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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Shangas, post: 9790575, member: 360&quot;]Finding reliable information about the Peranakan is very difficult because there&#039;s not much out there, partially because the Peranakan lived in such a small part of the world, mostly Java, Sumatra, Singapore and the Malay-Thai Peninsula. </p><p><br /></p><p>Ethnically, we&#039;re Chinese. The Peranakan all have Chinese surnames - Lim, Chin, Chi, Cheong, Fu, etc etc. But we share very little with actual mainland Chinese. </p><p><br /></p><p>The food, the clothing, the jewelry, crafts, art, architecture, etc, are all totally different. </p><p><br /></p><p>There are some similarities, like cultural practices / customs, but that&#039;s about it. </p><p><br /></p><p>Historically, at least, the Peranakan didn&#039;t even speak Chinese. </p><p><br /></p><p>The Peranakan would speak their ancient dialects - Hokkien, or Cantonese (because their ancestors came from southern China where these dialects were born), they would speak English (my grandmother and her siblings were all English-educated), or they spoke a Patois/Creole language known as &quot;Baba-Malay&quot;. </p><p><br /></p><p>My grandmother could all of that and more. She was a freak of nature for having only five years&#039; elementary school education back in the early 1920s. She could speak, read, and write English, Chinese, Cantonese, Hokkien, Baba-Malay, and Tamil - fluently. I have no idea how the hell she managed it. </p><p><br /></p><p>Yes there were similarities, but there were also lots of differences. </p><p><br /></p><p>For example the Peranakan never did foot-binding. </p><p><br /></p><p>They never grew-out their hair and braided queues. </p><p><br /></p><p>They never wore those fancy silk robes. Those are all Mainland Chinese customs which the Peranakan never adopted, because they all left China CENTURIES before that stuff ever started, so it was never part of their upbringing. </p><p><br /></p><p>Reliable information on Peranakan history, culture, antiques etc, used to be very hard to find - the culture is in SERIOUS danger of dying out completely. It&#039;s only been in the last few decades that people have been trying to preserve it. Nowadays there are museums, books, videos on YouTube, there&#039;s cultural associations and societies, but there used to be NOTHING, and people started panicking that it would all be lost and forgotten. </p><p><br /></p><p>Back in 2005, there was even a historical TV drama produced about a wealthy Peranakan family in the 1930s. It&#039;s set in Malacca on the west coast of Malaysia. If anybody wants to look it up, it&#039;s called &quot;The Little Nyonya&quot;. </p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s a fascinating look into how Peranakan life was lived back in the early 20th century. It&#039;s how my ancestors would&#039;ve grown up in the 1900s - 1940s. The show was a huge success, except for one thing: </p><p><br /></p><p>All the actors speak Chinese. </p><p><br /></p><p>NO Peranakan family in 1935 would speak Chinese. It just wasn&#039;t done. They spoke Malay, Hokkien, or Cantonese. Hell, if they had the cast speaking ENGLISH, that would&#039;ve been more historically accurate than speaking Chinese, because a lot of Peranakan were English-educated by then, and spoke English fluently - remember, they were subjects of the British Empire, so speaking English was kind of important.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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