“Popular Nanyang”: A Kaleidoscopic Ensemble

by Leong Yee Ting (NUS, Dept. of History)

Embracing diverse cultural practices from now-extinct art forms like street story-telling, street opera and song-and-dance troupe acts to modern entertainment media such as music, film, radio and print culture, the “Popular Nanyang: Re-thinking Chinese Cultures in Post-war Singapore and Malaya/Malaysia” International Conference served up a kaleidoscopic ensemble of the Chinese cultures of the region. 1945 to the 1970s marked a time of tumultuous transformations – the redrawing of geo-political ties with China, the formation of national identities, and the remoulding of “Chinese” identities between diaspora and nationhood. Mass entertainment of that time provides a nuanced lens into the shifting dynamics of gender, class, language, and youth identities.

“Popular Nanyang” is the first concerted effort at shining a light on the previously neglected role of ground-level popular and pop cultures in shaping everyday lives and the political, social, and cultural landscapes of the time. Jointly organised by the Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore, and Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre, this international conference was held in a hybrid format from 11 to 12 November 2023 and gathered twenty-four academics from Singapore, Hong Kong, United Kingdom, United States and Australia.

Nanyang Popular and Pop Culture: Nostalgia, Space and Bifurcated Worlds

Delivering the first keynote speech “Habitus of Popular and Pop Culture Consumption”, Professor Emeritus Chua Beng Huat (National University of Singapore) made an important conceptual distinction between “popular culture” and “pop culture”. The former referred to “everyday, bottom-up cultural practices of ordinary members”, whereas the latter referred to “commercially produced, profit-driven, mass entertainment products”. Prof Em Chua regaled the audience with nostalgic tales of his childhood, peppered by sociological insights about entertainment culture. For example, in the previously predominantly non-literate society of Singapore, the conception of time revolved around community rituals. The calendrical cycle revolved around festivals, most significant of which were Chinese temple celebrations. In the kampung, the day started with the arrival of hawkers, and ended when storytelling sessions in the kopitiam concluded and the shop closed for the day. With the expansion of mass education and the enforcement of the dialect ban in independent Singapore, these non-literate popular culture practices declined. Yet, Prof Em Chua incisively noted that our nostalgia may be borne out of a critique of the present, and a yearning for a different future.

The second keynote, “The ‘3Ps’ in Popular Nanyang: Park, Phonograph and Print” was delivered by Professor Yung Sai-Shing (National University of Singapore). Prof Yung similarly emphasised the importance of listening and seeing in a largely illiterate society. Amusement parks serve as a prime example of the rich entertainment cultures: As multi-ethnic, multi-lingual landscapes, they housed film theatres, cabaret halls and performances such as Chinese opera and getai. Prof Yung also introduced the audience to a diverse array of media such as tabloid news and mosquito papers featuring gossip, propaganda and eroticism, global gramophone production and radio broadcasts. Borrowing from David Harvey’s concept of time-space compression, Prof Yung reminded the audience that unprecedented forms of entertainment were taking root in post-war Malaya. For example, people did not have to go to a fixed place to enjoy radio broadcasts via a portable radio. The popular Cantonese storyteller Lee Dai Soh on Rediffusion had become a well-loved collective memory of Singaporeans.

Discussion after the two keynotes revolved around the theme of bifurcated worlds in post-war Malaya and Singapore: the entertainment cultures of the non-literate versus the literate, the cultural make-up of the Chinese-educated versus the English-educated and the spheres of street culture versus high politics.

Traversing Boundaries: Transmedia and Transcultural Pursuits of Popular Nanyang Artistes

The first panel paid tribute to the transmedia and transcultural pursuits of artistes, including the writer and Shaw Brothers manager Chua Boon Hean, Amoy-dialect film star Chong Sit Fong and itinerant gewutuan (song-and-dance troupe) artistes. Prof Yung traced the life journey of Chua Boon Hean, a Teochew wenren (literati) who migrated from China to Singapore and developed his career in the local entertainment industry, notably with Shaw Brothers. Prof Yung presented his story as a transmedia, transborder and transnational one. Chua was a prolific literary writer and played an important “gatekeeper” role in Shaw Brothers, where he decided which films were to be shown in Singapore. To adapt to the multi-lingual landscape of Singapore, he learnt English and Malay here. He wrote Malay films in Chinese and worked with an Indian director and a Malay crew to create these films. His transmedia and transcultural strategy was crucial to cementing Shaw Brothers’ success in Malay film production amid fierce competition.

