whether Ham Hop and the children had accompanied Poon Gooey to Shanghai, and so we lose our final trace of them.

Conclusion Historian A. T. Yarwood’s mid-twentieth-century accounts of Ham Hop and Poon Gooey’s case echoed the Australian government’s suspicions about the actions and motivations of Chinese Australians half a century earlier. Yarwood concluded that Poon Gooey was a man ‘highly respected by the community [who] resorted to subterfuge in order to accomplish an end that [he] felt to be legitimate, though opposed to the law as applied’.91 As I have shown in this chapter, however, Yarwood’s reliance on the one Department of External Affairs file skewed his telling of the case and led him to wrong conclusions, particularly about the colonial permission for Ham Hop to enter Victoria in 1900 and Poon Gooey’s application for a CEDT in 1910. A broader range of sources reveals that Poon Gooey was calculating rather than deceitful in his dealings with the government. He used his intelligence, his understanding of Australian bureaucracy, his social position, and his community connections in fighting against discrimination under the White Australia policy and in working towards an outcome he hoped would benefit his own family, as well as those of other Chinese Australians. A. T. Yarwood’s flawed telling of the story of Ham Hop and Poon Gooey has remained the canonical version of the case for more than half a century. But by returning to the archives and re-evaluating Yarwood’s scholarship, I hope to have both unsettled the established narrative and suggested how writing Chinese Australian women’s history is not just about finding new stories to tell. We also need to look back at the stories we already ‘know’, re-examining the archives in detail, mining our sources for overlooked facts and perspectives, and reframing our narratives—a process which in this case involved trawling through an abundance of material written about, but not by, Ham Hop to try to restore her place in the story. Taking advantage of the increasing availability and access to historical sources, particularly those in digital form, we can uncover detail that allows us to write more nuanced and critical interpretations of Chinese Australian history, ones in which the lives of women are no longer just a footnote.

90. NAA: B13, 1918/25405. On Poon Gooey in Shanghai, see also ‘Personal’, Geelong Advertiser, August 6, 1919, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article165745351; ‘Shanghai ji wen 上海紀聞 [Shanghai news]’, Tung Wah Times, March 19, 1921, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article227658916. On Cantonese Australians in Shanghai, see John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: University of NSW Press, 2007), Chapter 8. 91. Yarwood, ‘The “White Australia” Policy’, p. 255.

7 Missing Ruby Antonia Finnane

On the night of July 13, 1925, a young Perth woman by the name of Ruby Yen failed to return home from work. Ten days later her body was recovered from the harbour at North Wharf in nearby Fremantle. The subsequent inquest and trial were closely followed by the public, with courtrooms packed and newspapers carrying verbatim reports of proceedings. A number of Ruby’s relatives gave evidence: both parents, her brother-in-law, her younger sister, and her husband, Leong Yen. Leong Yen was eventually found guilty of manslaughter. The jury recommended leniency, and he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. Domestic violence, although not then known as such, was a marked feature of Australian society in the years after World War I. The treatment of offenders—true to the Leong Yen example—tended to be lenient. This has been explained as an outcome of popular sympathies with returned soldier perpetrators of violence in the context of a generally militarized society in the post-war years,1 but it was not only returned soldiers who were treated leniently. Historian Elizabeth Nelson has observed a broader tendency to blame the violence ultimately on selfish, pleasureseeking modern young women (the victims) who failed to face up to the responsibilities of wifehood.2 Nelson’s research was limited to Anglo-Australian society. Would a more inclusive survey lead to different conclusions? Did Chinese Leong Yen have anything in common with, for example, Anglo-Australians Roy Wilson and Leslie Bilney, who, ‘unable to achieve manliness through military combat . . . sought to forge their identities as men through absolute control over their young wives’?3 If not, where does the story of Ruby and Leong Yen belong in Australian history?

1. Judith Allen, Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880 (Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990), pp. 132–39. 2. Elizabeth Nelson, ‘Civilian Men and Domestic Violence in the Aftermath of the First World War’, Journal of Australian Studies 76 (2003), pp. 99–108. 3. Nelson, ‘Civilian Men and Domestic Violence’, p. 108.

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This is partly a question about comparative family formations in Australia. The model of Chinese Australian society as a ‘bachelor society’ in which family life was absent has been challenged in recent years by research on intermarriage between Chinese immigrants and non-Chinese, exposing emerging common ground across ethnocultural divisions.4 Documentation of endogamous marriages among Chinese people in Australia is not lacking but to date remains fragmentary, scattered through multiple studies of communities and personal memoirs. The rich body of material engendered by Leong Yen’s trial and the inquest that preceded it points to legal cases as a source worthy of systematic mining if the foundations of a broad-based history of Chinese Australian families is to be laid.5 The shattering end to Ruby’s marriage also prompts thinking about what historian Sigurður Magnússon might describe as the historicity of the ‘singular’ event.6 Ruby’s death was an untoward happening. It removed the victim, her parents, her siblings, and her husband from the solid mainstream of everyday family life. It was responsible for an unusually high degree of exposure in public of personal and family matters. The documentation of the case helps make visible relationships within the family, the specific cultural characteristics of which occasionally emerge in sharp relief. Precisely because it was a case of domestic violence, it sheds light on the home, a rarely illuminated space in Chinese Australian history. Most importantly, it draws attention to a historical absence, Ruby, the missing member of the family, who was also one of the many ‘missing women’ of twentieth-century Australia.7 What sort of history is appropriate to this absence? Working with a very different set of sources and issues, Sigurður Magnússon described his project on the life of Elka Björnsdóttir, a working woman of Reykjavik, as ‘reducing the scale of observation . . . [to] reveal the complicated function of individual relationships within each and every social setting and how they differ from the general norm’.8 It cannot be shown of relationships within Ruby’s family that they differed from the norm, because the field of Chinese Australian history in this respect is too nascent for a general view or theory of, for example, familial relationships and cultural change yet to have emerged. Where Magnússon’s microhistorical approach is helpful is via a poetics of history that legitimates attention to ‘so-called fragments, testimony of times past’ that can ‘offer ways of highlighting the diversity of life and promoting an 4. C. F. Yong, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia, 1901–1921 (Richmond, South Australia: Raphael Arts, 1977), pp. 171–74; Janis Wilton, Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales, 1850–1950 (Armidale, New South Wales: New England Regional Art Museum, 2004), p. 55. See also Kate Bagnall, ‘Rewriting the History of Chinese Families in Nineteenth-Century Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 42 (2011), pp. 62–77. 5. See Mark Finnane, ‘Law as Politics: Chinese Litigants in Australian Colonial Courts,’ in Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, ed. Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 117–36. 6. Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, ‘“The Singularization of History”: Social History and Microhistory within the Postmodern State of Knowledge’, Journal of Social History 36, no. 3 (Spring 2003), pp. 701–35. 7. Amartya Sen, ‘More than 100 Million Women Are Missing’, New York Review of Books 7, no. 20 (December 20, 1990), pp. 61–66. 8. Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, ‘The Life of a Working-Class Woman: Selective Modernization and Micro-history in Early 20th-Century Iceland’, Scandanavian Journal of History 36, no. 2 (May 2011), p. 188.

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understanding of all the extant threads relating to a restricted area of knowledge’.9 For Magnússon, in the study of Elka Björnsdóttir, the restricted area was bounded by the life experiences and mental world of a working-class woman, a view from which early twentieth-century Icelandic society appears in a particular light. In the present study, the restricted area is that occupied by Ruby and her family. When reporters descended on the family home in late July 1925, they anticipated the historian in seeking answers to some simply formulated questions: Who was she? Who were they?

Looking for Ruby Ruby is a reluctant subject of history: unlike Magnússon’s Björnsdóttir, she did not leave diaries behind. Nor to our knowledge was she a prolific letter writer.10 Reporters made inquiries about her without finding out much more than was revealed in the court proceedings. Some photos exist—of her as a small child, and of her wedding.11 There are a few newspaper advertisements bearing on her employment, certificates of birth, marriage, and death, and a gravestone. Her nephew, Bill Chiew, born in Perth in 1925, was interviewed in 2008 as part of a local oral history project. He mentioned her name among others of his mother’s family, but without elaboration.12 It was the aunt who survived on whom he dwelt, not the aunt who died. Something can be ascertained about the larger contexts of Ruby’s life and death: about the part of the world in which the events being traced here unfolded, and about the small Chinese community that was so intimately affected by them. Perth, where she was born and bred, was not just any Australian town. As capital and founding settlement of Western Australia, it had a particular history and character. The attachment there to Britain and empire was stronger than in the eastern coast cities, the albeit lighter convict “stain” more keenly felt, treatment of the indigenous population more paternalistic, and the reaction against Chinese immigrants sharper. Perth was closer to Asia than the eastern cities. Its isolation from them and proximity to Singapore and Java, kept in view by the daily newspaper reports of ships coming and going, in combination with a consciousness of a vast land mass inhabited by Aboriginal peoples, underpinned a pattern of consensus 9. Magnússon, ‘“The Singularization of History”’, p. 723. 10. See Kate Bagnall, ‘A Journey of Love: Agnes Breuer’s Sojourn in 1930s China,’ in Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott (Canberra: ANU Press, 2008), pp. 115–34. 11. Photograph of May and Ruby Leewood, c. 1905, Chiew Family Collection, in Chinese Historical Images in Australia (CHIA) [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D003742.htm; ‘Dead Body Found in Sack’, Mirror (Perth), July 25, 1925, pp. 1–2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page7435337; ‘Life at Its Best and Worst’, Sunday Times (Perth), July 26, 1925, p 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article58222294. 12. William Chiew with Felicity Morel-Ednie Brown, ‘Interview of William Chiew on 15 February 2008 for the Northbridge History Project’, Felicity Morel-Ednie Brown (interviewer), Northbridge History Project, NBHOH-164.

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in white social and political life.13 Suffrage for women was achieved early, in 1899, not because Western Australia was a strong proponent of women’s rights but arguably because in a small population it helped consolidate white political power.14 The state’s Immigration Restriction Act had been passed just two years earlier, in 1897.15 The year of Ruby’s parents’ marriage, 1901, was the year of Federation, bringing together the formerly separate colonies of the continent into a single sovereign state. The newly formed Commonwealth government passed the Immigration Restriction Act, based on the Western Australian Act of 1897.16 As had been the case in Western Australia, a dictation test was to be used to control the entry of nonwhite and other unwanted categories of people into the country. In 1904, the year of Ruby’s birth, the state legislature passed the Factories Act of Western Australia, restricting employment opportunities for Asians in manufacturing and requiring articles produced by them to be stamped as made by ‘Asiatic labour’.17 The Chinese population was in fact tiny, peaking at just under two thousand in 1897, and falling to around 1,500 in 1901, when Chinese-born residents accounted for less than one percent of the state’s population.18 Ruby’s parents emerge to visibility in history during the years of Western Australia’s greatest anxiety over the racial composition of the state’s population, and the period of most intense legislative and political activity concerning Chineseness. In the Western Australian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, they are identified as Hop Lin Wood and James (or William or Peter) Lee Wood. Ruby was their second daughter; her sister May had been born two years earlier. They and their siblings, James (b. 1906), Mabel (b. 1908), and William (b.1910), were part of a historically singular group—Australian nationals of Chinese ancestry born in the White Australia era. Possessing the advantages and protections of Australian nationality, however compromised such a status might have been by discrimination,19 they were distinguished not only from their China-born contemporaries, who could never

13. Geoffrey Bolton, A Fine Country to Starve In (Nedlands, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press in association with Edith Cowan University, 1996). 14. Patricia Grimshaw and Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘White Women, Aboriginal Women and the Vote in Western Australia’, in Women and Citizenship: Suffrage Centenary, ed. Patricia Crawford and Judy Skene, special issue of Studies in WA History Journal 19 (1999), pp. 1–19; Jasmina Brankovitch, ‘Votes for All Women: Racialised Silences in Western Australian Suffrage Historiography’, in Women and Citizenship: Suffrage Centenary, ed. Patricia Crawford and Judy Skene, special issue of Studies in WA History Journal 19 (1999), pp. 20–28. 15. Immigration Restriction Act 1897 (Western Australia), http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/wa/num_act/ ira189761vn13354/. 16. Jan Ryan, Ancestors: Chinese in Colonial Australia (South Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995), p. 68. 17. Factories Act 1904 (Western Australia), http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/wa/num_act/fa19043evn37201/. 18. Ann Atkinson, ‘Chinese Labour and Capital in Western Australia, 1847–1947’ (PhD diss., Murdoch University, 1991), p. 1; Tianming Cai, ‘Astride Two Worlds: The Chinese Response to Changing Citizenship in Western Australia (1901–1973)’ (MA diss., Edith Cowan University, 1999), p. 53. 19. Kate Bagnall, ‘Anglo-Chinese and the Politics of Chinese Overseas Travel from New South Wales, 1898–1925’, in Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, ed. Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 207.

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aspire to this level of belonging, but also from their own parents who were destined over the years to apply and reapply for registration as resident aliens. The family’s obvious social context was the Chinese community of Perth and Western Australia more broadly. Much is already known about this community, which has a distinctive history in Australian terms.20 It began not with a gold rush but with indentured labour. It grew through interstate migration. It lacked the nativeplace associations that characterized Chinese society in Sydney and Melbourne, but with the founding of the Chung Wah Association in 1909 led the way nationally in the formation of Chinese societies that transcended village, county, and provincial ties.21 Chung Wah was pivotal to the formation of something that could be called a Chinese community in Perth. It provided a meeting place for men from different walks of life, from different localities, speaking different dialects. Ruby’s father, James Lee Wood Sr, butcher and shopkeeper, was a founding member.

Lee Wood Lee Wood was born in Shala (沙瀾 C: sālàahn) village in Taishan, one of the famous Four Districts (四邑 C: seiyāp, M: sìyì) of Guangdong, a grouping too famous in the context of Chinese diaspora history to require further elaboration here, save to say that in Perth the Taishanese population ranked third in size, after natives of Xinhui and Kaiping.22 Lee Wood arrived in Perth in 1892, apparently from Melbourne, perhaps following in the footsteps of other Melbourne migrants.23 At the time of Ruby’s death he had been resident in Perth for thirty-three years. The family’s compound surname, Lee Wood or Lee-wood, was made up of the elements of his full name: surname Lee (李 C: léih, M: lǐ) and personal name Wood (活 C: wuht, M: húo). In the Chinese-language press he is sometimes referred to by an alternative name, 李仲泉 (C: léih juhngchyùhn, M: lǐ zhòngquán).24 Judging by registrations of paternity for his various children, he moved through a succession of English personal names: William, Peter, and finally James, which he kept. Photos of Lee Wood taken between 1901 and 1924 show a good-looking man in the prime of life, of confident, even arrogant, bearing.25 He looks like a man of consequence. An early reference to him in the English-language press notes that he sent a wreath to the funeral of Lucy Randell, the wife of parliamentarian George Randell, MLA, a funeral attended by the leading members of Perth society.26 The 20. See Ryan, Ancestors. 21. Cai, ‘Astride Two Worlds’, pp. 97–104. 22. Cai, ‘Astride Two Worlds’, pp. 276–83. 23. Cai, ‘Astride Two Worlds’, p. 98. 24. ‘Dangxun: Pufufu tongxun 黨訊 普扶阜通訊 [Party news: newsletter from the port of Perth]’, Chinese Times (民報 Minbao), February 11, 1922, p. 6, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/168667510. 25. For earlier photos of Lee Wood and his family, see Chiew Family Collection, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/archives/ACH000852.htm. 26. See her obituary, ‘Death of Mrs G. Randell, Sen.’, West Australian, January 27, 1897, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article3106161.

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few references we have to his socio-economic role and status have him as a butcher and a merchant. It is probable that he was also engaged in the opium trade, for he was a vocal opponent of restrictions on the import of opium introduced in 1905, a measure strongly advocated by prominent members of the Chinese community elsewhere in Australia.27 His acquisition of a very young wife in 1901 points to his capacity to command resources and perhaps to circumvent the law through engagement in illegal immigration.28 He played a prominent role in community associations, including the Chung Wah Association and the Kuomintang.29 While not foremost among community leaders, he maintained a highly visible presence. The Chinese population in Western Australia, as in Australia overall, was overwhelmingly male. Alanna Kamp has taken issue with the truism that there were few Chinese women in Australia before the 1970s. As she points out, their numbers, however small, were steadily growing during the White Australia era, especially relative to men.30 In Chinese community photos from Perth in the early decades of the twentieth century, women are certainly to be seen, sometimes in surprising numbers,31 and the men, in fact, were mostly married.32 At the same time, there is no denying the absence of many wives, who were mostly back in China. In funeral notices of Chinese men published in the West Australian newspaper, it is common for the only name apart from that of the deceased to be that of his (male) cousin or ‘sincere friend’, the person assuming responsibility for the conduct of the funeral. Very different from this was the funeral notice of Lee Wood, who after his death in 1946 was described as ‘a retired Merchant, late of 126 James-street, Perth, and of 11 Tiverton-street, Perth, dearly loved and devoted husband of Lin Lee Wood’. News of his death prompted a flood of ‘telegrams, cards, floral tributes and personal expressions of sympathy’, and not only from the Chinese community.33 Such tributes are testimony to the social prestige accruing to a man in possession of a family and prompt the question of how and why some men acquired wives in Australia and not others. In Perth it is obvious that relatively successful men in the community had families: apart from Lee Wood, these included furniture manufacturers Hoy Poy and Kum Yuan; storekeeper Quan A Sam, father of the redoubtable Shem brothers; market gardener John Lew Gooey, married to Mary Wong and the father of eight children; and Lee Wood’s son-in-law, storekeeper Timothy See Chiew, father of Bill Chiew.34 27. ‘Lai han 來函 (Incoming correspondence)’, Tung Wah Times (東華新報 Donghua xinbao), January 20, 1906. 28. Atkinson, ‘Chinese Labour and Capital in Western Australia’, p. 4. 29. ‘Xisheng Pufufu shiyinian zhiyuan biao’ 西省普扶阜十一年職員表 [(Party) membership list for (Minguo) year 11 (1922), Perth, Western Australia], Chinese Times, March 11, 1922, p. 6, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ newspaper/page/15346302. 30. See Alanna Kamp’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 5). 31. Mei-fen Kuo and Judith Brett, Unlocking the History of the Australasian Kuo Min Tang 1911–2013 (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013), p. 36. 32. Cai, ‘Astride Two Worlds’, pp. 274–83. 33. ‘Bereavement Notices’, West Australian, June 8, 1946, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article50345372; ‘Deaths’, West Australian, May 16, 1946, p. 14, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article50341237. 34. Cai, ‘Astride Two Worlds’.

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There appears to be no formal record of Lee Wood’s marriage, but a family wedding photo survives.35 It shows a well-built man of middle years, seated, wearing a suit. His young bride in her turn-of-the-century Western clothes stands by his side and slightly to the rear. The wedding may have been conducted informally, with a matchmaker and friends invited to a banquet.36 In the absence of ancestor tablets before which to bow, this was a conventional way to conduct a wedding (albeit not clearly understood by Australian courts).37 In China itself, even in villages where the orthodox rites of marriage were fully observed, the clan feast was important for giving the bride (necessarily from another village) ‘recognition, and security to her status as a wife’.38 The photograph was consistent with this logic. Sophie Couchman has found a close correspondence between the wedding photograph in Chinese Australian history and the popularization of the white wedding, but the photo of this non-white apparently unregistered wedding suggests that the wedding photo also played a role in securing the legitimacy of a wedding through making it visible.39 In a visual tradition where images of ancestors had a central place in family life, such a photo would have gained in significance with the births of children and grandchildren. Despite the passing of the Immigration Restriction Act, the first decade of Australian Federation was a time of modest growth in the Chinese population of Western Australia. It is known that in this period Lee Wood, whatever his other activities, was working as a butcher in the Quong Lee (also Kwong Lee and Kwong Li) store in James Street.40 This had probably always been his profession, as it was to remain. These were otherwise important years for him. His five children were born, giving him the heirs he needed and the visible substance that came with a wife and children. The birth of his elder son, James, in 1906, must have been especially important. The record of Lee Wood’s personal circumstances in the Chung Wah archives has him listed as a married man with two children, which necessarily means two sons (子 C: jí, M: zǐ), showing the retention of normative Chinese family ideals in this alien setting.41 The father-son structure of the greater number of family groupings in the diaspora must have reinforced a tendency to see sons, and not daughters, as central to social organization. 35. Wedding portrait of James and Lin Leewood, c. 1901, Chiew Family Collection, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D003738.htm. 36. Antonia Finnane, ‘Changing Spaces and Civilized Weddings’, in New Narratives of Urban Space in Republican Chinese Cities: Emerging Social, Legal, and Governance Orders, ed. Billy Kee Long So and Madeleine Zelin (Brill, Leiden, 2013), p. 13. 37. ‘Chinese Wife Refused Maintenance’, Recorder (Port Pirie, South Australia), January 28, 1933, p. 3, http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article95990357. 38. C. K. Yang, Chinese Communist Society: The Family and the Village (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), p. 84. 39. See Sophie Couchman’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 3). 40. Atkinson, ‘Chinese Labour and Capital in Western Australia’, p. 175. Lee Wood’s purchase of the Kwong Lee business is recorded in the advertising columns of the West Australian, April 29, 1914, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article26903957. 41. Cai, ‘Astride Two Worlds’, p. 281.

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In 1909 Lee Wood participated in the planning and establishment of the Chung Wah Association, with premises at 126 James Street, Perth’s ‘Chinatown’. The association was formally opened by the Governor, Sir Edward Stone, in 1910, and Lee Wood’s was one of seven names publicly associated with its founding.42 Cai Tianming explains the formation of the association as a defensive measure on the part of men whose livelihoods were threatened by laws and regulations such as the Factories Act 1904, or a later proposal to ban Chinese from market gardening. The association was formally non-political, but with the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, it moved from an effective alignment with the reformist ‘protect the emperor’ faction to the revolutionary Kuomintang faction, led by Sun Yat-sen. The Chinese press reported a new wave of anti-Chinese sentiment in Western Australia in this same year,43 but the social environment appears to have improved through the 1910s. The mocking term ‘Celestials’ gradually fell out of use, and there were fewer prosecutions of Chinese firms under racially restrictive clauses.44 In 1914 Lee Wood took over the Quong Lee business at 139 James Street, initially with a partner, Bow Wing, subsequently as an independent proprietor.45 An advertisement for the sale of a house at 11 Tiverton Street appeared in 1915 and this property might have been bought by him then.46 It was to be the family home for many decades. It is easy to see how much more information can be collected about a man than about his wife. Lee Wood was a man of humble profession, but he had a recognized public persona as merchant and property owner, and as a member of the Chung Wah Association and Kuomintang. His activities, legal or illegal, were very likely to be recorded in some form or another and reported in newspapers, whether Chinese or English. Patching together these scraps of text produces an impression of the man in contemporary social and economic context—perhaps a rather tough man capable of operating on both sides of the law. His death notice in 1947 described him as a beloved husband and loving father, but the first of these at least is unlikely to have been correct. In Bill Chiew’s recollection, Lee Wood never visited the house in Tiverton Street; he lived with an offsider on the premises of his business in James Street.47 When he died at the age of eighty-nine, it was not in the Tiverton Street house but in the home of his eldest daughter, May.48 He gambled and frequently hocked the deeds of the family house. Bill Chiew knew both his grandparents well. In the school term, he and his siblings went daily to Tiverton Street for their lunch, where they ate sandwiches prepared by their grandmother, the bread cut wafer thin. In their idle hours they 42. ‘Legal Notices’, Daily News (Perth), May 12, 1910, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article77833309. 43. ‘Xi’aosheng zhi paiya fengchao 西澳省之排亞風潮 [Wave of anti-Asianism in Western Australia]’, Chinese Times, August 10, 1912, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article168678532. 44. Atkinson ‘Chinese Labour and Capital in Western Australia’, p. 240. 45. ‘Notice is Hereby Given’, West Australian, May 2, 1914, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26904241. 46. ‘News and Notes’, West Australian, December 23, 1915, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26966748. 47. Chiew, ‘Interview’. 48. ‘Funeral Notices’, West Australian, May 15, 1946, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article50341018.

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amused themselves in their grandfather’s shop, hanging over the shoulders of the old market gardeners and being treated to bits of pork or chicken. His memories richly convey a sense of family and belonging, but nothing in what he had to say suggests a happy relationship between his grandparents.

Lin What can be known of Lin, Ruby’s mother, whom we meet first in the courtroom, ‘a slight, frail woman, in deep mourning and weeping quietly’?49 A photo taken for her application for renewal of residential status in 1948 shows a woman in the ordinary dress of those times, a button-through dress, her hair parted in the middle and done up at the sides (Figure 7.1). Her birthplace is given as Canton and her nationality as Chinese, but she had lived in Perth for nearly fifty years and, not surprisingly, she looks Australian and Chinese at the same time. Her full name in Chinese is given as Hop Lin Jong (possibly 鍾合蓮 C: jūng hahplìhn, M: zhōng hélián). She was also known as Lucy, which tells us something about her: she interacted with the Englishspeaking community. An earlier certificate, dating from 1939, remarks on Lin’s good English. Question marks appear next to both the year of her birth, 1886, and the year of her arrival, 1901, but these seem to refer to the absence of a precise date (day and month) rather

Figure 7.1:  Lin Lee Wood, 1948. National Archives of Australia (NAA: K1331, CHINESE/LEE WOOD L)

49. ‘Chinese Murder Case’, West Australian, August 12, 1925, p. 10, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31873790.

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than doubt as to years mentioned. She arrived in Australia on the SS Australind, which plied a route ‘from Singapore, via coastal ports’.50 It is probable that the ship carried Chinese migrants on each of its trips. The claimed ages of the young Chinese on some of these voyages adds an element of doubt to her birthdate: it is possible that she was seeking to arrive as a minor and was brought out by someone either in debt to Lee Wood or who could profit from obtaining a bride for him. Jong Shing How, charged with conducting a gaming house in 1909 and thought to be in the employ of a more prominent figure, is a candidate for this role.51 A man of this surname, with this sort of relationship to Lee Wood, is a plausible link in the human chain that brought Lin to Fremantle. The earliest image we have of Lin is her wedding photo, which shows a welldressed young woman in a ruffled blouse and tailored skirt. Her left hands holds a bouquet of flowers; her right rests on Lee Wood’s arm, no doubt on the photographer’s instruction.52 Even if she was somewhat older than the fifteen years indicated by immigration records, the age gap between the two, perhaps twenty-five years, is palpable.53 Huping Ling attributes age differences of this order, characteristic of diaspora marriages, primarily to the shortage of women consequent on immigration restrictions, but in fact they were typical of second marriages for men in China.54 It is possible that Lin was a second wife. There were few Chinese women in Perth when Lin arrived: census figures show eighteen women of Chinese nationality in the whole of Western Australia. But the European wives of Chinese men added to the size of the community. When Lin gave birth to her first child in 1902, who was at hand to help? A possible midwife was Elizabeth Gipp, the wife of Charlie Ah You.55 The Gipps moved to Western Australia from Melbourne in the 1890s, and their youngest child, Florence, was born in Perth in 1899. Lin was present at Elizabeth’s funeral in 1922, and Lee Wood was a pall-bearer, so the family relationship must have been close.56 A mother of six sons and five daughters, very much mourned in passing, Elizabeth looks just the sort of person to have helped out with the confinements of other women. Lin may, in turn, have assisted at the births of the Gooey children, the eldest of whom was born in 1905, a year after Ruby, and one of whom married her younger son. Her own five children were born at intervals of two years between 1902 and 1910. There is evidence that an ideal family size in China was five children, in the 50. ‘Notes’, Western Mail, November 16, 1901, p. 31, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article33214838. 51. ‘Asiatic Gamblers’, Western Mail, August 7, 1909, p. 30, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article37587778. 52. Wedding portrait of James and Lin Leewood, c. 1901, Chiew Family Collection, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D003738.htm. 53. ‘Funeral Notices’ (Lee Wood), West Australian, May 15, 1946, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article50341018. 54. Huping Ling, ‘Family and Marriage of Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Chinese Immigrant Women’, Journal of American Ethnic History 19, no. 2 (2000), pp. 52–53; James Lee and Feng Wang, One Quarter of Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 72. 55. Cai, ‘Astride Two Worlds’, p. 191. 56. ‘Obituary: The Late Mrs. Elizabeth Gipp’, Daily News (Perth), October 16, 1922, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article83155337.

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ratio of three boys to two girls.57 With the birth of their second son in April 1910, the Lee Woods has achieved this ideal family size, although with the ratio of boys to girls reversed. They named their youngest child William but called him ‘Boy,’ which in Cantonese means precious and is a common endearment for babies. Judging by the appearance of his nickname on the family gravestone in Karrakatta, he kept this name for the whole of his life. There were no more children after Boy. In the course of raising her family, Lin learned to speak English, as did her children, who grew up in a Chinese-speaking home situated in an English-speaking neighbourhood. Public schools were built at Highgate and Northbridge in 1895 and 1896, probably close to where the Lee Woods lived.58 Highgate was closer to Tiverton Street, and James Street Public School, near to the Beaufort Street Bridge, was close to Perth’s Chinatown, where Lee Wood had his business. The Gipp children attended the James Street school.59 It is probable that the Lee Wood children went to one or the other of these schools, as did the next generation of the family.60 Both schools had technical training as well as academic classes: the boys did woodwork, and the girls cooked and did laundry. Hand sewing and even machine sewing appears to have been offered no later than 1908.61 Lin herself could probably sew. In North America women in the Chinese diaspora sewed for their families, and for income.62 The same must have been true of their counterparts in Australia. A photo of May and Ruby at the ages of around three and eighteen months, respectively, shows the two small girls wearing ruffled dresses, the detailed handiwork showing evidence of some skill and patience on the part of the maker.63 Making clothes for the children at home was a common practice at the time, in both Australia and China, and was greatly facilitated by the advent of the sewing machine, in use by Chinese tailors in Australia at least from the 1880s.64 The sewing of ruffles, especially, was aided by the use of a sewing machine, and indeed stimulated one of the early advances in sewing machine technology.65 The house that Bill Chiew refers to as ‘grandma’s house’ was occupied by the family probably from 1915 onward. Tiverton Street was in walking distance of the city. Two blocks south via Beaufort Street lay James Street, Perth’s Chinatown, where 57. Boye De Mente, The Chinese Mind: Understanding Traditional Chinese Beliefs and Their Influence on Contemporary Culture (North Clarendon: Tuttle Publishing, 2011), p. 90. 58. ‘New Public School’, Inquirer and Commercial News, July 24, 1896, p. 11, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newspage6589076; ‘School Speech Days’, Daily News (Perth), December 19, 1896, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article81330086. 59. Cai, ‘Astride Two Worlds’, p. 191. 60. Chiew, ‘Interview’. 61. ‘Sewing in State Schools’, West Australian, June 11, 1908, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article28843723. 62. Ling, ‘Family and Marriage’, p. 48. 63. Photograph of May and Ruby Leewood, c. 1905, Chiew Family Collection, in Chinese Historical Images in Australia (CHIA) [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D003742.htm. 64. ‘Wounding with Intent to Do Grievous Bodily Harm’, Northern Territory Times, June 5, 1886, p. 3, http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article3159582. 65. Autumn Stanley, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 299.

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the Chung Wah clubhouse stood. An intrepid reporter from the Sunday Times made his way there sometime early in March 1922 and reported with delighted horror on the sights to be seen behind the facade of street-front businesses and residences: the ‘tangle of little ways, lanes and alleys’ with gaming tables all around and sausages hanging from rafters.66 The sausages were probably made by Lee Wood. ‘They were real handmade,’ recalled Bill. ‘They’d mix all the meat, put it through the sausage machine and get the skins, and they’d make all these . . . Lup Cheung—that’s what they call them in Chinese.’ Once a month, on sausage-making day, Lin would go down to the Chung Wah building and help with the making of the sausages. Bill recalled that she had ‘a crook leg’: She broke her ankle somehow and of course she didn’t go to the doctor and it sort of semi-healed . . . She used to work like hell. She used to work at grandad’s shop. She’d walk there and she had this crook ankle, when they used to make sausages, they were probably making them once a month, I suppose. No one used to give her a lift.

According to a newspaper report of 1925, the family home was a ‘comfortably furnished timber house’.67 Bill remembers differently: It was a funny sort of house, four rooms, and on the back verandah kitchen somehow all the floor was sloping down. . . . The roof of the room there [had] a 12 inch drop on it so everything [had] . . . the legs cut away and all that. We normally used to sit on wooden boxes, not many chairs.68

Bill’s memories of his grandmother’s house seem to date from the early thirties, when he was in primary school. It is possible that the house had become run-down since his birth. More probably, the reporter had never actually stepped inside the house and had no idea what the furniture was like. Tiverton Street is not very long, around 100 metres end to end. There are no family homes there now, but in 1925 it was the address of perhaps a dozen families, of whom only the Lee Woods were Chinese. The pattern of social interaction between the various residents of the street cannot now be known, but judging by Bill’s experience of nearby Bulwer Street in the 1930s, relations between Chinese and non-Chinese were on the whole neighbourly.69 The more important relationships of the Lee Wood family undoubtedly involved members of the local Chinese community, and all five of the Lee Wood children married within the community. Only in the next generation (Bill’s) did intermarriage occur. What role Lin played in the marriages of her children is unclear. The influence of relations between the men concerned are more obvious. May married See 66. Geoffrey M. Jacoby, ‘Chinatown: Smells, Scenes and Sausages—the Chinese at Home’, Sunday Times (Perth), March 5, 1922, p. 17, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article58026822. 67. ‘The Body in the Bag’, Daily News, July 24, 1925, p. 13, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article78442599. 68. Chiew, ‘Interview’. 69. Chiew, ‘Interview’.

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Chiew, also known as Ah Chiew or Timothy See Chiew (趙西周? C: jiuh sāijāu, M: zhào xīzhōu), who with his brother ran a local firm called J. & S. Chiew that lasted until the 1960s. The elder brother was probably Ah Chew (趙仲周 C: jiuh juhngjāu, M: zhào zhòngzhōu), who like Lee Wood was among the founders of the Chung Wah Association.70 Ruby’s marriage was facilitated by George Way (謝華威 C: jeh wàhwāi, M: xiè huáwēi), who combined business as a herbalist with matchmaking services for the Chinese community. George had succeeded in 1918 to the herbalist practice of Lee Sho Hen (李壽田 C: léih sauhtìhn, M: lǐ shòutián), another of the Chung Wah founders. These overlapping references are to be expected in such a small community, but they also point to close networking between male members of the community. May’s wedding to Timothy Chiew took place in 1922. Two years later the Lee Wood family was busy preparing for Ruby’s wedding to Leong Yen. According to an investigative article in Truth, Lin accompanied Ruby on visits to Leong Yen more than once during the period of the engagement, helping to negotiate the price of an engagement ring.71 Truth was primarily interested in illustrating the mercenary character of Chinese wedding transactions, but this minor detail is suggestive of a

Figure 7.2: Photograph of the wedding of Ruby Lee Wood to Leong Yen. From left to right: Lin Lee Wood, James Lee Wood (senior), Leong Yen, Ruby Yen, Dolly Lee Wood, unknown possibly James Lee Wood (junior). Truth (Perth), August 1, 1925, p. 5 70. C. H. Chan (ed.), Chung Wah Association Centenary Celebration Souvenir Publication (1910–2010), (Northbridge, Western Australia: Chung Wah Association, 2010), p. 60. 71. ‘Tragedy of Ruby Leong Yen’, Truth (Perth), August 8, 1925, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article208126866.

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busy coming and going on the part of mother and daughter in the weeks leading up to the wedding. The visits to Leong Yen took place in George Way’s shop at 380 William Street, around five minutes’ walk from Tiverton Street. Ruby’s wedding took place at the Trinity Congregational Church in St Georges Terrace. Lin may have helped Ruby make the fashionable wedding dress her daughter wore on the day, with its straight 1920s line and long veil (Figure 7.2, see p. 163). In the wedding photo, splashed over the daily papers after Ruby’s death, Lin herself looks the competent matriarch of a grown family, her dress rather old-fashioned, her bearing dignified. She must have been feeling just slightly apprehensive at the time this photo was taken because Leong Yen was coming home to live with Ruby in the family home in Tiverton Street.

Leong Yen For all the attention paid to him in 1925, very little is known about Leong Yen. At the time of his arrest he had not been in Australia for very long. In 1924 he was refused a Certificate for Exemption from the Dictation Test in Melbourne, signifying that he had sought to return to China for a visit within a couple of years of arrival.72 He may have had a wife there. Court reports from Melbourne in 1923 include a case of one Jow Wick being charged with causing grievous bodily harm to a man called Leong Yen, who spent three weeks in hospital recovering from knife wounds incurred in the attack.73 These events are consistent with Leong Yen’s having left Melbourne for Perth in 1924, and with the large number of scars recorded for him in the jail register: forearm, stomach, kneecap, side of eye, cheekbone, and ‘a large scar at side back of head’.74 He was twenty-nine at the time of the trial, eight years older than Ruby. The West Australian described him as ‘diminutive’,75 but the jail register gives his height as five feet and seven inches, only half an inch shorter than the average soldier would have been at the time.76 The reason he looked diminutive to the reporter may be simply that this is how Chinese were viewed. According to the same paper he looked like ‘the intelligent type of Chinese’, the inference being that he did not look like a market gardener. The wedding photos show that he and Ruby made a handsome couple. He could read and write ‘a little’ in English and may have had some schooling in it. 72. ‘Leong Yen (Ah Leong Sing) – Issue of Certificate for Exemption from Dictation Test Refused’ (Collector of Customs, Melbourne, 1924), National Archives of Australia: B13, 1924/2206. 73. ‘Alleged Stabbing’, Daily News (Perth), March 7, 1923, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article77899404. 74. Prisoner 12431, ‘Register – Prisoners 12097 – 13280’, Registers – Local Prisoners (Male) (Fremantle Prison, 1924–1927), State Records Office of Western Australia (SROWA): AU WA S672–cons4173 15. 75. ‘Chinese Murder Case’, West Australian, August 12, 1925, p. 10, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31873790. 76. Greg Whitwell, Christine De Souza, and Stephen Nicholas, ‘Height, Health and Economic Growth in Australia, 1860–1940,’ in Health and Welfare During Industrialization, ed. Richard H. Steckel and Roderick Floud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 391.

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Difficulty in making ends meet may have been among the push factors in his migration from Melbourne to Western Australia. In Fremantle he had relatives, or at least close connections, father-and-son laundry proprietors Hop Wah and Ah How, whose Chinese surname was Leong.77 They were from Kaiping, allowing us to identify Leong Yen, too, as a Kaiping native. The matchmaker George Way was also a native of Kaiping, which may have played a role in his acting on Leong Yen’s behalf very soon after the latter’s arrival in Perth. As a live-in son-in-law, Leong Yen was in a less than desirable social position after his marriage, even given that people far from home had to make pragmatic decisions about family and living circumstances. In China marriage meant, and to a considerable degree was constituted by, the bride going to the home of her parentsin-law. Adoption of a son-in-law was a measure sometimes taken by a family that lacked a son of their own, and hence heirs, but in such circumstances the son-in-law and his family suffered a loss of social standing and his position in his wife’s family was typically weak.78 The ritual subordination of the wife to the authority of the male line through naofang (鬧房 C: naauhfóng), or ‘nuptial hazing’, was impossible to effect in such a marriage, and in marital disputes the man was at a disadvantage: his wife had too many allies on hand. That disputes soon erupted is clear. Ruby and Leong Yen’s wedding took place in June, and in December his mother-in-law locked him out of the house. It seems that Leong Yen worked for Lee Wood in the early months of his marriage. After being ejected from the Tiverton Street house in December, he went to live in Fremantle with his relatives, and may have been employed there in their laundry business. Ruby had been unwell in August and had undergone an operation. In January she was again ill and underwent an operation for appendicitis. Leong Yen is known to have visited her regularly during this period, making the forty-minute journey on the train from Fremantle three times a week. He paid for the hospital bills. It seems from this as though he was eager to set the marriage, and his relations with the Lee Wood family, to rights. His father-in-law was at one with him. When Ruby came out of hospital, Leong Yen moved back into the house in Tiverton Street. Lee Wood helped him buy a grocery store, and a new phase of domestic life began, though very obviously not a happy one, for Ruby and he slept in different bedrooms.79

77. They were 梁亞有 (C: lèuhng ayáuh, M: liáng yàyǒu) and 梁西豪 (C: lèuhng sāihòuh, M: liáng xīháo), respectively. Cai, ‘Astride Two Worlds’, pp. 279–80; ‘The Death of Ruby Leong Yen’, Truth (Perth), September 12, 1925, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article208127250. 78. James P. McGough, ‘Deviant Marriage Patterns in Chinese Society,’ in Normal and Abnormal Behaviour in Chinese Culture, ed. Arthur Kleinman and Tsang-yi Lin (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981), pp. 178–80. 79. Chief Justice McMillan Criminal Bench Book, Judges’ Bench Notes (Supreme Court of Western Australia, 1925–1926), SROWA: AU WA S174–cons4459 057, pp. 67–69. ‘Chinese Murder Case’, West Australian, September 8, 1925, p. 8, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/31878954; ‘Tragedy of Ruby Leong Yen’, Truth (Perth), August 8, 1925, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article208126866.

