Philip A. Kuhn (Chinese name: simplified Chinese: 孔飞力, 孔复礼; traditional Chinese: 孔飛力, 孔復禮; born September 9, 1933) was an American academic, sinologist and the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Emeritus, at Harvard University.
Philip A. Kuhn (孔飛力)的詳盡資料無疑餵得飽我的好奇心,這部看得出下了一輩子苦功才綜合得出的華人移民史也掃除了我的盲點。我們定當知道馬來西亞的華人不少,可沒想過菲律賓也有,更是融入當地的 mestizos。中南半島上,除了越南這種有明顯關係的,原來泰族為首的泰國甚至出過華人血統的泰王;再查一查,就連紅色高棉的頭號人物們都不乏華人後代的;再新一些的移民,我自然想起緬北孤軍。
accessible & informative, but at times dry & repetitive in the way most academic writing is. read this for my chinese migrations class. i think this text is a great starting point if one knows little about the history of chinese diasporas & would like broad strokes across eras, regions, cultures. its portrayal of singapore (in chapter 7), though, comes across as frustratingly benign – which makes me wonder if kuhn's claims elsewhere might be flawed or oversimplified.
a very interesting book about Chinese emigration in modern times. It starts around the 18th, 19th century as Chinese trade was at its apogee and giant armadas were traveling around phillipines and Malaysia and all the way to India. The emigration was connected to that trade. There were 4-5 ethnic groups that made up most of the emigres, all connected to that southern trade. It also detailed the ways that the emigres assimilated into the cultures of the places where they landed. They were mostly there for trade, and they would often form affinity groups of their own tribe, village or neighborhood of origin. Then it went into how the other societies treated them. Since this all started during colonial times (indeed the apogee of trading times), there was a lot of the western colonizers using the chinese as middlemen against the native people. Since every country had different situations, there were varying levels of antipathy towards the chinese, from the natives. The chinese were useful to the westerners both for business and to separate themselves from the natives, but they feared and hated them. The book gets into what happened to the emigres after colonialism ended, due to war. It was different everywhere. In some countries, there was a concerted effort at assimilation, in others (Thailand), it didn’t make too much of a difference because of the strength of the Thai culture, and in still others (Indonesia) there was some persecution, but all led to assimilation at different levels. It does get into the Chinese in the west, especially the US, and including Australia. The extent in Europe was lesser simply because the discrimination and barriers were extremely high. But a lot of chinese went to the US and Australia looking for gold. The westerners are very consistent in their discrimination against chinese. They fear replacement, and they are confident in their superiority. It’s quite depressing. The book ends in the modern era, up to the millennium. It discusses how the countries always feared chinese being more loyal to China, and the practicalities of that, from the perspective of the Chinese government, which has been in flux for most of the period that we are discussing. In short, although the chinese abroad have nurtured their cultural ties to their homeland, practically speaking they adapted to their adopted countries and tend to use both their china connections and their adopted country birthright to their own advantages. I guess this is what happens when you are talking about a group of people who emigrated for reasons of trade and profit! This book really went straight to my deepest fears and experiences. For one thing, I realized, not a day goes by today where I am not on some level worried and afraid of the way that Americans view the Chinese. The book just confirmed everything I’ve already experienced about westerners and their deep-seated prejudices. It seems to be truly civilizational and constant throughout history. The second thing I realized is that all of us children of asian immigrants share many of these experiences. The book discusses how emigres “decide” to stay in the place that they have landed, given that the constant feature of the chinese emigres was the ways of remaining true to their own culture. It’s often just a matter of world events. The Japanese side of our family was active in a Japanese affinity group, and remained true to their culture in many ways, even 4 generations down. But during WWII, they basically had to choose a side and staying in Hawaii must have seemed an obvious choice.
Another excellent book by Kuhn, he takes on the surprisingly tough task of knitting together a thousand different threads followed by Chinese emmigrants around the world.