Transnational Families, Part Two: the 19th Century family in Southern China

Greetings, thanks for coming back for your weekly Asian Studies Fix!!

Just a little housekeeping, updates on this column type news first. Things are getting busier here, but I remain committed to a weekly Asian studies, Chinese history, Chinese American history column, and it will undoubtedly contain a great many columns relating to Chinese in the old American west and during the California gold rush era. I have, however, returned to ambulance work and taken a part time position as an Emergency Medical Technician. Between the actual work, commuting, and keeping up credentials and skills and such this will probably take 20 hours a week, possibly a bit more. For the record, I enjoy ambulance work, more properly known as EMS or Emergency Medical Services or sometimes Preshospital Care. I think it’s important to be doing something that helps people, and EMS involves helping people in a very direct, hands-on. morally unambiguous way. And the challenges are very real, and I like that too, and there’s always something new to learn, which I appreciate. And, honestly, it is a wonderful feeling to come upon a situation where people are scared, confused, and running away or, worse, running in several directions at once, and enter the situation, take control, and start fixing things or at least moving them in the best possible direction. And, quite frankly, I make more money doing that than I do writing this column, which is kind of a side issue as I remain committed to both activities, but also very true. So I am glad I have returned to EMS.

But as for this column, with this new position, plus an uninteresting but financially necessary day job, plus dieting, exercising, working on losing weight, and the decluttering that I have spoken of in past columns, I am not sure how much time I will have to write the political and other columns. Honestly, my guess is that something will happen and happen frequently, it’s the nature of this regime, it will piss me off, I will get the idea that I am seeing aspects of it that others are not, and I will stay up to some crazy hour writing a political column ranting about it. So they will probably continue. But if a week goes by and I miss one, just check out my past columns instead. Really, there are many great links there, and you can gain great insights from the people I recommend. Really, this whole “saving democracy” thing requires not just each of us doing our part but research from several venues, and while I am glad to be a small part of your research and sharing my insight into what’s happening if I can, this whole doing what needs to be done also requires asserting your own individuality without me. I have done my best to provide resources where I could, but for the moment use those resources, fly be free, as the links from last week might have taught you, determine where you stand in the pillars of society and use your various positions and skills to do what you can to change things. It took hundreds of thousands of people to defeat Hitler and they each did just one small part. Find your part, contribute, and we will defeat the forces that wish to subvert and end American democracy. Remember, you can do this. You are an important individual. ¹

Following my current standard practice, paid subscribers get the column today. Free subscribers receive a preview but will get the full thing in ten days. Please consider a paid subscription and if you like what you are reading, and many of you obviously do or you would not be reading this, please spread the word and let people know this column exists. Thanks.

This is the Chen ( 陳 ) Clan Academy in Guangzhou today. Taken from Wikipedia. It’s one of several buildings and projects operated by people with the surname Chen to celebrate theiir unity, and their “Chen-ness.”

The image is owned by ChinaTravelSavvy.Com. They don’t endorse this column, I don’t endorse their page. Neither of us knows much about the other but it would probably be nice if we did.

Transnational Families, Part Two: the 19th Century family in Southern China.

Last week, I introduced the idea of transnational Chinese families. By this I meant, a family where different members live in different nations at the same time. For instance, in the 19th Century, a large number of men from Guangzhou in Southern China went to California or other far away places to work. Their wives generally stayed in Southern China and had no plans to follow. The men were still considered part of the family, and they were expected to send money home to support and aid their family. ²

While away, the wives and children were still part of the larger, extended family at home and many of what would in most situations be seen as a husband’s duties would be taken up by others.

As for love, romance, and emotional intimacy between the married couple, obviously it would not occur while the husband was away, but in many cases love, romance, and emotional intimacy hadn’t occurred terribly muchbeforehand either. Chinese marriages of the time were all arranged, usually by parents or elders, and often the two people being married not only didn’t have any say in the matter, they often hadn’t met beforehand.

What if one or both of them didn’t want to get married? Well, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t their decision.

Marriage was considered basically mandatory, and the purpose of marriage was not love, happiness, or personal growth. While many have stated that the purpose of such a marriage was to create a family and produce children, I’m going to split hairs here to make a point, and argue that the purpose of these marriages was not so much to create a family as it was to add to the size and increase the importance and survivability of a pre-existing family and its members.

These families were part of huge clans that spread not just throughout China, but also spread to several nations and continents. There were family name organizations not just in China but throughout the world for people who had the same common Chinese last name. ³

Homosexual, gay or lesbian? Didn’t matter. Oh such things existed, of course. Not only are they part of the human condition, but if you search around there are some interesting pieces of gay erotica produced in pre-modern Chinese times. The ones I have seen date from the Ming and graphically depict two men engaged in various homosexual acts inside a Ming dynasty mansion, probably of the sort owned by an upper class male of the time who would be the kind of person to purchase or create such a painting. But actual, legal, familial-type marriage between men of the sort depicted in such pictures, absolutely not.