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Leong Yen’s greengrocery, in Subiaco, was one of a cluster of businesses located at the junction of Hay Street and Coghlan Road. Directly adjacent to it, within the one built structure, was a chemist shop. The building is still there, two rooms wide and one deep, with a house now tacked onto the rear. The distance from Tiverton Street to the shop in Subiaco was just under four kilometres. Leong Yen usually left for work at around half past seven in the morning, returning after dark—not until between half past nine and half past ten according to Lin. He might spend the evening in James Street before returning home. On Monday, July 13, he went as usual to the market in James Street to purchase vegetables for the shop and afterwards had lunch with his father-in-law. That night he did not return home until very late.80 According to the account Leong Yen subsequently gave to the police, Ruby was with him at the shop until three o’clock, then said she was going home to help her mother make a dress. He insisted she stay at the shop with him, and seeking to detain her, caught at her coat with one hand and her throat with the other. In the ensuing struggle he accidentally hit her ‘on her operation’, causing her to collapse. To Lee Wood he confessed that he thought initially she was not dead, ‘but she was dead.’81 Fearful of the consequences for himself (‘I very frightened,’ he repeatedly stated in court), he sought means to dispose of the body. A taxicab driver, James Gillon, testified to helping him lift a trunk into the boot of the car and driving him down to an address in Fremantle—the site of Hop Wah’s laundry.82 How Ruby’s body was then conveyed to the harbour was never clarified, but according to Leong Yen he carried it himself.83 Afterwards, he took the forty-minute train ride back to Perth and walked home. The house in Tiverton Street was small, and Lin must have heard him come in. In September she answered the queries of the Crown Prosecutor thus: – Yen did not call at the shop that night. – I did not see him till Tuesday morning. Did not speak to him. – He came to the shop on Tuesday night. I did not speak to him. – I saw him on Wed. morning and night. – On Wed. night he said policeman had been to see him at his shop. – That’s all he said. – I said I know police been to your shop. If you murder my daughter police catch you.84

A week later, Ruby’s body was found. 80. Chief Justice McMillan Criminal Bench Book, pp. 41–42. 81. ‘The Evidence: Lee Chiew’s Story’, Daily News (Perth), September 7, 1925, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article78441929. 82. Chief Justice McMillan Criminal Bench Book, p. 53. 83. ‘The Evidence: Lee Chiew’s Story’, Daily News (Perth), September 7, 1925, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article78441929. 84. Chief Justice McMillan Criminal Bench Book, p. 42.

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Ruby The forensic report submitted to the coronial inquest shows a young woman at home in the material world of 1920s Perth. Ruby’s hair was bobbed and tinted: her hairdresser, interviewed by the police, confirmed that Ruby had had a bob and tint just a few days before her death. She wore silk stockings, which at the time cost around ten shillings and sixpence a pair, earrings, and a ring on her finger. A ‘lady’s handbag’ was discovered together with her body. The contents included a nickel scent bottle, nail scissors, a ‘bobette’ comb, small card case, tweezers, a powder case, lip salve, nail paste, a nail file, eyebrow brush, face cream, hair pins, wax matches and part of matchbox, fancy needlework and hank of thread for same, two rings (one missing the stone), a pink handkerchief, and a ‘preventative article’, among other items.85 Nirad Chaudhuri’s phrase ‘culture in the vanity bag’ seems to capture the meanings in this small collection of personal possessions, so obviously the belongings of a young woman taking pride in her appearance—her nails, her eyebrows, her skin.86 She was pretty, ‘even by Western standards’, according to the Mirror.87 The vocabulary and some of the items mark the times. Nail polish or ‘nail polish paste’ was just beginning to supplant the older term ‘nail paste’ in advertising and beauty columns. The bobette comb, designed for shingled hair (the new, edgy bob), had not long come on to the market—the first advertisements in Perth newspapers had yet to run. Wax matches, later banned in Australia because of safety concerns, were still widely used; Ruby may have smoked cigarettes from time to time. The needlework and thread were consistent with her having been brought up by a Chinese mother: needlework was the definitive ‘women’s work’ in China. It was also consistent with the ‘present popularity of embroidery’ in Perth, as noted by the Daily News.88 Most of all, it made sense in the context of Ruby’s work history, for she was, reported the Mirror, ‘an expert dressmaker, and carried on a dressmaking business’.89 In fact, this was not the first time that Ruby’s name had appeared in a newspaper. Around the corner and up the road from Tiverton Street, in a two-storey ‘shop-house’ at 191 Beaufort Street, a Mrs S. Wilson presided over a ladies’ drapery that had been in operation since 1919. The business had been in difficulties in 1923 but was established on new footing in the latter part of that year when ‘Miss LeeWood (late of Galway and Bramley)’ was invited to take charge of the workroom.90 85. ‘Telling the Tragic Story of Ruby Leong Yen’s Death’, Truth (Perth), August 15, 1925, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article208126932. 86. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Culture in the Vanity Bag: Being an Essay on Clothing and Adornment in Passing and Abiding India (Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1976). 87. ‘Dead Body Found in Sack’, Mirror (Perth), July 25, 1925, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page7435337. 88. ‘Petit Point Embroidery’, Daily News (Perth), September 27, 1924, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article 78438341. 89. ‘Dead Body Found in Sack’, Mirror (Perth), July 25, 1925, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page7435337. 90. ‘Businesses’, West Australian, May 15, 1923, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article22625020; ‘Situations Wanted’, October 27, 1923, p. 20, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31196232.

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This sort of shop was an institution typical of the textile and apparel sector in the nineteenth century, and one that in the 1920s was still holding its own against the big department store with its stock of prêt-à-porter. At Mrs Wilson’s, simple slip dresses that were fashionable in the post-war years could be purchased for eight shillings. A full lady’s outfit cost around a guinea. These were competitive prices, as the Ladies Section columnist pointed out, and Mrs Wilson’s need for an assistant in 1923 suggests a good customer base for her business. How did Ruby acquire qualifications for this position? The professionalization of dressmaking in Australia was slow: in English-language countries generally, training institutes for dressmaking were rare and the professional dressmaker often started by ‘making frocks for friends’.91 In Ruby’s case, early training may have been provided by elementary sewing lessons at school, by her mother, and by an apprenticeship. The phrase ‘late Galway and Bramley’ was consistently appended to her name. This was presumably a drapery where she had at least some work experience. The post-war years may have been particularly opportune for a young woman seeking remunerative employment. In 1919, there were many advertisements for ‘tailoressess’ in the city of Perth, perhaps a consequence of labour shortages consequent on wartime losses.92 Ruby did not work in Mrs Wilson’s shop for very long. In November she set herself up as an independent dressmaker, advertising her services from her home base at 11 Tiverton Street. At not quite twenty years of age, she is visible to us through the tiny window of an advertisement in the West Australian: a young woman yet to achieve her majority, operating with apparent confidence in the social and economic environment of 1920s Perth.93 She was one of a generation of young women who, between the wars, were helping to normalize and standardize the idea of the working girl. In her wedding photo she looks the very image of ‘Miss Modern’.94 She continued to run advertisements for her business in early 1924, the last ad appearing on February 29. The year 1924 was the year of the Rat, with Chinese New Year falling on February 4. It must have been around this time that Ruby was introduced to Leong Yen. According to Truth—apparently on the basis of information from George Way—Leong Yen had not been long in Perth before taking ‘a great fancy’ to Ruby.95 Ruby’s sister Mabel (‘Dolly’) testified at the inquest in August that she (Dolly) had first met Leong Yen one Sunday around three months before the couple’s wedding in June, and had been made aware at that time that Leong Yen wished to marry

91. ‘The Wardrobe: Dressmaking’, West Australian, November 14, 1930, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article 33223988. 92. ‘Situations Vacant’, West Australian, June 10, 1919, p. 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article27607394. 93. ‘Situations Wanted’, West Australian, November 27, 1923, p. 12, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31201687. 94. See Penny Tinkler, ‘Women and Popular Literature’, in Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945, ed. Jane Purvis (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 121. 95. ‘Tragedy of Ruby Leong Yen’, Truth (Perth), August 8, 1925, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article208126866.

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her sister.96 Counting backwards, it seems reasonable to conclude that discussions leading to the engagement had commenced in February, and may have been a factor in the cessation of the dressmaking advertisements. The cultural logic in Chinese and Australian society was the same: a young unmarried woman might operate in the public sphere, but betrothal ultimately meant being absorbed into the private realm of the fiancé or husband. Afterwards, Ruby continued dressmaking on a commercial basis, perhaps in company with her mother, but evidently on the basis of an established reputation or word of mouth. For Ruby and her sisters, the early 1920s were momentous years; work, marriage, and—in the case of May—childbirth marked significant stages of the life cycle. With May’s marriage in 1922, Ruby lost a daily companion: her sister moved to Robinson Avenue, not far away, but she was not free any more to go to the pictures on a Saturday with Ruby. By 1925 May was already the mother of three small children. Dolly was four years younger than Ruby, but a self-possessed young woman judging by newspaper reports.97 She was witness at Ruby’s wedding. The two sisters were close, living in the same house even after Ruby’s marriage, going out together, and occasionally working at the same place. Leong Yen gave Ruby money, Dolly told the inquest, and the two young women would go out to the pictures together.98 In Love with Love was just then showing, starring Marguerite de la Motte as ‘a girl of the modern type—gay, restless, exceedingly attractive, and completely without conscience’.99 Ruby and Dolly probably talked to each other in English, which was their native if not quite their mother tongue, and they no doubt knew much more than their parents about each other’s attitudes and sentiments. Questioned at the inquest about the relationship between Ruby and Leong Yen, both Lee Wood and Lin stated that they thought Ruby had liked Leong Yen, a statement qualified by Lin to mean that had been the case early in the marriage. At the trial Lee Wood was insistent: ‘They seemed to get on all right. I heard no complaints.’100 Dolly, on the other hand, testified, ‘They were not very happy together. My sister told she did not like her husband very much.’101 Something hinted at by Truth was the cultural difference between Leong Yen, a recent immigrant who had been born and brought up in China, and Ruby, Australian by birth and formal education. On the one hand, wrote the reporter, Leong Yen ‘had lived under English customs’ and had accordingly desired to go ‘courting’, but ‘the girl’s relations, following Chinese customs, would not hear of such a thing at all’. On the other hand, ‘as a Chinese, [Leong Yen] was not able to quite understand the 96. ‘Mystery of Ruby Yen’s Death’, Daily News (Perth), August 11, 1925, p. 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article 78443810. 97. ‘Chinese Murder Case’, West Australian, August 12, 1925, p. 10, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31873790. 98. Chief Justice McMillan Criminal Bench Book. 99. ‘Movies and Mummers’, Sunday Times (Perth), July 12, 1925, p. 15, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article58221323. 100. Chief Justice McMillan Criminal Bench Book, p. 48. 101. Chief Justice McMillan Criminal Bench Book.

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freedom that the white man allows his womenfolk’—a freedom apparently assumed by Ruby—and was ‘apt to be jealous whether he had any real reason for it or not’. It was allegedly on this account that he was ejected from the Lee Wood home in December 1924.102 Not even Truth, however, ventured to speculate in print about the most obvious problem in the marriage, which must have been exposed by the forensic report: the marriage had not been consummated. This was revealed in the court proceedings, and reported in the newspaper, although without comment.103 We cannot know whether it was discussed by the jury, but it is open to speculation that this factor, in combination with the revelation that Ruby’s handbag carried a ‘preventative article’, underpinned the jury’s sympathy for Leong Yen, and the strong recommendation for leniency. The last day of Ruby’s life was a Monday. On the morning of July 13, 1925, she left home at 8:30 a.m. and called in at a shop in Beaufort Street, where her mother was working, in order to leave the house key with her. She must have been the last to leave the house that morning. It was the middle of the Perth winter, and she was wearing a coat of imitation fur. She reached the shop in Subiaco around 9.30 a.m.: Thomas Allan, the chemist in the neighbouring shop, saw her there. At 10 a.m., she came into the chemist’s to pay the rent. In response to a query from the coroner, Allan testified that Ruby ‘appeared depressed’.104 Later in the day, sometime before 1 p.m., Ruby visited the shop on the other side, a stationer’s, run by Mrs Ada O’Toole. A girl called Erna Rowland worked there, the same age as Dolly. It is possible that the girls were on friendly terms and that Ruby had called in for a chat. In any event, Mrs O’Toole did not say whether Ruby had bought anything, merely that she was ‘in my shop’. Erna’s name was listed among the witnesses for the inquest, but for some reason she was not called. As far as can be seen from the inquest and trial papers, the last person to see Ruby alive, apart from Leong Yen, was George Gerald Crisp, who owned the hairdressing salon across the road and testified at the inquest that he saw her inside the shop at one in the afternoon.105 How Ruby died is unclear. Leong Yen stated that he had caught her by the throat, but it seemed to the investigators that she had not been strangled. He said also that in the course of their altercation—in fact, in defending himself—he had inadvertently struck her in the stomach where she had recently had an operation. Considerable interest was taken in the small amount of strychnine found in her during the forensic examination. Despite the frequent mention of herbalist George Way at the inquest and trial, no comparable interest was taken in Chinese medicine: inquiries were confined to interrogation of the chemist next door.106 The amount 102. ‘Tragedy of Ruby Leong Yen’, Truth (Perth), August 8, 1925, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article208126866. 103. Chief Justice McMillan Criminal Bench Book, p. 67. 104. Chief Justice McMillan Criminal Bench Book, p. 49. 105. ‘Mystery of Ruby Yen’s Death’, Daily News (Perth), August 11, 1925, p. 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article 78443810. 106. See Kee C. Huang, The Pharmacology of Chinese Herbs (Florida: CRC Press, 1999), p. 164.

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of strychnine was judged insufficient to have caused death. Other evidence of the precise cause of death may have been obscured by decomposition of the body—her body had been ten days in the water. Her father was asked to identify her and cried on viewing her remains. They buried Ruby at Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth, in the Congregational section. Bill Chiew remembers going to Karrakatta as a child. His father would hire a sulky to take them all down every weekend, as if going to church. The overt purpose of this excursion was to stand before a headstone engraved in Chinese, a ritual that bewildered Bill until he learned that it bore the name of his father’s brother.107 He does not mention visiting the Congregational section, but perhaps his mother, May, on this weekly excursion, took the opportunity to visit her sister’s grave. Ruby’s gravestone is singular, made in the shape of a heart and engraved with the words ‘In loving memory of Ruby, beloved daughter of James and Lin Lee Wood’ (Figure 7.3). Her married name was omitted.

Figure 7.3:  Heart-shaped stone in Karrakatta Cemetery, Perth, marking Ruby Yen’s grave. Photograph by the author

107. Chiew, ‘Interview’.

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Conclusion The history of Chinese Australia has been written largely as a story of race relations, against a backdrop provided by the racialized immigration regime popularly referred to as the White Australia policy. The metanarrative, situated at the interface of Chinese immigrants and their Anglophone contemporaries, features a dichotomization of Chinese and white. Early studies mostly focus on policies and policing of immigration. While recent research shows the field turning to a ‘more Chinesecentred’ approach, to paraphrase Paul Cohen,108 the field as a whole is haunted by the issue of Chinese-white relations, and much scholarship continues to focus on exactly this. It is of course difficult to think of any respect in which race could be bypassed as an issue in Chinese Australian history, but its overwhelming significance as a factor in Chinese Australian life has meant that the sorts of categories employed and themes pursued in the social history of mainstream Australia—class and gender, urban and rural differentiation, religion, crime and punishment, and civil society, to name a few—have been only faintly recognized until now. Thinking about intracommunity relations among Chinese permits a partial break with the topic of race relations to consider some less often considered historical issues. Some of these issues are not easy to raise, let alone to research: sexual relations, domestic violence, gender relations more broadly, rites of passage, and cultural maintenance or change in respect of intimate family life over time. The importance of these issues is underscored by the fact and manner of Ruby’s death. In this chapter they have been exposed and probed via a detailed plotting out of what can be known of Ruby and her family, a working-class immigrant family in 1920s Perth. The members of this family were ordinary people who made their livings through manual work and small-scale commerce. They were culturally endogamous in the first two generations; not until the grandchildren’s generation did any marital alliances include non-Chinese. They make a poor fit for the categorization of Australian Chinese families either as sojourning or as transnational. With the exception of Boy, who joined the Royal Australian Air Force, they were not particularly mobile even within Australia. They were gradually losing touch with China: even the earliest of the family gravestones, Ruby’s, lacked Chinese characters. They lived mostly below the radar. Only the untoward death of a daughter enables us to know much about them. In the history of this family, the men enjoy a certain level of social visibility because of their connection with commercial interests and civil or political associations. The relationships between them deserve close examination. When the police sought information from Timothy See Chiew, he refused to divulge it because he was Leong Yen’s brother-in-law. When Leong Yen spoke to Lee Wood after he had seen the body, he did so in apparent confidence in the relationship, saying, ‘Don’t 108. Paul Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

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cry, Father.’ When Lee Wood spoke of Leong Yen at the inquest, he did so without overt animosity.109 Lee Wood’s life was lived mainly in the intensely male community of James Street and the Chung Wah Association, where he not only worked but also resided. In his later years he lived not with his son, James, in Tiverton Street, but in the house of his son-in-law. Timothy See Chiew appears in many respects to have acted as the eldest son in this family. He later provided James Jr with employment, and perhaps Dolly’s husband as well. All these facts point to a degree of quasilineage male solidarity, a solidarity pragmatically built between men with family connections through marriage, in the absence of true lineage relationships. The role of the marriage broker, George Way, in developing these brotherly bonds is highly interesting. The matchmaker was central to marriage organization, and indeed to the recognition of marriage in China.110 It is a role that deserves study in the context of diaspora communities. Relations between the female members of this family were likewise close. Unlike the adult males, the women were actually related to each other. The mother was highly capable: her English was good, she worked hard in whatever businesses her husband was involved in, and brought money into the household. She supported her elder daughter with daily care of the grandchildren during their school years.111 During the inquest into Ruby’s death she became bitterly distressed. Her younger daughter, Dolly, had to be called up to sit beside her before she was able to compose herself sufficiently to finish her testimony. She was perhaps disposed not to bear patiently with male behaviour. She disliked Leong Yen intensely, apparently not even looking at him if she could avoid it. The fact that Lee Wood lived away from the family home may have been his decision, but even so, her attitude to him may have been a factor. In a different country context, Huping Ling has remarked on the relatively high degree of personal independence enjoyed by women in the Chinese diaspora.112 This appears to have been true of Lin. Somewhere out of this mix of relationships, Ruby ended up married to Leong Yen, and dying at the age of twenty-one. The intense public interest taken in the circumstances surrounding her death can be attributed in part to exotic elements in her life story, beginning with the actual fact of Chineseness. There is, however, little evidence that her death was attributed to this fact. Perhaps it was tacitly recognized that Ruby was one of many victims of spousal assault in 1920s Australia. Early estimates show that in approximately 77 percent of these cases the death came about as a result of the victim’s threat to leave her husband because of his violence.113 Thinking back to Lin’s action in turning Leong Yen out of the house in December, 109. ‘Chinese Murder Case’, West Australian, August 12, 1925, p. 10, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article31873790. 110. Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 120. 111. Chiew, ‘Interview’. 112. Ling, ‘Family and Marriage’, p. 46. 113. Judith Allen, ‘The Invention of the Pathological Family: A Historical Study of Family Violence in N.S.W.’, in Family Violence in Australia, ed. Carol O’Donnel and Jan Craney (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1982), p. 7.

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it seems possible that violence had been inflicted on Ruby, too, at an earlier stage in the marriage. In any event, however greatly her life course was inflected by Chinese cultural factors, when considered from the perspective of her death, the story of her short marriage seems not un-Australian. An opinion piece by the Tung Wah Times published after Leong Yen’s sentencing shows that there can be no clear cultural proprietorship of a story such as this. Wife killing was certainly an atrocity, admitted the paper, but when the loving husband is confronted by a wife who ‘finds advice hard to take’, trouble will inevitably ensue. The root of the problem in the paper’s view was ‘free choice’. Women tended to ‘misunderstand freedom and flout conventions’, to the point even of exercising their freedom to walk out of the marriage. Naturally, husbands became angry.114 The reference to wife killing here could have been to either Chinese or Australian cases: in neither place was the death of a woman at the hands of an enraged husband extraordinary.

114. ‘Huaren shaqi’an zhi panjue 華人殺妻案之判決 [Judgement in a Chinese wife-killing case]’, Tung Wah Times, September 19, 1925, p. 7, http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/24101285.

8 Alice Lim Kee: Journalist, Actor, Broadcaster, and Goodwill Ambassador Paul Macgregor

Alice Lim Kee arrived back in Australia from China in 1943 charged with the task of promoting the Anti-Japanese War campaign among the people of Australia. Although born in country Victoria, Australia, Alice became a principal public face of the beleaguered people of China, and her Australian tour from May 1943 to August 1945 was widely discussed in the Australian press. Alice Lim Kee was emblematic of modern China and modern Chinese womanhood, and she used her exceptional public speaking skills and personal appeal to garner broad support for the nation of China and its citizens. Yet after 1945, Alice’s important campaign seems to have largely disappeared from public awareness, being remembered only slightly in Melbourne Chinese circles. Historians Tseen Khoo and Rodney Noonan, as well as Mei-fen Kuo and Judith Brett, have recently revived the history of the Chinese Anti-Japanese War campaigns in Australia, yet the role played by Alice does not feature in their analysis.1 This chapter seeks to bring Alice Lee Kim’s story back into the public consciousness and explores the reasons for her absence from public memory. I argue that this forgetting substantially stems from the way in which Alice repeatedly changed cultural milieu, social set, and career focus; her nation of residence; and even her name and national identity. Her mobility, and the historical transience of the WesternChinese hybrid society of interwar Shanghai, diminished the ongoing recognition of her role in bringing China and Australia into closer understanding. That I am now able to rehabilitate her complex story is in large part thanks to the availability of new digitized collections, which make possible the collation of numerous but widely scattered and disguised fragments of what was once a prominent public life.

1. Tseen Khoo and Rodney Noonan, ‘Wartime Fundraising by Chinese Australian Communities’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (2011), pp. 92–110; Mei-fen Kuo and Judith Brett, Unlocking the History of the Australasian Kuo Min Tang, 1911–2013 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013), pp. 100–27.

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Campaigning Chinese Women Chinese women played a significant role in the pro-China campaigns in America and Australia from 1937 to 1945, and although their role in America has been acknowledged and theorized, that role has not yet been given detailed historical consideration. Karen Leong, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, K. Scott Wong, and Him Mark Lai have outlined the extensive propaganda efforts in America to raise support for China and the anti-Japanese cause.2 These ranged from performances to exhibitions, parades to public speakers, festivals to fashion shows, and coordinated media campaigns. These campaigns tapped into an orientalist fascination for Chinese culture within white mainstream culture in America, Australia, and Britain. This fascination had long held sway in these countries, coexisting with apparently contradictory anti-Chinese immigration policies. The role of significant individual women in these campaigns, and how their life journeys led to prominent public roles in these times, has been little charted as yet, apart from a few notable exceptions. The most famous exception is Soong Mayling (宋美齡, 1897/1898–2003)—Madame Chiang Kai-shek—who ran a national campaign, meeting politicians and giving public speeches, in the United States in early 1943.3 Her personal and family biographies, and particularly the importance of her father’s and siblings’ education in the United States, has been highlighted by her biographers.4 Before Soong May-ling’s campaign in 1943, a number of other overseas-born or educated Chinese women had become public figures in the United States, Australia, and Britain. Chinese American film star Anna May Wong segued her Hollywood career playing ‘Chinese’ roles into an international theatrical roadshow in the 1930s, reprising scenes from her films and tapping into Western audiences’ fascination with the exotic Orient. Her world tour included Australia in 1939.5 Another such public figure was Rose Quong (1879–1972), a Melbourne-born Chinese Australian actor. Angela Woollacott has traced her rise in Britain and 2. Karen J. Leong and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, ‘Filling the Rice Bowls of China: Staging Humanitarian Relief during the Sino-Japanese War’, in Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, ed. Suchen Chan and Madeline Hsu (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), pp. 132–52; K. Scott Wong, ‘From Pariah to Paragon: Shifting Images of Chinese Americans During World War II’, in Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture, ed. Suchen Chan and Madeline Hsu (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), pp. 153–72; Him Mark Lai, ‘The War of Resistance against Japan’, in Chinese American Transnational Politics, ed. Him Mark Lai (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), pp. 100–22. 3. Wong, ‘From Pariah to Paragon’, pp. 163–65. 4. Emily Hahn, The Soong Sisters (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1941); Laura Tyson Li, Madame Chiang Kai-shek: China’s Eternal First Lady (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006); Hannah Pakula, The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). See also Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015). 5. Derham Groves and Lee McRae, Anna May Wong’s Lucky Shoes: 1939 Australia through the Eyes of an Art Deco Diva (Ames, IN: Culicidae Press, 2011); Shirley Jennifer Lim, ‘Glamorising Racial Modernity’, in Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, ed. David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska (Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2012), pp. 145–69.

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America from the 1920s as a professional performer of Chinese culture.6 Rose was not directly a political campaigner for China during the Sino-Japanese War, even though she was living in New York at this time. However, her cultural performances across America and around the world—in plays, as a reciter of poetry, and a speaker on Chinese culture and philosophy—was an early example of the performance methods that were used by the pro-China campaigners between 1937 and 1945. Woollacott has demonstrated how the changes of Rose Quong’s social milieu, from Melbourne to London, forced her to adopt a career as a ‘professional Chinese’, despite having started her career as a rising modern actor in Melbourne repertory theatre in the 1910s and 1920s, in roles that paid little attention to her Chinese cultural background.7 Aspects of the public roles of these three women are mirrored in Alice Lim Kee’s move into the role of ‘China’ campaigner, and also in how she represented ‘the Chinese’ to Western audiences in Australia. Alice Lim Kee (伍愛蓮, 1900–?), known also by her second husband’s name as Mrs Fabian Chow, ran two publicity campaigns in Australia. The first was a threemonth tour in 1938, the second in 1943–1945. Alice Lim Kee had received a modern Western college education in Melbourne, Australia, being raised within a relatively privileged segment of the émigré community of Chinese Australians in Victoria. She initially followed an actor’s path, but unlike Rose Quong, who migrated to London to further her career like many other Australians of her generation, Alice moved instead to Shanghai. In Shanghai Alice became a journalist, moving in the Western-educated circles of English-speaking Chinese, including those born in China, Australia, and the United States. After World War II Alice moved to the United States, apparently retiring from public life. Unlike Soong May-ling, Anna May Wong, and Rose Quong, over her career Alice Lim Kee almost completely abandoned the use of her birth name for public purposes, adopting four further public names—Wu Ai-lien, Alice Ma, Mrs Fabian Chow, and Madame Chow. This chapter traces her movements through these places, these phases of her life, and these changes of name and identity.

Shanghai Film Actress Community memory is often selectively guided by serendipity. In 1986 Melbourne Chinese community leader Frank Chinn (1897–c. 1986) donated his photographs to the Melbourne Chinese Museum.8 Frank was a founder and long-time president of the Young Chinese League and its predecessors, and had been active in Chinese community affairs since the 1920s. His album includes four photographs 6. Angela Woollacott, ‘Rose Quong: Appropriating Orientalism’, in Angela Woollacott, Race and the Modern Exotic: Three ‘Australian’ Women on Global Display (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2011). 7. Angela Woollacott, ‘Rose Quong: Appropriating Orientalism’. 8. Frank Chinn Collection, Chinese Museum, Melbourne.

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of Alice Lim Kee, a woman of his own era. The earliest photograph shows Alice, with her sister Queenie, in their teens, probably about 1915.9 The next photograph is one of Alice with American movie stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Handwritten on the photograph is the tribute ‘To Frank from Alice, in happy remembrance, Shanghai 1929’ (Figure 8.1).10 The third is a glamorous portrait of Alice, again with a handwritten tribute: ‘From your old friend, April 27, 1938’ (Figure 8.2, see p. 179).11 The fourth photograph, another portrait, is of Alice with a Chinese fan, likely also taken in the 1930s.12 From the brief captions that Frank wrote, it can be gleaned that Alice and Queenie Lim Kee were daughters of Ng

Figure 8.1:  Douglas Fairbanks, Alice Lim Kee (Mrs Fabian Chow), and Mary Pickford, Shanghai, 1929. Frank Chinn Collection, Museum of Chinese Australian History, Melbourne (photograph no. FC115) 9. ‘Queenie Lim Kee and Alice Lim Kee’, c. 1915, Frank Chinn Collection, Photograph No. FC096, Chinese Museum, Melbourne, http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D000186.htm. 10. ‘Douglas Fairbank[s], Alice Lim Kee and Mary Pickford in Shanghai’, 1929, Frank Chinn Collection, Photograph No. FC115, Chinese Museum, Melbourne, http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/ D000713.htm. 11. ‘Alice Lim Kee’, 1938, Frank Chinn Collection, Photograph No. FC038, Chinese Museum, Melbourne, http:// www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D000975.htm. 12. ‘Alice Lim Kee with fan’, n.d., Photograph No. FC039, Chinese Museum, Melbourne, http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/objects/D000976.htm. Although this photographed is listed in the Frank Chinn Collection as being of Alice Lim Kee, the author has determined that it is in fact a photograph of Elsie Lee Soong who accompanied Alice Lim Kee during her 1938 tour of Australia.

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Figure 8.2:  Alice Lim Kee (Mrs Fabian Chow), 1938. Frank Chinn Collection, Museum of Chinese Australian History, Melbourne (photograph no. FC038)

Hock Lim (also known as Charles Lim Kee) and were born in Rutherglen, Victoria. According to Frank, ‘some time in the 1920s [the Lim Kees] moved to Melbourne and at this stage (or earlier?) Alice was unofficially engaged to Frank Chinn. Alice later went to Shanghai and became a film star there.’13 The public biography of Alice remained at this level for almost twenty-five years. Sophie Couchman discovered more about Alice and her family for the ChineseAustralian Historical Images in Australia project.14 From Australian immigration records, Couchman discovered that Alice had married in China, to Fabian Chow, had two boys, and returned twice to Australia. Barbara Nichol also discovered that Alice’s father had been a major restaurateur in Melbourne from the 1910s to 1930s,15 but the possibility of an Australian Chinese Shanghai movie star remained an intriguing enigma. 13. Sophie Couchman, ‘Lim Kee, Alice’, Chinese-Australian Historical Images in Australia (CHIA) [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/biogs/CH00069b.htm. 14. Sophie Couchman, ‘Lim Kee Family’, in CHIA [online database], http://www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au/ biogs/CH00693b.htm; Sophie Couchman, ‘Lim Kee Family’, and ‘Lim Kee, Queenie’, unpublished research notes, correspondence with author, September 18, 2012. 15. Barbara Nichol, ‘The Breath of the Wok: Melbourne’s Early Chinese Restaurants: Community, Culture and Entrepreneurialism in the City, Late Nineteenth Century to 1950s’ (PhD diss., University of Melbourne,

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In 2011 Derham Groves and Lee McRae published a book about American film star Anna May Wong, focusing on her theatrical tour of Australia in 1939.16 Seeing an opportunity to promote a possible Australian Shanghai film star, I turned my attention to following the trail of Alice Lim Kee and discovered a plethora of Australian newspaper and magazine articles that presented her in a completely different light to how Frank Chinn remembered her. As Julia Laite has argued, the digitization and online searchability of historical records has massively expanded the scope and speed of historical record searching, and also enabled stitching together with comparative ease small pieces of scattered information from a wide range of records.17 My search for Alice Lim Kee benefitted enormously from the accessibility of digitized Australian newspaper articles via the Trove website developed by the National Library of Australia.18 The national scope of this digitized newspaper collection was critical to my ability to follow Alice’s campaigns across Australia. The name Alice Lim Kee appeared only in a few articles, but one of these indicated that she was also known as Mrs Fabian Chow in 1938 and during World War II, and that she was a journalist in Shanghai under the pen name Wu Ai-lien. None of these articles revealed that she had been a film actor, but they did show in great detail the public campaigns she had undertaken. Most of these articles were promotional stories by journalists, based on interviews with Alice. Aspects of Alice’s backstory were provided in small snippets in various articles, obviously crafted by her to create particular self-images depending on the audience. Through optical character recognition, I was able to search the digitized articles in Trove to quickly group, compare, and sort the stated elements of her background; to concatenate them into a basic sequence of life events and actions; to notice discrepancies and absences; and to find leads for further research. Her family background, and members of her family of origin in Australia, could be tracked in detail via the online indexing and digitization of births, deaths, and marriage records. The Australian federal government’s tracking of Chinese Australians as a part of the management of the White Australia policy meant that official records of her movements in and out of Australia, the various names and aliases she used, her reasons for journeying, and her husbands’ and children’s names, could be checked against the accounts in the news stories. The political nature of her campaigns, during a time of war and representing a foreign country, also meant that she drew the attention of the Australian security services. Their records, also digitized by the National Archives of Australia, contain accounts of interviews with her and surveillance reports of her activities. 2012), pp. 60–70; Barbara Nichol, ‘Lim Kee family’, unpublished research notes, correspondence with author, September 20, 2012. 16. Derham Groves and Lee McRae, Anna May Wong’s Lucky Shoes: 1939 Australia through the Eyes of an Art Deco Diva (Ames, IN: Culicidae Press, 2011). 17. Julia Laite, ‘The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age’, Journal of Social History (2020), pp. 1–27. 18. Australian newspaper articles cited in this chapter are mostly available online through the National Library of Australia’s Trove newspaper database (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/).

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Goodwill Ambassador for China The first major story to emerge from this research was Alice Lim Kee’s 1938 public campaign in Australia. As ‘Mrs Fabian Chow’, Alice arrived with Chinese American woman Elsie Lee Soong as the Chinese delegates to the International Women’s Conference held in Sydney on February 1–4, 1938, as part of the Australian sesquicentenary celebrations. Alice was on the Executive Board of the Chinese Women’s Club (and was its past chairman), was a member of the International Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) of Shanghai, had been Chairman of the Preparation Committee for the Pan-Pacific Congress, and had come to Australia under the auspices of the League of Nations Union.19 The Chinese Women’s Club was an organization started twenty years earlier (c. 1918) as a social club and later developed an additional interest in the welfare of women and children.20 In the Australian newspapers Alice Lim Kee was reported as being a journalist who wrote on Chinese women and their activities—under the pen name Wu Ai-lien—for foreign magazines and daily newspapers, principally the Englishlanguage North-China Daily News of Shanghai, where she had been on the staff for several years. She had left Australia for China in 1921; had taught English in the Teachers College in Beijing, and later in Shanghai; and had been ‘associated with the motion picture industry’ and broadcasting. She even claimed to be the first woman radio announcer in the Far East, broadcasting as ‘Little Miss Shanghai’. Even allowing for self-promotional enthusiasm, the newspaper accounts indicate a woman who had had a remarkably successful, well-rounded, and diverse career—remarkable if these had been achieved in Australia, even more so for a woman in China of the 1920s and 1930s. How had a girl from rural Rutherglen risen so high? Moreover, why did Frank Chinn only choose to record her as a film star? Had she really been one, but downplayed it for the Australian press? Addressing these questions opened up a rich story about modernizing Chinese, the changing roles of women, and the relations between overseas Chinese and the modern cities of Republican-era China. Alice Lim Kee and Elsie Lee Soong’s Australian visit was also staged as a tour to garner support in Australia for the Anti-Japanese War. Early 1938 was a crucial point in this war. Japan’s 1937 invasion of China was well underway, and the Kuomintang government was already retreating up the Yangtze valley to its wartime refuge of Chungking. On August 31, 1937, the Japanese started to attack the Pearl River Delta area, ancestral home to most Chinese in Australia, with a bombing raid on the city of Canton. In February 1938 the Japanese had still only achieved a foothold in the

19. Joy Damousi, ‘Australian League of Nations Union and War Refugees: Internationalism and Humanitarianism, 1930–39’, Humanities Australia: The Journal of The Australian Academy of the Humanities, 8 (2017), p. 74. 20. ‘Chinese Delegates’, Sydney Morning Herald, January 20, 1938, p. 24, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17423352; ‘Chinese Woman Visitors’, Age, February 17, 1938, p. 3, https://news.google.com/newspapers; ‘Warfare Destroys Their Land’, Argus, February 17, 1938, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11149506.

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delta, near Macao.21 Before Alice Lim Kee and Elsie Lee Soong left China, the two women had been working together for the relief of refugees.22 It was reported that ‘one of the most pathetic and appealing’ speeches at the International Women’s Conference had been Alice’s reading of an appeal by Soong May-ling, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, to the delegates for their support for Chinese women.23 In many articles in the Australian press, Alice Lim Kee and Elsie Lee Soong talked of the suffering of the Chinese people and the terrors of the Japanese army, and earnestly implored financial support for Chinese refugees. They travelled to cities and towns across eastern Australia, giving public lectures, meeting with civic bodies, and socializing with their members (Figure 8.3). They even spent the weekend in Canberra with Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and his wife, Dame Enid Lyons.24 The approach Alice Lim Kee and Elsie Lee Soong took to promoting the Chinese cause included cultural promotion—with both women giving a display of

Figure 8.3:  Mrs Fabian Chow and Mrs Elsie Lee Soong in the garden of Mrs J. G. Pott’s home at Toorak, Melbourne, on February 16, 1938, where they were guests at afternoon tea. Age (Melbourne), February 17, 1938, p. 3

21. Bob Hackett, Sander Kingsepp and Anthonym Tully, ‘The Campaign to Seize Canton (Guangzhou) 1937– 1938’, revision 4 (2012), Rising Storm: The Imperial Japanese Navy and China 1931–1941, https://web.archive. org/web/20200302192730/http://www.combinedfleet.com/Canton_t.htm. 22. ‘Warfare Destroys Their Land’, Argus, February 17, 1938, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11149506. 23. ‘Social and Personal: Back from the Conference’, Age, February 12, 1938, p. 4. 24. ‘Faith in China’, Sydney Morning Herald, January 22, 1938, p. 19, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17434313.

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Chinese cooking, which became an article in the Australian Women’s Weekly,25 and Elsie Lee Soong also designing and choreographing a pageant of famous women in different dynasties in China at the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne. She had ‘produced similar spectacles in Shanghai’.26 While the Australian newspapers made much of Alice Lim Kee’s Australian origins and career highlights in China, little background or character description was given about Elsie Lee Soong. Despite having a similar surname to the maiden name of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Elsie was not from the famous Soong family, although her husband had close business relations with the family.27 Elsie Lee Soong was born in Portland, Oregon, but for the last three years of her school life went to China, where later at Shanghai she acted as tutor in a Chinese family. After her marriage she became interested in working for charity. She was chairwoman of the hospital visiting committee of the Chinese Women’s Club and was the only woman on the relief committee of the Chinese Medical Association. At the beginning of the war, the Chinese Women’s Club, by virtue of its women’s welfare experience, was able to take over relief work. Elsie Lee Soong travelled to the front line and nearby hospitals several times to distribute supplies.28 Four years later American Geraldine Fitch wrote warmly of meeting Elsie Lee Soong on the road in China, just before the fall of Nanking in 1937, after Elsie had driven overnight from Shanghai on a truck with bandages made by volunteers at the Chinese Shanghai Club, to relieve the Chinese troops. Fitch remembered Elsie in a kinder time, ‘in a long graceful gown at the Cathay Hotel or Astor House charity balls, impersonating forgotten generals from ancient times in gorgeous embroidered robes, with long pheasant feathers in her headdress, for benefit fashion shows’.29 Alice Lim Kee did most of the public speaking on the two women’s tour of Australia. One report on her speech to the International Women’s Conference commented that she was ‘one of the outstanding women at the conference’, and ‘delivered her greetings from the women of China in a beautifully modulated voice, and with a delightful choice of English word and phrase’.30

The Early Life of Alice Lim Kee It is not known how much Chinese Alice Lim Kee could speak in 1938 or during her younger days, or which Chinese language or dialect it might have been. Her 25. ‘Eating in Chinese Style’, Australian Women’s Weekly, May 28, 1938, p. 26, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article 52257493. 26. ‘The Life of Melbourne: Chinese Pageant’, Argus, March 22, 1938, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11155042; ‘The World of Women’, Argus, March 26, 1938, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page587492. 27. ‘Mrs Soong and Mrs Chow’, The New Times (Australian League of Rights, Melbourne), March 25, 1938, p. 4. 28. ‘Chinese Woman Visitors’, Age, February 17, 1938, p. 3. 29. Geraldine T. Fitch, ‘Warrior Women Will Never Surrender’, Montana Standard, April 26, 1942, p. 32, http:// newspaperarchive.com/montana-standard/1942-04-26/page-32. 30. ‘Impressions of Sydney Women’s Conference’, Advertiser, February 9, 1938, p. 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article74209742.

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father’s name was written in English as both Charles Lim Kee and Ng Hock Lim. Ng (C: ńgh) is a Cantonese pronunciation of the Chinese family name 伍, which in Mandarin is pronounced Wu (M: wǔ). On his death certificate it states that his father’s surname was Ah Wu.31 Lim Kee may have been a business name for Ng Hock Lim, as kee (記 C: gei; M: jì) was a common term in business names, and Chinese men of that time in Australia sometimes used their business name as their personal name when dealing with the wider English-speaking community. In 1938 Alice Lim Kee stated that she had been called Wu Ai-lien when a child in Rutherglen,32 hence her ‘pen name’ for the North-China Daily News was actually her Chinese name in Mandarin. In the records of the Melbourne Chinese Consulate of that time, this name, in characters—伍愛蓮 (C: ńgh ngoilìhn; M: wǔ àilián)—is also how Alice Lim Kee was referred to.33 It may even be that Alice is an anglicized version of Ai-lien. As the daughter of immigrant parents from Guangdong, Alice/Ai-lien may well have spoken Cantonese or See Yip growing up in the family home in Rutherglen. Alice Lim Kee’s career start in China was no doubt supported by her father’s business success in Victoria, and perhaps his connections in China. Only a little is known about the early life of her family. Alice’s mother’s name in Chinese seems to have been Louey Ah Long.34 Both of Alice’s parents were born in ‘Canton [Province] China’, and they were married in Melbourne in 1890.35 They were living in Rutherglen, Victoria, by 1895 at least.36 The family had five children, the first two dying very young, then Alice (b. 1900), Queenie (b. 1902) and Charles (b. 1904), all born in Rutherglen.37 Charles Lim Kee was a fruiterer,38 who also had a restaurant in Rutherglen with Charles Quon as partner, established at least by 1896.39 According to his daughter, he also had a general store in the town, and at one time owned the Great Southern gold mine.40 31. New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, death registration of Charles Lim Kee, 1953/15640, Sydney, 1953. 32. ‘Warfare Destroys Their Land’, Argus, February 17, 1938, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11149506. 33. Mei-fen Kuo, correspondence with author, November 20, 2013. 34. On Alice Lim Kee’s birth certificate, her mother’s maiden name was recorded as Alice Ah Long. However, at the time of Alice Ah Long’s death in 1912, she was using Louey as her given name; this appears to be her maiden surname, as her death certificate records Louey Wah, tea merchant, as her father. Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Vic BDM), birth registration of Alice Hazel Lim Kee, 1900/14207, Rutherglen, 1900; death registration for Louey Lim Kee, 1912/11245, Middle Park, 1912 (erroneously indexed as ‘Lavey Lim Kee’); ‘Funerals: Lim Kee’, Age, September 6, 1912, p. 16, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article196266451. 35. Vic BDM, birth registration of Alice Hazel Lim Kee, 1900/14207, Rutherglen, 1900. 36. Lim Kee won second prizes for both pears and peaches at the Rutherglen Fruit and Flower Show on February 21, 1895. ‘Rutherglen Fruit and Flower Show’, Age, February 21, 1895, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article193459219. 37. Vic BDM, birth registration of Leslie Glen Lim Kee, 1897/22472, Rutherglen, 1897; birth registration of Alice Hazel Lim Kee, 1900/14207, Rutherglen, 1900; birth registration of Queenie Lim Kee, 1902/21571, Rutherglen, 1902; birth registration of Charles Edward Lim Kee, 1904/13245, Rutherglen, 1904. 38. Vic BDM, birth registration of Alice Hazel Lim Kee, 1900/14207, Rutherglen, 1900. 39. Couchman, ‘Lim Kee family’; ‘Chiltern District: From the Standard’, Ovens and Murray Advertiser (Beechworth), March 21, 1896, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article199699968. 40. ‘A Visitor from Chungking – Madam Fabian Chow interviewed by Chester Wilmot – 2 July 1943’ (Australian Broadcasting Commission, Head Office, 1943), National Archives of Australia (NAA): SP300/4, 231.