Assistant Professor Yeo Min Hui (Nanyang Technological University) introduced the audience to the “Queen of Amoy-dialect Cinema”, or Chong Sit Fong, a Singapore-born artiste well-loved in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. A glamorously dressed 91-year-old Chong graced the event with her presence. Her transnational fame, as Asst Prof Yeo argued, was due to the malleability of her star image in the politically charged 1950s and 1960s. Chong was at once the embodiment of an emergent local Malayan Chinese identity, and the symbol of a Kuomintang-sanctioned Chinese nationalist identity in anti-communist “Free Asia”. Singapore-Malayan fans saw in her a personal idol to emulate, whereas fans in Taiwan, Hong Kong and other parts of Southeast Asia identified with her transnational Chinese positionality. Asst Prof Yeo argues that “Popular Nanyang” is perhaps not just about the oft-cited processes of localization and creolization, but also the negotiation of a complex transnational Chinese identity.

Gewutuan artistes constitute a third group of cultural agents whose experiences provoke questions about the meaning of “Nanyang” during the Cold War. Uncovering a history previously obscured by the anti-yellow culture campaign, Dr. Yap Soo Ei (National University of Singapore) shared about the evolution of gewutuan artistes – who provided live performances of music, song and dance – in Singapore and Malaya from the 1930s to 1960s. One of their survival strategies was their itinerancy. They performed at diverse sites like amusement parks, cinemas, restaurants, clubs and television. Gewutuan artistes also participated in transmedia cultural productions, such as music, film and radio. Recently recognized as a form of intangible cultural heritage by the Singapore government, gewutuan holds a close relationship with the local arts and entertainment scene.

Mediating between Popular and Elite Spheres: Print Culture and Politics

The second panel focused on print cultures and their relationship with politics in the contentious post-war period. Associate Professor Xu Lanjun (National University of Singapore) used the mosquito paper Yeh Teng Pao to explore the complex relationship between popular culture and political mobilization and analyse the merging of popular, folk and elite cultures in the Chinese-language sphere of post-war Singapore-Malaya. One of the myriad mosquito papers emerging in post-war Malaya, Yeh Teng Pao was described by Assoc Prof Xu as a “mix of red culture and yellow culture”. “Red” or leftist news praising New China and student activism were interspersed among “yellow” or sensational and scandalous tabloid, gossip, and

entertainment news. The “red” and “yellow” composition of this publication shifted in accordance with the editorial direction. In the column “Uncle Ho Jiu’s Family Letters”, bai hua (colloquial language), May Fourth traditions, Chinese vernacular traditions and folk culture were creatively integrated in a bid to communicate to a working-class and middle-class public. “Gossip” was also used strategically: firstly, to evade colonial censorship and secondly, to vernacularise and simplify political messages to a mass readership. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, decolonisation and emerging Malayan nationalism, Yeh Teng Pao provides a glimpse of “popular culture” as plural, fragmented and ironic.

Associate Professor Wang Xiaojue (Rutgers University) similarly examined Yue Ou – originally a form of Cantonese ballad – as a site of socio-cultural and political tensions. While Yue Ou was popular among the Chinese diaspora in the early twentieth century, its popularity fell from the 1940s onwards. As a blend of classical Chinese and vernacular traditions, Yue Ou evolved to become a means of communicating messages about international and local politics. In post-war Malaya, Yue Ou’s dual positionality between orality and writing made it difficult to compete with rapidly rising modern media such as radio. Yue Ou was thus transformed and transduced into other spheres such as Cantonese opera, Cantonese pop music, radio broadcast and digital media. The story of Yue Ou also illuminates tensions between May Fourth nationalism based on a single language, the localised dialect landscape in Singapore-Malaya and nation-building in a new multi-ethnic Malaya.