In such a system, the goal was to produce a male heir to carry on the family line, and two men could not do that. Not only that, in a society where there was “men’s work” and “men’s roles and responsibilities,” and these were done by the husband, and there were “women’s roles, responsibilities, and women’s chores,” and these were done by the wife, a female, woman type person. If there were no female people present in a household, much of the work simply would not be done. ⁴

You may assume that the men in the paintings who were so enthusiastically engaged in “men only” activities, had wives on the side. (For the record, I am straight but it’s fascinating that the Chinese created gay erotica in the 15th century. Alas, substack rules don’t let me share any.)

I have never heard of actual, legal marriage between two men in pre-modern China or East Asia. I can tell people about a case in the early 19th century in the South China / Guangzhou area where a successful pirate, a male, chose a good looking teenage boy from among his captives and took him as a sex slave. As time went on, the two apparently became quite fond of each other or at least developed a good working relationship as the young man became a trusted assistant and a pirate leader himself. Eventually the older pirate adopted, not married but adopted, the younger man (he was now an adult) and made him his heir. Which is all pretty weird, especially as upon the death of his adopted father and lover, the pirate leader, this guy teamed up with his adopted father and lover’s wife, and they not only became co-leaders of the largest band of pirates on the Southern Chinese coast, but they began sleeping together too. ⁵

Which should cause us to remember the following lessons. 1) Whatever the arrangement between these three people was, this was not really a same sex legal marriage and marriages were strictly heterosexual in nature in China in pre-modern times. 2) Pirates are often very naughty people who don’t follow societal norms. and 3) History can contain some fascinating and surprising things. Even more significantly, and finally good thing this happened over 200 years ago before psychotherapy was invented because it’d be a heck of a thing to have to explain to a therapist how you were kidnapped by pirates as a teenager and this led to your sleeping with your adoptive step mom, wouldn’t it?

As for raising children that might have existed prior to the husband travelling abroad, there were lots of aunts, uncles, older brothers, and sisters (and East Asian cultures generally have a strong distinction between the older and younger siblings with the younger siblings expected to obey the older ones in return for guidance and care from the older ones)

And if this whole system sounds very strange and exotic, it was not uncommon for Chinese men to historically take jobs away from their families and even relatively short distances combined with demanding work hours meant it was impossible or impractical to do a daily commute and therefore much time was spent apart from the family.

This is a photo of the “Huang ( 黃 )Family Ancestral Shrine in Guangdong, Guangzhou China in 2019.

The Purpose of Children

Children served several purposes.

For instance, when children were added to such a family, they were seen as part of a plan to ensure that the elder members of the family were taken care of not just in their old age but even beyond. The family was seen as eternal, at least that was the hope, and not only would the younger members care for the senior and elderly members but when people died, as we all inevitably will, the surviving family members, generally speaking the younger generations would care for the graves of the deceased family members and leave offerings of the kind that were believed to be beneficial for the well being of the deceased. This was and continues to be an important part of familial duties in East Asian culture.

Now this continuing, multi-generational family was traced through the male bloodline and it was males who continued the family name. When females were born, as they often were, the plan was that should they survive to adulthood, and not suffer some horrible fate along the way, they would be transferred to become part of another family somewhere else. This was usually done for some benefit to their family of origin, and just as her new husband to be had nothing much to do with it, so, too, was she just an unwilling part of the wedding or marriage plans. ⁶

The fact that the females of the family were ultimately going to be going elsewhere as adults is one reason so many of them were either killed as infants or sold to become servant girls or sold knowingly or unknowingly to become prostitutes. In fact, and I hope to expand upon this more in a future column (ishl allah) one issue in ending the sale of human beings in East Asia in the 19th Century is that many upstanding, ethical Chinese citizens, including citizens of Hong Kong, a transnational shipping point for many products going in and out of China, including human trafficking victims and enslaved people destined for overseas Chinese communities, was the belief that allowing young girls to be sold by their families was definiteley preferable to the possible alternative of female infanticide. ⁷

Adoption

Generally speaking, when adoption occurred in this sort of family, there was a practical, pragmatic motivation for the adoption and legally there was often little difference practically, procedurally, or legally between adopting a child and purchase a child as a slove.