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In late 1910 Charles Lim Kee, Lee Yuan Sam, Louey Ling Tack, and others leased the Ritz Hotel near the Melbourne Town Hall in Swanston Street and renamed it the Hotel and Café Canton. In September 1911 the partners held a special dinner to celebrate the opening of their refurbished dining room. Guests included leaders in both Chinese and non-Chinese communities, including Yung Liang-Hwang, the Consul-General for China; the Reverend Cheok Hong Cheong; and Sir Henry Weedon, prominent contractor, financier, politician, and former Lord Mayor of Melbourne. The partners were supporters of the Republican movement in China. The Café Canton was the first fine-dining Chinese restaurant outside Chinatown, in the heart of Melbourne’s central business district, and was particularly pitched to appeal to non-Chinese customers with a desire for a ‘taste’ of the Orient—both in food and in decor.41 Alice worked in her father’s restaurant as business manager for a while before leaving for China.42 The Lim Kee family was living in Melbourne by at least 1912, when Alice Lim Kee was twelve.43 Her mother died that year after a long illness, and her father remarried at the age of about forty-one to Ballarat-born twenty-year-old Nellie Ah Tong.44 Charles and Nellie had two sons, William (b. 1911) and Ronald (b. 1913).45 Alice Lim Kee said in 1943 that she had been educated at Melbourne High School, the first government-run secondary college in Victoria.46 Her father’s business could probably, however, have afforded the fees of private school education; other affluent Chinese families in Melbourne at that time were sending their daughters to private schools, such as the daughters of prominent barrister William Ah Ket, and businessman and See Yup Society leader William Fong.47 Alice Lim Kee’s younger half-brothers, William and Ronald, were attending the wealthy and prestigious Presbyterian boys school Scotch College in 1922.48 In 1938 one of Alice Lim Kee’s speeches was made to the girls at the Hermitage, the Geelong Church of England 41. Nichol, ‘The Breath of the Wok’, pp. 60–71. 42. ‘A Visitor from Chungking – Madam Fabian Chow interviewed by Chester Wilmot – 2 July 1943’ (Australian Broadcasting Commission, Head Office, 1943), NAA: SP300/4, 231. 43. At 292 Richardson Street, Middle Park, Victoria. ‘Funerals: Lim Kee’, Age, September 6, 1912, p. 16, http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article196266451. 44. Vic BDM, death registration for Louey Lim Kee, 1912/11245, Middle Park, 1912 (erroneously indexed as ‘Lavey Lim Kee’). The marriage of Charles Lim Kee and Nellie Ah Tong, at Glebe Point, Sydney, New South Wales, is recorded on the birth certificate of their son Ronald Wilmot Lim Kee. A marriage certificate has not been located in the New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. The marriage may not have been registered, or it may be listed under an unusual spelling of their names. 45. Vic BDM, birth registration for Edwin William Lim Kee, 1911/3461, Fitzroy, 1911; and birth registration for Ronald Wilmot Lim Kee, 1913/26206, South Yarra, 1913. 46. ‘Mrs Fabian Chow in Melbourne’, Argus, May 21, 1943, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article1133851; NAA: SP300/4, 231; ‘History of Melbourne High School’, Melbourne High School, https://web.archive.org/ web/20200302195819/https://www.mhsviceduau.com/history. 47. Margaret T. Allen and Paul Macgregor, ‘Margaret Allen interviewed by Paul Macgregor for the AustraliaChina Oral History Project’, December 8–22, 1993. Copies of recording held at National Library of Australia, and Chinese Museum, Melbourne. See also Julia Martínez’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 9). 48. ‘School Speech Days: Scotch College’, Argus, December 16, 1922, p. 27, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newsarticle1862949.

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Grammar School;49 it is probable that Alice learned the art of being a confident modern woman at Melbourne High. She also was accomplished on the piano—at age twelve she performed a duet with Irene Lin at the Presbyterian Mission Hall in South Melbourne on July 13, 1912.50 After high school Alice studied commercial subjects at the Working Men’s College (now RMIT University) so that she could help her father manage his business.51 In 1919 Alice Lim Kee accompanied her father on a visit to Hong Kong, returning to Australia later that year.52 Her subsequent decision to move to China at the age of twenty-one, in 1921, was not unusual for Australian-born Chinese at that time, and there is a growing body of scholarship about their lives in their ancestral villages in Guangdong and in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Michael Williams has highlighted the role of huaqiao returning to the Pearl River Delta villages to help with welfare and modernization.53 Denise Austin has explored the life of Mary Yeung (née Chen), who returned as a missionary to her father’s village of Wong Chung (黃沖 C: wòhng chūng; M: huángchōng) in the Sunwui district of Guangdong in the 1920s,54 while Julia Martínez in this volume has written on Mary Chong. Yong Ching-fatt and others have recounted the stories of the Chinese Australian families who moved to Shanghai to establish the four big department stores in that city in the 1910s.55 Among them was Daisy Kwok, who became a glamorous Shanghai socialite, whose story is told by Sophie Loy-Wilson in this volume.56 Paul Jones has examined the life of Gordon Lum, Melbourne-born tennis champion, who lived in Shanghai after 1928 and played for China in the Davis Cup; his sister Ada was a journalist who also made dolls that she sold in her ‘Ada Lum’ shop in Shanghai.57 Alice Lim Kee’s journey to China in 1921 was made to accompany her sister Queenie, who was to be married in China, after which Alice decided to stay.58 Alice’s 49. ‘Visits and Visitors: Mrs Fabian Chow’, Coo-ee (Journal of Geelong Church of England Girls Grammar School, The Hermitage) III, no. 74 (December 1938), pp. 7–8. 50. ‘Concert at Montague: Presbyterian Mission’, Record (Emerald Hill, Melbourne), July 27, 1912, p. 3, http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article166233741. 51. NAA: SP300/4, 231. 52. NAA: SP300/4, 231; W.H. Barkley (Collector of Customs, NSW) to the Secretary, Home and Territories Department, memorandum, March 20, 1919, NAA: A1, 1932/4426. 53. Michael Williams, Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villagers around the Pacific, 1849 to 1949 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018). 54. Denise A. Austin, ‘Mary Yeung: The Ordinary Life of an Extraordinary Australian Chinese Pentecostal—Part I and II’, Asian Journal Pentecostal Studies 16, no. 2 (August 2013), pp. 99–137. 55. Ching-fatt Yong, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia 1901–1921 (Richmond, South Australia: Raphael Arts, 1977), pp. 53–58; John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007), pp. 194–99; Peter J. Hack, The Art Deco Department Stores of Shanghai (Edgecliff, New South Wales: Impact Press, 2017). 56. See Sophie Loy-Wilson’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 10). 57. Paul Jones, ‘Gordon Lum Bo Wah, Tennis Ace’, paper presented at Dragon Tails: Re-interpreting ChineseAustralian Heritage conference, Sovereign Hill, Ballarat, Victoria, October 9–11, 2009; Steph, ‘In Search of Ada Lum’, Asia with Embroidered Eyes blog, November 27, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20200302194243/ http://asiawee.blogspot.com/2009/11/in-search-of-ada-lum.html. 58. ‘Chinese Visitor’, West Australian, October 3, 1944, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article44980391; Alice (Lim Kee) Ma (Mrs Frank Ma) to F. J. Quinlan (Assistant Secretary, Department of Home Affairs), April 5, 1932, NAA: A1, 1932/4426.

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description in 1938 of her life from 1921 is sparse on dates and sequence. It was only after her second return to Australia, in 1943, that more details began to emerge in press accounts. After her sister’s marriage, Alice took up teaching English, first at Beijing Teacher’s College and later at the ‘University of Shanghai’—possibly Shanghai University, which existed from 1922 to 1927. She ‘took an active part in the newly established woman’s organizations’ in Shanghai and was twice Chairman of the Chinese Women’s Club there, ‘the first club founded by women in China’. In 1922, she converted to Catholicism, inspired by meeting Fr Robert Jacquinot de Besange, a French Jesuit, either in Beijing or Shanghai. The seed for her conversion ‘was really planted in Australia’—among her closest friends in Australia when she was young was ‘a family of devout Irish Catholics’, whose example impressed her.59 In Shanghai Alice joined the staff of the Evening News and also became the announcer on the first radio station in Shanghai—not just the first woman radio announcer in the Far East—working there until 1928.60 Alice Lim Kee never mentioned anything more during her Australian visit from 1943 to 1945 about her motion picture activities. The photograph of her with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford matches with the fact that Fairbanks and Pickford were in Shanghai in 1929 on a world tour,61 but I could not initially check her film career in the Shanghai press because my access to newspapers and periodicals from Shanghai was limited. Since digitized archives of various Shanghai newspapers have recently been obtained by the State Library of Victoria, I have, however, now confirmed that Alice was indeed a film actor, under her Chinese name of Wu Ai-lien. A review of her film Broken Jade, in which she played a romantic lead, is dated 1926, suggesting that Alice may have been the first Chinese Australian film actor in China (Figure 8.4, see p. 188).62 Yet she made no mention of this film acting career to the Australian press. Alice also never mentioned to the Australian press several other salient facts about her background. These were that she had married Shanghai-born Frank Ma in 1928, that she had divorced Frank and then married Fabian Chow (who, aged about twenty-one at the time of their marriage, was some thirteen years her junior), a journalist at the North-China Daily News, sometime before January 26, 1934; that her first son, Cecil, born 1929, was Frank Ma’s son; and that her uncle was Wu 59. ‘Warfare Destroys Their Land’, Argus, February 17, 1938, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11149506; ‘Mrs Fabian Chow in Melbourne’, Argus, May 21, 1943, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article1133851; ‘Chinese Visitor’, West Australian, October 3, 1944, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article44980391; Dorothy Bernard, ‘She is Used to Miracles’, Advocate, July 19, 1944, p. 13, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article172214415; ‘Wartime China’, Catholic Weekly, February 3, 1944, p. 13, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article146488721; ‘Of General Interest’, Advocate, July 5, 1944, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article172214037. 60. NAA: SP300/4, 231. 61. Zhang Wei 張偉, ‘Fan-peng-ke he Yuegong Baohe de fengbo 范朋克和月宮寶盒的風波 [Fairbanks and the “Palace Treasure Chest” Uproar]’, in Dazhong dianying 大眾電影 [Popular Cinema] 12 (2004), p. 43. English translation: ‘Douglas Fairbanks and the “Thief of Bagdad” Uproar’, The Chinese Mirror: A Journal of Chinese Film History. 62. ‘Broken Jade Release Set for Tuesday: Miss Ai-lien Wu Featured in New American-Oriental Picture’, The China Press, February 28, 1926, p. A7.

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Figure 8.4:  Alice Lim Kee, using her Chinese name of Wu Ai-lien, starring alongside Van Chu Yang in the film Broken Jade, 1926. ‘Broken Jade Release Set for Tuesday: Miss Ai-lien Wu Featured in New American-Oriental Picture’, China Press, February 28, 1926, p. A7

Lien-Teh (伍連德 C: ńgh lìhndāk; M: wǔ liándé), Director of the Republic of China’s National Quarantine Service, based in Shanghai, who was nominated for the 1935 Nobel Prize for Medicine. These details mostly came to light in her Australian immigration and security service files, and also in the archives of William J. Liu at the State Library of New South Wales.63 In a radio interview for the Australian Broadcasting Commission with Chester Wilmot in 1943, Alice Lim Kee mentioned that she was not content to, in her own words, ‘settle down to being nothing but a housewife’, and she had joined the NorthChina Daily News because ‘journalism gets in your blood and you can’t give it up’.64 It is not known which husband she was with when she wanted to avoid being a housewife, but her attempt to return to Australia in April 1932, with her son, but without her then husband Frank, might be indicative of difficulty in the marriage.65 63. Alice (Lim Kee) Ma (Mrs Frank Ma) to F. J. Quinlan (Assistant Secretary, Department of Home Affairs), April 5, 1932, NAA: A1, 1932/4426; Lien-Teh Wu to William Liu, January 26, 1934, William J. Liu Papers, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, MLMSS 6294/1, microfilm copy CY 4230, p. 0169; Lien-Teh Wu, Plague Fighter: The Autobiography of a Modern Chinese Physician (Penang: Areca Books, 2014; originally published Cambridge, 1959); Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, I Am Not An Island: An Experiment in Autobiography (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), pp. 143–44. 64. NAA: SP300/4, 231. 65. Alice (Lim Kee) Ma (Mrs Frank Ma) to F. J. Quinlan, April 5, 1932 (Assistant Secretary, Department of Home Affairs), NAA: A1, 1932/4426.

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Throughout her two visits to Australia, Alice Lim Kee mentioned her second husband, Fabian Chow, very little, stating once that he remained in China ‘to carry on his work for the Government’.66 Other sources indicate that Fabian Chow had been born in China and was fully literate in English, having ‘done the major part of his writing in the English language’.67 Their son, Colin—Alice’s second child—was born late 1935 or early 1936.68 In 1938 the young and later-prominent Indian journalist and film-maker K. A. Abbas travelled to China, and described Mr and Mrs Fabian Chow as ‘a couple of rare talent and charm’. They were then both journalists on the North-China Daily News. Abbas reported that Fabian Chow, then about twenty-five, ‘being one of the few Chinese among the important members of staff, was entrusted with the task of reviewing the war’, whereas Mrs Fabian Chow was ‘well educated, sociable and elegantly dressed . . . politically conscious and a social reformer’.69 During her attempts in late 1942 to get Australian government permission to return to Australia, Alice Lim Kee stated that she had divorced Fabian Chow around 1938. It is not clear whether this was true, as on June 23, 1943, after she had arrived in Australia, she sent a cable to the Chinese Ministry of Information in Calcutta, asking Fabian about ‘Takungpao [a major Chinese newspaper] and Tszyu’, and signing off, ‘All well, kindest regards.’ Perhaps talk of a divorce was part of an attempt to fabricate distance from allegiance to a Chinese citizen so that she could assert to the Australian government her continuing Australian cultural affinity. She knew that Australian government policy was that her marriage to a ‘domiciled resident of China’ meant that she had become a Chinese subject, and had therefore travelled under a Chinese passport during her 1938 visit to Australia.70 Fabian Chow continued working as a journalist and propagandist during the war. In 1945 he published an article in the American magazine Free World.71 In the magazine’s brief biography of him, it stated that in 1937 Fabian had been working as a reporter on the English language daily China Press and as chief Chinese political reporter for the North-China Daily News. When the war began that year, he joined the English writing section of the Chinese Ministry of Information and covered 66. Bernard, ‘She is Used to Miracles’. 67. ‘Who’s Who In This Issue’, Free World, January 1945, p. 4, https://web.archive.org/web/20200326060118/ https://www.unz.com/print/FreeWorld-1945jan-00004/. 68. L. T. Gamble (Detective Inspector, Customs and Excise Office, New South Wales) to the Boarding Inspector, December 3, 1942, NAA: SP42/1, C1944/1617. 69. Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, I Am Not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), pp. 143–44. 70. F. J. Quinlan (Assistant Secretary, Department of the Interior) to Alice (Lim Kee) Ma, June 16, 1932, NAA: A1, 1932/4426. L. T. Gamble (Detective Inspector, Customs and Excise Office, New South Wales) to the Boarding Inspector, memorandum, December 3, 1942, and Secretary of the Department of the Interior, Canberra to the Collector of Customs, Sydney, memorandum, November 30, 1942, NAA: SP42/1, C1944/1617; Detective Sergeant A. Wilks (Detective Sergeant, Security Service, Sydney) to Sergeant Campbell (Security Service, Sydney), report, July 14, 1943, NAA: C123, 21640. 71. Fabian Chow, ‘A Chinese Symbol’, Free World, January, 1945, pp. 59–62, https://web.archive.org/ web/20200302195624/https://www.unz.com/print/FreeWorld-1945jan-00059.

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many phases of the country’s struggle, from front-line fighting to government administration. In 1942 he was with the Chinese troops under General Stilwell in Burma, and had then spent several weeks following Chinese troops at the Salween front. In 1945 he was sent to America to cover an assignment, his first visit to a country outside China or Southeast Asia.72 He stayed on in New York, working at the New York Chinese News Service.73 The biography noted that he was also studying film-making, dreaming of ‘turning Shanghai into the Hollywood of the Orient’, and had just been appointed the Minister for Information (in America) for the Kuomintang government.74

Feminist, Christian, Modernist While Alice Lim Kee universally used her husband’s surname, Chow, as her own when referring to herself in English during her time in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, she self-consciously took a feminist approach in talking almost exclusively about her own career, achievements, family life, and values. She notably maintained a career as a journalist after marrying, which would have been unusual for a woman at the time in both Australia and China. In at least two speeches in Australia, she took pride in the fact that Chinese law, under the Republic, allowed women the right to work regardless of marital status, and provided for equal pay and the right for women to do men’s jobs, remarking that these were measures actively sought by women after the founding of the Republic.75 However, Alice commented little on how this equality was part of a remarkable transformation of the social roles that women, especially those of the middle and upper classes, achieved on a wide range of fronts in the 1910s and 1920s.76 She did state of her early years in China, in the interview for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1943, ‘The emancipation of Chinese women was just beginning. I knew what freedom meant to women in Australia and wanted to help Chinese women achieve that.’77 As Gail Hershatter has shown, these were recent developments in Republican China. The Kuomintang Civil Code of 1929–1930 established the importance of the individual for legal purposes, establishing women as fully autonomous and active agents, able like men to

72. ‘Who’s Who In This Issue’, Free World, January, 1945, p. 4, https://web.archive.org/web/20200302195229/ https://www.unz.com/print/FreeWorld-1945jan-00004. 73. Kuo-jen Tsang, ‘China’s Propaganda in the United States During World War II’ (paper presented to the International Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Convention, Gainesville, Florida, August 5–8, 1984), p. 44, https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED248514. 74. Leonard Lyons, ‘The Lyons Den’, Galveston Daily News, February 13, 1945, p. 5 (Syndicated column from New York Post), http://newspaperarchive.com/us/texas/galveston/galveston-daily-news/1945/02-13/page-5. 75. ‘In Black and White: Equal Pay’, News, September 29, 1944, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article127042919; ‘Woman’s Realm: Emancipation in China’, West Australian, October 10, 1944, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article44981200. 76. Harold B. Rattenbury, China, My China (London: Frederick Muller Ltd, 1944), pp. 183, 202–209. 77. NAA: SP300/4, 231.

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control their own marriage choices, inherit property, and seek divorce.78 Married in China before 1929, Alice would have felt the impact of these changes directly and personally; they may well have enabled her to divorce her first husband. Alice Lim Kee’s involvement in the Young Women’s Christian Association (中 華基督教女青年會 M: Zhōnghuá jīdūjiào nü qīngnián huì) in Shanghai may also provide part of the explanation for her feminist stance. Kwok Pui-lan has drawn attention to the important role of Chinese Christian women in the early twentieth century.79 Partly inspired by the social justice imperative that spurred foreign (particularly American) Protestant missionary activity in China from the 1890s onwards,80 and partly inspired by the movement for increasing women’s independence and social standing that gathered pace after the 1911 revolution,81 the YWCA in China found an appreciative audience in young educated Chinese women. The possible formative influence of the YWCA in developing social values of Alice Lim Kee and her social network is indicated by Mei-fen Kuo, whose research has highlighted the role of the YMCA and the YWCA in Shanghai in the 1920s. Kuo has demonstrated that these institutions were loci for young, affluent, and middle-class Chinese to adopt modernist values, including a public role for women and a concern for social welfare and self-improvement through education, exercise, and public discussion.82 Kwok Pui-lan points out that, at the turn of the twentieth century, some Chinese Christian women responded to the needs of the time by organizing various social reform movements, such as anti-footbinding, temperance unions, and health campaigns. The YWCA played a crucial role in the promotion of women’s social and political consciousness, and the advancement of women’s status. In addition to professional and cultural education for women, the YWCA also taught women how to better care for their babies, educate children, and do housework in a scientific way. Healthy entertainment, and swimming and gymnastics classes, were promoted to prevent gambling.83 Modern style was also encouraged, with the first fashion shows in China,84 and even the first women’s barbershop, established in

78. Gail Hershatter, Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 24. 79. Pui-Lan Kwok, ‘Chinese Women and Protestant Christianity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, in Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Daniel H. Bays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 194–208. 80. See China Christian Advocate, official organ of the China Section of the East Asia Central Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Shanghai, 1914–1941, http://hdl.handle.net/10079/bibid/1755051. 81. Owen Mortimer Green, China’s Struggle with the Dictators (London: Hutchinson, 1941), pp. 97–108; Rattenbury, China, My China, pp. 202–209. 82. Mei-fen Kuo, ‘Naming Organizations, Charitable Festivals, and the Chinese-Australian Legacy in Philanthropy: William Yinson Lee Between Australia and China in the early 20th Century’ (paper presented at International Workshop on Philanthropy and the Chinese Diaspora 1850–1949, Asia-Pacific Centre for Social Investment and Philanthropy, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, November 27–28, 2014). 83. Kwok, ‘Chinese Women and Protestant Christianity’. 84. Kuo, ‘Naming Organizations’.

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1927 in Shanghai under YWCA auspices ‘to meet the increasing demand on the part of the numerous Chinese women who now have bobbed hair’.85 Chinese American members of the YWCA may also have had a modernizing influence in Shanghai, and on Alice Lim Kee directly. Many Chinese Americans, like Elsie Lee Soong, moved to China in the 1920s and 1930s,86 and the YWCA would have facilitated networking in China between American-born Chinese in China and China-born women. A Chinese YWCA branch had been established in San Francisco in 1916 and became a hub for Chinese American women’s community welfare and education activities, a venue for them to socialize publicly, and a vehicle for them to take an active role in society. The modernizing role of the YWCA is also evident by the choice, in 1929, by the San Francisco Chinese YWCA, to commission progressive US architect Julia Morgan to design a new building, a striking blend of Western and Chinese styles that opened in 1932.87 The Shanghai YWCA building would have been very familiar to Alice Lim Kee—it still stands at 133 Yuanmingyuan Road.88 As in San Francisco, the YWCA commissioned a modern building for its Shanghai headquarters, coincidentally opened in 1932, the same year as the San Francisco building. For their design, the Shanghai YWCA engaged the YMCA architect, New York–born Poy Gum Lee, who also designed many art deco buildings in Shanghai. The YWCA appeared frequently in the North-China Daily News in notices of women’s activities,89 likely in articles written by Alice Lim Kee under her pen name Wu Ai-lien. Alice Lim Kee’s involvement in the YWCA possibly dates back to her early adult years in China, in the 1920s. The East Asia Library at Stanford University houses the photographs of Elsie Anderson, who spent seventeen years in China as a Secretary for the YWCA between the 1920s and 1940s. Anderson went to China around 1918 and worked in YWCA organizations in various places, including Canton, Shanghai, Shandong, and Tianjin. Three of these photographs include a young woman bearing a strong resemblance to Alice Lim Kee.90 Unfortunately, captions are minimal, so the prospect of congruence remains tantalizing, yet the photographs do demonstrate

85. Michelle Qiao, ‘National YWCA Building Shows Blossoming Influence of Women’, ShanghaiDaily.com, April 4, 2014, https://archive.shine.cn/feature/art-and-culture/National-YWCA-Building-shows-blossominginfluence-of-women/shdaily.shtml. 86. Norman T. H. Soong, ‘Problems of American-Born Chinese Difficult Here, In U.S. Writer Says Youths Face Much Trouble in Obtaining Jobs in U.S; Adjustment to Home Conditions Difficult’, The China Press, September 5, 1935, typescript copy in William J. Liu Papers, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Australia, MLMSS 6294/1, microfilm copy CY 4230, pp. 181–182. 87. ‘Julia Morgan Legacy Project’, Chinese Historical Society of America, San Francisco, https://web.archive.org/ web/20200326061720/https://chsa.org/exhibits/online-exhibits/julia-morgan-legacy-project/. 88. Qiao, ‘National YWCA Building’. 89. Qiao, ‘National YWCA Building’. 90. ‘Anderson Photograph Collection of YWCA in China, 1920s–1940s’, East Asia Library—Chinese Collection, Stanford University Libraries, California, https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/ry595rw5325. The three photographs are found at the following URLs: http://purl.stanford.edu/nz188zm5526; http://purl.stanford. edu/wf361sr5844; http://purl.stanford.edu/sy431zb6793.

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that young Chinese women of Alice’s generation (with short hairstyles) were active in the YWCA in the 1920s.

Mrs Fabian Chow and the Soong Sisters On her arrival in Melbourne in May 1943 for her second Australian publicity campaign, Alice Lim Kee declared that she was ‘very proud of the fact’ that she had been, in Hong Kong, confidential secretary to Madame H. H. Kung (Soong Eling), wife of China’s Minister of Finance and eldest sister of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and had frequently met the three Soong sisters. It was reported that Alice wore ‘a lovely jade ring, the gift of Mme Kung, as a memento of her work with her’.91 It was also clear from her comments that between 1938 and 1943 she had moved away somewhat from the civil society arena of organizations such as the Chinese Women’s Club, and more into working for the Chinese Nationalist government. Before the fall of Hong Kong in December 1941, Alice Lim Kee had been living there, working with the Chinese Ministry of Information, and broadcasting on behalf of Free China.92 She lived under the Japanese occupation for four months, in an Italian convent, where she and her sons, Cecil and Colin, ‘were practically unmolested, although they witnessed many gruesome and horrifying scenes in the town’. She was able to escape to ‘Free China’ in a small boat via French IndoChina, also occupied by the Japanese, but made a successful journey to Chungking. In Chungking, Alice Lim Kee was the first Australian-born Chinese woman to be elected a member of the Kuomintang, and she was acting as assistant editor for the British Ministry of Information. On her visit to Australia in 1943 she was the Australia/New Zealand representative of the People’s Foreign Relations Association of Chungking, and she brought a personal message from Madame Chiang Kai-shek. As a journalist and radio broadcaster, Alice’s move into government propaganda campaigns during wartime would be expected. Madame Chiang and the Soong family were particularly active in promoting the Chinese cause in America, and much was made of their Christianity in their appeal to the West.93 May-ling and her sisters had been educated at the Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, in the early years of the twentieth century. Their father, Charles Jones Soong (宋嘉樹 C: sung gāsyuh; M: sòng jiāshù), had converted to Christianity after emigrating to the United States in 1878. Upon returning to China, he established a firm to print Chinese-language Bibles, and this business was the basis of the wealth that enabled his children to acquire prominent positions in Shanghai Chinese society, through brokered career advances in finance and government, and 91. ‘Visitor from Chungking’, Age, May 22, 1943, p. 4; ‘Brings Message from China’, Sydney Morning Herald, June 22, 1943, p. 3. 92. ‘Visitor from Chungking’, Age, May 22, 1943, p. 4; ‘Brings Message from China’, Sydney Morning Herald, June 22, 1943, p. 3. 93. Elmer T. Clark, The Chiangs of China (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1943).

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also through marriage. Their mother, Ni Kwei-tseng (倪桂珍 C: ngàih gwaijān; M: ní guìzhēn), was an ardent Christian; she refused to allow Chiang Kai-shek to marry May-ling unless he converted to Christianity, which he did, apparently genuinely, with the couple marrying in Shanghai in December 1927.94 In such a milieu, involvement in the Shanghai YWCA and the Chinese Women’s Club would have enabled Alice Lim Kee to align herself and connect with the Soong sisters. Alice’s abilities as journalist and broadcaster, her English fluency, her familiarity with Australian society, and her connections with Australian Chinese communities would have been strongly attractive to the Soong China promotion campaign in Allied countries. Alice Lim Kee arrived in Melbourne on May 20, 1943.95 It was likely no coincidence that Madame Chiang Kai-shek had just completed her highly successful public speaking tour of the United States. Alice Lee Kim’s oratorical skills, demonstrated in 1938 in Australia, would have likely encouraged her to travel to Australia again and conduct a similar public speaking campaign to Madame Chiang’s. Alice, however, never stated that she had been sent to Australia by the Kuomintang government, and on arrival in 1943, according to an Australian government file, she was acknowledged as a representative of the Chinese newspaper Ta Kung Pao.96

Campaigning in Australia, 1943 to 1945 During her 1943–1945 sojourn in Australia, Alice Lim Kee proved to be a popular, persuasive, and sought-after speaker. She gave over fifty public talks, in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, and many country towns in New South Wales. She was broadcast over the radio at least three times. She was guest speaker at major conferences. Following her own feminist convictions, Alice Lim Kee focused her attention on women’s organizations—in particular, the Country Women’s Association, the Sydney Feminist Club, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Perth Women’s Service Guild.97 Naturally, as a Catholic, she spoke at and attended church functions, including the Legion of Catholic Women98 and the Catholic Daughters of Australia.99 She also spoke to Protestant congregations.100 94. Clark, The Chiangs of China, p. 81. 95. ‘Mrs Fabian Chow in Melbourne’, Argus, May 21, 1943, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11338515. 96. ‘Visit to Australia by Mrs Fabian Chow, representative of “Ta Kung Pao”’, NAA: SP112/1, 353/2/67. 97. ‘Vignettes from CWA Conference’, Courier-Mail, May 16, 1945, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article48951452; ‘World Peace in Women’s Hands’, Sydney Morning Herald, August 15, 1945, p. 6, http://nla.gov. au/nla.news-article17950080; ‘WCTU Activities’, Border Watch, November 9, 1944, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article78193647; ‘Women of China’, Western Mail, October 12, 1944, p. 30, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article38557069. 98. ‘Quarterly Meeting of Women’s Legion’, Catholic Weekly, July 20, 1944, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newsarticle146493252. 99. Winifred Moore, ‘Few Lines to Say’, Courier-Mail, May 21, 1945, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newsarticle48940615. 100. ‘Sunday Services: Methodist: Maughn Church’, Advertiser, September 30, 1944, p. 12, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article43222435.

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This focus on speaking to women’s groups was also a notable feature of Rose Quong’s ‘Chinese performance’ tour in the United States in 1934, although in Rose’s case, she sought to promote understanding of Chinese culture rather than women’s issues.101 Alice Lim Kee also met with Australian unionists and other workers’ organizations, and she made a great show of thanking the Waterside Workers for being the first organization outside China to support the Anti-Japanese War when in 1938 the Port Kembla waterside workers famously refused to load pig iron onto the steamer Dalfram, bound for Japan.102 She continued to be active in forums that promoted international cooperation and dialogue, such as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration103 and the Australian United Nations Assembly.104 She attended and organized many Chinese community events that reached out to the wider community, and she spearheaded fundraising campaigns for Chinese war refugees that became popular in Australia.105 Alice Lim Kee, with her powerful, emotional, and personable style of speaking, won many hearts in Australia to the China cause. She may well have had a pivotal role in laying the groundwork for a change in white Australians’ attitudes to China as a nation, and the Chinese as a people. The Perth Western Mail stated, ‘It would be no exaggeration to say that during her brief stay in our midst Madame Chow aroused a greater interest in China and its suffering than any previous visitor.’106

Madame Fabian Chow, an Australian Counterpart to Madame Chiang? Between 1943 and 1945 Alice Lim Kee was most commonly referred to as Madame Fabian Chow, whereas in 1938 she was Mrs Fabian Chow. As Madame Fabian Chow, Alice was being presented as an Australian version of Madame Chiang Kaishek. Like Madame Chiang, Madame Chow seems to have always appeared in the Chinese ‘national dress’, the modern cheongsam, the fashionable women’s dress of Republican China so stylish to Western eyes.107 Chinese costume was also a strong feature of Rose Quong’s performances.108 Unlike Madame Chiang in the United 101. Angela Woollacott, ‘Rose Quong: Appropriating Orientalism’. 102. ‘Pig-Iron Strikers Thanked’, Worker, May 15, 1944, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article71460170. 103. ‘UNRRA Conference: China’s Huge Claim’, West Australian, February 20, 1945, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article44998246. 104. ‘International Forum’, Sydney Morning Herald, October 21, 1944, p. 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article 27939865. 105. ‘Chinese Rally’, Sydney Morning Herald, April 14, 1944, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17890559; ‘Madame Chow in Adelaide’, News, September 28, 1944, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article127042685; ‘Double Tenth Day’, West Australian, October 7, 1944, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article44980988. 106. ‘Women of China’, Western Mail, October 12, 1944, p. 30, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article38557069. 107. ‘Country Women’s Association: Narandera’, Narandera Argus and Riverina Advertiser, May 16, 1944, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article101548666; ‘Madame Chow in Adelaide’, News, September 28, 1944, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article127042685. 108. Angela Woollacott, ‘Rose Quong: Appropriating Orientalism’; Naomi Yin-yin Szeto, ‘Cheungsam: Fashion, Culture and Gender’, in Evolution & Revolution: Chinese Dress 1700s–1990s, ed. Claire Roberts (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 1997), pp. 54–64.

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States, Alice Lim Kee appears to have spent little time with Australian politicians and political lobbyists, apart from the weekend with the Prime Minister and Dame Lyons in 1938. Madame Chow instead chose the sphere of civil society, garnering public goodwill and funds for China. Indeed, all her fundraising was pitched towards humanitarian aid.109 Again and again, reporters and commentators focused on Alice Lim Kee’s sincerity, integrity, and emotional commitment to her causes. Her campaign went beyond enlisting support for the suffering Chinese, and located their plight in wider issues of feminist agendas, international cooperation, post-war reconstruction, the merits of Christianity, and creating structures for lasting world peace.110 Similarly, in America, Madame Chiang was feted publicly almost everywhere she campaigned. Yet it is now well known that privately—in the inner circles of American government in Washington, and among many Allied commanders and diplomats active in Chungking—Chiang Kai-shek’s government and the Soong family itself were bywords for corruption and self-seeking. Such knowledge was kept from the public in Allied countries; to be fair, even within government and the military it was a controversial assessment, with many supporting the Chiangs and the Soongs, including President Roosevelt. At any rate, public morale in the West required the Chinese government and people to be seen in a heroic light, the gallant front line of defence in Asia.111 Within the Chinese community in Australia, awareness of corruption in the Kuomintang government was non-existent until late in the war. It was only when some Australian Chinese, such as Mavis Chinn (wife of Lo Chai-tze, a Kuomintang official), who had worked in Chungking as editor of the China Patriot newspaper, returned to Australia that disillusionment with the Kuomintang spread, including the view that all the money raised for a Chinese air force went into the coffers of Madame Chiang Kai-shek.112 But it is also the case that the Kuomintang movement was one in which many had high ideals for reform and modernization in China. It is from this idealism that Alice Lim Kee spoke. She spoke stirringly of mass literacy

109. ‘All Must Help China’, Daily News, October 10, 1944, p. 10, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article78525191; ‘Year of Progress: Parramatta CWA’, Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate, January 17, 1945, p. 10, http:// nla.gov.au/nla.news-article106135420; ‘News from District Centres: Thornton’, Queensland Times, May 31, 1945, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article114631672. 110. ‘Eminent Chinese Catholic Guest at Social’, Catholic Weekly, September 21, 1944, p. 13, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article146486566; ‘China’s Lesson to the World’, Advertiser, September 29, 1944, p. 3, http://nla.gov. au/nla.news-article43222205; ‘There Must Not Be A Third World War’, Molong Express and Western District Advertiser, May 4, 1945, p. 9, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article140872145. 111. John Gittings, ‘Madame Chiang Kai-shek’, Guardian, October 25, 2003, https://web.archive.org/ web/20200326063350/https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/oct/25/guardianobituaries.china; Frank McLynn, The Burma Campaign: Disaster into Triumph, 1942–45 (London: Vintage Books, 2011), pp. 52, 113–14, 120, 162, 199–200, 391, 399. 112. ‘Kuomintang in Australia: Official’s Visit’, Argus, January 28, 1941, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article8166914; Eunice Leong, conversation with author, October 31, 2012 (Eunice Leong is the sister of Mavis Chinn).

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campaigns, the industrial cooperative movement, the equality of Chinese women before the law, and of sixteen women in the Chinese parliament.113 Having been confidential private secretary to Madame H. H. Kung, it would be strange if Alice Lim Kee were unaware of the moral quicksand of the Soong family. That said, to date it is impossible to tell from research as to where she stood. In all public accounts she appears to be on moral high ground—indeed, a leader in moral and social values. Only once did journalists challenge Alice’s rosy view of China, the Chiangs, the Soongs, and her own campaigns. In 1938 the right-wing New Times (a publication of the Australian League of Rights) reported on pointed questions being put to Mrs Fabian Chow and Mrs Elsie Lee Soong at a public meeting on February 25, arguing that the Soong family ruled China.114

Madame Chow: A Threat to Australian Security? Some in the Australian Commonwealth Security Service were also concerned about Alice Lim Kee, and they kept an eye on her activities and associates in Australia during 1943 and 1944. The reason for this surveillance is never clearly stated in the remaining records, but inferences can be drawn. On July 1, 1943, Alice was interviewed at the Hotel Metropole in Sydney by Detective-Sergeant Alfred Wilks of the Security Service, ostensibly to see if she could suggest ‘means of contacting those who may have infiltrated into Australia under the guise of refugees and then act as enemy agents’. The inference that as a refugee herself Alice Lim Kee could be just such an enemy agent is reinforced by the comment in Wilks’s report that he ‘made a discreet attempt’ to discuss her escape from Hong Kong, ‘considering that [a] woman with her two sons was able to make an escape which able-bodied men have found impossible’. Alice’s only answer to this was that ‘an old family employee . . . a middle-aged Chinese who had acted has her secretary and tutor in Chinese to her two sons’, had facilitated their escape. She also reported that she had attempted to get permission to bring him to Australia with her but that this had been refused by the Australian government ‘as he might be a Japanese spy’.115 When on May 16, 1944, Alice Lim Kee, citing her role as correspondent for the Ta Kung Pao newspaper, sought ‘a permit entitling me to visit Naval, Military or Air 113. See, for example, ‘Country Women’s Association: Sale’, Gippsland Times, August 17, 1944, p. 4, http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article64168669; ‘Family Base for Wide Postwar Cooperation’, Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, June 15, 1944, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article134933891; ‘Women Should Be at Peace Table’, Queensland Country Life, May 17, 1945, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article97091311; ‘Message to Mme. Chiang Kai-Shek’, Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, November 22, 1943, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article133422733. 114. ‘Mrs Soong and Mrs Chow’, The New Times 4, no. 12 (March 25, 1938), p. 4, Australian League of Rights, Melbourne, https://alor.org/. 115. Report by Alfred Wilks (Detective Sergeant, Security Service, Sydney), July 14, 1943, NAA: C123, 21640; Margaret Tyrie, ‘Wilks, Alfred Amos (1901–1983)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2012), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ wilks-alfred-amos-15771.

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Camps and Establishments in my capacity as Writer, Photographer, Broadcaster’, William Simpson, Director-General of Security, reported that he and several other security and military officials recommended refusing her the permit, ‘on security grounds’.116 Included in this file was a report about Alice’s visit on May 6 to ‘thank the Port Kembla wharfies’ for refusing to load pig iron for Japan on the Dalfram,117 so perhaps her association with a Communist-led union was enough grounds for suspicion in his eyes.118 But it is more likely that Alice Lim Kee’s avowal to Wilks of her intention of changing public opinion towards support of immigration from China into Australia was of more concern to the authorities. In her interview with Wilks on July 1, 1943, she had made a strong representation that her ‘main mission to Australia is to attempt to break down the prejudice of Chinese being permitted to migrate to Australia’ and to change ‘the outlook of the Australian people in relation to the White Australia Policy’. Part of her supporting argument for this was that the ‘reason why the Japanese have not invaded Australia’ was ‘in no small way’ due to the Chinese resistance which occupied a large portion of the Japanese army’.119 Wilks commented in his report that Alice Lim Kee’s stated intention to give addresses to members of female societies in Sydney would also ‘no doubt’ be an opportunity for her to ‘spread propaganda on behalf of the Chinese people’.120 In an earlier letter to Sergeant Campbell of the Security Service, on June 24, 1943, Wilks declared his judgment: ‘Mrs Chow is described as being a very cunning, intelligent and vivacious woman, who has the ability of making contacts in diplomatic circles and with men of official ranking.’121 That this was not just Wilks’s view is supported by the request from his superior, J. C. McFarlane, the Deputy Director of Security for New South Wales, that Mrs Chow be most discreetly [McFarlane’s emphasis] interviewed. She will come here with accreditation as War Correspondent, and approved as the Australian Representative of the Peoples Foreign Relations Association. These facts are considered in order, but Canberra is actually doubtful regarding this woman . . . [She] should be approached in such a manner to convey to her the idea that she is being congratulated on her appointment and that she is welcomed here. At the same time 116. W. B. Simpson (Director-General of Security) to E. G. Bonney (Director General, Department of Information), June 9, 1944, and Deputy Director of Security for New South Wales to Director-General of Security, memorandum, May 22, 1944, NAA: C123, 21640; Jolyon Horner, ‘Simpson, William Ballantyne (1894–1966)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2002), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/simpson-william-ballantyne-11700. 117. J. Howe to J. Simpson, May 7, 1944, NAA: C123, 21640. 118. Jim Healy, General Secretary of the Waterside Workers’ Federation of Australia from 1937 to 1961, was a member of the Communist Party of Australia from 1934 onwards. Ray Markey and Stuart Svensen, ‘Healy, James (Jim) (1898–1961)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1996), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/healy-james-jim-10470. 119. Report by Alfred Wilks (Detective Sergeant, Security Service, Sydney), July 14, 1943, NAA: C123, 21640. 120. Report by Alfred Wilks (Detective Sergeant, Security Service, Sydney), July 14, 1943, NAA: C123, 21640. 121. Alfred Wilks (Detective Sergeant, Security Service, Sydney) to Sergeant Campbell (Security Service, Sydney), memorandum, June 24, 1943, NAA: C123, 21640.

