Mediating Self and Nation: Diasporic Chinese Women in the “Singapore New Wave”
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Popular narratives of “rising China” in Southeast Asia—embodied in the figures of new Chinese migrants in the region—do not account for the messy, multidirectional effects of new migrations and the questions they pose about seemingly “settled” national cultures and identities. Focusing on the representations of Chinese migrant women in two recent films set in Singapore—Sandcastle (2010), directed by Boo Junfeng, and A Yellow Bird (2016), directed by K. Rajagopal—I foreground how Singaporean directors use the figure of the diasporic Chinese woman as a powerful heuristic into the complex dynamics of historical memory, gender, class, and race in contemporary Singapore. Not simply a foreign Other to be assimilated into the multicultural nation, the Chinese woman serves as a guide to wayward Singaporeans, uncovering histories and memories repressed by the radical ruptures of postcolonial nationalism. In this way, intra-Asian diasporas mediate renewed understandings of self and nation in Singapore while revealing the possibilities for—and limitations of—broader humanist solidarities.
Abstract
Popular narratives of “rising China” in Southeast Asia—embodied in the figures of new Chinese migrants in the region—do not account for the messy, multidirectional effects of new migrations and the questions they pose about seemingly “settled” national cultures and identities. Focusing on the representations of Chinese migrant women in two recent films set in Singapore—Sandcastle (2010), directed by Boo Junfeng, and A Yellow Bird (2016), directed by K. Rajagopal—I foreground how Singaporean directors use the figure of the diasporic Chinese woman as a powerful heuristic into the complex dynamics of historical memory, gender, class, and race in contemporary Singapore. Not simply a foreign Other to be assimilated into the multicultural nation, the Chinese woman serves as a guide to wayward Singaporeans, uncovering histories and memories repressed by the radical ruptures of postcolonial nationalism. In this way, intra-Asian diasporas mediate renewed understandings of self and nation in Singapore while revealing the possibilities for—and limitations of—broader humanist solidarities.