For instances, sometimes a family would purchase a female child for a household servant, a mui tsai. Often, for a variety of reasons, these children were resold as they aged. In other cases, they were kept as part of the family with the ultimate goal being that when she attained adulthood, she could be married off to a male family member who needed a wife. This was normally done by families that could not afford a proper dowry to obtain a wife through the normal procedures.

As for the adoption of males or young boys, this was normally done when a family was concerned that it would not be able to produce a male heir to carry on the family line and ensure or provide care for the family graves and ancestral altars.

One of the most unusual examples of this that I have heard of comes from a lecture put on by Katie Bagnell, an Austtalian social historian in her interesting lecture, “Uncovering the stories of Chinese Australian families.” In this lecture she discusses how in some families, even though a son was away in Australia working with no way to return home to Guangzhou, the family still demanded that he produce a male heir in China who would be able to maintain the family line and ensure the graves were properly tended. Thefore, the families in China in some cases went so far as to acquire a bride for their overseas son, marry the couple in abstentia with the husband not present at the wedding, and then adopt a male child, at least one, for the new couple (who, please remember, were not together as couples normally are) and raise that child in China so that technically if the child’s adopted father, and the woman’s legal husband, never came home to China, he would still have managed to fulfill the duty to carry on the family line. ⁸

Dating? Did anyone in this period date?

Basically no. Not really. Not in the western sense of dating where people seek out each other and ask them if they would like to spend time together and see if romance developed.

Women just were not supposed to do such things. Of course, I am sure some of them did, that is the way humans act, after all, but they weren’t supposed to.

As for men, well, men were supposed to marry the women their parents or elders found and assigned for them to marry. But that didn’t mean they had to be exclusive. As they say, “Well, no one said we were exclusive.” (at least they say that in the movies and TV shows. People I know don’t really talk like that.)

They could, for instance, go visit prostitutes. That was allowed. While so far, this column has mostly focused on low class prostitutes, mostly human trafficking victims, such as were found in overseas frontier areas, there were high class prostitutes in much of China.

Years ago, when I lived and taught at Fudan University in Shanghai, I read the book “Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai,” by Gail Hershatter. ( 1999, University of California Press.) While this does not, I will admit, sound like a terribly commendable thing to read, honestly, people familiar with work (and while at Fudan, I dealt with many academics and visiting scholars) were quite impressed that I had read it as it is a detailed and in-depth history of prostitution in Shanghai in pre-Communist China.

One aspect of the whole thing that stuck in mind is that when an upper class Chinese man decided to visit an upper- class prostitute, “courtesan” is probably a better term, they would request an appointment, visit, and the woman could refuse if she wished. To such men, who had had their wives chosen for them, this was one of the few forms of “dating” and romance available to them in their lives. (Obviously we are not discussing low class prostitutes who like everywhere else were often unwilling, basically enslaved women forced to do things they did not wish to do with very little romantic about the entire experience for anyone. Nor were the men, low class laborers. These patrons were men of wealth and privilege and even for a paying client to win the chance to spend time with such women was considered something earned, not merely bought, although wealth and gifts were among the tools used to win the favor of such women,)

Polygamy and taking concubines and marriage abroad.

And men in Chinese society could get married more than once if they wished and had the financial ability acquire and support a second wife. Concubines, meaning a woman who lived with a man as a companion and sexual partner, and was financially supported and cared for by that same man, but without the benefit of marriage were another option. This was not an uncommon arrangement pursued by the wealthier Chinese men abroad with a wife at home, and, compared to the alternatives, was probaby not a bad alternative compared to many others for the women who were sold into prostitution and human trafficked abroad (although it must be said that freedom would, of course, have been preferable to any of this.)

In fact, according to Katie Bagnell, the Austtalian social historian who gave the interesting lecture, “Uncovering the stories of Chinese Australian families,” there were cases of White or Aboriginal Australian women marrying Chinese men in Australia and being brought back to China when the man’s time in China was over. She also reports that there were cases where these women got to China only to discover that their husband had another wife there already and they were expected to cohabitate and live together.

Last week I mentioned that I had recently learned that Mexico passed laws prohibiting marriage in either the 19th or early 20th Century specifically prohibiting Chinese, but not other Asians, from marrying Mexican women. While I have not time to research it yet, I suspect that this was likely to have been a reason for such laws, but again have not looked into it. .