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A few months later, on September 1, 1943, Wilks reported to J. C. McFarlane that ‘propaganda favourable to the Chinese Government’ written by Alice’s supposedly ex-husband Mr Fabian Chow,123 had been received in Australia. Fabian Chow, then resident in Calcutta, was the representative in India of the Chinese Ministry for Information. This propaganda was ‘an appeal to Chinese living abroad to remember the country of their origin . . . [of] improved living conditions in China, and [that] all are reminded that the Chinese, being a progressive race, are fitted to take their place in the post-war world’.124 In turn, two weeks later the Deputy Director of Security asked the Censorship Liaison Officer of the Security Service in Sydney to arrange interception of the propaganda, which may be in the mail. The final sentence in this letter suggests a diplomatic delicacy in the matter: ‘As Mrs Fabian Chow moves in influential Chinese circles, the question becomes a trifle delicate, but with the District Censor’s help, you could perhaps hit on a safe method of interception.’125 Obviously, there was an uncomfortable disjunct between the public policy that Australia and China were allies and the undercover investigations by certain officials in the security, censorship, and military services raising concerns about both pro-China ‘propaganda’ and Alice Lim Kee’s campaign against the White Australia policy. Was this disjunct felt at the highest level of the Australian government, or were these officials acting on their own sense of what was best for Australia regarding China and the Chinese in Australia? This is an important question requiring further research but beyond the scope of this chapter. What is likely, though, is that Alice Lim Kee clearly apprehended a certain level of resistance to her, both towards her person and her political views, by influential people in the Australian government. Wilks had also stated in the report of his interview with her that he was ‘non-committal’ in his reply to her request for advice on ‘regaining her British Nationality’.126 She also would have known that her father, a naturalized British

122. J. C. McFarlane (Deputy Director of Security for New South Wales) to Sergeant Campbell (Security Service, Sydney), May 27, 1943, NAA: C123, 21640. 123. In her interview with Wilks on July 1, 1943, Alive Lim Kee stated that she ‘had become divorced from her husband when he became mentally unbalanced about five years ago’, yet Wilks in his report on the interview questioned this as being true, citing his knowledge of the cable of June 23, 1943, mentioned earlier in this chapter, from ‘A. Chow’ to ‘Fabian’. In this letter of September 1, Wilks reiterated his concern about the discrepancy between talk of a divorce due to Fabian’s mental instability on the one hand and his ability to write such propaganda on the other. 124. Alfred Wilks (Detective Sergeant, Security Service, Sydney) to Deputy Director of Security, 1 September 1943, NAA: C123, 21640. The identity of J. C. McFarlane as the Deputy Director of Security can be found in J. C. McFarlane (Deputy Director of Security for New South Wales) to Director General of Security, July 27, 1943, NAA: C123, 21640. 125. Deputy Director of Security for New South Wales to Censorship Liaison Officer, Security Service, Sydney, September 15, 1943, NAA: C123, 21640. 126. Report by Alfred Wilks (Detective Sergeant, Security Service, Sydney), July 14, 1943, NAA: C123, 21640.

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subject,127 who had previously been able to travel to and from China with documents from the Department of the Interior authorizing his readmission to Australia, was advised by that department in March 1935 that ‘it will not be possible now to issue a similar document’ and that he should ‘obtain a Chinese passport from the Consul General’ in Sydney—surely an illegal position to take with respect to a someone officially recognized as a naturalized British subject, and a sign of a hardening of official exclusion practices towards Chinese Australians.128 In considering official Australian reluctance to return her British nationality, and concern about her politics, Alice Lim Kee may have had her interest stirred instead towards the United States. The passing there of the Magnuson Act, otherwise known as the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act, which came into effect on December 17, 1943 was a tangible outcome of Madame Chiang’s meeting with US politicians earlier that year in May.129 This would have signalled to Alice that perhaps the United States would be a more favourable place for her to advance her goal of reconciling China and the West, and to assist Chinese Americans who were already campaigning to further liberalize immigration laws in the United States.130 Accounts of Alice Lim Kee’s engagements disappear from the Australian press after August 1945, and she left Australia for Shanghai on October 18, 1945, on the SS Arawa.131 She later moved to New York,132 and although it is known that Fabian was also there in 1945 and 1946,133 it is not known whether they resumed living together. Alice Lim Kee’s only subsequent mention in the Australian media after 1945 was in 1953, when she sent from Hong Kong a dress to her niece, Joan Pon (the daughter of her sister Queenie, Mrs F. T. Pon), who lived in Sydney; the dress was for Joan to wear at her twenty-first birthday party.134 Joan also stayed with Alice in New York in the mid-1950s when visiting America after she had finished her university studies.135

127. A memorandum from Atlee Hunt, Secretary of the Home and Territories Department, in 1919 acknowledged that Charles Lim Kee was a naturalized British subject. Memorandum for Customs Officers by Atlee Hunt, 23 January 1919, NAA: A1, 1932/4426. 128. A. R. Peters (Department of the Interior) to C. Lim Kee, March 6, 1935, NAA: A1, 1932/4426. 129. Wong, ‘From Pariah to Paragon’, pp. 164–69. 130. Him Mark Lai, Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004), pp. 20–21; Elaine Low, An Unnoticed Struggle: A Concise History of Asian American Civil Rights Issues (San Francisco: Japanese American Citizens League, 2008), p. 4, https://web.archive.org/ web/20100613102647/http://jacl.org/public_policy/documents/An%20Unnoticed%20Struggle.pdf. 131. ‘Ai Lien Wu Chow . . . left . . . per S.S. “Arawa” on 18.10.45’; William J. MacKay (Commissioner of Police) to F. A. Kearns (Security Service), memorandum, November 16, 1945, NAA: C123, 21640; ‘Shipping: Clearances’, Daily Commercial News and Shipping List, October 20, 1945, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page16623470. 132. Bettina Pon, correspondence with author, May 11, 2015. Bettina Pon is the grand-niece of Alice Lim Kee. 133. ‘Who’s Who in This Issue’, Free World, January, 1945, p. 4, https://web.archive.org/web/20200326060118/ https://www.unz.com/print/FreeWorld-1945jan-00004/; Tsang, ‘China’s Propaganda in the United States During World War II’, p. 44. 134. ‘More December Dates’, Sydney Morning Herald, December 10, 1953, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article18400548. 135. Bettina Pon, correspondence with author, May 11, 2015.

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Why Did Madame Fabian Chow Disappear from the Historical Record? The career of Alice Lim Kee, in all her roles and variety of names, is a remarkable one that ought to have greater prominence—in Australian history, in the history of Republican-era China, in overseas Chinese history, in women’s history, and the history of modernism. After being so well known in Australia during World War II, why did she disappear from public view and historical recognition? Alice Lim Kee’s disappearance from public view may partly be due to the fact that the American press began to circulate stories about Kuomintang corruption,136 leading to a loss of community support in America and Australia for the Kuomintang government cause that she so strongly advocated. Her moral focus on universal world peace led by women may also have been derailed by the onset of the Cold War and its need for ongoing military preparedness, and the perpetuation of a conflict strategy in world affairs. The decline of the Kuomintang’s global reputation after their loss to the Chinese Communist Party may also have had a bearing on Alice’s withdrawal from public life. It may also be simply that the strain of her exacting publicity efforts during the war led her to retire from more prominent involvement in public affairs. There was more mention of her in the Australian English-language press of the day than in the Australian Chinese-language press or community records, and her work does not feature at all in the most recent account of the Chinese Australian community’s Anti-Japanese War activity, which draws largely on official Australasian Kuomintang sources, Chinese consular records, and Chinese language newspaper in Australia.137 A renewed focus on these campaigns, their politics, their allegiances, their intellectual underpinnings, and their engagement with the wider Australian community, would allow the achievements of Alice Lim Kee/Wu Ai-lien/Alice Ma/ Mrs Fabian Chow/Madame Chow to be properly honoured.

Women as Active Citizens Karen Leong and Judy Wu have emphasized the orientalized role of Chinese American women in the public campaigns for China in the United States from 1938 to 1945. They argue that a feminized, attractively exoticized Chinese culture could embody a non-threatening and accessible image of China, a nation and a people too often seen in America and Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the source of an incomprehensible, disturbing, male incursion into white society.138 The appeal of the exotic and the feminine alone, though, proved to be only partly effective with white audiences. Leong and Wu point out that funds raised for the war relief in China remained lower than those raised for other non-English 136. McLynn, The Burma Campaign, p. 391. 137. Kuo and Brett, Unlocking the History of the Australasian Kuo Min Tang, pp. 100–27. 138. Leong and Wu, ‘Filling the Rice Bowls of China’, p. 145.

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nations that were part of the Allied forces. China Relief organizers in the United States quickly discovered that the most effective figure for stirring up compassion for China were orphaned children and suffering mothers. White women, with their tradition of international maternalism, soon participated enthusiastically in humanitarian campaigns to assist the women and children of war-torn China.139 The oriental allure also featured in pro-China campaigns in Australia. Elsie Lee Soong’s tableau of Chinese historical fashion, staged in Melbourne during the 1938 tour, focused on the exotic allure of Chinese fashion through the ages. In Adelaide in September 1942, Chinese women were present in national dress at a dance in the town hall organized by the Chinese Group in aid of Allies Day.140 Alice Lim Kee and Elsie Lee Soong also emphasized the suffering of women and children in their 1938 tour of Australia, and Alice returned to this theme repeatedly in her 1943–1945 tour. Even her own personal story of escape from Hong Kong, with just her two young sons, fitted completely with this appeal. Yet the most powerful publicity for Alice Lim Kee came from her own voice, and her own compelling arguments for a modern China’s role in the new world of the post-war United Nations. As with Madame Chiang in the United States in early 1943, Alice Lim Kee/Madame Chow was ‘western-educated, Christian, attractive, fluent in English, and an outstanding orator’.141 Madame Chow’s only concession to oriental fascination by then was wearing the cheongsam in public. As with Madame Chiang, Madame Chow represented a ‘New China’, appealing to middleclass, mainstream, and progressive Australians, emphasizing Christian values and welfare, democratic and feminist principles, and the common humanity between Chinese and whites. Alice Lim Kee chose a different path to modernity than fellow Australian and fellow actor Rose Quong. While Rose had moved to London to be at a centre of Western modernity, Alice found her modernity in China. Unlike some young Chinese Australians who returned to the Guangdong villages of their parents, Alice gravitated to Shanghai. In that city she found a social milieu that was both Chinese and modern, both Christian and socially progressive, both international and nationalist, but which had no interest in an essentializing orientalism. In that city, as a journalist and a feminist, she could actively pursue the transformation of China’s society in concert with others of like mind, be at the centre of communal citizen agency for this goal, and leave behind, in her country of birth, the orientalization and stigmatization of her Chinese ancestry. Alice Lim Kee’s campaign in Australia from August 1943 onwards increasingly emphasized the transformation and modernization of China, and the desire of China, and Chinese people, to be regarded as equals with the West. Her campaign 139. Leong and Wu, ‘Filling the Rice Bowls of China’, pp. 133, 145. 140. ‘Chinese Group Arranges Dance’, Advertiser (Adelaide), September 26, 1942, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article48884689. 141. Wong, ‘From Pariah to Paragon’.

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also increasingly focused on the active role women would take in creating that modern future. Perhaps heartened by the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States in December 1943, but more likely angered by the deep racist suspicions of the Australian security service, she repeatedly eschewed the orientalist and non-feminist tinges that other Chinese campaigners felt necessary to appeal to whites. Being Chinese, Australian, and modern, and having a public role as an equal with white Australians, yet without needing to perform ‘Chineseness’, was probably too much of a personal challenge for her to remain in the country of her birth.

9 Mary Chong and Gwen Fong: UniversityEducated Chinese Australian Women Julia T. Martínez

When twenty-two-year-old Mary Chong was interviewed by the Brisbane Courier in 1930, she was described as the embodiment of Chinese women’s emancipation for speaking out publicly on behalf of Chinese immigrants to Australia. As the first known woman of Chinese heritage to graduate from an Australian university, she was one of a small group of Australian-born Chinese who, by virtue of their education, felt empowered to take on such leadership roles. From the time of Mary’s graduation in 1929 until 1950, there were no more than a handful of such university-educated Chinese women in Australia. Their exceptional lives are all but untold, even though, as literate women with public lives, their archive is more tangible than most.1 Harnessing sources such as the women’s own writings and newspaper articles about them, as well as school, university, and official migration records, it is possible to gain a sense of these women’s educational journeys and their political aspirations. Often when historians embark on the task of recovering previously neglected aspects of women’s lives, such as women’s education, their work builds on, or challenges, earlier androcentric histories. In the case of university education of Chinese in Australia before 1950, however, this history is all but untold. To begin to tell the history of university-educated Chinese women in Australia, it has therefore been necessary to also piece together, from primary sources, the story of their male counterparts in order to provide a broader context for these women’s significant educational achievements. The first half of the twentieth century saw a considerable expansion in women’s higher education in both Australia and China. In Australia there were just 539 women studying at university in 1911, and this figure rose to 2,123 women in 1921,

* Author’s note: Thanks to Kate Bagnall for helpful editing and advice on sources. Thanks to Peter Gibson for research assistance into Australian university records, and thanks also to Claire Lowrie, Jane Carey, and Simon Ville for comments on an early draft. 1. Shen Yuanfang has noted that illiterate women were unable to record their own life stories; see Dragon Seed in the Antipodes: Chinese-Australian Autobiographies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), p. 48.

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representing 29.3 percent of university students overall.2 Mary Chong’s decision to commence studying at university in 1926 was likely influenced by local campaigns promoting women’s greater participation in education and the workplace. In 1925, for example, while Mary was in her fifth year at Dubbo High School, the school arranged a university extension lecture titled ‘The Economic Position of Women’ presented by economist F. C. Benham from the University of Sydney, who maintained that a woman should earn her own living.3 It seems highly likely that Mary would have attended that lecture. That Mary’s parents accepted her decision to study at university may also have been influenced by social change relating to women in China. In early twentiethcentury China, women’s education not only revolutionized the role of women within the family but also encouraged women to emerge as public figures in their own right, engaging in the advancement of health, education, and politics.4 This message spread to the diaspora in Australia, facilitated by the 1920s establishment of Australian branches of the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (國 民黨 Guómíntǎng; KMT) and a call in 1921 for women members. The uptake of Chinese women KMT members took time; a 1923 photograph of the organization’s office bearers shows only one woman among thirty-seven men.5 By the late 1930s a number of well-educated China-born women found their way to Australia, reinvigorating the China-Australia connection and providing new role models for young Australian Chinese women. Many of these new arrivals were connected to the Chinese consulate, being wives and daughters of Chinese diplomatic representatives. Also among wartime arrivals in the early 1940s were overseas-born women of Chinese ethnicity from Singapore and British Malaya.6 The 1950s ushered in a new era of Australia-Asia engagement with university scholarships offered under the Colombo Plan and a growing number of selffunded students. While this shift away from Australian isolationism has been acknowledged by scholars, the earlier instances of Chinese university attendance in Australia have been all but ignored.7 Those Australian-born Chinese women and 2. Alison L. Booth and Hiau Joo Kee, ‘A Long-Run View of the University Gender Gap in Australia’, Australian Economic History Review 51, no. 3 (November 2011), p. 257. 3. ‘University Extension Lectures’, Dubbo Liberal and Macquarie Advocate, September 11, 1925, p. 4, http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article76100955. 4. Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 8. 5. Mei-Fen Kuo and Judith Brett, Unlocking the History of the Australasian Kuo Min Tang 1911–2013 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013), p. 23; C. F. Yong, The New Gold Mountain: The Chinese in Australia, 1901–1921 (Richmond, South Australia: Raphael Arts, 1977), p. 155. 6. ‘University Students Do Vacation Work at Shepparton’, Australasian, January 23, 1943, p. 17, http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article142146050. Wang Gungwu refers to the well-educated cosmopolitan migrants who travelled from Southeast Asia to Australasia as part of the huayi pattern of migration in ‘Patterns of Chinese Migration in Historical Perspective’, Observing Change in Asia: Essays in Honours of J. A. C. Mackie, ed. R. J. May and William J. O’Malley (Bathurst, New South Wales: Crawford House Press), p. 38. 7. Daniel Oakman, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra: ANU Press, 2010), p. 179; Julia Horne and Geoffrey Sherington, Sydney: The Making of a Public University (Carlton, Victoria: Miegunyah Press, 2012), p. 51.

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men who completed their university education before 1950 did so with very little public acknowledgement of their achievements. This chapter seeks to highlight the remarkable lives of two women graduates, Mary Chong of Sydney University and Gwen Fong of Melbourne University. It explores their very different lives within the context of their Australian contemporaries and situates the education of Chinese women in Australia within the broader context of education of Chinese overseas, acknowledging that Australia was not a leader in this respect. Australia may have been slow to produce Chinese women graduates, particularly in comparison with the United States, but there is every indication that these few women were able to successfully navigate their education without overt challenge from an ostensibly pro-White Australia government and society. The existing historical literature on the education of Chinese girls and women in Australia, and biographies of university-educated Chinese Australian women, remains sparse. One exception is my work on Lena Lee or Chong Shue Hing (鍾少卿 C: jūng síuhīng, M: zhōng shǎoqīng).8 Lena was born in Darwin in north Australia on April 8, 1902, the daughter of Ah Ngoi and her prominent merchant husband, Chin Yam Yan.9 Lena travelled to China in 1906 with her family and was educated to university level before returning to Darwin in 1924. Lena’s experiences reveal the challenges of political engagement for educated women in Australia. Lena worked both as a teacher of Chinese language and culture at the Darwin Chinese school, and later as a member of the Kuomintang (KMT). She made her first public appearance on behalf of the KMT in 1927 when the Thai Royal Prince visited Darwin. The Northern Territory Times noted that ‘two ladies’ represented ‘the New China’ at this event, speculating that this was the first instance ‘in which Chinese ladies have officially participated in an Australian public function’.10 Lena Lee became Secretary of the Darwin KMT in 1929 and attended their conference in Sydney along with seven male committee members.11 Even though she was warmly welcomed by the Chinese Consul General, it was to be her last conference; she committed suicide a few months later, despairing that members no longer followed the teachings of Sun Yat-sen. Historian Wang Gungwu, in describing the nationalist inflection of the term huaqiao for overseas Chinese, highlighted the important role that educated nationalists such as Lena Lee played in promoting 8. Julia Martínez, ‘Patriotic Chinese Women: Followers of Sun Yat-Sen in Darwin, Australia’, in Sun YatSen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution, ed. Lee Lai To and Lee Hock Guan (Singapore: ISEAS, 2011), pp. 200–18; Julia Martínez, ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin: Interconnections Between the Wah On Society and the Kuo Min Tang’, in Chinese Australians, Politics, Engagement and Resistance, ed. Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 240–66. Barbara James brought the story of Lena Lee to public attention in No Man’s Land: Women of the Northern Territory (Sydney: Collins Publishers, 1989), pp. 121–22. 9. ‘Leena Pack Fong Chin’, Australia, Birth Index, 1788–1922, in Ancestry.com [online database] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010). 10. ‘Darwin Kuo Min Tang’s Welcome to Prince of Siam’, Northern Territory Times, July 12, 1927, p. 1, http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article4551386. 11. ‘The Kuo Min Tang’, Northern Standard, October 11, 1929, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article48024748.

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continued loyalty to China.12 Lena Lee’s passion for politics has prompted historian Jan Ryan, in her study of post-war Chinese women, to describe her as ‘the epitome of the modern global woman that was to come’.13 As for the history of education of Chinese in Australia, historian Mei-fen Kuo has explored the importance of secondary school education for Chinese girls in twentieth-century Australia. The Sydney Chinese School, established in 1910, included five female students aged approximately eight to fourteen, who were likely the children of Chinese merchants. A photograph of the students shows welldressed children in typical Australian school uniforms of the time, the girls in white lacy dresses.14 Subsequent work with John Fitzgerald on China-born students in Australia shows 1920s Chinese in Australia advocating for women’s education for ‘gainful employment’ and that a small number of girls were among the Chinese students admitted to study in Australia.15 From 1912 to 1920 students from China were allowed to apply for exemption from immigration restrictions to enter Australia, but with strict regulations no more than thirty students were admitted. Between 1920 and 1925, however, there were some 400 school students from China studying in Australia under a more liberal exemption arranged by the Chinese Consul General, T. K. Quei.16 Chinese students aged between eleven and seventeen enrolled in both government-run and private schools, and most of those who came joined fathers or other family members living in Australia. While the student exemption was most often used by secondary students, at least two male students from China used this exemption to study at university. One was M. Y. Hsia (Shan Min You), a graduate of Wesley College, Wuchang, who in 1923 did teacher training at Sydney University. During his stay he resided at the Presbyterian St Andrew’s College.17 The second was Arthur Chun Wah, who graduated in 1931 from Sydney University in Engineering.18 His uncle, Henry Fine, a naturalized Chinese, had arranged for him to come from China on a student exemption in 1911, aged 10. Arthur first attended Forest Lodge Public School and 12. Wang, ‘Patterns of Chinese Migration’, pp. 36–37. 13. Jan Ryan, Chinese Women and the Global Village: An Australian Site (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003), p. 140. 14. Tung Wah Times, February 4, 1911, cited in Mei-fen Kuo, ‘Confucian Heritage, Public Narratives and Community Politics of Chinese Australians at the Beginning of the 20th Century’, in Chinese Australians, ed. Couchman and Bagnall, p. 163. 15. Mei-fen Kuo and John Fitzgerald, ‘Chinese Students in White Australia: State, Community, and Individual Responses to the Student Visa Program, 1920–1925’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 2 (2016), p. 264. See also Mei-fen Kuo and John Fitzgerald, ‘Colonial Pathways to International Education: Chinese Students in White Australia in the 1920s’, in Colonialism, China and the Chinese: Amidst Empires, ed. Matthew P. Fitzpatrick and Peter Monteath (Routledge: Abingdon, 2019). 16. Kuo and Fitzgerald, ‘Chinese Students in White Australia’, p. 260. 17. ‘Chapman B. B. – Admission of Chinese student’ (Department of Home and Territories, 1920–1923), National Archives of Australia (NAA): A1, 1923/29220. 18. ‘Mr. A. C. Wah’, Sydney Morning Herald, May 2, 1931, p. 14, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article16774359; Calendar of the University of Sydney for the Year 1932 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1932), p. 703, http:// calendararchive.usyd.edu.au/Calendar/1932/PDF/1932%20-%200755.pdf.

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completed secondary schooling in Sydney before attending Sydney University.19 As the upper age limit for the visa was twenty-four, this was sufficient to complete a university degree. Thus far, I have found no similar cases of China-born women attending university on a student exemption. The case of Jane Kwong Lee suggests that the reason for this lies, at least in part, with the restrictive Australian immigration system. Jane’s father, Kwong Sam Been, had lived for many years as a merchant in Geraldton, a remote town in Western Australia. He had tried to bring his family to Australia in 1909, but his petition had been denied, as was his application for naturalization in 1911.20 If Jane had joined her father at this time, she might have gone on to study at the University of Western Australia in Perth.21 Instead, by historian Judy Yung’s account, Jane completed her schooling in China at the Presbyterian-run True Light Seminary and Canton Christian College, and in 1922 left her home in Taishan to study sociology in California. As her father’s remittances were only enough to support her brother’s education, her mother sold some land to pay for Jane’s passage to the United States.22 Most Australian-born Chinese were educated in Australia, in mainstream English-language schools. Even so, some families took the alternative option of having their children educated in China where they could gain important language and cultural skills. Some children were sent back to live with extended family for education in village or mission schools, while others returned to China with their families, sometimes for a number of years. In her chapter in this volume, Sophie Loy-Wilson remarks on the life of historian Mavis Gock Ming, who was born in Perth in 1916 to a Chinese father and English Australian mother and travelled to China in 1925 with her family, where she was educated at different schools. Before leaving for China, Mavis had spoken only English at home and knew only a few words in Chinese.23 Only much later in life did Mavis return to Australia to gain her Bachelor degree.24

19. Brad Powe, ‘When is This Lad Going Home?’, presentation to the Chinese Heritage Association of Australia, Sydney, November 11, 2017. See also ‘Chun Wah Educational Exemption Certificate’ (Department of External Affairs, 1911–1931), NAA: A1, 1931/1485. 20. ‘Governor General’s Office – Correspondence – Request for Permission to Bring Wife and Children from China’ (Governor-General, 1909), NAA: A6662, 1501; ‘Been, Sam – Naturalisation Certificate’ (Department of External Affairs, 1911–1928), NAA: A1, 1928/2722. 21. C. Y. Leong-Salobir, ‘Striving for Equity and Diversity’, in Seeking Wisdom: A Centenary History of the University of Western Australia, ed. J. Gregory and J. Chetkovich (Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2013), p. 3. 22. Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 61–62. 23. Sophie Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 22. 24. Harriet Veitch and Richard Horsburgh, ‘Teacher and Writer Between Two Worlds (Mavis Yen, 1916–2008)’, Sydney Morning Herald, October 18, 2008, http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/teacher-and-writerbetween-two-worlds/2008/10/17/1223750325013.html.

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When searching for the history of Chinese women students in Australia, the situation is not helped by the dearth of historical studies on Australian women university students in general. In 2006 historian Alison Mackinnon declared that the ‘history of women in Australian universities has not been written’.25 Her own study of early twentieth-century women students focused on issues of class and marital status but did not touch on the subject of ethnic diversity. More than a decade later, the history of female university students in Australia remains largely untold, although more recent references to individual women students can be found in institutional university histories. For example, a recent collection of the life stories of forty women at Melbourne University included a biography of June Howqua, medical student of Chinese descent, discussed below.26 While the numbers of Chinese women at university may have been tiny, their presence represents a significant turning point in educational history. In theory, and in most cases in practice, Australian schools and universities did not bar Chinese students on racial grounds, unlike Indigenous Australian students who were generally excluded from mainstream schools up until the late 1960s.27 University education, however, remained elitist, being determined by class, as it required the financial means to pay for education and to provide a suitable home environment for study. In the case of female students, it also required families to prioritize the education of their daughters. Thus, while higher education was possible for Chinese women in early twentieth-century Australia, it was a rare achievement. It is possible to gain a more specific sense of the proportion of Chinese women studying at university from the census year of 1933. Of the 1,535 Chinese females and 1,602 Chinese ‘half-caste’ females recorded in Australia in 1933, an estimated 600 women were of a likely age to pursue tertiary education; there were 171 Chinese women aged fifteen to nineteen and 204 Chinese women aged twenty to twentyfour, with similar numbers of Chinese ‘half-caste’ women (161 aged fifteen to nineteen and 177 women aged twenty to twenty-four).28 Both these census categories were based on the category of ‘race’ and applied to women of Chinese heritage born in Australia. There were an additional 507 immigrant China-born women recorded in Australia in 1933, and of those 45 were aged fifteen to nineteen and 80 were 25. Alison Mackinnon, ‘“Nowhere to Plant the Sole of the Foot?”: Women University Education and Subjectivity in the Early Twentieth Century’, Critical Studies in Education 47, no. 1–2 (2006), p. 269. 26. Juliet Flesch, 40 Years 40 Women: Biographies of University of Melbourne Women, University of Melbourne Library, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20190824041952/http://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/ AWE6069b.htm. 27. Nina Burridge and Andrew Chodkiewicz, ‘An Historical Overview of Aboriginal Education Policies in the Australian Context’, in Indigenous Education: A Learning Journey for Teachers, Schools and Communities, ed. Nina Burridge, Frances Whalan and Karen Vaughan (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012), pp. 11–22. 28. ‘Females Classified According to Race in Conjunction with Age’, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia (Melbourne: Bureau of Census and Statistics, 1933), p. 914. The Census does not elaborate on the category ‘half-caste’, a term which has long been regarded as derogatory. The majority of women placed in this category were, however, of mixed European and Chinese descent; see Kate Bagnall, ‘Rewriting the History of Chinese Families in Nineteenth-Century Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (March 2011), pp. 62–77.

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aged twenty to twenty-four.29 Of all these women, the 1933 census reveals just two women of Chinese ‘race’ studying at university. There were none recorded from the China-born group, and indeed no other non-European women. In the same year there were eleven Chinese men and four so-called ‘half-caste’ Chinese men at university.30 If we contextualize Chinese women’s university attendance within the broader population, those two Chinese women were all but invisible among the total of 2,273 women attending university in 1933, and thus far no sources have been found to reveal their identities.31 While the 1947 census would have revealed an increase in the number of Chinese women at university, the question about educational status was sadly not included in that census.

In the Shadow of the United States Much of what we know about Chinese women’s university education outside China comes from the literature on China-born women travelling to the United States.32 Historian Weili Ye has described their arrival between the 1880s and the 1920s in three waves. The earliest group were encouraged by American missionaries to study medicine.33 They joined a more sizeable cohort of 120 Chinese male students, who had arrived with the Chinese Educational Mission between 1872 and 1881, a program organized by Yale graduate Yung Wing.34 The second group of women students arrived between 1900 and the mid-1910s at a time when women’s education promoted the idea of the ‘good mother/virtuous wife’.35 The May Fourth New Culture movement in China inspired the third group after 1915. As Ye explains, these women were ‘defining their own roles’ as well as being inspired by American feminists.36 Carol Chin cautions, however, against overemphasizing American agency in promoting women’s liberation in China, arguing that Chinese activism developed in parallel with Western moves towards modernity and feminism.37 29. ‘Females Classified According to Birthplace in Conjunction with Age’, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia (Melbourne: Bureau of Census and Statistics, 1933), p. 756. 30. ‘Females Classified According to Race in Conjunction with Schooling’, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia (Melbourne: Bureau of Census and Statistics, 1933), p. 946. There were far more Chinese girls in primary and secondary education, with 263 girls attending government schools and 75 attending private schools. 31. ‘Schooling—Persons Receiving Instruction’, Census of the Commonwealth of Australia (Melbourne: Bureau of Census and Statistics, 1933), p. 1150. 32. For a discussion of the US exemption of Chinese students leading to a new narrative of Chinese immigrants as a ‘model minority’, see Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 4. 33. Weili Ye, ‘“Nü Liuxuesheng”: The Story of American-Educated Chinese Women, 1880s–1920s’, Modern China 2, no. 3 (1994), p. 316. 34. K. Scott Wong, ‘Cultural Defenders and Brokers: Chinese Responses to the Anti-Chinese Movement’, in Claiming America, Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era, ed. K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chang (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), p. 25. 35. Ye, ‘The Story of American-Educated Chinese Women’, p. 316. 36. Ye, ‘The Story of American-Educated Chinese Women’, p. 317. 37. Carol C. Chin, ‘Translating the New Woman: Chinese Feminists View the West 1905–15’, Gender & History 18, no. 3 (November 2006), pp. 490–518.

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It is not surprising that the United States was the first overseas choice for Chinese women students, compared with Australia. The United States had a thriving university system. In 1885, when Jin Yunmei became the first Chinese woman to receive a medical degree from the Women’s Medical College in New York, American women had already been studying medicine since the 1850s.38 The London School of Medicine, in contrast, did not open for women’s education until the 1870s.39 In Australia the first woman university graduate, Bella Guerin, took a degree in Arts at Melbourne University in 1883.40 Women enrolled in Medicine at Sydney University in 1885 and at Melbourne University in 1887, while Adelaide University had its first woman medical graduate in 1891.41 Despite this, the earliest known Chinese Australian women graduated decades later, from Arts in 1929 (Alma Mary Chong) and Medicine in 1942 (Edna Gork Ming). In New Zealand there is evidence that the earliest education of a Chinese woman in medicine was the result of missionary influence. The first European woman graduated from the University of Otago Medical School in 1896, while the first Chinese woman graduate was Kathleen Pih (Cheng Hua-Pih) in 1929. She was born in 1902 in Antung (now Dadong) in Liaoning Province and brought to New Zealand as a child by missionary Margaret Reid.42 Kathleen Pih later completed postgraduate study in Ophthalmic Medicine and Surgery at London University and returned to China to work as a medical missionary.43 Pih’s career spans a similar period to that of medical missionary Victoria Chung (1897–1966) from Canada. Chung was born and educated in Victoria, British Columbia, going on to take a medical degree from the University of Toronto in 1922 with the help of a Women’s

38. Ye, ‘The Story of American-Educated Chinese Women’, p. 316. 39. K. F. Russell, The Melbourne Medical School 1862–1962 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1977), p. 74. 40. Farley Kelly, ‘Guerin, Julia Margaret (Bella) (1858–1923)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1983), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ guerin-julia-margaret-bella-6503/text11153; Alison Mackinnon, ‘Early Graduates’, Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia (Australian Women’s Archives Project, 2014), https://web. archive.org/web/20200302091129/http://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0432b.htm. 41. Russell, The Melbourne Medical School, pp. 55, 59, 74–75; Alison Mackinnon, The New Women: Adelaide’s Early Women Graduates (Adelaide, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 1986), pp. 33, 49; Jane Carey, ‘No Place for a Woman? Intersections of Class, Modernity and Colonialism in the Gendering of Australian Science, 1885–1940’, Lilith 10 (2001), pp. 153–72. 42. See Register of New Zealand Presbyterian Ministers, Deaconesses & Missionaries 1840 to 2015, Presbyterian Research Centre, New Zealand, https://web.archive.org/web/20200302091414/http://www.presbyterian.org. nz/archives/Page190.htm, and ‘Little Pih’, Evening Post, February 7, 1908, p. 3, https://paperspast.natlib.govt. nz/newspapers/EP19080207.2.41. 43. Kathleen Pih lived in Shanghai, survived internment during World War II, and eventually retired to New Zealand with her husband, who was also a medical doctor. ‘Chinese Woman Doctor’, Evening News, September 17, 1930, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article118762913; ‘Kathleen Chang (Pih-Chang) (1903–1991)’, Tauranga Memories: Tauranga Local History (Tauranga City Libraries), https://web.archive.org/web/20200302091523/ http://tauranga.kete.net.nz/site/topics/show/127-kathleen-chang-pih-chang-1903-1991; ‘Chinese Doctor’, Bay of Plenty Beacon, January 22, 1943, http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BPB19430122.2.4.

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Missionary Society scholarship. She became a medical missionary in China, practising medicine in the Pearl River Delta port of Kongmoon until her death there at age of sixty-nine.44 Other Chinese women graduates in New Zealand were part of the World War II intake. Edna Lowe is said to be the first Chinese New Zealand–born woman to graduate, with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Auckland in 1945. Another important early graduate was Ng Bickleen Fong who came to New Zealand as a war refugee in 1939 who, after completing her primary and secondary education in New Zealand, went on to gain a Bachelor of Education at Otago University in 1950 and a Master of Arts in Education in 1956, publishing her groundbreaking thesis as The Chinese in New Zealand in 1959.45 An important factor that encouraged more Chinese women to go to the United States was the availability of funding. Missionaries supported the first wave of students and, in later years, nine female students arrived in 1914 on Boxer indemnity scholarships.46 Other self-funded students arriving in this period included the famous Soong sisters, whose father, Charlie Soong (宋嘉樹 M: sòng jiāshù), had been part of the early wave of missionary-inspired education. Second daughter Soong Ching-ling graduated in 1913 and her younger sister, Soong May-ling, graduated in 1917; they would go on to marry Chinese presidents Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, respectively, becoming public figures in Chinese politics in their own right.47 Weili Ye has noted that by 1922 more than 200 Chinese women were studying in the United States, although it is unclear if this figure includes Americanborn women.48 When discussing Chinese women graduates it is sometimes difficult to draw a sharp distinction between American or Australian students and those from China, since so many were born into transnational families whose lives straddled two countries. Students born in America or Australia could be sent to China at a young age for education, while those born in China might be brought to America or Australia at a young age. For example, China-born student Li Pinghua (Mabel Lee), who studied economics at Columbia University in 1921, is known as ‘the first Chinese woman to receive a doctoral degree’.49 But Mabel Lee’s father had been in the United States since 1880 and she had moved to the United States at the age of 44. See John Price with Ningping Yu, A Woman in Between: Searching for Dr. Victoria Chung (Vancouver: Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia, 2019). 45. Kitty Chang, ‘Zengcheng Women in New Zealand’, in Zengcheng New Zealanders: A History for the 80th Anniversary of the Tung Jung Association of NZ Inc., ed. Henry Chan (Katoomba, New South Wales: Echo Point Press, 2007), pp. 103–104; Ng Bickleen Fong, The Chinese in New Zealand (Hong Kong University Press and Oxford University Press, 1959). 46. Ye, ‘The Story of American-Educated Chinese Women’, p. 337. 47. ‘We Have History: Soong Sisters’, Wesleyan College (Macon, Georgia), https://web.archive.org/ web/20200302091839/https://www.wesleyancollege.edu/about/history/soongsisters.cfm. 48. Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900–1927 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 114. 49. Ye, ‘The Story of American-Educated Chinese Women’, p. 334.

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nine, joining her father who had become minister for the New York Morningstar Mission. She completed secondary schooling in New York and went on to attend Barnard College.50 Chinese women students like Mabel defy easy categorization as either foreign or domestic students.

University Education for Chinese Men and Women in Australia A search for Australian-born Chinese graduates of Australian universities up to 1950 has thus far uncovered the names of just eighteen students: four men and one woman in the 1920s; five men in the 1930s; and five men and three women in the 1940s. There were also two China-born men in the 1930s and two overseasborn Chinese women in the 1940s.51 This count includes Chinese students of mixed descent. This initial identification of both male and female students is an important first step in recovering the history of Chinese education in Australia. The first known Chinese Australian graduate was Aubrey Moore Ping from Gayndah, Queensland, son of a Chinese Scottish mother and a Fujian-born father. Aubrey completed a Bachelor of Science at the University of Queensland in 1920, and a Bachelor of Medicine at Sydney University in 1929.52 The first medical graduate was James Kem Yee, who completed Medicine at Sydney University in 1921.53 Arthur Lee Chun graduated in Arts from Sydney University in 1925.54 In 1927 the Tung Wah Times newspaper published a list of four Chinese students attending Sydney University. The list included Mary Chong, along with three men: Harry Kee, from Paramatta High School, who graduated from Medicine in 1928; Arthur Lee Chun, who was then studying law; and China-born Arthur Chun Wah, who graduated from Engineering in 1931.55 Mary Chong was thus acknowledged among the ranks of the earliest Chinese graduates. The newspaper did not, however, highlight her gender, nor single her out for particular congratulations as the first Chinese

50. ‘New York City’s Chinatown Post Office Named in Honor of Dr. Mabel Lee 1916’, News, Barnard College, Columbia University, https://web.archive.org/web/20200302092229/https://barnard.edu/news/ new-york-citys-chinatown-post-office-named-honor-dr-mabel-lee-1916. 51. Barrister William Ah Ket, born in Victoria in 1876, commenced law at Melbourne University in 1893 but did not graduate, instead becoming an articled clerk before being admitted to practice in 1903; see John Lack, ‘Ah Ket, William (1876–1936)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1979), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ah-ket-william-4979/text8267. 52. ‘University Examinations’, Queenslander, April 3, 1920, p. 15; Senior Year Book 1928–9, University of Sydney Medical School, pp. 71–72. 53. Maurice Mishkel, ‘Rev. James Fong Kem Yee, Chinese Presbyterian Church, Newcastle’, Australian Postal History and Social Philately, https://web.archive.org/web/20200302092924/http://www.auspostalhistory.com/ articles/1897.php; ‘The Chinese Graduates of the Sydney University’, Tung Wah Times, February 5, 1927, p. 11, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article227458564. 54. ‘University Public Examinations’, Sydney Morning Herald, March 3, 1925, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newsarticle16186666; for Harry Kee, see Senior Year Book 1927–28, Sydney University Medical School, p. 58. 55. ‘Mr. A. C. Wah’, Sydney Morning Herald, May 2, 1931, p. 14, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article16774359; Calendar of the University of Sydney for the Year 1932 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1932), p. 703.

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woman student.56 As a female student, Mary was not so unusual by this period; 27 percent of undergraduates at Sydney University in 1919 were women, and a similar gender ratio continued up until World War II.57 We know from the 1933 Australian census that there were two Chinese female students and fifteen male students attending university that year. Overall, in the 1930s it has only been possible thus far to identify seven male students by name. In 1935 Frederick Chong, a student of the prestigious public boys school Fort Street High School, graduated with a Bachelor of Science from University of Sydney, after which he went on to a Master’s at Cambridge University, before returning to take up a lecturing position at Sydney University’s New England College in 1940. In 1950 he completed his PhD dissertation at Iowa State University and later became Professor of Mathematics at Macquarie University in Sydney.58 Charles Que Long Lee, born in Darwin in 1913 to Cantonese parents, graduated in Arts from the University of Queensland, St John’s College, in 1935 and became the first Chinese Australian diplomat in 1941. He was educated first at Darwin public school and after 1927 went on scholarship to Brisbane’s Southport School.59 William Lee took a degree in Law in 1938 at Sydney University. He was educated at Christ Church primary school in Sydney before leaving for Hong Kong for a Chinese education. After graduation from Sydney University he became the first Chinese barrister in New South Wales, practising for forty-five years.60 Melbourne University produced two graduates in Medicine in the 1930s, William Marc Ket in 1938 and Maurice Lau Gooey in 1939 (see Table 9.1 on p. 216). In South Australia China-born Lew Mon Ham graduated with a diploma of Engineering at Adelaide University, School of Mines, in 1933 and planned to return to China with his family. He was born in China, but at the age of eleven his father, a draper in Adelaide, had arranged for his son’s education in Australia. His brother George Fong was studying engineering at Lingnan University in Guangzhou.61 56. ‘The Chinese Students at the Sydney University’, Tung Wah Times, February 5, 1927, p. 11, http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article227458564. 57. Horne and Sherington, Sydney: The Making of a Public University, p. 70. 58. ‘Honorary Awards: Emeritus Professor Frederick Chong’, University of Sydney, https://web.archive.org/ web/20200302100752/https://sydney.edu.au/content/dam/corporate/documents/university-archives/honorary-awards/c/emeritus-professor-frederick-chong.pdf; Ross Street, ‘Obituary: Professor Frederick Chong’, August 30, 1999, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Macquarie University, https://web.archive.org/ web/20200302101359/http://maths.mq.edu.au/~street/Obit_Chong.pdf. 59. Kate Bagnall, The Chungking Legation: Australia’s Diplomatic Mission in Wartime China (Melbourne: Museum of Chinese Australian History, 2015), pp. 35–36; ‘Levity and Dignity Combine’, Telegraph (Brisbane), May 3, 1935, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article182436231; Gregory Pemberton, ‘Charles Que Fong Lee, a Diplomat Who Overcame Racist Foes’, Australian, July 9, 2011, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/charles-que-fong-lee-a-diplomat-who-overcame-racist-foes/news-story/ fae2d79c888037d4ed65c650c83dcb8e. 60. Malcolm Oakes, ‘William Lee: First Barrister of Chinese Descent Admitted to the New South Wales Bar’, Bar News: Journal of the New South Wales Bar Association, Winter 2015, pp. 73–76, http://www.nswbar.asn.au/ docs/webdocs/BN_022015_lee.pdf; ‘Chinese Barrister’, Sydney Morning Herald, May 28, 1938, p. 13, http:// nla.gov.au/nla.news-article17469277. 61. ‘Clever Chinese Student’, Advertiser (Adelaide), February 4, 1933, p. 14.

