For instance, Dick Lee (an internationally acclaimed Singaporean
pop star),
in a newspaper interview in 1993, said he had suffered an identity
crisis
for all of his life. "My [Nyonya] grandmother was
very British. She drank
tea at four and read Jane Austen. I thought I was a character in an
Enid
Blyton novel."
He only realised he was not English when he visited England at age
14.
In my description of the social and cultural history of the Babas,
I have
refused to apply a modern, culturally-based definition of the
Babas.
While the public focus until the electoral victory of the PAP was
clearly
on Baba politics, there began -- after a decade of silence and
the
Peranakan Association's intermittent attempts to restore some
political
weight -- a public emphasis on Baba culture.
Ironically, this switch of emphasis occurred at a time when aspects
of Baba
cultures not only began to disappear or be diluted, but they were
also
commercialised and used to promote tourism.
The new cultural definition, which necessitated a deviation from
the
equation of "Baba" with "Straits Chinese", is thus, in historical
terms,
rather recent.
This assessment is not contradicted by the justifiable assumption
that the
synonymous usage of the terms Straits Chinese, Peranakan and Baba
in
written records was trailing behind the rapidly changing social
reality of
Singapore and was becoming increasingly ambiguous.
In my interpretation, the Babas' newly-published distinctions
between
"Straits Chinese" and "Babas" along cultural lines have to be
taken
seriously when accounting for the time of their appearance and the
more
recent past, but not further back (namely, the period preceding
the
Japanese Occupation).
According to the new cultural definition, a Baba should also be
a Hokkien.
According to some purist Hokkien Babas, who regard themselves as
true-blue
Baba jati, non-Hokkien Babas are only Baba chelup.
The expression suggests that the Baba chelup are only superficially
dipped
in the paint of Babaness and are at best "nominal" Babas. Apart
from the
conceptual history until the late '50s which contradicts such a
narrow
conception of a Baba, we have a few examples of prominent
non-Hokkien
Babas.
First and
foremost, there is Hakka Baba Lee Kuan Yew (who regards
himself
as a Baba only technically). Others are the Melaka
dondang sayang singer
and serunee player Yeo Kim Swee, who is a Hainanese Baba, and
Ambassador to
Germany Walter Woon, who is a Cantonese Baba...
http://www.asiawind.com/pub/forum/fhakka/mhonarc/msg01319.html