It should be mentioned that unlike many English speaking regions including much of the United States, California during this time had strict anti-miscegenation laws. ⁹ Therefore, there were few marriages in California between Whites and Chinese. I can however provide examples of marriages between Whites and Chinese in several other states including New York and Oregon among others and at least one marriage between a Chinese man and an American Indian woman (the exact state escapes me at the moment. I have a paper filed away on relations between Chinese and Native American Indians. It’s in there.) In the American South (southeast) where many Chinese men went to work in agriculture (and ofen followed very different immigration routes), it was not uncommon for them to marry African American women. ¹⁰

Conclusion

This week’s column has gotten long. Honestly, it could have been much, much longer. (I’ve got three books on the subject sitting next to me that I had been hoping to take information from.) But launch time is in half an hour and I think this is sufficient. As stated, I spent 12 and a half hours yesterday at the new job. The challenge this week is to start sooner.

Hope you learned a lot of cool stuff, and if you did please tell your friends.

To celebrate, I am going to share a cool song that is rarely heard these days but should be. (Barbara Streissand singing Laura Nyro’s song, Stoney End. It has nothing to do with Asia as near as I can tell.)

Following that, you should find a lot of cool links to things that will help make this whole seem “real” and provide perspective and context for it. Take care. See you next week if not sooner.

Resources for tracking down Chinese family Organizations

My China Roots: Introduction to Chinese Genealogy

Chinese Family History Group: Tips for Getting Started

familysearch.org -- Ancestral Hall A place for honoring ancestors and preserving family heritage.

'Please bring honor to us all!': Ancestral Halls and Southern Fujian Writer: The Lannang Archives The Lannang Archives Oct 27, 2021 4 min read Author: Yixuan Wu

Vancouver Public Library - Your Ancestral Home

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestral_shrine

Example of one such group

H.W.O.N.G. Huang Worldwide Organization Network Group

Footnotes

1. Sorry. I know I shouldn’t do this but I just can’t help myself. From Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian.”

2. While I am sure that the term is not original to Elizabeth Sinn, I first saw this term used to describe the 19th Century Chinese family of these men who were working in North America and elsewhere far away from their wives and children while facing great ethnic animosity. See Sinn, Elizabth. 2013. “Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong.” Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. It is an excellent book and this issues is adressed and adressed well in chapters 6 and 7.

3. To illustrate my point that family associations for people with the same Chinese family name are “real” and exist around the world, you can take a look at this list of the member organizations of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of Boston. You will see a few different Chinese name associations among its member organizations. Note that these names are written with the Cantonese, not Mandarin, pronunciation. (Thus the “Ng family” and not the “Wu family” although both are written as 吳 . Entirely coincidentally this is the same last name as Michelle Wu, aka 吳弭 -Wu Mi, the current Mayor of Boston. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Wu ) I

See: https://ccbaboston.org/en/about-us

4. If this subject really interests you, you might consider reading a blog post I wrote years ago: Huston ESL and International Education Friday, November 18, 2016 Saudis and explaining same sex marriage

5. Not the best sources, and the whole thing can get real confusing real fast as the pirates tended to each have multiple names and spend a lot of time hanging out with cousins and such with similiar names to their own, but start with the following:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Yi_(pirate)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheung_Po_Tsai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Yi_Sao

6. If you get a chance, it’s worth seeing a ludicrous Hong Kong action film from 1978 known (mostly but not always as it was released under several names) as “Heroes of the East.”

Set in the 1930s before many Chinese were able to select their own spouses, the film starts with a young man hiding in bed and pretending to be ill on his wedding day as he is scared to meet his new wife for the first time and is quite concerned that she might be very ugly. His father, you see, has arranged for him to marry a woman from Japan, where the father has business, and they have never met.

Fortunately, she turns out to be good looking. Unfortunately, she is quite talented at several Japanese martial arts while he, instead, is quite skilled in Chinese kung fu and several Chinese martial arts. This leads to all kinds of complications as not only do he and his wife have to engage in martial arts contests to see which nations arts are superior, but the noise is making the neighbors and servants fear that he beats his wife, and no one approves of a man who beats his wife. Very important movie with many valuable lessons to be gained through careful study. I am particularly fond of the scene where she booby traps their house to demonstrate the value of ninjitsu.

See ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroes_of_the_East

7. Again, see Sinn, see chapter six, and the section on prostitution and shipping of prostitutes to China.

8. I believe the statement is somewhere around the 20 minute point in the lecture.
See “Uncovering the stories of Chinese Australian families” hosted by Libraries Tasmania, Australia, and put on by Kate Bagnall. The lecture was put on YouTube on August 9, 2023. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcw88O04JTw

”Kate Bagnall is a social historian whose research explores histories of migration, citizenship, family and the law, and one of her particular interests is the women, children and families of Australia’s early Chinese communities. Kate is Senior Lecturer in Humanities and coordinator of the Family History program at the University of Tasmania.”

9. This is my column, I write it, and I have my quirks. One of them is that I cannot use the word “miscegenation” without wanting to share this song. Often I can fight down that urge, but not today.

10. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States