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While Mary Chong was the first woman to graduate in Arts in 1929, it would be some time before Edna Gork Ming became the second known woman graduate and the first known Chinese woman medical graduate, completing a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery from Sydney University in 1942. Born in Perth in 1917, Edna was the sister of historian Mavis Gock Ming, who was mentioned earlier. Like Mavis, Edna had been educated in China and Hong Kong. Edna’s story suggests that America was an attractive option for young Chinese Australians seeking higher education. Only two years into her medical degree Edna applied for an Australian passport, stating that she planned to go to China and from there to the United States to study medicine. She wrote on the form that her absence from Australia would be ‘indefinite’. For some reason, perhaps because of the escalation of the war in China, she decided to remain on in Australia.62 Curiously, her Sydney University senior yearbook did not acknowledge her Australian birth, stating only that her early years had been ‘spent in the British outpost of Hong-Kong’. It is not known if this omission was deliberate, or whether it was an expression of Edna’s own sense of self after ten years away from Australia. Her fellow students described Edna thus: Armed with her trustworthy bike she was independent of customary modes of travel. Easy-going and cosmopolitan in outlook, her quiet humour has delighted those who know her, and we feel confident of her success in any field she decides to explore.63

Two years later, in 1944, Melbourne University had its first female medical graduate with Chinese ancestry, June Howqua. June Howqua had an illustrious career in medicine, working at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, the Royal Children’s Hospital, in hospitals in London, and later at the Queen Victoria Hospital. While June was not usually recognized in the public record as being of Chinese heritage,64 the Royal College of Australasian Physicians noted in her biography that she had in her possession the naturalization certificate of her Chinese great-grandfather Howqua. Ah Kin Howqua had come to Victoria from China in the mid-nineteenth century and—like both his son and grandson (June Howqua’s paternal ancestors) would later do—married a woman of British ethnicity.65 Given the preponderance of Chinese students undertaking degrees in Medicine, it is worth noting that in the years from 1938 to 1949 Melbourne University produced twelve Chinese graduates in Medicine (see Table 9.1 on p. 216).66 There were 62. ‘Miss Edna Gork Ming’ (Collector of Customs, Sydney, 1934–1938), NAA: SP42/1, C1938/8992. 63. A. B. Hogan (ed.), Senior Year Book 1941 (Sydney: Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney, 1941), p. 76, https://sydney.edu.au/medicine/museum/mwmuseum/index.php/Senior_Year_Books. 64. See, for example, an interview with June Howqua in ‘A Tower of Strength’, Age, June 18, 2006, http://www. theage.com.au/news/in-depth/a-tower-of-strength/2006/06/18/1150569215154.html; Flesch, 40 Years 40 Women: Biographies of University of Melbourne Women. 65. D. Hunt and G. Sloman, ‘Howqua, June Louise’, College Roll, Royal Australasian College of Physicians, https:// web.archive.org/save/https://www.racp.edu.au/about/college-roll/college-roll-bio/howqua-june-louise; and further Howqua family information found on Ancestry.com [online database]. 66. In comparison, in China by 1947 there were nearly 12,000 female students of medicine. See Colin Mackerras,

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Table 9.1:  Chinese graduates in medicine at Melbourne University, 1938–1949 Year

Graduate in Medicine

Education

1938

William Marc Ket

Unknown

1939

Maurice Maxime Lau Gooey

Scotch College (Dux), Ormond College scholarship

1940

Norman Cornelius Lee Tet

Scotch College

1941

Raymond Victor Chong

Bairnsdale High School

1944

June Louise Howqua

Melbourne Girls’ Grammar, Trinity Collegeii

1946

Melville Daymond Lau Gooey

University High School (co-educational)iii

1947

Elaine Chong

Educated in Perak, British Malaya

1947

Gwen Fong

St Michael’s Grammar School

1947

John Leongiv

1948

Dorothy Chong

1948

Wyman Kay Wong

1949

Mona Siew Gek Lim

i

University High School Bairnsdale High School

v vi

Unknown Educated in Malaysiavii

Source: Compiled from ‘List of Degrees Conferred’, University of Melbourne Calendar, 1939–1950, https://digitised-collections.unimelb.edu.au. Notes: i. William Marc Ket was the son of barrister William Ah Ket and his wife, Gertrude Bullock. His brother Stanley took a degree in law in 1935, and his sister Toylaan a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Sydney in 1982. Toylaan Ah Ket, ‘William Ah Ket—Building Bridges between Occident and Orient in Australia, 1900–1936’, https:// arrow.latrobe.edu.au/store/3/4/5/5/1/public/stories/wahket.htm; John Lack, ‘Ah Ket, William (1876–1936)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (National Centre of Biography, Australian National University), published first in hardcopy 1979, http://adb.anu.edu. au/biography/ah-ket-william-4979/text8267. ii. D. Hunt and G. Sloman, ‘Howqua, June Louise’, College Roll, Royal Australasian College of Physicians, http://members.racp.edu.au/page/college-roll; ‘Examination Results and Honour Lists 1940 to 1941’, University of Melbourne Calendar 1942, p. 652, http://hdl. handle.net/11343/23436. iii. Suzanne Lau Gooey, ‘Dr Melville Daymond Fee Cheung Gooey, born 1922’, ABC Open, https://open.abc.net.au/explore/86746, accessed September 16, 2016. iv. Norman N. Greenwood, Recollections of a Scientist: Boyhood and Youth in Australia (1925–1948), vol. 1, (Xlibris Corporation, 2012), p. 78. v. Dorothy Chong was raised in Bairnsdale in country Victoria where her father was a China-trained herbalist. In 1938, while at Bairnsdale High School, Dorothy won a Rotary Club essay competition on the topic of ‘the best means of promoting international friendship’. Morag Loh, ‘A Country Practice: Thomas Chong—Herbalist of Bairnsdale, Victoria; His Place, His Peers’, in Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the Pacific, ed. Paul Macgregor (Melbourne: Museum of Chinese-Australian History, 1995), pp. 15–28; ‘Speech Days in the Country’, Argus, December 27, 1935, p. 8, http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article11868319. vi. Wyman Wong lived in the United States after graduation. ‘Wyman Wong’, Legacy.com, http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/baltimoresun/obituary.aspx?pid=174002738, accessed April 25, 2017. vii. Mona Lim was the daughter of Singapore physician and politician Sir Han Hoe Lim. ‘Chinese Nurses Here for Studies’, Argus, February 28, 1947, p. 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article22411743.

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an additional nine Chinese students who took degrees in disciplines other than Medicine during this period.67

Two Australian-Born Women Graduates For the remainder of this chapter I explore the lives of two pioneering Australian Chinese university graduates, New South Wales–born Alma Mary Chong (1908– 1982) and Victorian Gwen Fong (c. 1920–1975). They were both path-breaking in their decision to become university students. They had both excelled at secondary school and both became strongly involved in politics and went on to publish their ideas on Australian politics. Much less is known of their personal lives, but through a careful review of newspapers, school and university records, and other archival records we can piece together their main life events. In considering the details of their lives we can see the diversity among Chinese Australian students. Mary was a country girl of relatively humble origins who went on to work alongside the ruling elite of China, while Gwen was raised among the Chinese elite of Melbourne and went on to a medical career in Melbourne and a sometimes-controversial political career in the Communist Party of Australia. Being born twelve years apart—in 1908 and 1920, respectively—was no doubt an important factor that contributed to their different trajectories.

Alma Mary Chong: English Secretary to Consul General F. T. Sung Alma Mary Chong, known as Mary, was not only the first Chinese woman university graduate in Australia, she also went on to a successful career in China first working for the Chinese government and then in journalism. She gained her first official position as English Secretary to the Chinese Consul General to Australia, F. T. (Fartsang) Sung (宋發祥 C: sung faat chèuhng, M: sòng fāxiáng; 1883–1940), at the age of twenty-two. Having been raised in the small country town of Dubbo in the central west of New South Wales, Mary’s successful rise into the world of China’s elite demonstrates the power of a university education to facilitate social mobility. Mary Chong was born in Dubbo in 1908, the youngest of four surviving children of Ah Kee and James Chong, who were both born in Guangdong.68 Ah Kee ‘Education in the Guomindang Period, 1928–1949’, Ideal and Reality, Social and Political Change in Modern China, 1860–1949, ed. David Pong and Edmund S. K. Fung (Lanham: University of America Press, 1985), p. 172. 67. These were: Stanley Mouy (Bachelor of Science, 1940); Merlyne Lee Gow (Diploma in Physical Education, 1943); Richard Thomas Leong (Bachelor of Metallurgical Engineering, 1944); Eng Yap Guat (Bachelor of Arts, 1945); Edward Wing Shing (Bachelor of Commerce, 1945); Hsueh Yu Chi and Martin Liangkwen Wang (Master of Arts, 1945); Kenneth Ying Doon Gin (from Singapore) (Bachelor of Civil Engineering, 1945); Seow Eu Jin (Bachelor of Architecture, 1945). ‘Degrees Conferred, 1944 and 1945’, University of Melbourne Calendar 1946, pp. 840–46, http://hdl.handle.net/11343/23438. 68. New South Wales Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages (NSW BDM), birth registration of Alma Mary Chong, 24134/1908, Dubbo, 1908. Her siblings were Jack, Kenneth, and Agnes.

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had come to New South Wales around 1888, aged about four, to live in Coonamble, a town near Dubbo, where her father, Goo Gan (or Goo Gun), had run a business since 1882. Judging by a letter Ah Kee wrote by hand in English to the Australian government in 1905, when she was aged twenty-one, she had been educated at least to primary school level in Australia.69 The fact that she was willing to write directly to the government also suggests that she was woman of action, a trait she may well have passed on to her daughter Mary. The Goo Gan family returned to China at the turn of the century, but left Ah Kee behind in Australia to marry James Chong in 1901.70 Like other Chinese Australian business owners in this era, the Chong family were, of necessity, integrated into the European Australian community around them. The White Australia policy, centred around the federal Immigration Restriction Act 1901, sought to exclude Chinese immigrants from entering Australia but did not encourage the same degree of race-based segregation of schooling and housing that was common in the United States until the 1920s and only seriously challenged during World War II. 71 Official discrimination against Chinese in Australia was more obvious in the area of employment opportunities, and many Chinese Australians, like Chinese Americans, struggled to find employment outside the Chinese community.72 As a consequence, many Chinese, including the Chong family, were self-employed in business. The Chong family owned and ran Wing Jang and Co., a general store on the main street of Dubbo and, given the town’s predominantly European population, their customers were mostly Europeans. The 1921 census recorded 2,458 males living in Dubbo—of whom thirty-five were born in China and forty-four were recorded as being of Chinese ‘race’—and 2,574 females—of whom only two were born in China and ten were of Chinese ‘race’.73 One of the China-born women would have been Ah Kee, Mary’s mother, while Mary and her sister Agnes would also have been counted among the ten females of Chinese ‘race’. The Chong family were of Church of England faith and attended the 69. ‘Mrs Chong and Thomas Goo Gun’ (Collector of Customs, Sydney, 1905), NAA: SP42/1 C1905/814; ‘Ah Kee Chong [Chinese – Arrived Sydney, c. 1888. Box 19]’, NAA: SP11/2, Chinese/Chong Ah Kee. 70. ‘Victor Peter Goo Gun’ (Collector of Customs, Sydney, 1913–1918), NAA: SP42/1, C1918/4591; ‘Ah Kee’ (Collector of Customs, Sydney, 1902), NAA: SP11/26, A4/74; Ray Christison, Coonamble Shire Thematic History (self-published, 2009), p. 19, http://www.coonambleshire.nsw.gov.au/_literature_85058/Coonamble_ Shire_Thematic_History; ‘Marriages’, Sydney Morning Herald, December 30, 1901, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article14447088. 71. Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America, Immigration, Family, and Community, 1940–1965 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), pp. 51–55; Sucheng Chan, ‘Race, Ethnic Culture, and Gender in the Construction of Identities among Second-Generation Chinese Americans, 1880s to 1930s’, in Claiming America, Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era, ed. K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chang (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), pp. 132–41. 72. For example, Californian Flora Belle Jan’s life story, as told by historian Judy Yung, reveals her struggles against entrenched societal racism and sexism and the limited job opportunities for her after graduation. See Judy Yung, ‘“It is Hard to be Born a Woman but Hopeless to be Born a Chinese”: The Life and Times of Flora Belle Jan’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 18, no. 3 (1997), pp. 66–91. 73. Census of the Commonwealth of Australia (Melbourne: Bureau of Census and Statistics, 1921). See figures for Dubbo population by birthplace, pp. 563, 569; by race, pp. 605, 614.

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Holy Trinity Church; being of Christian faith was common for Chinese in Australia in this period.74 Like many other Chinese merchant families in country Australia, the Chongs worked hard to be good public citizens of Dubbo. During World War I, Wing Jang and Co. contributed £2 to the Patriotic Fund and another £10 for the Australia Day Fund.75 Mary’s sister Agnes helped with the Red Cross Market Stall, for which her mother contributed the raffle prize of a roll of Chinese silk.76 Mary was also something of a local celebrity in Dubbo, where her academic achievements were praised in the local newspaper. At the start of 1921, at thirteen years of age, she was one of only three girls who qualified for admission to Dubbo High School. By the end of 1921 she had also passed the commercial examinations run by Stott and Hoare’s Business College, held at St Patrick’s Convent of Mercy, Dubbo, gaining high scores in bookkeeping and shorthand, skills that no doubt helped her gain employment. On completing her secondary education in 1925, Mary was named dux of Dubbo High School.77 With excellent scholarly credentials, Mary won a scholarship to study at Sydney University, as well as a residential bursary to live at Women’s College from 1926 to 1928. While there, she worked in the library to help pay her way. She graduated first with a Bachelor of Arts in 1929 and then with a Diploma of Education in 1930. While at the university, she also studied journalism in the Law School.78 In March of her final year of study her father died. At that time Mary was living in an apartment in Glebe Point Road in Sydney, within walking distance to both the university and to Sydney’s Chinatown.79 As an Australian graduate, with native-language fluency in English, Mary was now well placed in terms of her career prospects. But as Sucheng Chan argues in relation to graduates in the United States, qualifications were not sufficient to guarantee employment for Chinese in the face of systemic racial prejudice.80 It is not known if Mary initially tried to find employment as a teacher or journalist within the mainstream Australian employment system. It seems unlikely, as immediately after her graduation in 1929 she took up the post of English Secretary to the Chinese Consul General. Fujian-born Consul General F. T. Sung was a graduate of the University of Chicago and a professed Christian, and his wife had been the headmistress of a Methodist Mission school in China and President of the Beijing 74. See Denise Austin, Christian Identity and the Contributions of Chinese Business Christians (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 75. ‘Dubbo Patriotic Fund’, Dubbo Liberal and Macquarie Advocate (hereafter Dubbo Liberal), October 6, 1914, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article75295881; ‘Australia Day Fund’, Dubbo Liberal, July 30, 1915, p. 4, http:// nla.gov.au/nla.news-article77599097. 76. ‘Local and General’, Dubbo Liberal, October 11, 1918, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article75565045. 77. ‘Qualifying Certificate’, Dubbo Liberal, February 11, 1921, p. 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article76892245; ‘Local and General’, Dubbo Liberal, December 13, 1921, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article76895748. 78. Register of Students 1892–1939, Women’s College Archives, University of Sydney, p. 537. 79. ‘Alma Mary Chong’ (Collector of Customs, Sydney, 1930), NAA: SP42/1, C1930/10292. 80. Chan, “Race, Ethnic Culture, and Gender”, p. 134.

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Young Women’s Christian Association.81 Mrs Sung’s brother, W. P. Chen, who was later Consul General to Sydney in 1931, graduated from Peking Methodist College.82 In 1930, when Mary was appointed, Consul General Sung already had help in the form of a Vice Consul appointed by the Nanking government, Harold Chiang, a law graduate from the Sorbonne in Paris; this was evidently a family appointment, given that his wife was Sung’s daughter Lucy (or I-Lein). The Chiangs arrived in Australia in February 1930 from France, where Lucy had graduated in music from the Paris Conservatorium.83 In an interview for the Daily Pictorial in Sydney, the couple confessed to being Francophiles, explaining that they liked the French people because they were ‘so courteous and so cosmopolitan. To them race does not matter.’84 It is possible that Mary’s appointment was made with both Lucy and Mrs Sung in mind, although, as it turned out, both mother and daughter would leave for China in July 1930.85 Mary’s role with the Consul was well suited to her degree in Arts. In June 1930 she conducted a study of the conditions of Chinese Australians alongside the Consul’s wife, Mrs Sung. In winter they travelled together to tropical Cairns in north Queensland, known for its strong Chinese community.86 While there, the Cairns Post published Mrs Sung’s speech on the emancipation of Chinese women, and the two women were described as Chinese nationalists who had faith in the future of new China, while retaining a love of its ancient traditions ‘to a degree’. The newspaper explained that ‘both ladies are women of culture and speak English perfectly’ but failed to mention that Mary was Australian-born.87 In a report in the Brisbane Courier, the journalist evinced a typically orientalist admiration for Mary, writing: This demure, unassuming little lady, with the delicate olive complexion and dark almond eyes peculiar to the ancient race from which she has sprung is a zealot in her mission. . . . Here was the emancipation of women of China personified. She is one of the literate of China. A Bachelor of Arts of the Sydney University, she has taken post-graduate courses in teaching and journalism.88 81. According to historian John Fitzgerald, Methodism was strongly associated with the KMT members. See Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007), p. 169. For details on F. T. Sung, see Who’s Who in China: Biographies of Chinese Leaders, 5th ed. (Shanghai: China Weekly Review, 1936), p. 215; ‘An Oriental Maid: Appeal to Women of Queensland’, Brisbane Courier, June 14, 1930, p. 24, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article21537466; Austin, Christian Identity, p. 193. 82. ‘Death of Mrs. F. T. Sung’, Evening News (Rockhampton), November 11, 1931, p. 12; Who’s Who in China, p. 35. 83. ‘Chinese Consul’s Daughter’, Sun (Sydney), February 5, 1930, p. 23, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article226032523. 84. ‘Charming Chinese’, Daily Pictorial (Sydney), February 25, 1930, p. 18, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newspage27026422. 85. ‘Chinese Club Entertains’, Sydney Morning Herald, July 22, 1930, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article 16681181. 86. Catherine May, Topsawyers: The Chinese in Cairns, 1870–1920 (Townsville, Queensland: James Cook University, 1984). 87. ‘Town and Country’, Cairns Post, June 3, 1930, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article41070538. 88. ‘An Oriental Maid: Appeal to Women of Queensland’, Brisbane Courier, June 14, 1930, p. 24, http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article21537466.

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In America and Australia at this time, Chinese women were often positioned as ‘exotic and alluring’, as Carole Tan has observed, although Mary is depicted here as rather more quiet and intellectual.89 Mary was presumed by the press to be Chinaborn, and as such, her education and passion for politics were viewed as representative of the new China rather than as a marker of her ‘Australianness’ or Western education. Newspaper reports show Mary as fearless in her criticism of discriminatory Australian policy relating to Chinese residents during the 1930s. She expressed distress over Australian allegations of Chinese involvement in white slave traffic, opium smoking, and gambling. She also spoke out strongly against the Australian government for denying Chinese men the right to bring their wives from China to live with them permanently. In one incisive instance, Mary implored: I ask the women of Australia to try to imagine the agony suffered by both the husband and wife when, at the end of that brief period of happiness, the law steps in and the wife must be shipped back to China to undergo another five years of separation.90

Mary’s appeal to Australian women suggests she expected empathy from mainstream Australians—not unreasonably, since she had been born and raised as an Australian among Australians. Nevertheless, in Mary’s life there is a sense of inbetweenness typical of second-generation immigrants, who recognized Australia as their home but struggled with the lack of acceptance or recognition because of their Chinese heritage. Sucheng Chan acknowledges in the context of the United States that some American-born Chinese eventually despaired of finding this kind of recognition in American society and decided instead to ‘go back’ to China.91 The Sydney Morning Herald also published Mary’s views on immigration restriction, including statistics showing that in 1928 ‘there were 13,614 Chinese males in Australia and only 185 Chinese females’, a rather low figure presumably based on China-born women alone. She argued that the entry of wives was not against the White Australia policy: We are not asking for the entry of new Chinese immigrants, for the Chinese Government is discouraging emigration to countries which exercise discriminatory action against Chinese subjects, but we claim that it is not in the interests of morality that Chinese residents here should be separated from their wives in China.92

89. Carole Tan, ‘Living with “Difference”: Growing up “Chinese” in White Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 27, no. 77 (2003), p. 101. 90. ‘An Oriental Maid: Appeal to Women of Queensland’, Brisbane Courier, June 14, 1930, p. 24, http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article21537466. 91. Chan, ‘Race, Ethnic Culture, and Gender’, p. 156. 92. ‘Chinese: Want to Bring Wives Out’, Sydney Morning Herald, June 20, 1930, p. 14, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article16669402.

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Consul Sung officially endorsed her statements. Mary’s statements on immigration reflected the general policy of the Australian KMT at the time. In Darwin in 1929, for example, KMT official Gee Ming Ket had led a deputation to the Government Resident making similar demands.93 In September 1930 Consul General Sung announced that he was to leave Australia for China owing to his wife’s ill health.94 Cables from China claimed that he had been dismissed for defying instructions from China, although he denied these allegations.95 On November 11, 1930, Sung submitted an application to travel to New Guinea for two months for himself and Mary Chong, presumably to extend their Queensland study on the social well-being of the Chinese community, but he had to cancel the trip.96 Sung remained in Sydney for several more months before sailing for China on January 14, 1931. Mary left for China on February 11, 1931 on the St Albans, telling her mother that she planned to stay with Sung and his wife until she could decide what to do. She had been offered jobs in Shanghai and Tientsin, and she was learning Mandarin to supplement her Cantonese.97 Continuing to work for Sung in China was not an option, however, as he had accepted the post of Consul General for Batavia (Jakarta) in the Netherland East Indies, a post that did not require an English Secretary.98 As far as can be gleaned from her letters home, which were published in the local Dubbo newspaper, Mary appears to have enjoyed success in China. In August 1931 she was employed as the English Secretary for the Minister for Foreign Affairs in Nanking. In 1932 she moved to Peking during the disturbances, returning to Nanking the following year. In 1934, writing home to family in Dubbo, she mentioned that she had also worked for the All China Weekly in Shanghai. In 1935 she gave a broadcast in English for the Nanking Central Broadcasting Station that could be heard in Australia.99 During World War II, Mary’s family in Australia heard nothing from her for three years, but finally in 1947 an article in the Dubbo Liberal told how she had been working for high-ranking diplomat Dr Wellington Koo (顧維鈞 C: gu wàih gwān, M: gù wéijūn; 1888–1985). Koo had been China’s Ambassador to France and later to Britain, as well as delegate to the League of Nations. He was, like Mary, fluent in English and had gained a doctorate from

93. ‘Deputation’, Northern Territory Times, June 29, 1929, p. 12. 94. ‘A Sydney Message’, Barrier Miner, September 23, 1930, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article46562027. Mrs Sung died within a year of their departure from Australia; ‘Mrs. F. T. Sung’, Sydney Morning Herald, November 7, 1931, p. 17, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article16812660. 95. ‘Chinese Consul-General’, West Australian, November 14, 1930, p. 16, http://nla.gov.au/nla.newsarticle33224069. 96. NAA: SP42/1, C1930/10292. 97. ‘Dubbo Schoolgirl Doing Good Work’, Dubbo Liberal, February 6, 1931, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article132218547. 98. ‘Consul-generaal van China’, Bataviaasch nieuwsblad, July 17, 1931, p. 2. 99. ‘Historic Schools’, Dubbo Liberal, October 13, 1934 p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article131587414; ‘Over the Teacups’, Dubbo Liberal, August 8, 1935, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article131288138.

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Columbia University in 1912, taking the post of English Secretary to the later President Yuan Shikai.100 During the Second Sino-Japanese War, presumably in the context of the 1937 Japanese capture of Nanking, Mary Chong had moved with the Foreign Office from Nanking to Peking to Shanghai. In about 1939 she married Dr Sweding Wang (LLD of USA), who worked as adviser to the Vice-Mayor of Shanghai. They had three children. While we have no further details of her life in Shanghai, it is possible that Mary knew and socialized with other Australian and American women, such as Alice Lim Kee and Daisy Kwok mentioned elsewhere in this book, and American Flora Belle Jan, who was in Shanghai writing for the China Weekly Review.101 Mary continued to have career success in the 1940s, becoming the Associate Editor of the radical newspaper China Critic, an English-language newspaper published in Shanghai that shut down at the end of 1946.102 After 1949, with China now ruled by the Communist Party, it is unlikely that Mary, with her strong KMT connections, would have chosen to remain in China. By 1958 she had returned to Australia with her family, and she and her husband became teachers in Sydney. Mary remained in Sydney until her death in 1982.103

Gwen Fong: Melbourne Communist, Feminist, and Doctor Gwen (or Gweneth) Fong was one of several Chinese women to graduate with a degree in medicine in the 1940s in Australia. Unlike Mary Chong’s country-town storekeeping family, Gwen’s parents, Ivy Maude Ng Yook and William Soo Soong Fong, were part of Melbourne’s Chinese elite. They had married in Paddington, Sydney, in 1916. Gwen’s maternal grandmother, Rose Ah Ket, was born in Buckland, Victoria, to immigrant parents from Guangdong, making Gwen a fourth-generation Chinese Australian on her mother’s side. Gwen was born around 1920, and she had an older sister, Waehlin (or Eileen), a younger sister, Patricia, and a younger brother, George.104 Gwen lost her mother at the age of seven, in a tragic car accident in 1928, and her father remarried to May Poon in 1930.105 William Fong was a merchant and 100. Stephen G. Craft, V. K. Wellington Koo and the Emergence of Modern China (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), pp. 28, 105. 101. Yung, ‘The Life and Times of Flora Belle Jan’, p. 75. 102. ‘Dubbo High School Ex-Student’s Career’, Dubbo Liberal, December 11, 1947, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article132615778. 103. Register of Students 1892–1939, Women’s College Archives, University of Sydney, p. 84; ‘Wang, Alma Mary’, 1958, and ‘Wang, Alma Mary’ and ‘Wang, Sweding’, 1963, Australia, Electoral Rolls, 1903–1980, in Ancestry. com [online database] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2007); NSW BDM, death registration of Alma Mary Wang, 23121/1982, Sydney, 1982. Mary Wang née Chong was survived by her husband and three children. 104. ‘Fong George’ (Department of Air, 1939–1948), NAA: A9300, FONG G. 105. ‘Family Notices’, Argus, April 17, 1928, p. 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article3925329; Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria (Vic BDM), death registration of Ivy Maud Fong, 6605/1928; Marriage registration of William Soosoong Fong and May Pon, May 2, 1930, Victoria, Australia, St. Peter’s Eastern Hill, Marriages, 1848–1955, in Ancestry.com [online database] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2007).

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Figure 9.1:  Head prefect Gwen Fong (centre front) with prefects of St Michael’s Church of England School, St Kilda, 1938. Michaelian vol. 26, no. 2, December 1938 (courtesy St Michael’s Grammar School, St Kilda, Victoria, Australia)

a leader of the See Yup Society in Melbourne.106 In 1936 Fong was a pall-bearer at the Anglican-Masonic funeral of Grand Master William Ah Ket, the younger brother of Gwen Fong’s grandmother, Rose Ah Ket.107 William Ah Ket’s son, William, who was Gwen’s cousin, had started studying medicine at Melbourne University in 1932, and he may well have inspired Gwen’s decision to study medicine herself. Gwen and her sisters attended the prestigious St Michael’s Church of England School in St Kilda, Melbourne. Gwen was an outstanding pupil: she was head prefect, house sports captain, captain of tennis, vice captain of the basketball team, and violinist in the school orchestra.108 Gwen’s cousin Toylaan Ket, daughter of William Ah Ket senior and Gertrude Bullock, had been a prefect in 1936, and in that year both girls were on the school debating team together.109 A school photograph taken 106. Thank you to Paul Macgregor for this information. 107. Lack, ‘Ah Ket, William’; Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, p. 14. 108. ‘School Officers’ and ‘Sports Notes’, The Michaelian XXVI, no. 2 (December 1937), pp. 1 and 29, https://www. stmichaels.vic.edu.au/the-michaelian-yearbooks/. 109. ‘School Officers’, The Michaelian XXV, no. 2 (December 1936), p. 1, https://www.stmichaels.vic.edu.au/ the-michaelian-yearbooks/.

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in Gwen’s final year of school in 1938, showing her standing at the head of the other school prefects, suggests that she was a young woman of considerable confidence.110 Gwen commenced her study at the University of Melbourne with a Bachelor of Science in 1939. That year there were nearly 4,000 women enrolled in Australian universities and they represented twenty-eight percent of all students.111 Gwen then moved on to a degree in Medicine and her name appears in the Trinity College newsletter, Fleur-de-Lys, graduating in Medicine in 1947.112 Trinity College was the Church of England residential college of the University of Melbourne, and Gwen lived at Janet Clarke Hall, the women’s residence of Trinity College, located just next door. Her brother George also studied engineering at Melbourne University, commencing in around 1940.113 There is no evidence to suggest that Gwen had close contact with overseas Chinese women while she was studying at Melbourne. But studying medicine at Melbourne at the same time as Gwen was Chinese Malayan Elaine Chong, whose father was a doctor in Perak; Elaine was a resident at University Women’s College. Two other Chinese students from British Malaya also studied medicine at Melbourne University in this period: Lim Leong Chang, who had commenced her studies in Edinburgh in 1939 but left because of the war; and Lee Mui Yun, who was a resident at the Loreto Catholic St Mary’s Hall during her studies.114 During her student days Gwen Fong’s name became known to the Australian government as a member of the Communist Party. The Security Service intercepted a letter she had written to Dulcie Miller at Victorian Communist Party headquarters in which Gwen thanked her for agreeing to speak to the communist study group, the Chinese Study School. Miller represented the Victorian Housewives Association and the Australasian Council for Women in War Work. Gwen had a list of the other potential speakers, including L. J. Samson for the Communist Party, J. A. Dewsnap of the Guardian, and Brian Fitzpatrick for the Australasian Council for Civil Liberties.115 Gwen was not only an organizer, but was also a speaker, being invited to speak at an event organized by the wartime Eureka Youth League, a body controlled by the Australian Communist Party.116 110. ‘The Prefects’, The Michaelian XXVII, no. 2 (December 1938), p. 6, St. Michael’s Grammar School, St. Kilda, Victoria, Australia. 111. Booth and Kee, ‘A Long-Run View’, p. 260. 112. Trinity College, University of Melbourne, Fleur de Lys, December 1947, p. 18, https://www.trinity.unimelb. edu.au/about/art-and-heritage/fleur-de-lys-magazines/1940-1949. 113. Diana Giese, Courage and Service: Chinese Australians and World War II (Marrickville, New South Wales: Courage and Service Project, 1999), title page verso; Ralph Powell, ‘“That Was Some Groovy Piano Playing”: Melbourne Pianist George Fong, 18 July 1922 – 8 January 1945’, VJazz 60 (November 2013), pp. 3–4, https:// web.archive.org/web/20200302102929/http://www.ajm.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/VJAZZ60.pdf. 114. ‘Women Students from Malay’, Argus, March 7, 1941, p. 10, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article8180913. 115. ‘CP of A [Communist Party of Australia] Victoria Chinese Branch’ (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, 1943–1954), NAA: A6122, 619. 116. Photograph 3, Accession No. 1996.0060, Audrey Blake Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, Melbourne; ‘Chinese Communists in Australia’ (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, 1948–1961), NAA: A9108, Roll 9/10.

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Gwen Fong was Secretary of the Melbourne University Branch of the Communist Party during her fifth year of medicine. Ken Gott, later editor of Melbourne University Magazine, recalled being admonished by Gwen after he was dismissed from his war-effort employment in an orchard in Mooroopna in rural Victoria. She claimed his excessive drinking was ‘giving country people the wrong impression about Communists and Labor Club members’.117 Gwen wrote that as communists ‘we are in full support of the war’ and criticized D. B. Bradley and R. M. Mortimer, also student communist members, for creating the impression that ‘left means loose’.118 Gwen had a personal motivation for her stance on the war. Her brother, George, had left university and enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force in 1942. Tragically, in 1945 his plane was lost at sea near Palestine, and he was officially presumed dead in 1948.119 Gwen’s letters to Gott and others reveal a young woman of serious political intentions. A private and somewhat bawdy poem written by Bradley about ‘our Secretary Fong’ in her breastplate ‘of half-inch steel’ was later published by historian John McLaren in his history of the communists in Melbourne, suggesting that her fellow communists were not entirely respectful of her leadership role.120 While attending university Gwen also kept connections with the Melbourne Chinese community. Carolyn Landon, a young nursing aide, remembered how Gwen arranged and paid for a group of communists to attend a ‘feast’ at the Chung Wah Chinese restaurant in Little Bourke Street.121 The Victorian Communist Party was active within several Chinese associations in Melbourne and across Australia, including the Chinese Citizens Club, the Chinese Youth Club, and the Chinese Seamen’s Union. As a woman member of the Communist Party Gwen was not unusual. In 1944 the Chinese Branch of the Victorian Communist Party had a membership of some thirty women and twenty men and was led by President Roy Geechoun. According to the government intelligence report, Gwen Fong was Treasurer and ‘Hazel’ Fong, Secretary, both listed as living in the Fong family home in Malvern. The name Hazel was likely a mistake, as Gwen’s sister Eileen was the only working-age woman living with Gwen, though Eileen’s occupation was listed as Secretary on the 1943 electoral roll.122 Alternatively, the report may have been referring to Hazel Walsh, who was Roy Geechoun’s married sister.123 Roy Geechoun 117. John McLaren, Free Radicals of the Left in Postwar Melbourne (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2003), p. 5. 118. McLaren, Free Radicals, p. 5. 119. ‘FONG, George – (Flying Officer); Service Number – 428417’ (Department of Air, Central Office, 1945–48), NAA: A705, 166/14/333; ‘FONG GEORGE: Service Number – 428417’ (Department of Air, Central Office, 1939–48), NAA: A9300, FONG G. 120. McLaren, Free Radicals, p. 8. 121. Carol Landon, Bett Gina and Les Boyanton, Cups with No Handles: Memoir of a Grassroots Activist (Melbourne: Hybrid Publishers, 2008), p. 176. 122. NAA: A6122, 619; Australia, Electoral Rolls, 1903–1980, Ancestry.com [online database] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010). 123. Vic BDM, marriage registration for Hazel Geechoun and James Patrick Walsh, 1960/1939.

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was also chairman of the Australia-China Co-operation Association (ACCA), which campaigned against the White Australia policy.124 According to the 1949 electoral roll, Roy was working as a fruiterer at the time, but his political life placed him among the social elite.125 Rina (Rena) Muriel Geechoun (née Stride), Roy’s wife, was photographed in 1948 at a society luncheon celebrating the anniversary of the Chinese Revolution organized by the Australia-China Association, alongside Mrs W. P. Liu, wife of the Chinese Vice Consul. The luncheon was attended by Martin Wang, the Consul for China, and other Chinese dignitaries, suggesting that communist political affiliation did not affect their social standing with China’s representatives.126 While there is no evidence to suggest that Gwen sought to travel to China, her sister Eileen, who went by the name of Waehlin, did travel to Chungking in 1945. Waehlin was living in the affluent suburb of Bellevue Hill in Sydney at the time and was one of three Australian women working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). This China expedition was overseen by T. V. Soong (Soong Tzu-wen, 宋子文 M: sòng zǐwén; brother to the Soong sisters), then Minister for Foreign Affairs. Interviewed in Adelaide on her way to China, Waehlin was described in the Adelaide News as ‘Petite little Miss Fong’, who was born in Australia of Chinese parents, a clerk-stenographer who had previously worked for the Chinese Legation in Canberra and the US Army in Brisbane.127 Writing in the American context, Gloria Chun explains how Chinese American youths during the World War II period found new opportunities to perform the role of cultural ambassadors or ‘cultural bridges’. This was a time when their ‘political allegiance to America’ did not compromise ‘the interests of their ancestral land’.128 We might speculate that Waehlin Fong felt similarly about the opportunity to join the UNRAA, a role that brought together Australia and China under the auspices of the United Nations. While Gwen Fong did not travel to China, after her graduation in 1947 her exemplary result saw her appointed as a junior Resident Medical Officer (RMO) at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which served as the teaching hospital for the

124. A. G. Thomson Zainu’ddin, ‘Marshall, Alma Elizabeth (1879–1964)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2000), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ marshall-alma-elizabeth-11061/text19685. 125. Australia, Electoral Rolls, 1903–1980, Ancestry.com [online database] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010). Roy and Rina’s address was listed as Demark Hill Road. 126. ‘The Life of Melbourne’, Argus, October 12, 1948, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article22674582. See ‘Geechoun, Paul Maxwell’, Argus, November 8, 1952, p. 16, for surname Stride. 127. ‘Women for U.N.R.R.A’, Age (Melbourne), September 12, 1945, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article205648127; ‘3 UNRRA Women off to China’, News (Adelaide), September 14, 1945, p. 3, http://nla.gov.au/ nla.news-article130235639. 128. Gloria Heyung Chun, Of Orphans and Warriors: Inventing Chinese American Culture and Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 41, 43.

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University of Melbourne.129 Apart from her medical career, her political interests were broad, covering issues on medicine, women’s rights, and nuclear disarmament, but as far as can be judged from her publications, she was not active on behalf of China or Chinese in Australia. Her criticism of the Australian government came from the position of a left-leaning activist. After the gruelling first year of her medical internship, Gwen wrote for the Melbourne University medical students’ journal Speculum on the subject of RMO wages and working hours. She found some RMOs earning less than hospital orderlies for three times as many hours and recommended that they apply for their own award wage.130 In 1950 the Argus newspaper published her criticism of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Plan.131 In the same year she was an invited speaker at the inaugural meeting of the Union of Australian Women.132 In 1954 Gwen wrote again to the Argus, protesting over atomic bomb tests at Woomera, and demanding a ban on atomic weapons.133 Unlike Mary Chong, Gwen Fong’s political contribution, although initially fostered within a Chinese context, was ultimately expressed in a concern for the broader Australian politics. Research to date has not uncovered much more about Gwen’s later life. She remained in the Melbourne suburb of Kew for at least the next twenty years, being listed on electoral rolls as late as 1972 still using her maiden name.134 The Age recorded her early death in 1975, aged in her mid-fifties, and the death notice reveals that she had married Jack Branston Mitchell in 1947 and had three children.135 She and Jack had worked together in the Eureka Youth League in the 1940s.136

Conclusion Gwen Fong and Mary Chong were pioneers of their generation, the first female university graduates of Australian Chinese heritage, whose path-breaking careers allowed them to express their commitment to public and political life. For Mary Chong, her career commenced in 1930 and took her to China, working first for the 129. ‘Resident Doctors at Royal Melbourne’, Argus, July 15, 1947, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2243 8168; ‘Young Doctors Graduate: Yesterday’s Conferring’, Argus, July 8, 1947, p. 24, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article22438007. 130. Gwen Fong, ‘Remuneration of Resident Medical Officers’, Speculum: The Journal of the Melbourne Medical Student’s Society 1948, pp. 28–29, http://hdl.handle.net/11343/24172. 131. ‘Few to Gain by Free Drugs?’, Argus, September 9, 1950, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article22902803. 132. Women’s Liberation Archives, University of Melbourne, cited in ‘Post-War 1945 and After: In Our Own Right’ (Chapter 11), Women Working Together: Suffrage and Onwards, comp. Geraldine Robinson, http:// www.womenworkingtogether.com.au. 133. ‘Woomera?’, Argus, March 30, 1954, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26600007. 134. Australia, Electoral Rolls, 1903–1980, Ancestry.com [online database] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010). 135. Thank you to Kate Bagnall for locating this death notice in the Age (Melbourne), December 13, 1975. 136. Photograph of Jack Mitchell and Gwen Fong, Audrey Blake Collection, University of Melbourne Archives, 1996.0060.

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Chinese government and later in journalism. Towards the end of her career, Mary returned to Australia, working as a teacher in Sydney. Gwen Fong, who graduated as a doctor in 1947, choose to remain in Melbourne, engaging in a medical career and maintaining her political activism in the Communist Party. Both women had been well served by the Australian education system, Mary attending university with the help of a scholarship and Gwen most likely supported by her merchant father. Education within the Australian university system represented neither an act of assimilation into mainstream Australian society nor a rejection of their Chinese heritage. Intelligent young Chinese Australian women like Mary and Gwen took up opportunities offered to them within changing worlds for women’s education in Australia and in China. Families like theirs, who valued education for daughters (and not all did), were both a product of the Australian environment and of Chinese modernization. And for these two women, their university education enabled both to stand up and publicly speak out against discriminatory Australian government policies. In the absence of more substantial personal recollections, we cannot be sure of the extent to which the daily lives of Chinese students in the years before 1950 were affected by the race prejudice we know existed in Australia during this period. The published writings of these two women suggest that Mary Fong, in particular, was galvanized to speak out against discriminatory immigration practices in Australia. Gwen Fong, as a member of the Communist Party of Australia, was equally critical of the Australian government, though her critical politics were similar to those of non-Chinese communists. If we compare the lives of these Australian women with those of educated American-born Chinese women, there are many points suggestive of overlapping experiences. The distinctiveness of the Australian experience, however, seems to lie in the early years within a mainstream, non-segregated schooling system that celebrated their educational success. Also important for these two women was the support and encouragement they received from their families to go on to study at university.

