The babas, on the other hand, also known as Straits Chinese, were
Chinese more in name than practice. They were the descendants of
the very early Chinese immigrants (Hokkiens from the Fujian
province) to the straits settlements of Malaya (Penang, Singapore
and Malacca). They assimilated with both the local Malays and the
colonising British, whom they especially admired. The babas
developed their own culture, cuisine and language - Malay liberally
sprinkled with Hokkien.
The
sinkeh were the traders, the coolies and the shophouse owners. The
babas became the lawyers, the civil servants and the politicians;
they attended the local English-language schools run in the
tradition of the UK's public schools, and Oxford and Cambridge. If
the sinkeh received an overseas education at all, it was in Nanking
or another university in China.
Although the sinkeh dominated Singapore's
population, it was the babas who dominated public
decision-making.
In effect, a baba minority captured sinkeh
Singapore, and that minority's attitudes were more those of
Victorian England than China.
It was the babas who were the framers of
Singapore's rules and institutions. Many of Singapore's most
prominent Chinese have had baba
backgrounds.
Lee Kuan Yew, who became
prime minister of Singapore aged just 35, is the most obvious
example. He claims a Hakka heritage, although his upbringing was
that of a baba: at home, he spoke English with his parents and baba
Malay to his grandparents. "Mandarin was totally alien to me and unconnected
with my life," Lee said of his
childhood.
For Lee, Chineseness was an acquired skill and
later a political necessity. He was not
brought up as a Chinese with a focus on China, but as a baba who
looked to England. He followed the conventional career path of a
baba and went to London to study law. And so Lee Kuan Yew of
Singapore became Harry Lee of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. His
father had given him and two of his brothers English, as well as
Chinese, names.
Did Lee run Singapore as a piece of Asia mired in
Chinese ways?
No. He ran it in a manner to which a British
colonial administrator would have
aspired.
That
other great framer of Singapore's institutions, Goh Keng Swee, who
rose to become finance minister and deputy prime minister, is the
epitome of the baba elite. Goh was born in 1918 in Malacca, the
epicentre of baba culture, into a baba family. His parents were
English-oriented Chinese Methodists.
The
baba influence is now more subtle, but still there.
Singapore's current prime minister Lee Hsien
Loong has the strongest baba pedigree of any of the country's
leaders.
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/648273/