Associate Professor Shen Shuang (Pennsylvania State University) is also interested in the relationship between popular and elite cultures, specifically in the context of literary realism. Assoc Prof Shen argued that the worlds of popular culture and literary ecology are not polarised, or rigidly demarcated by clear boundaries. Rather, she urged the audience to consider literary realism as a form of “Nanyang popular” due to its popular appeal and emotive power. Analysing “Under the Eaves of Singapore”, a 1951 short story by Miao Xiu, Assoc Prof Shen demonstrated the influence of popular culture on the two lower-class protagonists, with the male protagonist as an active consumer of pornographic magazines and the female protagonist as a new urban migrant holding a worldview shaped by Cantonese opera.

Between Cosmopolitanism and Localisation: The State, Towkays and Cultural Consumers

Focused on audio-visual culture, the third panel threw up questions about the dominant players – the state and businessmen – in the production and circulation of pop culture. Mr. Goh Song Wei (National University of Singapore) and Ms. Wong Hei Ting (National University of Singapore) shared about the production of Sinitic popular music in 1950s and 1960s Singapore. The waves of Cantonese and Amoy pop songs unfolded against changing geopolitical contexts. For instance, following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the restriction on Chinese cultural imports prompted the development of local entertainment industries, including music recording. Both scholars also shared about the interplay between music and diverse and dynamic media forms such as getai, radio broadcasting and films.

Traversing into the world of radio broadcast, Associate Professor E.K. Tan (Stony Brook University) told the story of the rise and fall of the beloved institution Rediffusion, the first cable-transmitted radio station in Singapore. Echoing previous speakers who emphasised the importance of audio-visual entertainment in a largely illiterate society, Assoc Prof Tan urged the audience to think of the formation of the “imagined community” via radio broadcast, instead of print culture as originally conceptualised by Benedict Anderson. Through its affordability and diverse offerings in Hokkien, Cantonese and Teochew alongside Tamil, Malay, English programmes, Rediffusion built a pluralistic Sinophone community in Singapore from the 1950s to 1970s. Yet, the Singapore state’s “Speak More Mandarin, Less Dialect” policy in 1979 led to the reduction

and phasing out of Rediffusion’s dialect programmes, and the homogenisation of this pluralistic community. Despite post-independence rhetoric on multiculturalism, Singapore had ironically become more homologous with a convergence towards Mandarin as an “official” mother-tongue of Chinese people, regardless of their dialect group.

The rise of cinema culture and the Chinese towkays backing it formed the subject of the next presentation by Assistant Professor Wong Yee Tuan (New Era University College). Asst Prof Wong explained the factors behind the growth and development of cinemas in Malayan towns: Rapid urbanisation in the post-war period, a general increase in the wages of rubber tappers, factory workers and estate labourers, and a reduction in their working hours. These workers had more leisure time and spare change to indulge in cinema-going. To most Chinese towkays, establishing cinemas in Malayan towns was a form of diversification of their commercial investments. Chinese towkays were also articulating a vision of cosmopolitan modernity, as reflected in the cinemas’ architectural grandeur and names such as the Rex, the Globe, the Empire, the Royal and the Magestic.

Assistant Professor Seng Guo-Quan (National University of Singapore) spoke of the Singapore state’s push to nationalise and depoliticise Nanyang culture on television. To counter the influence of Hollywood and Hong Kong films, dramas and variety shows deemed “immoral” by local politicians, the state embarked on an attempt to localise Chinese entertainment programmes between 1968 and the mid-1970s. While the leftist Malayan wenyi musical movement had to go underground, Singaporean Chinese could now enjoy state-sanctioned, depoliticised Nanyang culture from the comforts of their home on television.