10 Daisy Kwok’s Shanghai: Life in China before and after 1949 Sophie Loy-Wilson

Shanghai was neither Daisy’s birthplace nor her native home. By 1949 most of her brothers and sisters had left together with their families. But Daisy remained.1

At the end of the Pacific War, hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted with the expansion of the Japanese Empire across the Pacific.2 The Japanese Army occupied the Shanghai International Settlement in December 1941. Over the next three years, Allied citizens living in the city were gradually placed under house arrest and then forced by the Japanese Army into internment camps.3 In 1945 the Swiss Consul General toured these camps on behalf of the Australian government to compile detailed lists of internees needing repatriation and assistance from the Red Cross.4 One section of the internee population proved especially hard to categorize— internees claiming to be ‘bone fide’ Australians and yet of Chinese appearance.5 This group held paperwork showing they were Australian citizens and yet, upon visual assessment, they were patently of ‘Chinese origin’.6 Anxious to provide clarity in tense and chaotic circumstances, the Swiss Consul General pushed this group of internees for more information: Where were you born and to whom? How did you come to be in Shanghai? Are you Chinese? Are you Australian?7 1. Chen Danyan, Shanghai Princess: Her Survival with Pride and Dignity (New York: Better Link Press, 2010), p. 15. 2. Laura Madokoro, ‘Surveying Hong Kong in the 1950s: Western “Humanitarianism” and the Problem of Chinese Refugees’, Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 2 (2015), p. 493. 3. Bernice Archer, The Internment of Western Civilians under the Japanese 1941–1945 (Routledge: London, 2004), pp. 54–56. 4. ‘Australian Internees – Shanghai – Lists of Internees’ (Australian Legation, Republic of China, 1945–1947), National Archives of Australia (NAA): A4144, 228/1947: ‘Australian Internees – Shanghai 1945–1945’ (Australian Legation, Republic of China, 1945), NAA: A4144, 228/1945. See also Roger Zetter, ‘Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity’, Journal of Refugee Studies 4, no. 1 (1991), pp. 36–32. 5. ‘Internees, Australians Abroad, Far East. Kennedy A.R. Mission to Internment Camp Shanghai. 1945–1945’ (Department of External Affairs, 1945), NAA: A1066, IC45/55/3/13. 6. NAA: A4144, 228/1947; NAA: A4144, 228/1945. 7. At the end of World War II, displaced overseas Chinese defied easy categorization and posed unique

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The Swiss Consul General’s detailed list is one of the only known documents testifying to the existence of a small yet prominent community of Australian-born Chinese who built lives in Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century.8 There they formed a unique set of families, travelling frequently between Australia and China until 1949 when ‘frontiers slammed shut’ after the Chinese Communist Party banned emigration and imposed strict entry/exit controls on the movement of people and capital.9 While scholars have established that Australia’s Chinese population declined sharply in the first half of the twentieth century, few have interrogated why this might be or where Chinese Australians went next. Drops in Chinese Australian population figures have, in the past, been explained using vocabulary also applied to Indigenous Australians; Chinese Australians were ‘in decline’ or ‘dying out’.10 But while white Australians and some resident Chinese Australians may have imagined Chinese Australians as a ‘dying race’ after 1901, the view from China tells a different story. An average of 9,000 Australian-born Chinese departed Australia every five years between 1915 and 1939, and many had their sights set on two of Asia’s biggest treaty port cities: Hong Kong and Shanghai. Here, they were part of a large domestic Chinese migration from rural to urban areas.11 In Shanghai, Chinese Australians joined over a million rural Chinese migrants attracted by China’s preeminent ‘city of immigrants’.12 If London was where Anglo-Australians went to

challenges. See Meredith Oyen, ‘The Right of Return: Chinese Displaced Persons and the International Refugee Organization, 1947–56’, Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 2 (2015), p. 549. 8. The Swiss Consul General counted 594 Australians total in his list. See NAA: A4144, 228/1947. I have not managed to find statistics for the number of Chinese Australians residing in Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century; however, we can track the sharp drop in the total Chinese Australian population in Australian data. For example, census figures record 32,700 Chinese residents in Australia in 1901 and just half that number in 1939. The Great Depression contributed to a sharp drop in the early 1930s, as many Chinese chose to return to China in the face of difficult economic conditions in Australia. Chinese Australians made up 14 percent of the total Australian population in 1931 and just 2 percent in 1936. See ‘Chinese in Australia’ (Department of External Affairs, 1906), NAA: A1, 1906/7525. See also Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 1911, vol. 2, part 8, ‘Males and Females of Each Non-European Race Enumerated in the Several States and Territories of the Commonwealth of Australia at the Census of Third April 1911 (Exclusive of Full-Blooded Aboriginals)’, p. 904; Census of the Commonwealth of Australia 1933, vol. 1, part 12, Males and Females of Each State and Territory Classified According to Race as Recorded at the Census of Thirtieth June 1933 (Exclusive of Full-blood Aboriginals)’, pp. 900–903. 9. Oyen, ‘The Right of Return’, pp. 546–71. 10. Margaret Allen makes this argument for Indian Australians. See ‘“Innocents Abroad” and “Prohibited Immigrants”: Australians in India and Indians in Australia 1890–1910’, in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, ed. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2005), pp. 111–25. 11. Emily Honig, ‘Migrant Culture in Shanghai: In Search of a Subei Identity’, in Shanghai Sojourners, Chinese Research Monographs 40, ed. Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkley: University of California Press), pp. 239–66. 12. From 1885 to 1935 Shanghai natives accounted for an average of only 19 percent of the population of the entire international concession and 26 percent of the Chinese-owned parts of the city. Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou bianqian de yanjiu [Research on changes in the population of old Shanghai] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1980), pp. 112–13.

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‘seek their fortune’, then Shanghai was the ‘metropole’ of the Chinese Australian world.13 Chinese Australians thrived in Shanghai in the interwar decades after Sun Yat-sen invited many to return and ‘help build the Chinese nation’.14 They numbered among some of the most ardent supporters of the 1911 Chinese Revolution and were subsequently devoted nationalists and loyalists to Sun Yat-sen.15 Descended from goldrush-era immigrants who had settled in Australia in the nineteenth century, Shanghai’s Chinese Australians were typically second- or third-generation Australian and well equipped to navigate the semi-colonial society they encountered in China’s treaty ports. Usually Christian and highly educated, many spoke English as a first language. Many Chinese Australians were Eurasian, and some had ‘wives of European origin’.16 In 1945 the Swiss Consul General interviewed a Eurasian man named Luther James Lismore Yung, who was described as an ‘Accountant—Australian of “Chinese origin”’. Luther Yung was born in his namesake town of Lismore, New South Wales, in 1895 and married Alice Yuin Ding Young, also from Lismore. He was a prominent Chinese Australian community leader in Shanghai and was related to Chinese Australian journalist Vivian Yung Chow. Luther’s daughter, Margaret Yung Kelly, was born in Shanghai and recalls that her father managed a prominent bank during the treaty port era, socializing in elite émigré and government circles.17 The Consul General also met the Gwok-gew sisters, Gwendoline Iris and Ann Murial, born in Sydney in 1915 and 1910. Efigenia Quark, although born in Peru, had Australian citizenship because she was married to Frank William Quark from Bundaberg, Queensland, while Edith M. E. Kwok, born in London, had become Australian through her marriage to Tai Chiu Kwok from Sydney. Edith and Tai Chiu’s children had no passports, having been born in Shanghai, haven to the stateless, where famously a passport was not required.18 In company with the Swiss Consul General, governments and historians have struggled to categorize Chinese Australians. In fact, the group is rarely visible in government archives because the complex forms of geographical mobility and 13. Angela Woollacott, To Seek Her Fortune of London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (London: Oxford University Press, 2001). 14. Mei-fen Kuo, Making Chinese Australians: Urban Elites, Newspapers and the Formation of Chinese-Australian Identity, 1892–1912 (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2013). 15. John Fitzgerald, ‘Equality and the “Unequal Treaties”: Chinese Émigrés and British Colonial Routes to Modernity’, in Twentieth-Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday and the World, ed. Bryna Goodman and David S. G. Goodman (Routledge: London, 2012), pp. 180–96; Rodney Noonan, ‘Grafton to Guangzhou: The Revolutionary Journey of Tse Tsan Tai’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 27, no. 1–2 (February– May 2006), pp. 101–15. 16. On the topic of mixed marriages and Eurasian Chinese Australian families, see Kate Bagnall, ‘Golden Shadows on a White Land: An Exploration of the Lives of White Women Who Partnered Chinese Men and Their Children in Southern Australia, 1855–1915’ (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2006). 17. Margaret Yung Kelly, correspondence with author, August 4, 2016. 18. Antonia Finnane, Far from Where? Jewish Journeys from Shanghai to Australia (Carlton: University of Melbourne Press, 1999), p. 37.

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cultural exchange they inherited sat uncomfortably against state-produced ideas about belonging and citizenship. Once returned to China, the reach of their transnational lives was lost in loose categorization. In the republican and socialist periods in China they were grouped under the title ‘returned overseas Chinese’ ( 歸國華僑 C: gwāi gwok wàh kìuh, M: guīguó huáqiáo), while in twentieth-century Australia they were described as having been ‘repatriated’ or ‘returned to their native land’.19 In the nomenclature of the White Australia policy, Australian-born Chinese were usually simply categorized as ‘Chinese’ or ‘half-caste Chinese’, with their race trumping their legal status as British subjects.20 Eurasian journalist Vivian Yung Chow preferred the term ‘Australian-born Chinese’.21

Reading Chinese Australian Journeys to Shanghai Little is known about Shanghai’s Chinese Australians. As their life stories are typically subsumed into the history of a much larger group of émigrés, the returned overseas Chinese in Shanghai, they have not featured in Chinese language histories or in scholarship in the West. While there is a growing body of academic and popular history drawing attention to white Australian experiences in Shanghai, epitomized by Peter Thompson’s Shanghai Fury: Australian Heroes of Revolutionary China, the history of Chinese Australians whose families migrated to China from Australia remains little researched.22 The information we do have documents their history up until the ‘watershed’ year of 1949, when the severing of ties between the two countries cut some families in two, closing off communication between Chinese Australians who left Shanghai before 1949 and those who chose to stay behind in the city.23 For those who stayed, their Australian connections were obscured by the inflated dichotomies of ‘East/West’ or ‘Communist/free’ mythologized during the Cold War. The overdetermination of 1949 as a year of ‘radical

19. In its 1953 national census figures, the Chinese government claimed there were just over 11.7 million ‘overseas Chinese’ worldwide, made up of ethnic Chinese regardless of nationality who lived outside the territorial border of the Chinese state. By the end of the same decade, there were an almost equal number (approximately 11 million) of ‘domestic overseas Chinese’, according to official sources. Part of this group was known as ‘returned overseas Chinese’ (歸國華僑, C: gwāi gwok wàh kìuh M: guīguó huáqiáo, known as 歸僑, C: gwāi kìuh, M: guīqiáo). By 1960 there were up to 60,000 guiqiao in China, following several major waves of return migration. 20. Kate Bagnall, ‘Anglo-Chinese and the Politics of Overseas Travel from New South Wales, 1898 to 1925’, in Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, ed. Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 21. V. Y. Chow, ‘Anzac Society’s Disservice to Australia’, United China, December 1935, p. 25. 22. Peter Thompson, Shanghai Fury: Australian Heroes of Revolutionary China (London: Random House, 2011). For academic work on white Australians in Shanghai, see Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘White Cargo: Australian Residents, Trade and Colonialism in Shanghai between the Wars’, History Australia 9, no. 3 (December 2012), pp. 154–77. 23. John Fitzgerald, Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (UNSW Press: Sydney, 2006); Kuo, Making Chinese Australians; Paul Macgregor, ‘Crossing between Cultures: The Australia-China Oral History Project’, National Library of Australia News 5, no. 1 (October 1994), pp. 12–15.

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break’ in China-Australia relations has meant that historians have rarely ventured across the 1949 divide to trace Chinese Australian lives.24 This chapter emphasizes a type of continuity in China-Australia relations by telling the story of Chinese Australians in Shanghai in the twentieth century. It does so by following the life of Daisy Kwok (郭婉瑩 C: gwok yúnyìhng M: guō wǎnyíng; 1909–1998), who arrived in Shanghai from Sydney in 1917, during the heyday of Chinese Australian travel to that city, and who stayed after the Communist takeover in 1949.25 Having survived imprisonment and persecution during the Cultural Revolution, Daisy died in Shanghai in 1998 as an Australian citizen. The Australian government reissued her Australian passport at an official ceremony held at the Australian Consulate in Shanghai in 1989.26 Highly educated, and a gifted chronicler of the Chinese Australian connections that had so deeply affected her life, she greatly assisted staff at the Australian Consulate when it reopened in Shanghai in 1987, translating documents, teaching Chinese language, and being a repository of a longer history of China-Australia connections before the cutting of diplomatic ties in the 1950s. Although Daisy Kwok began writing her memoirs in 1989, she never finished them. Her family asked Chinese author Chen Danyan (陳丹燕) to compile and complete her manuscripts. These were published posthumously as 上海的金枝玉葉 (M: shànghǎi de jīnzhīyùyè) and quickly made the bestseller lists in China.27 Chinese Australian historian Mavis Gock Ming translated the memoirs into English with the help of Daisy’s son and titled the English-language version Shanghai Princess: Her Survival with Pride and Dignity.28 Mavis’s own life had moved in step with Daisy’s. They had played together as children and suffered similar fates during the Cultural Revolution. As a fellow Gock from the same Cantonese village, Mavis’s father had worked for Daisy’s in Shanghai in the 1930s, and Mavis also chose to stay in China after 1949. In order to tell Daisy’s story, I rely on four sets of sources: Daisy’s published memoirs as they appear in the Chinese and English language versions of Shanghai Princess; files from the Australian Department of External Affairs; interviews conducted with Daisy’s friends and family; and the numerous personal archives of Chinese Australian families shared with me by descendants. I have also consulted 24. Agnieszka Sobocinska, ‘Overturning the Point: Exploring Change in Australia-Asia Relations’, History Compass 12, no. 8 (2014), pp. 642–50. 25. For more on Daisy and other Chinese Australian women in Shanghai, see Kate Bagnall, ‘Women, History and the Shifting Patterns of Chinese Australian Life’, in John Young, Modernity’s End: Half the Sky [exhibition catalogue] (Chatswood, New South Wales: Willoughby City Council, March 2016), pp. 14–19. 26. Murray Mclean (former Australian Consul General in Shanghai), correspondence with author, December 12, 2014; Evan Williams (former staff member at Australian Consulate General, Shanghai), correspondence with author, February 1, 2015. 27. ‘Chen Danyan and Her Shanghai Princess’, China.org.cn, September 8, 2005, https://web.archive.org/ web/20200326224641/http://www.china.org.cn/english/NM-e/141191.htm; Chen Danyan 陳丹燕, Shanghai de jinzhiyuye 上海的金枝玉葉 [Shanghai’s jade twig, golden leaf] (Taibei shi: Erya chubanshe, 1999). 28. Chen Danyan, Shanghai Princess: Her Survival with Pride and Dignity (New York: Better Link Press, 2010).

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Figure 10.1:  Daisy Alma Kwok, as depicted in immigration documents before her family’s departure for Shanghai, 1917. National Archives of Australia (NAA: SP244/2, N1950/2/3885)

the personal papers of Daisy’s close friend, Tess Johnston, which were deposited at the Hoover Institute in 2015.29 The Johnston papers include drafts of Daisy’s memoirs.30 These family stories make up, in Kirsty Walker’s words, ‘an archive of fragmentary, often nostalgic memory’.31 There are personal stories of emotional attachments within and beyond families but, at the same time, there are histories of Shanghai’s connections with Australia, histories of migration, failed migration under the White Australia policy, the development of business and trading networks, of religious conversion, and cultural exchange.32 What becomes clear when these family stories are placed against state-based archives (immigration records, passports, consular files, internment records) is the complex interplay of assimilation, adoption, separation, and conflict that found their way into their family histories while being flattened out in institutional records. 29. ‘Materials relating to Daisy Kwok’, Tess Johnston papers, Hoover Institute, 2015C32, box 17, Folder 5. 30. ‘To Shanghai’, Daisy Kwok personal writings, ‘Materials relating to Daisy Kwok’, Tess Johnston papers, Hoover Institute, 2015C32, box 17, folder 5. 31. Kirsty Walker, ‘Intimate Histories: Eurasian Family Histories in Colonial Penang’, Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2012), pp. 303–29. 32. Walker, ‘Intimate Histories’, p. 313.

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Since this adaptive syncretism was anything but the deliberate policy of a White Australia, which depended on the maintenance of social and racial difference, the lives of second- or third-generation Chinese Australians sit uncomfortably within readings of Australian history that figure them as victims of colonial rule or a marginalized minority within the Australian state. Chinese Australians were not ‘natives of Shanghai’, nor were they colonized peoples of Australia; they were aspirational migrants drawn to Shanghai through entwined networks of family and capital. Their very existence spoke to the imperfect reach of settler colonial forms of governance and population control. As we shall see, Chinese Australians were both the beneficiaries and the victims of the imperial governance systems some of them learned to evade so well. Many of the family histories explored here were marked indelibly by the Cultural Revolution, when the complex foreign ties of overseas Chinese, once so beneficial, became grounds for persecution.

Daisy Kwok’s Shanghai: 1909–1949 Daisy Kwok was born in Sydney’s Chinatown on April 2, 1909, the seventh child of George Kwok Bew (郭標 C: gwok bīu, M: gúo biāo) and his wife, Darling (née Tin Young).33 While her father had arrived in Australia in the 1880s as a gold miner, her mother was Australian-born Chinese—named Darling because she was the first Chinese girl born near the Darling River in northwestern New South Wales.34 Like most Chinese Australians, George and Darling were Cantonese, and their families came from villages in the Pearl River Delta. Darling’s family came from a village in Heungshan (香山 C: hēung sāan, M: xiāngshān) county while George’s family came from nearby Chuk Sau Yuen (竹秀園 C: jūk sau yùhn, M: zhúxiùyuán).35 They had met at the home of a Christian minister in Sydney, John Young Wai (周容威 C: jāu yùhngwāi, M: zhōu róngwēi), who also acted as Darling’s guardian.36 She was sixteen when she married George.37 The couple settled in Sydney, where George worked peddling vegetables before he met fruit and vegetable merchants Ma Ying-Piu (馬應彪 C: máh yīngbīu, M: mǎ yīngbiāo), Ma Wing-Chan (馬永燦 C: máh wíhng chaan, M: mǎ yǒngcàn), and James Choy Hing (蔡興 C: choi hīng, M: cài xīng) in a Sydney teahouse and went into business with them. Pooling their capital, they began Wing Sang & Co. 33. A copy of Daisy Kwok’s birth certificate can be found in ‘George Bew, Leon Bew, Pearl Bew, Percy Bew . . . ’ (Department of Immigration, New South Wales Branch, 1950), National Archives of Australia (NAA): SP244/2, N1950/2/3885. My thanks to Kate Bagnall for bringing this certificate to my attention. 34. Terence Fu and Maunie Kwok, email correspondence, October 15, 1998. My thanks to Paul and Maunie Kwok for kindly sharing this correspondence with me. 35. Zhongshan ren zai aozhou [Zhongshan people in Australia], Zhongshan wenzhi [Records of Zhongshan], no. 24 (Guangzhou: Zhengxie guangdongsheng zhongshanshi weiyuanhui wenshi weihuanhui, 1992), pp. 84–90 and 198–219. 36. ‘Materials relating to Daisy Kwok’, Tess Johnston papers, Hoover Institute, 2015C32, box 17, folder 5. 37. ‘Materials relating to Daisy Kwok’, Tess Johnston papers, Hoover Institute, 2015C32, box 17, folder 5.

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(永生 C: wíhng sāang, M: yǒngshēng).Mincho38 The firm began as a wholesaler of fruit and vegetables, and struggled for the first few years as it was hidden in an alley away from any main thoroughfare. George Kwok Bew raised two hundred pounds from other business associates to buy new premises at 20 Campbell Street in the heart of Sydney’s Chinatown, and the business turned around, making its partners wealthy men.39 George Kwok Bew’s eldest son, Leon, was born in the third floor of this building.40 More funds came from George Kwok Bew’s cousin, Kwok Lock (郭 樂 C: gwok lohk, M: gúo lè), who married Darling’s sister Kate.41 Kwok Lock (also known as James Gocklock) opened a companion businesses in the building next to Wing Sang & Co. and called it Wing On & Co. (永安 C: wíhng ngōn, M: yong’an).42 The timing of these business decisions was fortuitous. Archives of the Chinese Consul General of Singapore, who visited Australia in 1902, confirmed that the largest Chinese Australian communities were to be found in Sydney and Melbourne, so there were plenty of customers for the new business.43 Wing On thrived, and George Kwok Bew moved his family of eight to a sprawling home in Sydney’s suburbs, with rose gardens, lush parlour rooms, long verandas, and white Australian servants. Daisy remembered it clearly: ‘I was eight years old when we left Australia, but I still had a vivid memory of the house. . . . Breakfast and lunch were eaten in the kitchen, but dinner was served in the dining room. As a rule we ate Western food, as our maid was Australian.’44 George Kwok Bew made sure his family followed the rituals of middle-class life that were becoming of Australian families of their class; they went to the opera, to church, and to Sunday school. Chinese was banned in the home and the children were brought up speaking only English. And yet wealth and assimilation could not insulate the children from racism: ‘There was much racial discrimination in school. . . . The children at Sunday school called me all sorts of names, so I decided not to go there again,’ said Daisy.45 Not all Chinese Australian families lived like the Kwok Bews. Mavis Gock Ming’s father, Willy Gock Ming, also worked in a family-run grocery store in Perth (Wing Hing & Co.), but it was not as successful. In 1910 he married his English teacher, Mabel Jenkins, a Christian who taught English to Chinese market gardeners as part of her mission work. Their interracial marriage meant their church congregation and Mabel’s parents cut contact with the couple. Mabel gave birth to 38. Robert Norton, ‘The History of Wing On’, p. 28. My thanks to Paul and Maunie Kwok for lending me this pamphlet. See also a letter from Leon Kwok Bew documenting his family’s history, written in the 1970s to Doreen Feng, daughter of Edith Feng née Kwok Bew, who was Daisy Kwok’s elder sister.  Daisy’s nephew Bobby Fu obtained a copy of this letter from Daisy on her last trip to America in the mid-1990s. My thanks to Bobby Fu for sharing this letter with me. 39. Letter from Leon Kwok Bew documenting his family’s history written in the 1970s to Doreen Feng (original in the possession of Bobby Fu), p. 2. 40. Letter from Leon Kwok Bew, p. 2. 41. Letter from Leon Kwok Bew, p. 2. 42. Letter from Leon Kwok Bew, p. 2. 43. Kuo, Making Chinese Australians, p. 18. 44. Daisy’s memoirs, as quoted in Chen, Shanghai Princess, pp. 8–13. 45. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 21.

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Mavis in 1916, the second of five children. Although the family was not destitute, there were no trips to the opera and certainly no servants. Mabel felt ‘outside’ white society and her brother Harry recalled the racist taunts they received.46 As Mavis’s son-in-law related in her eulogy, ‘The opportunity to mix with the wider community was not great.’47 Like the Kwok Bew children, the Ming children always spoke English at home: ‘They never spoke Chinese. Their Dad had tried to teach them some expressions but they only picked up a few words.’48 In 1917 George Kwok Bew moved his family back to China and chose to settle in Shanghai, far from his native village in Guangdong, so that he could manage the newly opened Wing On Department Store in the city’s International Settlement. Immigration records show the family were already frequent travellers; they went to Hong Kong three times before 1910.49 Shanghai, however, with its maze of foreign concessions and laws around extraterritoriality, rendered them foreigners. It was so far removed from Daisy’s world as an eight-year-old child; she later recalled telling her classmates in Sydney that Shanghai was a restaurant, not a city.50 George Kwok Bew’s decision to move his family to the city was motivated by a combination of patriotism and business sense. Like many Chinese Australians, Kwok Bew was frustrated by the restrictions placed on Chinese Australians by the White Australia policy.51 Mei-fen Kuo has suggested that other factors also played a role in Kwok Bew’s decision. He had successfully collected shares for the Wing On company as early as 1916 and had impressed Wing On proprietors in the process. Terence (Bobby) Fu, George Kwok Bew’s great-grandson, believes the family moved to Shanghai to avoid conscription during World War I: ‘Grandma used to tell us that her father had sent his two older boys (and my grandma) back to China to avoid army drafting. Uncle Leon used to tell us the story of the Battle of Gallipoli, and how terrible was the army charges in the battle field that killed Uncle Percy’s entire high school classmates.’52 After arriving in Shanghai, the Kwok Bews were quickly ensconced in one of the best hotels in the Shanghai, the Oriental, owned by relations of Darling Kwok Bew, who also managed the Sincere Department Store: ‘Our Uncle Gock Lock, whose first wife was my mother’s sister also lived in the same hotel. He was to be the managing director of the new Wing On company with my Father. He had a Ford 46. ‘Eulogy for Mavis Gock Yen’, 2008, in possession of Siaoman Horsburgh. 47. ‘Eulogy for Mavis Gock Yen’. 48. ‘Eulogy for Mavis Gock Yen’. 49. Gock family immigration files. See: ‘George Bew [2 photographs attached], Leon Bew [2 photographs attached], Pearl Bew [2 photographs attached], Percy Bew [2 photographs attached], Daisy Alma Bew [2 photographs attached], George Noel Bew [2 photographs attached], Walter Bew [2 photographs attached], Elsie Bew [2 photographs attached], Edith Bew [2 photographs and birth certificate attached], Darling Bew [2 photographs and birth certificate attached] [Box 36]’, NAA: SP244/2, N1950/2/3885. 50. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 15. 51. Marilyn Lake, ‘Chinese Colonists Assert their Common Human Rights: Cosmopolitanism as Subject and Method in History’, Journal of World History 21, no. 3 (September 2010), pp. 375–92. 52. Terence Fu, email correspondence with author, June 6, 2017.

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car which was considered very luxurious in those days.’53 The association with Wing On would make them minor celebrities, with Kwok family christenings, weddings, and funerals reported in the North China Herald. For Chinese Australian journalist Vivian Yung Chow, who was born in Lismore, Australia, but relocated to Shanghai with his brother Luther Yung in the 1920s, the visibility of Chinese Australian businesses in Shanghai marked the community as separate from Shanghai locals. ‘The Australians’, as he called them, had shown everyone in China that they were the most forward-looking, unassuming, and practical people of Chinese descent the world over: The world can see how true this is by a visit to Shanghai. They note the difference between the Australian Chinese department stores and the ‘home side’ at business. There is no comparison, the superiority of the Australians is so marked.54

As members of this elite class of patriotic returned overseas Cantonese in Shanghai, Daisy and her siblings attended a Cantonese school for students of returned overseas Chinese, but they struggled, as they could not speak Cantonese or Shanghainese. Even their names were lost in translation. As they were never given Chinese names, the teacher wrote them each a new name down on a piece of paper. But Daisy forgot hers, and the piece of paper was blown out of her hand on the way home.55 ‘Life at the Cantonese school was a nightmare for me,’ Daisy wrote in a draft of her memoirs: All three of us [Kwok siblings], in spite of the difference in age, were put in the first grade to beginning learning Chinese. I just couldn’t pronounce the words correctly. Every day I just cried and cried. Then we were put in the highest class for English . . . again I couldn’t keep up. The reader was too difficult for me.56

The family became close to a Chinese girl from Jamaica who lived in the nearby Burlington Hotel. She recommended the girls attend the prestigious McTyeire School run by American missionaries. At McTyeire they no longer had any language difficulties, as the classes were all in English. Daisy would come to regret this turn of events: Neglecting our study of Chinese was a big mistake, one I have regretted all my life. I did not realize how much I was handicapped until I graduated from college. However, at the time Shanghai was a city ruled by the foreign imperialists. Everyone spoke English. It seemed more important to know English than Chinese. I remember attending a meeting of the Shanghai Chinese Women’s Club, and was surprised to find the meeting was conducted in English. Other international Women’s Clubs

53. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 22. 54. ‘China in Revolution (Broadcast Lectures)’, United China 1, no. 11 (October 1932), pp. 454–56. 55. Chen, Shanghai Princess, 30. 56. Daisy Kwok draft memoir, ‘Materials Relating to Daisy Kwok’, Tess Johnston papers, Hoover Institute, 2015C32, box 17, folder 5.

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Daisy Kwok’s Shanghai held meetings in their own language. In the big department stores attendants had to know English to get a job. Even some rickshaw coolies could speak a few words.57

The Kwok family moved to a mansion on Lucerne Road, on what was then the outskirts of the International Settlement. Set back from the street behind large wrought-iron gates and sitting on a long green lawn, the mansion was built and designed by a Swiss architect, who had kept his Chinese mistress hidden in one of the mansion’s upper wings.58 Inside, chandeliers lit up frescoes of Swiss chalet scenes complete with smiling Aryan children and cows grazing against alpine mountains.59 The decision to move to the area signalled Kwok Bew’s intimacy with the Republican government, whose ministers occupied many of the adjacent mansions—the Finance Minister, T. V. Soong, ate at the Kwok home once a week.60 T. V. Soong was Harvard educated and brother to the famous Soong sisters, Soong Mayling and Soong Ching-ling, who married Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, respectively. In Shanghai, Daisy Kwok attended McTyeire, the same school as these sisters.

Figure 10.2:  Pearl Kwok in Shanghai, 1927. Private Collection of Bobby Fu

57. Daisy Kwok draft memoir. 58. Tess Johnston and Deke Erh, A Last Look: Western Architecture in Old Shanghai (Hong Kong: Old China Hand Press, 1993), pp. 20–21. 59. Tess Johnston, interview with author, Shanghai, November 2014. 60. Tess Johnston, interview with author.

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Marina Mar (whose uncle William Liu helped open the Sun Sun department store, a successor to Wing On) travelled to Shanghai as a child in the 1930s and recalled being instantly struck by ‘the fine homes and opulent lifestyle of Chinese Australian émigrés in the city’.61 For her part, Daisy remembered the garden of the house better than its furnishings; she often worked pruning flowers with her father, who had become a keen horticulturist during his time in Sydney. ‘He always wound little pieces of string into balls and placed them in drawers, something he started doing in his days as a market gardener.’62 George Kwok Bew was appointed head of the Central China Mint in the 1920s and security was heightened for the children as the family’s political connections and association with the Wing On Department Store made them possible targets for kidnappings and ransom. The Kwok children rarely went out. Male family members were allowed more freedom of movement than the women and girls. Daisy’s elder brothers, now in their late teens, were granted access to the ‘Seventh Heaven Wing’ of Wing On, where they threw lavish parties and entertained girlfriends and mistresses.63 Daisy’s father also left the house frequently, as he had taken a Chinese mistress and started a second family. Daisy remembered her father’s mistress, whom she called ‘Yi Tai Tai’ (二太太 C: yih taaitaai, M: èr tàitai; meaning ‘second wife’), coming to the house to see her mother. Daisy ‘did not like her because she had taken away her father’.64 As the Kwok girls grew older, they were put under increasing pressure to act as visual and moral representations of the Wing On brand. Aware that they were on show, they attended parties frequented by American film stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, dressed in the latest fashions, and were among the first women to learn to drive in Shanghai.65 Daisy appeared in local plays, specializing in Englishlanguage versions of Chinese classics, and captained the North China women’s tennis team.66 When Daisy visited the Wing On Department Store, her behaviour was closely scrutinized by patrons and management. Daisy remembers being admonished by her brother when she could not find what she needed in the store, as a crowd had gathered outside to watch her shop.67 The sisters walked a fine line between embodying a Westernized consumer culture without appearing to support European imperialism in China, or dishonour Chinese traditions around femininity and feminine exposure. In 1929 Daisy’s sister Elsie was criticized after winning the Miss Shanghai beauty pageant, organized by Chinese Australian William Yinson Lee (李源信 or 李元信 C: léih yùhnseun, M: lǐ yuánxìn) to raise money for 61. Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, p. 89. 62. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 33. 63. Tess Johnston, correspondence with author, January 8, 2014; Paul Gock, conversation with author. 64. Tess Johnston, interview with author; Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 76. 65. ‘Over the Tea Cup: Relaxation and “Teeth-Ache”: Douglas Fairbanks to Tea: Hearts and Cupid’, North China Herald, February 7, 1931. 66. ‘“Lady Precious Stream”: Shanghai’s Presentation at Carlton Theatre’, North China Herald, July 3, 1935. 67. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 112.

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his charity.68 In order to win the contest, she had campaigned for votes, leading one journalist to criticize her ‘Coney Island’ salesmanship techniques: ‘there is such a thing as shyness in Chinese womanhood’.69 The fact that her winnings included a car or a trip to Hollywood attracted satire from those who implied her motives were shallow and unpatriotic, especially considering China’s trade deficit with Europe and America, which sparked anxieties over the loss of sovereignty implicit in the growing foreign dominance of the commercial economy.70

Figure 10.3:  The Kwok family in Shanghai, 1931. Daisy is standing on the far right. Private Collection of Bobby Fu

If Chinese Australian women were considered too Western by Chinese nationalists, Shanghai’s white colonial elites considered them too Chinese to sanction socially. In European clubs and hotels, they were either banned entry or forced to use the service elevators, as the main elevators were reserved for Europeans.71 White Australians in the city were especially vigilant in their monitoring of these racial 68. ‘A Hard Task for Judicial Pars, Popularity Contest in Court: Judge’s Advice to Settle’, North China Herald, November 23, 1929. On William Yinson Lee, see John Fitzgerald and Mei-fen Kuo, ‘Diaspora Charity and Welfare Sovereignty in the Chinese Republic: Shanghai Charity Innovator William Yinson Lee (Li Yuanxin, 1884–1965)’, Twentieth-Century China 42, no. 1 (January 2017), pp. 72–96. 69. ‘A Hard Task for Judicial Pars, Popularity Contest in Court: Judge’s Advice to Settle’, North China Herald, November 23, 1929. 70. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 71. Tess Johnston, interview with author.

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lines.72 The ANZAC Society blocked Chinese Australians from becoming members or entering their club room, leading to an outcry in the Chinese Australian newspaper United China in 1931. The newspaper’s editor, Vivian Yung Chow, responded by finding similarities between Chinese Australians and British settler colonists. He wrote of Chinese Australians as being no different from white Australians (as ‘brothers within the British Empire’), describing the ‘great part that the early Chinese pioneers played in the up building of the Australian nation’, and the vital role played by Chinese Australians as mediators between ‘the world’s oldest civilization and the youngest of the nations’.73 In 1925 Chinese Australian William Yinson Lee wrote a similar editorial criticizing the Shanghai Club for not allowing Chinese membership or even Chinese visitors, describing the restriction as ‘race discrimination’.74 Responding to Yinson Lee’s protest, the Shanghai Club pointed to the segregated nature of Shanghai’s social world more generally. After all, it argued, it was not as if Europeans were accepted into Chinese clubs either.75 These debates over inclusion and exclusion were played out in other ways in Chinese Australian families, where ‘Asian’, ‘Australian’, and ‘Eurasian’ identity were deeply contested, leading to the obliteration or deliberate forgetting of certain kinds of Eurasian connections and a corresponding emphasis on ‘pure’ Chinese connections.76 Paul Kwok grew up in the wider Chinese Australian Kwok clan in interwar Shanghai. Daisy Kwok was his aunt, and his father worked for the Wing On Department Store. In 1934 Wing On sent his father to Manchester to study textile chemistry, so that he could better manage his own cotton mills in Shanghai. There he met his wife Edith Spliid through mutual friends and the couple became engaged, marrying in Hong Kong in 1937. Because he was marrying a ‘foreigner’, Paul’s grandmother refused to attend the wedding. When the couple travelled to Shanghai with the Kwok family after the wedding, his mother insisted on leaving on a different boat so she would not be forced to travel with the interracial couple. Paul recalls that, although his English mother was eventually accepted by the family, she endured long years of hardship and social isolation owing to her status as a European woman in a Chinese family. In 1937, the year Japan invaded China, Chinese Australian Ann Chung Gon travelled from Tasmania to Shanghai to stay with the Kwok family in their Lucerne Road mansion. When Ann returned to Australia in December, she was interviewed

72. Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India’, Journal of British Studies 40, no. 4 (October 2001), pp. 489–521. 73. V. Y. Chow, ‘Anzac Society Disservice to Australia: How They Flayed the Game’, United China Magazine (December 1931), p. 25. United China was a Shanghai-based publication. 74. ‘Why Are Returned Students Anti-foreign?’, North China Herald, April 4, 1925. See also Mei-fen Kuo, ‘Everyday Life Approaches and Changing Perspectives in Diaspora Philanthropy: The Stories of Joe Tong and William Yinson Lee’, in Conference Proceedings: International Symposium on International Migration and Qiaoxiang Studies, Wu Yi University, Jiangmen, China, December 11–14 2014, pp. 346–77. 75. Kuo, ‘Everyday Life Approaches’, p. 371. 76. Walker, ‘Intimate Histories’, p. 252.

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by the Launceston Examiner.77 Asked if she wore her ‘native costume’ in China or dressed in Western clothes, ‘Miss Chung said “I had to dress in native costume otherwise I was mistaken for a Jap wherever I went.”’ She told the paper that ‘seventy percent of the people mistook her for a Japanese when she was dressed in Western clothes’. She received ‘a very cool reception and even dangerous scowls from the coolies’.78 As a Chinese Australian, Ann Chung Gon’s position in China tracked back and forth between local class divisions, transnational family networks, and geopolitical conflicts, while her racial status, she thought, was read through her choice of Western or Chinese clothing. Confronted while wearing Western dress by lower-class workers in the docks of Asian treaty ports, she felt herself the object of ‘coolie’ derision and on the streets of Shanghai she felt these clothes aligned her with Japanese imperialism. In Chinese clothing, however, she believed her outsider status as an Australian-born Chinese was clarified, or at least harder to read as ‘foreign’. Evelyn Hu-DeHart writes of Asian diasporas ‘finding each other’ colliding, converging, interacting, while maintaining their distinct identities.79 In interwar Shanghai, white Australians and Chinese Australians were acutely aware of each other’s quotidian social behaviour. While some Anglo-Australians liked to slot Australian-born Chinese into the familiar imperial racial hierarchies they remembered from Australia, men and women like George Kwok Bew and Daisy Kwok Bew were, in some ways, the social superiors of white Australians in the city, enjoying a lifestyle uncomfortably similar to European elites. We are ‘your brothers in Empire’, William Yinson Lee had written. Being a member of the Australian-born Chinese community in early twentieth century Shanghai seemed in many ways to be cemented by a collective class identity and common public and social spaces, rather than by any meaningful ethnic identity. This was especially the case of Chinese Australian women, whose bodies were anxiously puzzled over for clues to their class position in competing political and imperial cultures.

Daisy Kwok’s Shanghai: 1949–1996 George Kwok Bew would not live to see the fall of the Republican regime nor the arrival of a Communist government in 1949; he died suddenly of a stroke in 1932 without a will, leaving Daisy and her siblings to manage his vast estate. Obituaries celebrated a man who ‘was much esteemed by all communities in Shanghai’ and whose ‘career spoke eloquently of the possession of unusual gifts which won success in two widely different centres of commercial activity’.80 Five years earlier, Mavis 77. ‘My Native Land: A Visit to China by a Tasmanian Born Chinese Girl, Miss Ann Chung Gon Interview’, Examiner (Launceston), December 22, 1937, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article52175815. 78. ‘My Native Land: A Visit to China by a Tasmanian Born Chinese Girl’. 79. Evelyn Hu-DeHart, quoted in Tim Harper and Sunil S. Amrith, ‘Sites of Asian Interaction: An Introduction’, Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2012), p. 251. 80. ‘The Late Mr Kwok Bew’, North China Herald, January 6, 1932.

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Gock Ming had also lost a parent. Her mother, Mabel, ‘the centre of the children’s universe’, had died of complications from smallpox one year after the family arrived in Shanghai from Sydney in 1926. Mavis’s father worked seven days a week for Wing On, so chose to remarry quickly in order to have help looking after his children. At fifty-two, he married a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Chinese woman, who was the same age as Mavis’s elder brother.81 The legacies of their parents’ choices, to live across cultures and between countries, would shadow Daisy and Mavis in ways neither set of parents could have anticipated. After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, many Australian-born Chinese left Shanghai and returned to Australia. Evelyn Yin Lo remembered arriving in Sydney with ‘lots of dresses, Shanghai style’, which she wore in the streets of Sydney, ignoring the children who ‘ran behind me poking their fingers saying I was wearing a dressing gown’.82 Daisy Kwok spent part of the war in Hong Kong, while Mavis Gock Ming returned to Sydney. Most of their siblings and friends moved their families and belongings to Hong Kong, Australia, or America. In the late 1930s and early 1940s Mavis and Daisy both returned to China, a decision that would change their lives and see them cut off from their family members for nearly forty years.

After Liberation: 1950s–1960s In 1949, after a protracted civil war (1945–1949) with its Nationalist rivals, the Chinese Communist Party took control of the country. Mao Zedong announced the founding of a new nation, the People’s Republic of China. Within years of establishing national government, the Communist Party banned emigration and imposed strict entry/exit controls on the movement of people and capital, while the US-led international embargo against China quickly curtailed external trade with countries outside the Soviet bloc such as Australia: ‘The huaqiao era of unbounded movement came to an end.’83 Soon after 1949, the Wing On company became a joint state-owned enterprise, and the remaining Kwok family left for the United States or Hong Kong, where the department store continued to flourish. But Daisy Kwok decided to stay: she was running a scientific instruments company with her husband, Woo Yu-Hsiang (or Y. H., as she called him)—a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—and it was only just beginning to make money: ‘We didn’t have anything outside. Where would we go?’84 In fact, her husband, whose own business career, he felt, had always been overshadowed by his wife’s connection to Wing On, was revelling in the most successful professional period of his life. In 1945, after 81. ‘Eulogy for Mavis Gock Yen’. 82. ‘Interview with Evelyn Yin-lo’, Shirley Fitzgerald Papers, City of Sydney Council Archives (CoSA): 2014/441808, box SFO444. 83. Glen Peterson, Overseas Chinese in the People’s Republic of China (Hong Kong: Taylor & Francis, 2012). 84. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 116.

