Peranakan Singaporeans, what are your views on Lee Kuan Yew as
baba?
Do you feel proud of him?
I have always admired my father
for his dedication to Singapore, his determination to do what is
right, his courage in standing up to foreigners who try to tell us
how to run our country.
But my father was also the eldest
son in a typical Peranakan family. He cannot
even crack a soft-boiled egg - such things not being expected of men,
especially eldest sons, in Peranakan
families...
http://hongjun.blogspot.com/2009/04/dr-lee-wei-ling
A significant category of Chinese, although one not listed in
the census reports, were the Baba Chinese or
Straits Chinese.
They were Chinese who after long residence in Southeast Asia
spoke Malay or English as
their first language, and whose culture
contained elements from China, Southeast Asia, and sometimes Europe
as well.
An indication of the size of the Baba Chinese community was
provided by the 1980 census report that 9 percent of Chinese
families spoke English at home. Stereotypically the Baba were the
offspring of Chinese migrants and local women. In the nineteenth
century, they tended to be wealthier and better educated than the
mass of immigrants and to identify more with Singapore and
Southeast Asia than with China.
In spite of their language, the Baba considered themselves
Chinese, retained Chinese kinship patterns and religion, and even
when speaking Malay used a distinct Baba dialect of Malay with many
loan words from Hokkien.
Never a large proportion of
Singapore's Chinese population, in the late
nineteenth century they took advantage of opportunities for
education in English and promoted themselves as loyal
to Britain.
In Singapore, many Baba
families spoke English as a first language and produced many of the
leaders of Singapore's independent political movements,
including Lee Kuan Yew.
Although the Baba, in a sense, provided the model for the
current Singaporean who is fluent in English and considers
Singapore as home, the community fragmented in the early twentieth
century as Chinese nationalism spread.
After the 1920s its members gained no advantage, economic or
political, from distinguishing themselves from the rest of the
Chinese population and tended increasingly to become Chinese again,
often learning to speak Chinese as adults. In the 1980s, Baba
culture survived largely in the form of a well-known cuisine that
mixed Chinese and Malay ingredients and in some families who
continued to use English as the language of the home...
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+sg0044)
