By the way I won't exactly put LKY as peranakan, he is more the
Indon Chinese that lost most if not all the Chinese heritage.
But his daughter says that Lee Kuan Yew is peranakan.
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://roly-poly.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns
The U.S army also says that Lee Kuan Yew is peranakan.
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.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy