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the Japanese surrender, he had been put in charge of managing enemy German property in Shanghai. He befriended German merchants and, after they returned to Germany, they continued trading with him—hence the success of the couple’s scientific trading company. They lived in comfortable circumstances, relieved that war was over, and ‘shared a widespread conviction that the 1950s would be China’s golden age’.85 While members of Y. H.’s family were leaving China, too, he told Daisy, ‘When the Japanese were here, the people of Shanghai still lived a good life. There is nothing to fear from the Communists.’86 The Woo family even kept their servants; the Communists forbade them to discharge their domestic staff lest they aggravate the unemployment problem. Mavis Gock Ming also stayed in China. By 1957 she was living in Peking and employed as an English-language translator for Radio Peking. Since the late 1930s she had been working with left-wing foreigners such as Rewi Alley to promote socialist agricultural ideas in China, setting up communes and training farmers.87 In Shanghai in the late 1950s Daisy experienced a stark shift in her economic fortunes. Food was scarce in Shanghai owing to the devastating results of agricultural collectivization during the Great Leap Forward. The political reverberations of these famines culminated in the Anti-Rightist campaigns of 1957, which targeted ‘capitalists’, especially those with Western connections, and anyone against collectivization. In 1958 Y. H. was arrested and sent to Tilanqiao Prison (提籃橋 監獄 M: tílánqiáo jiānyù) for speaking out against the policy and for increasingly problematic friendships with foreigners. He stood accused of defrauding the state of $64,000, a crime he would be cleared of posthumously in the 1980s. After he was sentenced in 1963 Daisy was ordered to repay the money and all their property was confiscated, in addition to Daisy’s jewellery and clothing, her wedding dress and veil, and multiple photo albums. As Daisy wrote in her memoirs, ‘They also took away all our cutlery. So I went to the Seventh Heaven Building [an extension of Wing On] to the apartment-homes of the Kwok family upstairs who had already left Shanghai, and helped ourselves to what we needed.’88 Daisy would not see her husband until he died in prison in 1960 when she was called to identify his body. The night he had been arrested she was called to go and pick up the now very rundown car he had left at his offices. Most of his colleagues had stopped driving as it was now considered a politically unwise pursuit, redolent of pre-liberation days. In her memoirs Daisy recalled picking up the car: ‘As I drove home in this car, which never should have been driven, I thought Y. H. must have known it was already un-drivable, and he was hoping for an accident.’89

85. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 117. 86. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 117. 87. Siaoman Horsburgh, correspondence with author, August 28, 2015. 88. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 131. 89. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 143.

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Cultural Revolution: 1960s–1970s To assist in the agricultural effort and to ‘reform her capitalist mindset through labor’, Daisy was ordered to begin work on a farm in the northeast of Shanghai where she would be in charge of feeding the pigs.90 She also cleaned toilets and dug pits for human waste. On the farm Daisy’s inability to speak adequate Chinese led to the nickname ‘that old foreign women’.91 Most of her salary went to paying Y. H.’s debt, and the family was in need of money. She wrote to her relatives abroad but only one responded—her brother Wally who sent $8,000 as repayment on a loan she had once given him.92 She was later separated from her two children (known as Loly and Deedums in the Kwok family) and sent to Chongming Island (崇明島 M: chóngmíng dǎo) outside Shanghai, where she peeled frozen cabbages in a factory. One assignment was to peel the outer layer off white cabbages that had come from the north—they were to be exported to Hong Kong, and the frozen leaves had to be removed before they were packed again. Daisy later recalled, ‘My fingers would be frozen stiff by the time I finished the day’s work. That caused the arthritis I suffer from now. My fingers are disfigured and I can’t grasp things tightly.’93 Daisy’s friend Tess Johnston told me, ‘You know, she really suffered a great deal. She was never imprisoned but was often segregated . . . So she had a pretty hard time of it.’94 After 1949 media coverage of Communist China in the United States and Australia warned of ‘Mass Red Killings in China’ and ‘Red Ransom Plots’ in which overseas Chinese were imprisoned and forced to write to their families in the West for money. Such reports played on the worst fears of separated families.95 Many family members in the West were suspicious of letters coming out of China purportedly written by their relatives. While Cold War coverage of China in Australia was undoubtedly coloured by unhelpful and anti-Communist editorializing, Chinese Australian families had reason to be sceptical. Since the early 1950s the Communist government had been running a propaganda campaign, encouraging and sometimes forcing those with family overseas to write asking for remittances to be reinstated to assist in boosting China’s economy.96 Such ransom letters typically began with family members describing illness, poverty, and other non-political forms of privation and ended with an urgent plea for assistance. In some instances, the

90. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 143. 91. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 143. 92. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 143. 93. Chen Danyan, ‘Secrets of a Survivor in the Face of Adversity’, Xinhua News, November 20, 1996. See also ‘Daisy Refused to Wilt as Old Shanghai Changed’, Deseret News, July 26, 1996. 94. Tess Johnston, interview with author. 95. ‘Thousands Slain in China’s Red Purge’, Sydney Morning Herald, August 20, 1951, p. 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla. news-article18218110. 96. Peterson, Overseas Chinese in the People’s Republic of China, pp. 31–35.

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letters were so distressing that their recipients were reportedly driven to suicide.97 The Kwok family diaspora would certainly have been aware of these occurrences. For Daisy Kwok, this politicization of that most intimate of transnational family rituals—letter writing—meant her pleas for assistance from family members overseas were usually met with silence. There was no help to be had from the Australian government either. The Australian Consulate in Shanghai had closed in 1951, and Australian-born Chinese with separated families were viewed as a possible ‘fifth column’ for Communism in the West.98 These views were echoed in Australian newspapers starting in the early 1950s. The Sydney Morning Herald warned readers that millions of Chinese abroad may turn out to be the ‘Herrenvolk’ of the Far East: ‘That is a strong China might try to exploit their presence in areas marked out for expansion.’99 Meanwhile, the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin, in an article entitled ‘Who Are the Overseas Chinese?’, told its readers in 1954, ‘The struggle for Asia is made up of many little struggles, and one of them is the fight for the favour of the overseas Chinese. It’s a vague, hard to understand fight, and its outcome could decide the [Communist] issue.’100 If Australians conflated individual overseas Chinese lives with the wider tensions of the Cold War world, so too did Chinese Communists in their encounters with Australian-born Chinese. In her memoir Life and Death in Shanghai, Nien Cheng, once a member of the Westernized Republican-era elite like Daisy, remembered fearing for her daughter’s safety during a Shanghai political campaign in the early 1960s and hoping that her Australian birth would protect her from criticisms over her capitalist background. ‘Wasn’t it lucky I was born in Australia rather than the United States or Britain?’ her daughter told her in the early months of the Cultural Revolution:

97. On December 14, 1951, a letter signed by over 1,100 Chinese in the United States was sent to Mao Zedong and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission accusing the People’s Republic of China of widespread violations against overseas Chinese lives and property. ‘If this is liberation’, wrote the signatories, ‘then it can only mean the annihilation of overseas Chinee families’. The Chinese Association of San Francisco eventually brought a petition condemning the PRC’s attempts to ‘extort’ money from overseas Chinese before the United Nations. See Peterson, Overseas Chinese in the People’s Republic of China, pp. 28–36. 98. Confidential Memo (Hong Kong Consulate Overwhelmed by Family Reunion Cases from Canton), April 9, 1980, ‘China – Australian Representation – Australian Consulate General in Shanghai’ (Department of Foreign Affairs, 1984–85), NAA: A1838, 3107/38/1/5 Part 3. 99. ‘Mass Red Killings in China’, Courier Mail, April 4, 1951, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article50099406. 100. ‘Who are the Overseas Chinese?’ Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton), November 26, 1954, p. 5, http://nla.gov. au/nla.news-article57346251. See also ‘Drought in Red China’, Canberra Times, May 31, 1962, p. 11, http:// nla.gov.au/nla.news-article130576663; ‘Red China Exports “Opium”’, Southern Cross (Adelaide), August 22, 1952, p. 9, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article167084695; ‘Dissension in Red China’, The World’s News, August 11, 1951, p. 11, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article139911200; ‘Mass Red Killings in China’, Courier Mail, April 4, 1951, p. 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article50099406.

Sophie Loy-Wilson 249 ‘Certainly no one can say Australia is an imperialist country.’ ‘No, most people . . . think it’s still a British colony where the people are oppressed. They don’t know that Australians are really British and only the kangaroos are the natives.’101

By the time Nien Cheng was arrested, however, after her daughter was killed by Red Guards in 1967, a different view was propagated among the revolutionaries who interrogated her about her years in Australia: ‘They thought Australia and the United States were one and the same place.’102 During the Cultural Revolution, all returned overseas Chinese, because of their historically rooted and continuing close economic, social, and personal ties abroad, were an especially conspicuous target.103 Many were denounced and at times persecuted as ‘enemies of the people’, and ‘foreign spies’; sometimes they were attacked simply for wearing Western clothing and sporting Western hairstyles.104 Daisy’s sister Pearlie was once beaten so badly by a Red Guard that she had to be hospitalized.105 Now living in Peking, Mavis Gock Ming—or rather Mavis Gock Yen after her marriage to a Communist official—was imprisoned for her foreign connections and later sent to the countryside for re-education. Mavis had considered fleeing China in 1957—her daughter, Siaoman, recounts finding a 1957 Qantas flight schedule in her possessions—but had decided to stay.106 In the early years of the Cultural Revolution numerous political meetings were organized to denounce overseas Chinese. As Daisy wrote in her memoirs: Once they held a big meeting with over a hundred people present to accuse me of my crimes. I sat in front facing the group while different people got up to talk. The things they accused me of were so fantastic that I began enjoying listening to them.107

Because Daisy and her sister Pearlie were the last members of the Kwok family remaining in China, they bore the brunt of public anger against the Wing On company as a lingering symbol of Westernized capitalism. At another meeting a colleague said that before 1949, whenever Daisy went shopping at Wing On, she would sit on a sofa with a cup of tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Meanwhile, the salesgirls paraded before her holding up new stock. If she nodded, they would wrap up whatever she wanted. She would then book it, jump into her new American 101. Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai (New York: Grove Press, 1986), p. 35. 102. Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai, p. 363. 103. Glen Peterson, ‘Socialist China and the Huaqiao: The Transition to Socialism in Rural Guangdong, 1949– 1956’, Modern China 14, vol. 3 (July 1988), pp. 309–35. 104. It was not until 1978, with the publication of a report by party official Liao Chengzhi entitled ‘We Must Pay Attention to Overseas Chinese Work’ (必須重視僑務工作 Bixu zhongshi qiaowu gongzuo), that official attitudes towards domestic overseas Chinese like Daisy Kwok softened to allow many to be released from prison or mandatory re-education camps. 105. Tess Johnston, interview with author. 106. Siaoman Horsburgh, correspondence with author, November 12, 2015. 107. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 73.

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Figure 10.4:  Daisy, Pearlie, and Bobby (Pearlie’s grandson) in Shanghai in the summer of 1967. Private Collection of Bobby Fu

car, and leave.108 Daisy wrote that such behaviour would have been impossible: ‘I would have been swept out of my family long ago.’109 Speaking English—once a mark of prestige—was now dangerous. One day over lunch at the factory, Daisy spoke to another member of the ‘capitalist class’ in English. Asked what she intended to do during the break, Daisy said she wanted to go to the Park Hotel to buy bread. Then she added, ‘You know the bread they make now is better than before Liberation in 1949.’ After the break, the teachers were unexpectedly told to wait in a small room downstairs. A roomful of people was waiting for them. The worker in charge asked all those who knew English to stand up in front, and Daisy complied. She noticed that one of the workers who had shared a table with them at lunch was also present. He fetched the two other teachers who were at the same table to the front. He came forward and told Daisy to kneel down and told her to report what she had said while working upstairs. Daisy told them in Chinese. He accused her of lying: ‘I understand English,’ he said ‘didn’t you say the word “Park”? You intended going to the park at lunchtime. Who were you going to meet there? And for what?’ I told him I was going to the park hotel, not the park, ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘you claimed that the bread after liberation was no good. Do you deny that you mentioned the park 108. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 74. 109. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 74.

Sophie Loy-Wilson 251 and bread?’ That shows how things could be twisted. After a few more taps on the head with the broom the meeting was adjourned.110

Teaching English: 1980s–1990s By the late 1970s the rapprochement between China and the United States, and the end of the Cultural Revolution, gave way to a new period in China’s relations with the wider world. Embassies and consulates slowly reopened, and, along with the renewal of diplomatic ties, the importation of scientific and technical materials in the English language created a demand for English teachers.111 ‘Returned overseas Chinese’ like Daisy and Mavis found their English skills in demand once again. Nien Cheng remembered that English teachers were so highly sought after in the early 1980s that she was able to use her own language skills to barter on the black market: English lessons for medical care. Daisy attracted a dedicated circle of students and it was perhaps her desire to practice and polish her own spoken English that led her to socialize frequently in foreign diplomatic circles. At some point in the early 1980s, Daisy made contact with the newly reopened Australian Consulate in Shanghai.112 When Evan Williams, an official at the Australian Consulate in Shanghai, encountered her in early 1986 he remembered a ‘slight women with grey hair who told fantastic stories’.113 Tess Johnston recalls meeting Daisy at the consulate happy hour: People seemed to cluster around her and I said, ‘Who is that?’ and people said, ‘That’s Daisy Kwok.’ And they said, ‘Oh, she is from the Wing On Department Store fortune, and she never left China.’114

At a time when the foreign population of Shanghai was tiny—around 150 people, most of whom were Japanese—Daisy was, in Evan Williams words, ‘mixing with us at a time when it wouldn’t have gone unnoticed’.115 At the consulate Daisy worked as a teacher and translator. She was one of a select group of teachers circulating in diplomatic circles at the time. Some would impart their knowledge of pre1949 Shanghai during lessons. One teacher was famous for teaching his students Chinese and tap dancing, having worked as a jazz musician before 1949. Above all, these individuals were useful reminders of China’s pre-1949 connections with the

110. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 23. 111. Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai, p. 35. 112. Murray Mclean, correspondence with author, December 12, 2014; Evan Williams, correspondence with author, February 1, 2015. See also ‘Alistair Murray McLean – Consul General of Shanghai’ (Department of Foreign Affairs, 1989–92), NAA: A10476, TC-AMM Part 5; and ‘China – Australian Representation – Australian Consulate General in Shanghai’ (Department of Foreign Affairs, 1983–84), NAA: A1838, 3107/38/1/5 Part 2. 113. Evan Williams, phone interview with author, December 10, 2014. 114. Tess Johnston, interview with author. 115. Evan Williams, phone interview with author, December 10, 2014.

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West at a time when newly arrived diplomats were re-establishing a foreign presence in the country. Returned overseas Chinese in the People’s Republic also served as a repository of knowledge for overseas Chinese families seeking out their ancestral ties to a newly accessible mainland. By then, a younger generation of the Kwok family living abroad were frequently visiting Shanghai, and Daisy took them to see the old house in Lucerne Road.116 At that time, thirty-seven families were housed there. Tess Johnston remembered visiting the house with Daisy: ‘I asked her where the servants’ quarters were, and she said she didn’t know. I think that says a lot about her old life, and the fall she experienced after 1949.’117 Chen Danyan writes of the late 1980s and early 1990s as a time of restoration and of nostalgia for Shanghai’s more cosmopolitan Republican-era past. At a time of ‘reform and opening’ (改革開放 M: gǎigé kāifàng), foreign connections and capitalist success were celebrated once more: During the 1990s when Shanghai began to restore much of its old self, an old photo of Daisy’s family was taken in front of their large house, was featured in many publications. When Shanghai people looked at the photo they could not determine whether they had returned to the past or arrived in the future.118

Daisy died on September 25, 1998. She donated her remains to the Red Cross Society. Family members speculated that seeing her parents’ graves vandalized and eventually dug up during the Cultural Revolution motivated this decision. The Australian Consul General, Murray McLean, spoke at her funeral. Officials from the Overseas Chinese Office said they had only just learned she was a Chinese from overseas, who returned to China as a child. She had never mentioned this to them.119 * * * To return to my original question, how do we read Chinese Australian journeys to Shanghai across the long twenty-first century? Since her death, Daisy’s story has since been canonized in the field of overseas Chinese history by one of its founders, Wang Gungwu, who first heard about her as a small boy living in the Malay fishing town of Ipoh: Relatives of family friends arrived as refugees from the Japanese invasion of China [in 1937]. They had come from Shanghai where they were all born. I found them very different from the rest of us and their memories very fresh and exciting. Through the eldest of them, I met a strong longing for the home he had left. But what struck me most was his admiration for an aunt who stayed on in Shanghai.

116. Evan Williams, phone interview with author. 117. Tess Johnston, interview with author. 118. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 45. 119. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 15.

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Wang’s relatives had smuggled Daisy’s documents and photograph albums out of China. This decision would preserve Daisy’s youth in the glamorous sepia tones of interwar portraiture and her image would circulate, without her knowledge, throughout the overseas Chinese diaspora for decades to come. Her photographs acquired a revered status, relics from a lost city now out of reach to many families. After Daisy’s death, Chen Danyan would travel around the world collecting copies of the photographs to place in Daisy’s memoir. In China Daisy herself had witnessed the remainder of her photograph collection destroyed by Red Guards. She only managed to preserve one wedding photo, which she gave to Tess Johnston in the 1990s. As a young boy looking at these albums in the 1940s, Wang Gungwu found the images affecting: ‘I was shown photographs of her wedding to [my friend’s] uncle. She was radiant in a beautiful wedding gown that would have drawn sighs from brides-to-be in London and Paris.’ Wang learnt that she was born of Cantonese parents in Sydney and had grown up with English as her first language. ‘To my friend, she was the epitome of all that was modern and progressive, and symbolized the China that he wanted to see flourish. In today’s terms, she was transnational before the word was invented.’120 In the 1990s Wang Gungwu was sent a copy of Daisy’s memoirs and reflected on his reaction: ‘Every page of the book added to my understanding of how this daughter of Sydney, despite all that happened to her and her family, came to love Shanghai.’ He wrote: I was particularly moved when I read about how his aunty felt about the death of her husband in the hands of fanatical Community youth, and why she stayed on in Shanghai to dedicate herself to teaching English to another generation.121

For Wang, Daisy’s life could be firmly plotted into a grander narrative of overseas Chinese nationalism, a way to knit together a resilient tie to a Chinese homeland across distinct historical epochs. This interpretation of Daisy’s story builds upon a foundation already set by the editor of her memoirs, Chen Danyan, who spent considerable time depicting Daisy as a Chinese patriot who had chosen to stay in Shanghai while almost every other member of her wealthy family had fled.122 Viewing mobile Australians in the interwar years beyond the heuristic views of empire allows us break down monolithic readings of European empires and the place of ‘Australians’ within them. The fragments of Chinese Australian family histories collected here reveal a skein of interconnected lives, rooted simultaneously in Shanghai, Australia, and the wider world.123 These journeys can go some way to bal120. Wang Gungwu, ‘Mixing Memory and Desire: Tracking the Migrant Cycles’, in Chinese Overseas: Migration, Research and Documentation, ed. Tan Chee-Beng, Colin Storey, and Julia Zimmerman (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2007), pp. 3–22. I am grateful to Mei-fen Kuo for bringing this reference to my attention. 121. Wang, ‘Mixing Memory and Desire’, p. 19. 122. Chen, Shanghai Princess, p. 89. 123. Alison Blunt, ‘“Land of our Mothers”: Home, Identity, and Nationality for Anglo-Indians in British India, 1919–1947’, History Workshop Journal 54 (2002), pp. 49–72.

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ancing histories that emphasize the often-thwarted attempts of Chinese migrants to enter Australia, rather than Australian desires to migrate to China. As Kate Bagnall has argued, there is a need to reimagine the migratory relationship between Australia and China through models that take into account the actions of Australians ‘who maintained strong family or business connections with the Chinese communities in Australia or with those in China itself ’.124 These families were involved in many of the key moments in Australian and Chinese history, and their lives were imbricated in the move away from empire and towards Asian decolonization. Within their family histories, we can trace the melding of cultural practices, alongside the struggles of interracial marriage, the renegotiation of previous identities as regimes shifted, and the politicization of family intimacy during the treaty port era, the Cold War, the Cultural Revolution, and the period of Opening and Reform.

124. Kate Bagnall, ‘A Journey of Love: Agnes Breuer’s Sojourn in 1930s China’, in Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2008), p. 125.

Further Reading

This reading list features a selection of work that highlights the histories of women who were part of Chinese communities in Australia and New Zealand over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Austin, Denise A. ‘Women and Guangdong Native-Place Charity in Chinese Australian Pentecostalism: “The Miracle of Grace”’. In Chinese Diaspora Charity and the Cantonese Pacific, 1850–1949, edited by John Fitzgerald and Hon-ming Yip, pp.  173–92. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020. Austin, Denise A. ‘Mary Yeung: The Ordinary Life of an Extraordinary Australian Chinese Pentecostal – Part I and II’. Asian Journal Pentecostal Studies 16, no. 2 (August 2013), pp. 99–137. Bagnall, Kate. ‘Chinese Women in Colonial New South Wales: From Absence to Presence’. Australian Journal of Biography and History 3 (2020), pp. 3–20. Bagnall, Kate. ‘“To his Home at Jembaicumbene”: Women’s Cross-Cultural Encounters on a Colonial Goldfield’. In Migrant Cross-Cultural Encounters in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Jacqueline Leckie, Angela McCarthy, and Angela Wanhalla, pp.  56–75. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017. Bagnall, Kate. ‘Rewriting the History of Chinese Families in Nineteenth-Century Australia’. Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (2011), pp. 62–77. Couchman, Sophie. ‘Chang Woo Gow: The Man and the Giant’. In An Angel by the Water: Essays in Honour of Dennis Reginald O’Hoy, edited by Mike Butcher, pp.  85–101. Kensington, Victoria: Holland House Publishing, 2015. Couchman, Sophie. ‘“Oh, I Would like to See Maggie Moore Again”: Selected Women of Melbourne’s Chinatown’. In After the Rush: Regulation, Participation and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860–1940, edited by Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald, and Paul Macgregor, pp. 171–90. Melbourne: Otherland Press, 2004. Giese, Diana. Astronauts, Lost Souls & Dragons: Voices of Today’s Chinese Australians in Conversation with Diana Giese. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997. Hales, Dinah. ‘Lost Histories: Chinese-European Families of Central Western New South Wales, 1850–80’. Journal of Australian Colonial History 6 (2004), pp. 93–112. Kamp, Alanna. ‘Chinese Australian Women’s “Homemaking” and Contributions to the Family Economy in White Australia’. Australian Geographer 49, no. 1 (2018), pp. 149–65. Kuo, Mei-fen. ‘The “Invisible Work” of Women: Gender and Philanthropic Sociability in the Evolution of Early Chinese Australian Voluntary Organizations’. In Chinese Diaspora

256

Further Reading

Charity and the Cantonese Pacific, 1850–1949, edited by John Fitzgerald and Hon-ming Yip, pp. 154–72. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2020. Ip, Manying. Home Away from Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand. Auckland: New Women’s Press, 1990. Loh, Morag, and Christine Ramsay. Survival and Celebration: An Insight into the Lives of Chinese Immigrant Women, European Women Married to Chinese and Their Female Children in Australia from 1856–1986. Melbourne: self-published, 1986. Loy-Wilson, Sophie. Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017. Macgregor, Paul. ‘Dreams of Jade and Gold: Chinese Families in Australia’s History’. In Australian Family: Images and Essays, edited by Anna Epstein, pp. 25–36. Melbourne: Scribe, 1998. Martínez, Julia. ‘Chinese Women in Prostitution in the Courts of 1880s Darwin’. Northern Territory Historical Studies 30 (2019), pp. 28–42. Martínez, Julia. ‘Chinese Politics in Darwin: Interconnections between the Wah On Society and the Kuo Min Tang’. In Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, edited by Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall, pp. 240–66. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Martínez, Julia. ‘Patriotic Chinese Women: Followers of Sun Yat-sen in Darwin, Australia’. In Sun Yat-Sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution, edited by Lee Lai To and Lee Hock Guan, pp. 200–18. Singapore: ISEAS, 2011. Robb, Sandi. ‘North Queensland’s Chinese Family Landscape: 1860–1920’. PhD diss., James Cook University, 2019. Robb, Sandi. ‘Myths, Lies and Invisible Lives: European Women and Chinese Men in North Queensland 1870–1900’. Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 12 (2003), pp. 95–109. Rule, Pauline. ‘The Chinese Camps in Colonial Victoria: Their Role as Contact Zones’. In After the Rush: Regulation, Participation, and Chinese Communities in Australia, 1860– 1940, edited by Sophie Couchman, John Fitzgerald, and Paul Macgregor, pp. 119–31. Melbourne: Otherland Press, 2004. Ryan, Jan. Chinese Women and the Global Village. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2003. Ryan, Jan. ‘“She Lives with a Chinaman”: Orient-ing “White” Women in the Courts of Law’. Journal of Australian Studies 60 (1999), pp. 149–59, 215–17. Williams, Michael. Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villagers around the Pacific, 1849 to 1949. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018. Wilton, Janis. Golden Threads: The Chinese in Regional New South Wales. Armidale and Sydney: New England Regional Art Museum in association with Powerhouse Publishers, 2004. Wollacott, Angela. ‘Rose Quong Becomes Chinese: An Australian in London and New York’. Australian Historical Studies 38, no. 129, April 2007, pp. 16–31.

Contributors

Kate Bagnall is Senior Lecturer in Humanities and Coordinator of the Diploma of Family History at the University of Tasmania. Much of her research focuses on the history of women, children, and families in Australia’s early Chinese communities. Before joining the University of Tasmania in 2019, Kate was an ARC DECRA Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong. Sophie Couchman is a curator and historian with a particular interest in migration history and the role that photographs play in how we tell history. She has worked as a curator at the Chinese Museum in Melbourne and at Museums Victoria. With Kate Bagnall, she has edited Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance (Brill, 2015). Antonia Finnane is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne and a historian of China. She is the author of Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850 (Harvard Asia Center, 2004) and Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (Columbia University Press, 2008). She is currently writing a book about making clothes in Mao’s China, a project funded by the Australian Research Council. Natalie Fong is a PhD student at Griffith University. Her thesis focuses on Chinese merchants in the Northern Territory, 1880–1950. She is descended from Northern Territory matriarchs Fong Young See and Lowe Lie See. Natalie teaches English and History at Citipointe Christian College and is a sessional lecturer at Christian Heritage College. Alanna Kamp is Lecturer in Geography and Urban Studies at Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on feminist and postcolonial understandings of migrant experiences and attitudes to immigration in Australia. Central to this research is the examination of links between historical geographies of migrant experience and current community experiences and identities. Mei-fen Kuo is Lecturer of Contemporary Chinese Culture and History at Macquarie University. Her books include Making Chinese Australia: Urban Elites, Newspapers, and the Formation of Chinese Australian Identity, 1892–1912 (Monash University Press, 2013) and Unlocking the History of the Australasian Kuo Min Tang 1911–2013 (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013) with Judith Brett. Sophie Loy-Wilson is Lecturer in Australian History at the University of Sydney. She specializes in Chinese Australian history, immigration history, and the new history of capitalism. Her first book, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (Routledge) was published in 2017.

258 Contributors Paul Macgregor, historian and heritage consultant, is Secretary of the Dragon Tails Association, which organizes biennial conferences on Chinese diaspora history and heritage. He is also President of The Uncovered Past Institute, which undertakes archaeological excavations with public participation. Curator of Melbourne’s Chinese Museum from 1990 to 2005, Paul has published widely, organized conferences and exhibitions, and worked on several major research projects, all on Chinese Australian history. Julia T. Martínez is Associate Professor in History at the University of Wollongong, researching Asia-Pacific migration. Her books are Pearl Frontier (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015) with Adrian Vickers (winner of the 2016 Northern Territory History Award and the Queensland History Literary Award) and Colonialism and Male Domestic Service (Bloomsbury, 2019) with Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel, and Victoria Haskins.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to maps, tables, and photos. Abbas, K. A., 189 Abbott, Aubrey, 84 Ack Fun, Charlie, 91 Adelaide University, 211, 214 Age (newspaper), 228 Ah Chew, 163 Ah Chiew, 163. See also Timothy See Chiew Ah Chow, William, 50–51 Ah Cue, Susie, 55 Ah Gow (San She), 94 Ah Hook, 52 Ah How, Ralph, 17 Ah Kee, 217–18 Ah Ket, Rose, 223, 224 Ah Ket, Toylaan, 224 Ah Ket, William (Jr), 224 Ah Ket, William (Sr), 40, 185, 224 Ah Kin Howqua, 215 Ah Ngoi (Mrs Chin Yam Yan), 86, 94, 101, 206 Ah Poo, Emma Ann, 46 Ah Poo, Guoc, 46 Ah Poo, Lily, 45; wedding photography, 46; white wedding, 54 Ah Tong, Nellie, 185 Ah Whay, Mary Jane, 20 Ah Wu, 184 Ah You, 15 Ah You, Charlie, 160 Ah You, Florence, 160 Aiguo Women’s School (Shanghai, China), 36 Allan, Thomas, 170 All China Weekly, 222

Alley, Rewi, 246 Ancestry.com, 4 Anderson, Elsie, 192 Ansell, Robyn, 20 anti-Japanese war campaigns: in Australia 1938, 181–83; in Australia 1943–1945, 175, 193, 198; US and Australia, 176–77 ANZAC Society, 243 Appoo, Ruby, 57 Argus (newspaper), 228 Argyrou, Vassos, 54 Asian Migration to Australia (Yarwood), 130 Astronauts, Lost Souls and Dragons (Giese), 121 Austin, Denise, 18, 186 Australasian Council for Civil Liberties, 225 Australasian Council for Women in War Work, 225 Australia: anti-Chinese legislation, 13–14; anti-Japanese war campaign 1938, 181–83; anti-Japanese war campaign 1943–1945, 175, 193, 198; Cantonese usage, 4; Chinese goodwill ambassador tour 1938, 181–83; Chinese migration female-to-male ratio, 9–10; Chinese prostitutes, 13–14; importance as site of historical Chinese migration, 1; reissues Daisy Kwok passport, 234; role of Chinese women in pro-China campaigns, 176–77; union support for anti-Japanese war campaign, 195,

260 Index 198; use of orientalism in pro-China campaigns, 202 Australia-China Co-operation Association (ACCA), 227 Australian-born Chinese, 110; first woman elected to Kuomintang, 193; higher education, 205–6, 213; migration to Hong Kong and Shanghai, 231, 233, 244, 245, 248; return to ancestral villages, 186; return to China for education, 208 Australian Broadcasting Commission, 188, 190 Australian Commonwealth Security Service, 197, 225 Australian Consulate (Shanghai, China), 234, 248, 251 Australian Dictionary of Biography, 17–18 Australian Journal of Politics and History (1961), 130 Australian national identity, 29, 43 Australians in Shanghai (Loy-Wilson), 18 Australian United Nations Assembly, 195 Australian Women’s Weekly, 183 Bagnall, Kate, 17, 18, 19, 22, 77, 111, 254 Batchelor, E. L., 130, 138 Bawden, Emily, 142 Beijing Teacher’s College, 187 Benham, E. C., 205 Barnard College (New York), 213 Berry, James, 139 Besange, Rev. Robert Jacquinot de, 187 Betts, Mary Helen, 140 Bew, George Kwok. See Kwok Bew, George Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (Fitzgerald), 2 Bilney, Leslie, 151 Bishop, Catherine, 4, 77 Björnsdóttir, Elka, 152, 153 Blain, Macalister, 98 Boo Jung (Mary), 51. See also Nomchong, Boo Jung (Mary) Bowman, Sarah, 76, 85, 96, 97, 101 Bow Wing, 158 Bradley, D. B., 226

Braham, Marion, 55 Braidwood and District Historical Society, 51 Brett, Judith, 175 Brisbane Courier, 204, 220 British Ministry of Information, 193 Broken Jade, 187, 188 Bullock, Gertrude, 224 Cairns Post, 220 Cai Tianming, 158 Calwell, Arthur, 98 Canada: medical missionaries, 211; merchant widows, 89 Canton Christian College, 208 Cantonese Pacific, 1, 7–15; maps, 8 Carey and Company, 94–95 Carr, Mabel Que Fook, 59 Catholic Daughters of Australia, 194 census. See population census Certificate Exempting from the Dictation Test (CEDT), 83, 95, 110, 138, 139, 150, 164 Certificate of Domicile, 83 Certificate of Exemption, 83, 139, 142 Chan, Harry, 87, 102 Chan, Henry, 17 Chan, Lilyan (née Yuen), 87 Chan, Nellie Shu Ack, 102 Chan, Sucheng, 3, 219, 221 Chan Fon (Chin Fong), 90 Chan Fon Yuen, 87, 102 Chang Woo Gow, 17 Chan Shaw, Vivian, 18 Charlie On: Draper, Tailer, Grocer (business), 96 Chen, W.P. (Weiping), 77, 95, 220 Chen Danyan, 234, 252, 253 Cheng, Nien, 248–49 Cheng Hua-Pih, 211 Chen Huanzhang, 37 Cheok Hong Cheong, 185 Cheong, Ethel Goot Ying, 78 Cheong, Jimmy Ah Yu (Cheong Yau), 103 Cheong Yau, 103 Chew, Sylvia, 67

Index 261 Chi, Lydia, 55, 56 Chiang, Harold, 220 Chiang Kai-shek, 194, 212, 240 Chiang Kai-shek, Madame, 176, 182, 193, 194 Chiew, Bill, 153, 156, 158–59, 161–62, 171 Chiew, Timothy See. See See Chiew, Timothy Chin, Albert, 73 Chin, Carol, 210 Chin, Lily (Mrs Charlie On), 70, 71, 96, 104 Chin, Lizzie Yook Lin, 103 Chin, Pauline, 78 China: 1911 Chinese Revolution, 232; Australian Consulate, 234, 248, 251; break in Australia relations 1949, 233–34; civilized/new-style wedding guidelines, 68; civilized/new-style weddings, 63–64, 74; difficulty categorizing Chinese Australians internees WWII, 230; emergence of progressive attitude towards women, 80, 190; emerging higher education for women, 36, 204; end of foot binding, 60; first female radio announcer, 181, 187; ideal family size, 160–61; Japan invasion, 181–82, 243–44, 245; marriage by proxy, 50; May Fourth Movement, 94, 210; official memorandum between Australia 1910, 146; repatriation of overseas-born for education, 208, 214, 215; repatriation of overseas-born for marriage, 123, 129; returned overseas Chinese, 149, 233, 249, 251, 252; returned overseas Chinese status, 239; role of Christian Chinese women in women’s rights, 191–92; role of missionaries in women’s education, 210, 211–12; ways women contribute to household, 88; white weddings, 74; white weddings (1920s–1930s), 62–73; women as assumed heads of households, 89; women’s move from private to public spaces, 60–61; women’s rights, 36, 60, 80, 190. See also People’s Republic of China; Shanghai

China–Australia Steamship Company, 65 China Critic, 223 Chin Ah Cheong, 86 China Patriot, 196 China Press, 189 China Relief, 202 Chin Ark Hen, 91 China Weekly Review, 223 Chinese Act 1890 (Victoria), 133–34; exemption proclamation, 135; exemptions, 134 Chinese American women, 16 Chinese Australian Herald, 28; on adapting to Western fashion and lifestyle, 31–32; critical of suffrage movement, 38; on departure of Ham Hop and Poon Gooey, 148; recognition of growing rights of women, 34; stance on gender relations, 30–31; stance on mixed marriages, 31; stance on negative Western societal traits, 36 Chinese-Australian Historical Images in Australia (CHIA) project, 179 Chinese Australians: discrimination against, 237, 238; formation of national identity narrative, 39–44; gender imbalance in community, 49; migration to Hong Kong and Shanghai, 231–32; national conference 1905, 39; notable and accomplished, 214; reimagining identity to reflect Australian narrative, 29–30; repatriation to China to marry, 123; white weddings (1890s-1920s), 53–61 Chinese Australian women: discrimination from western and Chinese societies, 242–43; diversity and multiplicity, 4–5; employment statistics 1933, 77, 79; factors for involvement in business, 79–81; forms of oppression, 6–7; independence of, 173–74; interview participants recruitment strategies, 106–7; masculinist whitewashing, 1–2; memoirs and biographical works, 19; microhistorical approach, 22, 152–53; mobility, 5–6, 122–24; participation

262 Index in community political events, 41; population, 113, 114; public function participation, 95; relationship with Indigenous Australians, 22; understudied themes, 23; ways of being involved in business, 84–88. See also mixed-race Chinese women Chinese Australian Women’s Stories (Jessie Street National Women’s Library), 20 Chinese Citizens Club, 226 Chinese Commercial Society, 92 Chinese Communist Party, 201, 231, 245 Chinese communities: endogamy practice, 123, 152, 162, 172; fundraising activities, 37; historical stereotypes, 47; less considered issues about, 172; in Northern Territory 1880s–1940s, 81–82; projection of ideal urban families, 33–34; use of business names as personal names, 184. See also overseas-born Chinese Chinese Consul General of Singapore, 237 Chinese Consul Generals, 40, 41, 185, 207, 217, 219, 222; negotiates Ham Hop extension on exemption, 143; official memorandum 1910, 146; visit to Darwin, 77 Chinese diaspora, 1, 40, 114, 244; characteristic of marriages, 160, 173; father-son structures, 157; Taishanese, 155; United States, 7, 161 Chinese Educational Mission, 210 Chinese Empire Reform Association, 65, 146; newspapers, 31; South Australia, 137; US and Canadian branches, 35 Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act 1943 (Magnuson Act), 200, 203 Chinese Immigration Restriction Act 1888 (SA), 83 The Chinese in New Zealand (Ng), 212 Chinese-language newspapers: discussion forum for role of women and gender relations, 27–28; evolution of attitudes towards free marriage, 38–39; evolution of principal function, 41–42; influence in Confucian codes of gender

relations, 28, 30; male-dominated, 30; recognition of emerging women’s roles and rights, 34–37; reportage of ‘civilized/new-style’ weddings, 63, 64; reportage of weddings, 50–52; stance on marriage, 36–39; supplementary reading material for female readers, 36; on ways to adapt to local conditions, 32–33. See also individual newspapers Chinese Medical Association, 183 Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change (McKeown), 9 Chinese Ministry of Information, 189, 193, 199 Chinese Nationalist Party. See Kuomintang Chinese Republican Revolution, 40, 60 Chinese Republic News, 28 Chinese Seamen’s Union, 226 Chinese Shanghai Club, 183 Chinese Study School, 225 Chinese Times, 28, 35–36, 38; embrace of emerging women’s roles and rights, 41; serialization of popular novels and articles, 40; supplementary reading material for female readers, 36 Chinese women: arrival in Northern Territory, 81–83; country of birth 1911–1961, 115; discriminatory immigration policies, 119–20; diversity of places of birth, 114; foot bound women contribution to household, 88, 91, 92; marginalization of voices, 131–32; population 1901–1971, 111, 112; population 1911–1971, 113; prostitution in US, 14; restrictions on entry, 109 Chinese Women’s Club, 181, 183, 187, 194 Chinese World’s News, 28 Chinese Youth Club, 226 Chin Fong (Chan Fon), 90 Chin Gong, 85 Chin June. See Chin Mee Leung (Chin June) Chin Kwong-Leung, 96 Chin Loong Pak, 91 Chin Loong Tang, 103

Index 263 Chin Mee Leung (Chin June), 86, 91, 103 Chin Mee Leung, Mrs (Wong See), 86, 89, 90, 91, 103 Chin Mon Dai, 70–71, 73 Chinn, Frank, 177–78, 179, 181 Chinn, Mavis, 196 Chinn, Ruby (Tue Gnoak), 68 Chinn, Tutoy, 57 Chin Toy, 86, 88 Chin Toy, Mrs (Granny Quong), 90 Chin Yam Yan, 86, 94, 101, 206 Chin Yam Yan, Mrs, 86, 94, 101, 206 Choi, C. Y., 5, 111, 114 Chong, Agnes, 218, 219 Chong, Alma Mary, 22, 186, 204, 211, 213–14, 217–23; advocacy for changing discriminatory practices, 221–22, 228–29; English Secretary for Minister of Foreign Affairs (Nanking), 222; English Secretary to Chinese Consul General, 217, 220; as first Chinese Arts graduate, 215, 217; marriage, 223; scholarship at University of Sydney, 219; work in China, 222–23 Chong, Dorothy, 216 Chong, Elaine, 216, 225 Chong, Elsie, 62 Chong, Emma, 66 Chong, Florence, 59 Chong, Frederick, 214 Chong, James, 218 Chong, Mary. See Chong, Alma Mary Chong, Raymond Victor, 216 Chong Shue Hing (Lena Lee), 70, 101, 206 Chow, Colin, 189, 193 Chow, Fabian, 179, 189–90, 199, 200 Chow, Mrs Fabian, 22, 177, 179, 180, 182, 195; goodwill ambassador public campaign 1938, 181–83 Chow, Madame, 177; appeal of, 202; Australian surveillance on activities, 197–200; pro-China public campaign 1943–1945, 195–97 Chow, Vivian Yung, 232, 233, 239, 243 Choy, Dorothy May, 66 Choy Hing, James, 66, 236

Christie, Michael, 84 Chun, Gloria, 227 Chung, Dorothy Ethel, 67 Chung, Helene, 19 Chung, Victoria, 211–12 Chung Gon, Ann, 243–44 Chung Pang, 55 Chung Wah Association: Perth branch, 155, 157; Perth branch founders, 156, 158, 163 Chung Wah Society, 92 Chun Kay, Judges, 56 Chun Lan. See Leung Tem Choy (Chun Lan) Chun Wah, Arthur, 207 civilized/new-style weddings: bridal fashion, 71; in China, 63–64, 74; in Darwin, 70–73, 74; in Hong Kong, 64–65, 74 Colombo Plan, 110, 114, 120, 205 Coloured Restriction Act 1896 (SA), 13, 83 Columbia University, 212 Communist Party of Australia, 217; Gwen Fong as member, 225, 229. See also Victorian Communist Party community political events: women’s limited influence, 42; women’s participation, 41 community projects, 20 concubinage, 50 Confucianism: codes for gender relations, 28, 30; newspapers challenging codes of conduct, 34–35; patriarchal family systems, 117, 121; precept of interpersonal relationships, 29; treatment of women, 85, 87 Couchman, Sophie, 19, 20, 22, 79, 100, 157, 179 Country Women’s Association, 194 credit-ticket system, 81 Crisp, George Gerald, 170 Cronin, Kathryn, 10 Daily News, 167 Daily Pictorial, 220 Dalfram (ship), 195, 198