Greater Nanyang, Multi-sited Mandalas

Kicking off the second day of the conference was the keynote speech, “Popular Culture in the time of Greater Nanyang”, delivered by Professor Caroline S. Hau (Kyoto University). In this fascinating, wide-ranging talk, Prof Hau proposed reclaiming and repurposing the term “Greater Nanyang” to cover Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau (and littoral China) as hubs for the creation of “Popular Nanyang”. She argued for the significance of ethnic Chinese in the networked production, circulation and consumption of “Popular Nanyang”. Deftly weaving the personal and political, she reminisced about growing up in 1970s Binondo (Manila’s Chinatown) in the Philippines and being exposed to the likes of Chong Sit Fong films and Shaw Brothers’ dramas.

Prof Hau incisively analyses the multivalent historical, socio-cultural, economic and political nuances of “Nanyang”. Following China’s dual-nationality treaty at the 1955 Bandung Conference, ethnic Chinese were encouraged to integrate into their respective independent nation-states, and “Nanyang” had become an unpopular term by the late 1950s. Yet, Prof Hau argues that Nanyang popular culture outlived “Nanyang” as a political term, through the ongoing flows of objects, cultures and ideas across the markets and imaginary of “Greater Nanyang”. She urged the audience to think of the region as “multi-sited mandalas” with many hubs engaged in the creation and consumption of popular culture. Thought-provoking questions were raised about the continued relevance of “Greater Nanyang” today, for instance, in mobilising youth political activism via the Milk Tea Alliance.

Writing Nanyang Stories: Place, Cold War and the Chinese diaspora

Focused on print culture, the first panel of the day explored the politics of nationalism, Cold War and Chinese identity in novels and tabloid newspapers. Introducing the audience to the world of detective

fiction in 1950s to 1970s Singapore and Malaya, Assistant Professor Wei Yen (University of Hong Kong) surfaced various tensions inherent in the circulation and reception of this genre. Some detective fiction books – often associated with sensationalism – were banned during the anti-yellow culture movement in a nationalist endeavour to purify the new nation of unsavoury foreign influences. Anxieties about urban development and social inequality were also expressed in locally-produced detective fiction.

The next presentation explored the imagination of Nanyang in The Story Paper written by Liu Yichang and produced by the US Information Services as a form of anti-communist propaganda. Associate Professor Kenny K.K. Ng (Hong Kong Baptist University) used the concepts of “topophilia” – love of a place – and “topophrenia” – a feeling of uneasiness in a place – to interrogate the stories. Catering to a street-level audience that usually eschewed reading books, The Story Paper featured the lives of migrant laborers and social misfits in Nanyang. Assoc Prof Ng urged for a reading of these stories based on geopoetics and affective geography, paying close attention to the writer’s creation of place and the characters’ sense of place.

“Topophrenia” and place-mindedness also featured in the next presentation. Associate Professor Song Weijie introduced the audience to the literary and psycho-geographical links between Nanyang and the famed martial arts fiction writer Jin Yong (Louis Cha). Nanyang was the birthplace and cradle of his work Sincere Sword, which features an ahistorical fantasy on treasure hunting and human desire. Assoc Prof Song argued that Jin Yong had developed a “chivalrous psychogeography” mediated against the backdrop of the Cold War and Cultural Revolution. In the real and imagined geographies of Jin Yong’s martial arts world, knight-errants and outcasts wandered across large spaces guided by their sentiments and emotional journeys.

Building an Archive of “Popular Nanyang”: Library, Personal Collections and Life History

The next panel showcased important partners who create, preserve and maintain the archive of historical materials for scholarly research: a librarian, a collector and a former radio broadcaster. Deputy University Librarian Sim Chuin Peng (NUS Libraries) shared about the dazzling array of old magazines, script-books, films, television dramas and music albums in the library’s collection. These were sourced via various expeditions to Malaysia and generous donations from private individuals. Independent researcher Su Zhangkai passionately spoke of his journey as a local collector of popular entertainment materials. Since 1995, he had been an avid collector of old entertainment magazines, vinyl records, Teochew opera merchandise and other historical materials. Even a dance-hall matchbox, he shared, was significant; a wife could tell from the matchbox that her husband had gone to a dance-hall.

Former radio broadcaster Liang Peng shared about living through the changes in local radio broadcasting scene over the decades. Radio broadcast evolved from a means of conveying news and policies to a largely illiterate society in the 1950s and 1960s to imparting cultural awareness and knowledge to a more educated society in the 1970s and promoting beauty and household products with the commercialisation of the 1980s. Accordingly, the role of a broadcaster also transformed from one shrouded in secrecy to a public figure who even led overseas trips with fans.

Navigating Cold War Moral Politics: Writers, Intellectuals and Print Culture

Assistant Professor Jessica Tan (Lingnan University) proposed using the concept of “Cold War middlebrow” to analyse Huang Ya’s popular fiction work Wisteria. While Huang Ya – the longest serving editor of the

literary magazine Chao Foon – has been well-known as a pioneer of Malaysian Chinese modernism as, Asst Prof Tan shed light on his identity as a popular fiction writer. Published in Hong Kong but set in Malaya, Wisteria served as “a form of sentimental education for readers navigating a Manichean Cold War milieu”.

Occupying the spotlight of the next presentation was Lin Chen, famed playwright-director of the Singapore Mandarin theatre scene since the mid-twentieth century. Assistant Professor Chan Cheow Thia (National University of Singapore) shone a different light on Lin by examining his role as the editor of two lifestyle periodicals in the 1950s – Linglong (Smart) and Wenyu shenghuo (Culture and Amusement). During the anti-yellow culture movement, both publications interestingly appear to fall on opposing ends of the moral spectrum, with Smart containing sensational content and Culture and Amusement advocating for wholesome entertainment. Reframing Lin as a “cultural entrepreneur”, Asst Prof Chan surfaces the interesting tensions in his work, related to attitudes towards women, youths and the moralistic appraisal of popular culture in that milieu.

Yao Zi, a prominent editor of literary publications in 1950s Singapore, was the subject of the last presentation by Dr. Show Ying Xin (Australian National University). Amidst the moral panic and sexuality debates about “yellow culture”, Yao Zi was simultaneously attacked by contemporaries for being a “yellow writer” and targeted by colonial authorities for being too anti-colonial. Yet Yao Zi believed that being an “anti-yellow culture” writer was not about completely removing sexual scenes, but about writing popular works that depicted people’s experiences. By analysing his portrayal of women, Dr. Show demonstrates his anxieties about preserving an authentic “Chineseness” endangered by colonialism.

The Afterlives of Popular Nanyang

In the first roundtable presentation, “The Nanyang as Southeast Asia: Conflations, Losses and Traces”, Associate Professor Shelly Chan (University of California, Santa Cruz) invited the audience to consider the gains and losses in the process of equating “Nanyang” with “Southeast Asia”. While accepting that “Nanyang” may unhelpfully connote a China-centrism, Assoc Prof Chan argued persuasively that “Nanyang” is the richer and more meaningful term. “Nanyang” reminds us of the intercoastal and intercultural ways of the region and its complex legacies of colonialism and mass migration. Delivering the second roundtable presentation, “‘Chinese Affairs’ in Malaya: Colonial Knowledge Production and the Study of Chinese Culture during the Emergency”, Professor Jeremy E. Taylor (University of Notthingham) highlighted the colonial endeavour to document, analyse and define Malayan “Chinese culture”. Prof Taylor urged the audience to think of the colonial state as an important actor in the production and mediation of Nanyang popular culture. Fearful of China-minded sentiments among the ethnic Chinese during the Emergency, the British colonial state attempted to shape Chinese culture in more “acceptable” ways.

Over the course of the two-day conference, “Nanyang” and “popular culture” have been thoroughly deconstructed as complex, multivalent, and historically specific terms. As an entry point and a pair of lenses into the volatile and vibrant Chinese cultures of post-war Singapore-Malaya, they have transported us on immensely productive trajectories. In today’s era where anxieties around China-mindedness are resurfacing, “Popular Nanyang” as a historical legacy reminds us of the unique, diverse and unstable meanings of being Chinese in this part of the world.