264 Index Daphne (interview), 119 Darwin: attack by Japanese, 84; businesses owned by Chinese women, 95, 96, 97–98, 99; Chinese businesswomen, 22; Chinese prostitutes, 13–14, 17; civilized/new-style weddings, 70–73, 74; family trees, 101–4; merchant daughters, 94–99, 100; merchant patriarchs, spouses and firms, 85–87, 86; merchant widows, 89–93, 100; Prince of Siam visit 1927, 95, 206; property compensation claims, 84, 91–92, 96, 97–98, 99. See also Kuomintang (Darwin branch); Palmerston Darwin Chinese School, 206 Darwin Convent School, 94 Darwin Public School, 94 Deakin, Alfred, 147 Department of External Affairs, 130–31, 138, 139, 235 Dewsnap, J. A., 225 Dictation Test, 83, 108, 154 digitized resources: historical newspapers, 3–4; Shanghai newspapers, 187 Dilly (Aboriginal servant), 87 domestic violence, attitudes post WWI, 151, 173 Doreen (interview), 118 Dubbo, 218–19 Dubbo High School, 205, 219 Dubbo Liberal, 222 Du Qingchi, 36 East Asia Library (Stanford University), 192 Education Act 1875 (SA), 94 Edwin Verburg (business), 91 Esmore, Percy, 56 Eureka Youth League, 225, 228 Evening News, 149, 187 Examiner, 244 Factories Act 1904 (WA), 154, 158 Fairbanks, Douglas, 178, 187, 241 family, transition from brotherhood and clan to nuclear, 39–40, 43 family-related petitions, 40

Fang Cheong Loon (business), 86, 87, 88; family tree, 102 Faulkner, Claire, 21 Fay, Harry, 61, 122–23 feminist research strategies, 106, 125 Fengyabao (magazine), 37 Findlay, Edward, 147 Fine, Arthur, 207 Fine Chong, Henry, 45; wedding photography, 46; white wedding, 54 Finnane, Antonia, 6, 22, 60, 76 Fisher Labor government, 130 Fitch, Geraldine, 183 Fitzgerald, John, 2, 49, 207 Fitzgerald, Shirley, 20 Fitzpatrick, Brian, 225 Fleur-de-Lys (newsletter), 225 Foelsche, Paul, 15, 84–85 Fong, Albert, 73, 103 Fong, Edward, 103 Fong, George, 214, 225, 226 Fong, Gweneth, 5, 22, 216, 217, 223–28, 224; academic success, 224–25; political activism and speaking engagements, 228, 229; Resident Medical Officer at Royal Melbourne Hospital, 227; Victorian Communist Party membership and activities, 225–26 Fong, Hazel. See Fong, Waehlin (Eileen) Fong, Myrtle, 68, 70, 71, 72, 78, 96, 104. See also Yee, Myrtle Houng On Fong, Natalie, 22, 23 Fong, Nellie, 87, 88 Fong, Patricia, 223 Fong, Sarah, 94 Fong, Waehlin (Eileen), 223, 226, 227 Fong, William, 72, 185 Fong, William Soo Soong, 223–24 Fong Ding, 96, 98, 104 Fong Ding, Mrs (Wong See), 90, 96, 98 Fong Fook Lim. See Lim, George Fong How, 86, 87, 103 Fong How, Albert, 92 Fong How, Mrs (Young See), 86, 87, 92, 103 Fong Kam Lan. See Fong, Myrtle Fong Lim, Alec, 99

Index 265 Fong Yuen Kee (business), 92 Fong Yuen Kee Brothers and Bakers, 92 Fooke, George, 57 Fook Kee, 73 foot binding, 60, 85–86, 87, 88, 91, 92 Forest Lodge Public School, 207 Fort Street High School, 214 Free China, 193 free marriage, 37; Chinese newspapers views, 30; evolution of attitudes towards, 38–39 Free World (magazine), 189 Fu, Terence (Bobby), 238, 250 Fung, Violet (Mrs Lee Chow), 86, 92, 102 gāmsāanpòh. See ‘Gold Mountain wife’ (gāmsāanpòh) Ganter, Regina, 79 Gassin, Grace, 19 Geechoun, Rina (Rena) Muriel, 227 Geechoun, Roy, 226–27 Geechoun, Violet, 55–56 Geelong Chinese Mission, 145 Geelong Church of England Grammar School (The Hermitage), 185–86 Gee Ming Ket, 79, 222 gender: Confucian codes, 28, 30–31, 44; imbalance in Chinese community, 49 Geraldton Fruit Company, 133, 137 Giese, Diana, 19, 79, 105, 121 Gillon, James, 166 Gipp, Elizabeth, 160 Gittins, Jean, 120 Gocklock, James, 237, 238–39 Gock Ming, Harry, 238 Gock Ming, Mabel, 238, 245 Gock Ming, Mavis, 208, 215, 234, 237, 238, 244–45; returns to Australia, 245; returns to China, 246; treatment during Cultural Revolution, 249. See also Gock Yen, Mavis Gock Ming, Willy, 237 Gock Yen, Mavis, 249 Golden Threads (Wilton), 20 ‘Gold Mountain guests’ (gāmsaānhaak), 136

‘Gold Mountain wife’ (gāmsāanpòh), 6, 129, 136 Gooey, Olive, 58 Goo Gan (Goo Gun), 218 Goon, Lucy Edna, 62 Goong, Dorothy, 68 Gork Ming, Edna, 211; first Chinese medical graduate, 215 Gott, Ken, 226 Government Gazette (Victoria), 134 Granny Lum Loy, 87, 103 Granny Quong, 90 From Great Grandmothers to Great Granddaughters (Loong), 19–20 Grote Street Church of Christ Chinese Mission (Adelaide), 137 Groves, Derham, 180 Guangdong Women’s School, 36 Guardian (newspaper), 225 Guerin, Bella, 211 Gum, Alice, 94 Gum Fong Sing, 94 Guoc Ah Poo, 46 Gwok-gew, Ann Murial, 232 Gwok-gew, Gwendoline Iris, 232 Hales, Dinah, 18 Ham Hop (Mrs Poon Gooey), 22, 129, 131, 141; 1900–1910, 136–37; betrothal to Poon Gooey, 132; birth of first and second babies, 140; help during and after pregnancies, 141–42; lobby to stay, 142–44; marginalization of voice, 131–32; marries Poon Gooey in Hong Kong, 139; Protestant churches support fight to stay, 143–44; return to China with family, 147–50; six-month exemption visit, 138–39. See also Poon Gooey deportation case Hammond, Martha, 51 Ham See. See Ham Hop (Mrs Poon Gooey) Hassan, Ali, 97, 101 Hassan, Allan, 97 Hassan, Connie, 72, 97, 98, 101 Hassan, Ruby, 72, 78

266 Index Hassan, Selina, 70, 79, 89, 90, 96–98, 100; 1917–1935, 78; as Kuomintang secretary, 76–77; marriage to Ali Hassan, 97; marriage to Hamdan Bin Mahomed Amid, 97; as secretary of KMT Darwin, 95 Hassan, Serapha Constance. See Hassan, Connie Helen (interview), 121 Hershatter, Gail, 190 higher education: emerging higher education for women, 205; expansion in Australia and China, 204; role of missionaries in women’s education, 210, 211–12; student exemptions in White Australia policy, 207–8. See also Colombo Plan Hill, Ernestine, 85, 88 Hing, Bertha, 56 Hing, Ella, 18 historical newspapers digitization, 3–4, 180, 187 historical resources: benefits of digital, 3–4, 150, 175, 180; difficulty locating and accessing, 3; digitization of Shanghai newspapers, 187; value of family stories, 234–35; wedding photographs as, 46–49 Holy Trinity Church, 219 Home Away from Home (Ip), 116 Hong, Clara May, 63 Hong Kong: Chinese Australians migration to, 231–32; civilized/new-style weddings, 65–67, 68, 74 Hong Kong Daily Press, 65 Hoover Institute, 235 Hop Lin Wood, 154, 159. See also Lee Wood, Lin (Lucy) Horsham Church of Christ, 137 Hotel and Café Canton (Melbourne), 185 Hotel Metropole (Sydney), 197 Houng On Yee, Charles, 68, 70, 72, 96, 97, 104 Houng On Yee, Myrtle, 78, 89, 90 Howqua Ah Kin, 215 Howqua, June, 209, 215, 216

Hoy Poy, 156 Hsia, M. Y. (Shan Min You), 207 Hsu, Madeline, 16 huaqiao, 186, 206, 245 Huck, Arthur, 120 Hu-DeHart, Evelyn, 244 Hune, Shirley, 6 Hung Men organization, 41 Immigration Restriction Act 1897 (WA), 154 Immigration Restriction Act 1901, 13–14, 49–50, 83, 98, 154; early iteration, 109; effect on Chinese migration, 108–10, 111; exemptions, 109, 138–39; migrant wives’ experiences, 119–20; Poon Gooey deportation case, 145–47; repeal 1905, 109, 138; temporary permits under, 129; ways to get around, 118–19, 125 Ina (interview), 123, 124 Indigenous Australians, excluded from education, 209 Inglis, Christine, 111, 114 International Women’s Conference 1938, 181, 182, 183 Ip, Manying, 105, 116, 123 J. & S. Chiew, 163 James, Barbara, 79 Jan, Flora Belle, 223 Jaschok, Maria, 81 Jauhari, Omar, 97, 98, 101 Jenkins, Mabel, 237 Jessop and Company, 99 Jin Yunmei, 211 John Poon Gooey. See Poon Gooey Jong Shing How, 160 Johnson, Amy, 76, 79 Johnston, Tess, 235, 247, 251, 252, 253 Jones, Paul, 186 Jones, Timothy, 79 Jorae, Wendy Rouse, 16 Jow Wick, 164 Judge, Joan, 7

Index 267 Kamp, Alanna, 19, 77, 79, 100 Kang Tongbi (Kang Tung-bi/Kang Tung Pih), 35 Kang Youwei, 35 Karrakatta Cemetery, 171 Kay, Iris, 67 Kee, Harry, 213 Kee, Jenny, 19 Kem Yee, James, 213 Kennedy, T. J. M., 141, 143 Kessler-Harris, Alice, 2–3 Ket, William Marc, 214, 216 Ke Young, Florence May, 68 Khoo, Tseen, 19, 175 Kim Linn, 17 Kim Que Chin, 85 Kin Foo, 17 King Edward Sailors’ Rest (Geelong), 145 King Koi, Norma, 20 Kirkby, Diane, 29, 32 Kirsty Walker, 235 Kong Meng, Agnes, 54–55 Koo, Wellington, 222–23 Kum Yuan, 156 Kung, Madame H. H. (Soong Eling), 193, 197 Kuo, Mei-fen, 22, 98, 175, 191, 207, 238 Kuomintang, 158, 207; Australasian Conference 1929, 70, 206; calls for female members, 205; conference 1929, 95; corruption in, 196, 201; establishment of Australian branch, 205; first Australian-born Chinese woman member, 193; Perth branch, 156; role of women in, 18 Kuomintang (Darwin branch): deputation for easing of White Australia policy, 222; endorsed-weddings, 70–71, 73, 74; facilitation of women in business, 79–80; female membership, 18, 70, 95–96, 98; Hassan as secretary, 76–77; Lee as secretary, 70, 95, 206; members, 101, 102 Kuomintang Civil Code of 1929–1930, 190–91 Kwok, Daisy, 18, 22, 186, 223

Kwok, Daisy 1909–1949, 242; attends McTyeire School, 240; as depicted in immigration documents, 235; difficulty learning Chinese, 239; family moves to Shanghai, 238–44; scrutiny of social behaviour, 241–42 Kwok, Daisy 1949–1996, 244–45, 250; assistance to Australian Consulate, 234; death, 252; impact of husband’s arrest, 246; memoir recollections, 246, 249; reasons for staying in China, 245–46; teaching and translating English 1980s–1990s, 251–54; treatment during Cultural Revolution, 247–51 Kwok, Edith M. E., 232 Kwok, Elsie, 241–42 Kwok, Kate, 237 Kwok, Leon, 237, 238 Kwok, Paul, 243 Kwok, Pearl, 240, 249, 250 Kwok, Percy, 238 Kwok, Tai Chiu, 232 Kwok, Wally, 247 Kwok Bew, Darling, 236, 238 Kwok Bew, George, 236, 237, 244; appointment to Central China Mint, 241; contributing factors for move to China, 238. See also Wing On Department Store Kwok family diaspora, 238–45, 248 Kwok Lock, 237. See also Gocklock, James Kwok Pui-lan, 191 Kwong Gang Hoong, 103. See also Fong, Edward Kwong Gang Yuen, 103. See also Fong, Albert Kwong Hai (business), 96 Kwong Lee, Jane, 208 Kwong Lee/Kwong Li (business), 157 Kwong Sau Wing. See Fong How, 103 Kwong Tung Cafe (Darwin), 95 Lai Fook, Ellen Laura, 63, 65 Laite, Julia, 180 Lake, Marilyn, 29 Lam Chik Shang, 65, 67

268 Index Landon, Carolyn, 226 Lau Gooey, Maurice, 214, 216 Lau Gooey, Melville Daymond, 216 League of Nations Union, 181 Lee, Arthur, 79 Lee, Charles Que Long, 214 Lee, John (Jahun), 55 Lee, Lena, 95, 206–7; as secretary of KMT Darwin, 70, 95, 206; suicide, 70, 206. See also Chong Shue Hing Lee, Lucy (Mrs Willie Lee), 70, 92, 96, 102 Lee, Mabel, 78 Lee, Mabel (Li Pinghua), 212–13 Lee, Selina, 76, 101. See also Hassan, Selina Lee, William, 214 Lee, William Yinson, 241, 243, 244 Lee, Willie (Leih Ging Fuk), 95, 97, 101 Lee, Willie (Leih Ying Wah), 70, 96, 102 Lee Bing Chow, 93 Lee Chow, 86, 102 Lee Chow, Mrs (Violet Fung), 86, 92–93 Lee Chun, Arthur, 213 Lee Goot Ying (Ethel), 78. See also Cheong, Ethel Goot Ying Lee Hang Gong, 70, 76, 96, 101 Lee Hang Gong, Arthur, 96–97, 101 Lee Lim, 86, 93 Lee Lim, Mrs (Moo Sue Quen), 86, 93 Lee Mui Yun, 225 Leen Hon, 15 Lee Tet, Norman Cornelius, 216 Lee Toy Kim (Granny Lum Loy), 87, 103 Lee Transport Company, 93 Lee Wah, Violet, 58, 59 Lee Wood, James, 154, 157, 163, 173 Lee Wood, James Sr (William/Peter), 154, 163, 172–73; death notice, 158; presence in community, 155–59 Lee Wood, Lin (Lucy), 159–164, 163, 166, 173–74 Lee Wood, Mabel (Dolly), 154, 163, 168, 169, 173 Lee Wood, May, 154, 158, 161, 162–63, 169, 171 Lee Wood, Ruby, 161; marriage to Leong Yen, 163–64. See also Yen, Ruby

Lee Wood, William ‘Boy,’ 154, 161, 172 Lee Yan, Eileen (interview), 117–18 Lee Yan, Fong See, 117–18 Lee Yan, Frederick, 117 Lee Yuan Sam, 185 Legion of Catholic Women, 194 Legoon, Archibald, 57 Leong, John, 216 Leong, Karen, 201 Leong Ah How, 165 Leong Hong, Maggie, 61 Leong Hop Wah, 165 Leong Lee (business), 132, 138, 142 Leong Yen, 151, 163, 163–64, 164–66; greengrocery business, 166; refused CEDT, 164 Lepp, Annie, 57 Lepp, Rosanna, 57 Leung Tem Choy (Chun Lan), 87, 103 Lew Gooey, John, 156 Lew Mon Ham, 214 Lie See (Mrs Lowe Dep), 82–83, 90, 98, 103, 104 Liew See (Lew See), 86 Life and Death in Shanghai (Cheng), 248–49 lijiao (taught manners), 28–29, 30; evolving interpretations, 31, 33–34 Lily (interview), 119 Lim, George, 96, 98, 104 Lim, Lorna (Lowe), 96, 98–99, 100 Lim, Mona Siew Gek, 216 Lim, Shirley Jennifer, 18 Lim Kee, Alice, 22, 178, 223; as actress in Shanghai, 177–80; anti-Japanese war campaign 1938, 177, 202; antiJapanese war campaign 1943–1945, 175, 177; campaign against White Australia policy, 199–200; conversion to Catholicism, 187; disappears from public view, 200–201; divorces, 189, 191; early life, education and career, 183–90; as first female radio in Shanghai, 181, 187; interviews by Security Service, 197; interviews with ABC, 188, 190; involvement with YWCA, 191–92; marriages, 187;

Index 269 pro-China public campaign 1943– 1945, 202–3; pro-China public campaign audience 1943–1945, 194–95; return to Australia 1943, 189; sons, 187, 189; stars in Broken Jade, 187, 188; work with Chinese Nationalist government, 193–94. See also Chow, Fabian (Mrs); Chow, Madame; Wu Ai-lien Lim Kee, Charles, 179, 184, 185. See also Ng Hock Lim Lim Kee, Charles (Jr), 184 Lim Kee, Queenie, 178, 184, 186, 200. See also Pon, F. T., Mrs Lim Kee, Ronald, 185 Lim Kee, William, 185 Lim Leong Chang, 225 Lim On, 58 Lim Sisters, 99 Lin, Irene, 186 Ling Huping, 16, 105, 160, 173 Ling, Ivy Elizabeth, 56 Li Pinghua (Mabel Lee), 212–13 Li Pingxiang, 37 ‘Little Miss Shanghai’ broadcast, 181 Liu, Mrs W. P., 227 Liu, William J., 188, 241 Lo Chai-tze, 196 Loh, Morag, 17, 79, 89 London School of Medicine, 211 Looey Toon Yick, 55 Lorna Lim and Sons, 99 Louey Ah Long, 184 Louey Ling Tack, 185 Louey Yow, Fannie, 62 Louie Yet Tie, Emily, 96–97, 101 Lowe, Edna, 212 Lowe, Emma Ann. See Ah Poo, Emma Ann Lowe, Lorna, 104. See also Lim, Lorna (Lowe) Lowe, Mary, 103 Lowe Dep, 98, 103, 104 Lowe Dep, Mrs (Lie See), 82–83, 90, 98, 103, 104 Lowe Kong Meng, 55 Lowe Sue Gee. See Lowe, Lorna Lowe Sue Yook. See Lowe, Mary

Lowrie, Claire, 83 Low See (Mrs Yuen Yet Hing), 86, 87, 91, 92, 96, 102 Loy-Wilson, Sophie, 18, 22, 86, 208 Lum, Ada, 186 Lum, Gordon, 186 Lum, Stephen, 137 Lum Loy, 103 Lum See (Mrs Chin Mee Leung), 86 Lyons, Ellen, 21 Lyons, Enid, 182, 196 Lyons, Joseph, 182, 196 Ma, Cecil, 187, 188, 193 Ma, Frank, 187, 188 Ma, Mabel, 78. See also Lee, Mabel Macgregor, Paul, 3, 19, 22 Mackinnon, Alison, 209 Magnuson Act (Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act 1943), 200, 203 Magnússon, Sigurdur, 152 Mah, Joe, 69 Mahlook, Alberta, 58, 59 Mahomed Amid, Hamdan bin, 97, 98 Ma Joesing, 37. See also Ma Zuxing (Mrs) Making Chinese Australia (Kuo), 22 Man Fong Lau (business), 86, 92–93; family tree, 102 Mann, John, 21 Mao Chun Gum. See Yamamoto, Mary Mao Zedong, 245 Mar, Marina, 241 marginalized groups, giving voice to, 106–7 Marina (interview), 122 Markus, Andrew, 14 marriage: characteristic of diasporic, 160; Chinese newspapers views, 30, 36–39; Confucian codes of conduct, 35; delayed transfer, 88; early Chinese Australian (1820s-1880s), 49–58; endogamy practice, 123, 152, 162, 172; newspapers encourage monogamy, 36; newspapers stance on mixed, 31; nuptial hazing, 165; by proxy, 50; repatriation of overseas-born Chinese, 123; traditional bridal attire, 51. See

270 Index also free marriage; mixed marriage; polygyny marriage nuptial rites, 50–51 Martínez, Julia, 17, 18, 22, 79, 95 Mary (interview), 121, 122 mateship, 29, 43. See also Australian national identity Ma Wing-Chan, 236 May Fourth Movement, 94, 210 Ma Ying-Piu, 236 Mayor of Darwin, 97, 99 Ma Zuxing (Mrs), 37–38 McFarlane, J. C., 198–99, 199 McGowan, Barry 20 McKeown, Adam, 9, 10, 16, 19 McLaren, John, 226 McLean, Murray, 252 McRae, Lee, 180 McTyeire School (Shanghai, China), 239, 240 media: coverage of Communist China, 247–48; portrayal of Chinese women, 220–21 medical missionaries, 210, 211–13 Mei-an, 37 Melbourne Chinese Consulate, 184 Melbourne Chinese Museum, 177 Melbourne High School, 185, 186 Melbourne University, 206, 209, 214, 217, 225; Chinese medical graduates 1938–1949, 216; first Chinese female medical graduate, 215; first female graduate, 211 Melbourne University Magazine, 226 merchant widows, 89–93, 100 M. Houng-On (business), 96 microhistorical approaches, 22, 152–53 Miers, Suzanne, 81 migrant wives, 116–20, 125; permission exemptions, 134 migration and mobility: Chinese Australians in Shanghai, 232–33; gendered nature, 106–7; illegal dealings, 109–10; migrant wives, 116–20, 125; sponsored migration, 117; student migration, 120–22; during White

Australia policy, 105, 107, 114, 116, 124–25 Millar, James, 139 Miller, Dulcie, 225 Mills, Francis George, 60 Ming Ket, Tommy, 70 Mirror (newspaper), 167 missionaries, influence in women’s higher education, 210, 211–13 Mitchell, Jack, 5, 228 mixed marriage, 31, 40, 52, 152, 243 mixed race Chinese women, 4–5; education in China, 208; population 1901–1971, 111, 112 mixed race families, 237–38, 243; works that discuss, 18–19 Moo, Mavis, 94 Moo Fatt, 91 Moo Fatt, Rose, 92 Moo Sue Quen (Mrs Lee Lim), 86, 93 Morgan, Julia, 192 Morning Bulletin, 248 Morrison, Dr George, 40 Mortimer, R. M., 226 Moss, Irene (interview), 116 Moy, Richard, 57 Mrs Yet Loong (business), 91 mui tsai. See servant girls (mui tsai) Mung, Sara, 55 Nancy (interview), 116, 124 Nanking Café, 117 Nanking Central Broadcasting Station, 222 National Library of Australia, 3, 180. See also Trove naturalization: changes in legislation, 110, 117–18; Poon Gooey’s attempts at, 133 Nelson, Elizabeth, 151 News (Adelaide), 227 New South Wales Chinese Chamber of Commerce, 65 newspapers, digitization of historical, 3–4, 180, 187 New Times, 197 New York Chinese News Services, 190 New York Morningstar Mission, 213

Index 271 New Zealand: first New Zealand-born Chinese female graduate, 212; medical missionaries, 211 New Zealand Chinese women, 116, 119–20, 123 Ng, Clarence, 70, 72 Ng, William, 68 Ng Bickleen Fong, 212 Ng Hock Lim, 178–79, 184 Ng Yook, Ivy Maude, 223 Nichol, Barbara, 179 Nikko Maru (ship), 129, 139 Ni Kwei-tseng, 194 Nomchong, Boo Jung (Mary), 51 Nomchong, Chee Dock 51 Noonan, Rodney, 19, 175 North-China Daily News, 181, 184, 187, 188, 189, 192 North China Herald, 239 Northern Standard, 85, 91 Northern Territory, 81–82; arrival of Chinese women, 81–83; Chinese population, 14; Chinese population 1880s–1940s, 81–82; Chinese women’s involvement in business, 79–81, 100; deaths of merchant patriarchs, 90–91; public perception of Chinese women, 85; ways to limit Chinese property ownership, 84 Northern Territory Education Ordinance 1917, 94 Northern Territory Times, 68, 97, 206 nuptial hazing, 165 O’Hoy, Que, 60–61 O’Hoy family, 20 Omohundro, John, 89 On, Mrs Charlie (Lily Chin), 70, 71, 96 On, Charlie Fong Fook, 96, 104 oral history and community projects, 19–21 orientalism, 220–21; use in pro-China public campaigns, 201–2 Otago University, 212 O’Toole, Ada, 170 overseas-born Chinese: support of Chinese Republican movement, 185; ways to

commemorate Republic of China, 158 Overseas Chinese Office, 252 Pack Queen, William, 137, 142 Page Act 1875 (US), 10–11 Pak Fong, Lena (Lena Lee), 94, 101 Palmerston, 84–85, 87 Palmerston and Pine Creek Railway, 15 Pang, Marion Ada Wating, 55 Pang, Marion (née Braham), 55 Paramatta High School, 213 Patricia (interview), 106, 117 Peffer, George, 7, 9 People’s Foreign Relations Association of Chungking, 193, 198 People’s Republic of China, 245; AntiRightist campaigns 1957, 246; Cultural Revolution 1960s–1970s, 247–51; returned overseas Chinese as repository of knowledge, 252; treatment of returned overseas Chinese, 249–51 Perth Women’s Service Guild, 194 Philippines, merchant widows, 89 Pickford, Mary, 178, 187 Pih, Kathleen (Cheng Hua-Pih), 211 Ping, Aubrey Moore, 213 Ping Nam, Mary Rosina Victoria, 62, 65 Ping Nam, William, 65 The Poison of Polygamy, 40 polygyny, 50 Pon. See Poon clans Pon, Joan, 200 Pon, Mrs F. T., 200 Pon Check Tan, 138, 142 Pong. See Poon clans Pon Hap, James, 133, 137 Poon, Dr Frederick S.W., 66 Poon, May, 223 Poon, Yuk Lan, 31 Poon Bros, 140, 147 Poon Choy, 137, 148 Poon clans, 132–33 Poon Gooey, 129–30, 141; 1900–1910, 137; arrival in Victoria, 133; exemption from Chinese Act, 134, 135,

272 Index 136; granted CEDT, 138–39; letter to Commissioner of Customs, 144; marries Ham Hop in Hong Kong, 139; proactive lobbying for change in antiChinese laws, 145–47; return to China with family, 147–50; return to Geelong to reestablish business, 149; work in Shanghai, 149–50 Poon Gooey, Lena Hop, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147 Poon Gooey, Queenie Hop, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147 Poon Gooey and Co., 137, 138–39 Poon Gooey deportation case, 22, 130, 142–47; newspaper interviews and reports, 148–49 Poon Lee, 137 Poon Num, Daniel, 137, 142 Poon See, 137, 142 Poon Suey Gook, 61 population, gender imbalance, 49 population census: Darwin, 15; statistical considerations, 10 population census 1850s–1860s, 9–10 population census 1861–1921, Chinese females in Australia, US, Hawaii and New Zealand, 11 population census 1861–1947, Chinese in Australia, 12 population census 1900s, Chinese in Western Australia, 160 population census 1901–1971, full and mixed-race females, 111, 112 population census 1911–1961, foreign-born females’ country of birth, 115 population census 1911–1971, Australianborn and foreign-born females, 113 population census 1921, 218 population census 1933: Chinese Australian employment statistics, 77, 79; Chinese Australian women and education, 209–10, 214 population census 1947, 210 population census 1950s, 10 Potts, Mrs J. G., 182 Poy Gum Lee, 192

Preparation Committee for the Pan-Pacific Congress, 181 Prince Albert, 53 Princess Victoria, 53 Protestant churches support Ham Hop’s fight to stay, 143–44 Prussia, Ann, 55 Prussia, Mary Ann, 55 Prussia, William, 55 qiaoxiang (hometown), 19 Quan A Sam, 156 Quark, Efigenia, 232 Quark, William Frank, 232 Queen Victoria, 53 Quei, T. K., 207 Quon, Charles, 184 Quong, Rose, 17–18, 176–77, 195, 202 Quong Lee (business), 157, 158 Quoy, Cecil Gilbert, 62, 63, 65 Quoy, Gilbert Yet Ting, 65 Quoy, Vera, 63 Radio Peking, 246 Ramsay, Christine, 17, 121 Randell, George, 155 Randell, Lucy, 155 Rasmussen, Amanda, 20 recovery history, 2–3 Red Cross Society, 252 Reid, Margaret, 211 returned overseas Chinese. See under China returned soldiers, leniency towards violent, 151 Ritz Hotel, 185. See also Hotel and Café Canton Robb, Sandi, 18, 20 Rolls, Eric, 147 Rowland, Erna, 170 Royal College of Australasian Physicians, 215 Royal Melbourne Hospital, 227–28 Rule, Pauline, 18 Ryan, Jan, 18, 77, 207 Sam, Elsie, 59

Index 273 Sam, Florence, 58 Sam Moy, 20 Samson, L. J., 225 Sandy (interview), 121, 122 San Francisco Chinese YWCA, 192 San She (Ah Gow), 94 Scotch College (Melbourne), 185 See Chiew, Timothy, 156, 162–63, 172, 173 See Chin, Phyllis Grace Jan, 66 Soo Kee, 92 See Yup Society, 51, 224 servant girls (mui tsai), 6, 83; as help for women with bound feet, 87 sewing as form of employment, 88, 100 Shanghai: Chinese Australian department stores, 238–39, 241, 243, 245, 249–50, 251; Chinese Australians in, 202, 223, 238; Chinese Australians return to Australia during war, 245; Chinese Australians support of 1911 Revolution, 232; difficulty categorizing internees during WW II, 230–32; influence on Chinese Americans in, 191–93; lack of information about Chinese Australians, 233–34. See also Kwok, Daisy Shanghai Chinese Women’s Club, 239 Shanghai Club, 243 Shanghai Fury: Australian Heroes of Revolutionary China (Thompson), 233 Shanghai International Settlement, 230, 238 Shanghai Princess: Her Survival with Pride and Dignity (Chen), 234 Shanghai University, 187 Shanghai Women’s Learning Society, 36 Shanghai YWCA, 192, 194 Shan Min You (M. Y. Hsia), 207 S. Hassan and Co., 97 Sheen, Fred, 59 Shen, Margaret, 18 Shen Yuanfang, 105 Shung Fong, 15 Shun Wah, Annette, 20 Siakew, Ada (Wing Yen), 142 Sieh King King, 35. See also Xue Jinqin (Sieh King King)

Simon, Ivan, 91 Simpson, William, 198 Sincere Department Store, 238 Sing, Queenie Ellen, 60 Sinn, Elizabeth, 16 Sleeman, John, 146 Smith, Gertrude, 142 Soong, Charles Jones, 193, 212 Soong, Elsie Lee, 181, 182, 183, 192, 197, 202 Soong Ching-ling, 212, 240 Soong Eling (Madame H. H. Kung), 193 Soong May-ling, 176, 177, 182, 193, 194, 212, 240. See also Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Soong Tzu-wen (T. V.), 227, 240 South Australia: Chinese Empire Reform Association, 137; Chinese Immigration Restriction Act 1888, 83; Coloured Immigration Restriction Act 1896, 13; Education Act 1875, 94; Married Women’s Property Act 1883/84, 90 South Australian Register, 84–85 Southport School, 214 Speculum, 228 Spliid, Edith, 243 spousal assault. See domestic violence SS Arawa, 200 SS Australind, 160 SS Coblenz, 139 SS Eastern, 136 St Albans (ship), 222 St Andrew’s College (Sydney University), 207 State Library of NSW, 188 State Library of Victoria, 187 Stella (interview), 116, 122, 123 St Michael’s Church of England School, 224 Stone, Sir Edward, 158 Storz, Moni Lai, 121 Stott and Hoare’s Business College, 219 St Patrick’s Convent of Mercy, 219 A Stranger No More (Gittins), 120 student migration, 120–22 Sue Han, 142 Sue Wah Chin (Mrs), 88

274 Index suffrage movement, 38, 154 Sumerling, Patricia, 79 Sun (newspaper), 136–37, 148 Sunday Times, 162 Sung, F. T. (Fartsang), 217, 219–20, 222 Sung, Lucy (I-Lein), 220 Sung, Mrs F. T., 219–20 Sun Hing Kee (business), 86, 91 Sun Hop Lee (business), 94–95 Sun Sun Department Store, 241 Sun Yat-sen, 80, 94, 158, 212, 232, 240 Survival and Celebration (Loh and Ramsay), 17 Swiss Consul General, 230–31 Sydney Chinese Constitutional Society, 37, 38 Sydney Chinese School, 207 Sydney Feminist Club, 194 Sydney Morning Herald, 148, 221, 248 Sydney University, 206; first Australianborn Chinese female graduate, 211, 215; first Chinese medical graduate, 213; Mary Chong scholarship, 219, 229; student exemptions during White Australia policy, 207–8 Sym Choon, Gladys, 96 Ta Kung Pao, 194, 197 Talbot, Diann, 21 Tan, Carole, 105, 221 Teare Ah Dun, 140 Thomas, Josiah, 130, 146–47 Thompson, Peter, 233 Tilanqiao Prison (Shanghai, China), 246 Tin Young, Darling, 236. See also Kwok Bew, Darling Tin Young, Kate, 237 Tizzard, George, 62 Tock, Alice, 58 Tock, Frank, 68, 69 Tock, Norma, 68, 69 Tock, Violet, 65, 67 transnational families, 19, 212, 231–33, 243–44, 253; impact of Cultural Revolution on, 247–48

transnationalism: effect on women in China, 23; historiographies, 1, 19; reimagined models, 253–54 Trinity College, 225 Trove, 3–4, 180 True Light Seminary, 208 Truth, 163, 168, 169, 170 Tseng, Mrs Tsung-chien (T. K.), 41 Tseng Tsung-chien (T. K.), 41 Tue Gnoak (Ruby Chinn), 68 Tung Wah News, 28, 30; embrace of emerging women’s roles and rights, 35; loosening Confucian codes of conduct, 34–35; stance on gender relations, 31 Tung Wah Times, 28, 39; community picnic for Emperor’s birthday 1908, 33; embrace of emerging women’s roles and rights, 37–38; list of Chinese students at Sydney University, 213–14; reportage of ‘civilized/new-style’ weddings, 63, 64, 65; reportage of Ruby Yen’s murder, 174; serialization of popular novels and articles, 37; stance on negative Western societal traits, 36–37; supplementary reading material for female readers, 36; underlying values about women’s rights, 39 Union of Australian Women, 228 United China, 243 United Chung Wah Association, 41, 42 United Kingdom, popularity of white weddings, 53–54, 73–74 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 195, 227 United States: Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act 1943, 200, 203; Chinese migration female-to-male ratio, 9, 10; Chinese prostitutes, 14, 16; Chinese YWCA branch, 192; first Chinese woman medical graduate, 211; first Chinese woman with doctoral degree, 212–13; Madame Chiang speaking tour 1943, 194, 196; missionary-inspired education, 210, 211, 212–13; Page Act 1875, 10–11; as preferred education

Index 275 destination for students, 211; role of Chinese women in pro-China campaigns, 176; Rose Quong’s cultural tour, 176–77, 195; Soong family, 193–94; Soong sisters’ Chinese campaigns, 193; use of orientalism in pro-China campaigns, 201–2; ways Chinese women make income, 161 university: first Australian-born Chinese female graduate, 204, 211; scholarships, 205. See also Colombo Plan University of Auckland, 212 University of Otago Medical School, 211 University of Queensland, 213, 214 University of Toronto, 211 urban families, 33–34 Van Chu Yang, 188 Victoria: Chinese Act 1890, 133–34; first Chinese woman in Geelong, 140; first fine-dining Chinese restaurant, 185; naturalization policies, 133; population of Chinese women in regional, 140 Victoria Hotel, 99 Victorian Communist Party, 225; Chinese branch, 226–27 Victorian Council of Churches, 148–49 Victorian Housewives Association, 225 Wah On Society, 73 Wai, Dr Arthur Tuk Woo, 66 Walsh, Hazel, 226 Wang, Martin, 227 Wang, Dr Sweding, 223 Wang Gungwu, 7, 206, 252–53 Waterside Workers, 195 Way, George, 163, 165, 168, 170, 173 Way Lee, 137 wedding photography: destruction of photos in Communist China, 253; as displays of status and wealth, 52, 53, 64; Edwardian trends, 55–58; outdoor garden settings, 56–57; as a type of historical record, 45–49; use in China and Hong Kong, 60–61; as way in securing

legitimacy, 157; as way to challenge stereotypes of Chinese Australians, 75 Weedon, Henry, 185 Wesleyan College (Macon, Georgia, USA), 193 Wesley College (Wuchang, China), 207 West Australian, 99, 156, 164, 168 Western Australia: Chinese community associations, 155, 156, 157, 158; Factories Act 1904, 154, 158; Immigration Restriction Act 1897, 154; male networking groups, 163, 172–73; Poon clan businesses, 133; population of Chinese, 160; prominent Chinese families, 156; Taishan population in, 155; workplace discrimination against Asians, 154 Western Mail, 195 Whay, Maud, 58, 59 Whay, Ruby, 62 White Australia policy: Alice Lim Kee’s campaign against, 199–200; areas of discrimination, 218, 219; categorization of Chinese Australians, 233; family-related petitions, 39–40; Mary Chong’s arguments against discriminatory practices, 221–22, 229; migration and mobility during, 105, 107, 114, 116, 124–25; student exemptions, 207–8; tracking movement of Chinese Australians, 180; ways Chinese communities resist, 32–33, 41–43, 44. See also Immigration Restriction Act 1901; Poon Gooey deportation case White China (Sleeman), 146 whitewashing process, 1–2 white weddings, 47–48; in Australia and China (1920s–1930s), 62–73; bridal fashion, 54, 55, 57–58, 62, 66–67, 71, 74; Chinese Australian (1890s–1920s), 53–61, 74–75; incorporation of photography in, 52–53; as way to display wealth, 54; World War I impact on, 59–60 Whitlam Labor government, 109 Wilks, Alfred, 197, 198, 199

276 Index Williams, Evan, 251 Williams, Michael, 19, 186 Wilmot, Chester, 188 Wilson, Roy, 151 Wilton, Janis, 19, 20, 105, 123 Wing Cheong Sing (business), 86, 91; family tree, 103 Wing Hing & Co., 237–38 Wing Jang and Co., 218, 219 Wing On & Co., 237 Wing On Department Store, 238, 241, 243, 245, 251; as symbol of Western capitalism, 249–50 Wing Sang & Co., 236, 237 Wing Sang Tong (business), 86, 93 Wing Wah Loong (business), 86, 92; family tree, 103 Wing Yen, Ada (née Siakew), 142 Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 194 Women’s Medical College, 211 Women’s Missionary Society, 211–12 women’s rights: in China, 36, 60, 80, 190; Chinese newspapers’ recognition of, 34–37; role of Christian Chinese women in promoting, 191–92; suffrage movement, 38, 154 women with bound feet, ways of being involved in business, 87, 88, 91, 92 Wong, Anna May, 18, 176, 177, 180 Wong, Mary, 156 Wong, Shiu-pun Preston, 66 Wong, Wyman Kay, 216 Wong Ang Fit, 15 Wong Chee, Ruby, 61, 122–23 (Wong) Chi/Quee Shee, 102 Wong Hee, Charles, 57 Wong Home, Jessie, 68, 69 Wong Quee, 87 Wong See (Mrs Chin Mee Leung), 86, 89, 90, 91, 103 Wong See (Mrs Fong Ding), 90, 96, 98, 104 Wong See, Mary, 58, 59 Woo, Deedums, 247 Woo, Loly, 247 Woo Yu-Hsiang (Y. H.), 245–46 Working Men’s College (now RMIT), 186

World War II, Japan attack on Darwin, 84 Woung Shee, 140 Wu, Judy, 201 Wu Ai-lien, 177, 180; articles written under, 181, 184, 192; stars in Broken Jade, 187, 188 Wu Lien-Teh, 187–88 Xue Jinqin (Sieh King King), 35 Yamamoto, Mary, 95 Yamamoto, Tsunematsu, 95 Yam Yan and Company, 86 Yarwood, A. T., 130–31, 134, 139, 145, 150 Yawata Maru, 148 Ye, Weili, 210, 212 Yean Ying & Co., Bakers, 91 Yee, Glenice, 79 Yen, Ruby, 22, 151; gravestone, 171; inquest into death, 167–71; as professional dressmaker, 167–68 Yen, Siaoman, 249 Yet Loong (business), 86, 91; family tree, 102 Yet Loong & Sons (business), 91 Yet Ting Quoy, Gilbert, 65 Yeung, Mary (nee Chen), 18, 186 Yin Lo, Evelyn, 245 Yong, C. F., 130 Yong Ching-fatt, 186 Young, Alice Yuin Ding, 232 Young, Dorothy, 68 Young, Mavis, 62 Young China League, 40–41, 41 Young Chinese League, 177 Young See (Mrs Fong How), 86, 87, 92 Young Wai, John, 236 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 181, 191–93, 220 Yu, Henry, 1, 7 Yuan Shikai, 223 Yuen, Dolly, 79, 94 Yuen, Dorothy, 70, 71, 72 Yuen, Ernest, 91 Yuen, Lilyan, 87 Yuen, Lucy (Mrs Willie Lee), 70, 92, 96, 102

Index 277 Yuen, Maude, 72 Yuen, Selina, 70, 95 Yuen See Kee, 94, 95 Yuen Yet Hing, 86, 87, 91, 96, 102 Yuen Yet Hing, Mrs (Low See), 86, 87, 91, 92 Yum, Walter, 65 Yung, Judy, 16, 105, 208 Yung, Luther James Lismore, 232, 239 Yung Kelly, Margaret, 232 Yung Liang-Hwang, 185 Yung Wing, 210