Fluid motherhood: gender, Chinese religions, and kinship maneuvers in the Buddhist women’s Southern Sea diaspora (1880–1960)

ABSTRACT

Chinese kinship, the basis and vital force of Chinese societies, is defined by patrilineal descent; thus, it has an agnatic character. The Chinese kinship system was brought to Southeast Asia by Chinese communities in their various diasporic trajectories. Its patriarchal norms have been maintained through various social institutions, under which women were generally peripheral. This article utilizes new materials garnered from fieldwork on women’s temples in Singapore to demonstrate how unmarried, widowed, and unattached Chinese women organized themselves and their networks through matricentric religious establishments. Further, they reconfigured, rebuilt, and reorganized their kinships based on religious lineages, dialect groups, and mutual interests rather than blood. Through providing empirical insights into the gendering and religionizing of Chinese kinships in Southeast Asia, this article seeks to address the persistent male bias in studies of Chinese kinship, arguing for the need to consider non-normative family units that center around women and female religious leadership. Many of the religious women concerned were associated with Buddhism in some way; therefore, this article suggests that Buddhist “families” on the ground do not necessarily comply with traditional Buddhist monastic orders. Rather, they have fluid dispositions and diversified natures. The ambivalence that characterized these local forms of Chinese Buddhism enabled women to navigate and negotiate their multiple socioreligious identities and create their own spiritual homes in male-centered Chinese diaspora communities in Southeast Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Motherhood
• kinship
• Buddhism
• Chinese religions
• vegetarian nun
• Chinese diaspora

Special terms

Table

Notes

1 Interviews are being conducted with the selected temples (based on a questionnaire) to capture the history of the temples, their development over the years, temple management, daily activities, events, female significance, and linkage with ancestral places. Each interview typically lasts 1–4 hours and is conducted by team members in Mandarin, English, or Chinese dialects (Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka, in particular) based on the respondents’ preferences. Pictorial data, information on material cultures, and oral histories are archived, in addition to text and epigraphy records, such as tombstones, ancestral tablets, plaques, and couplets are documented.

2 A temple affiliated to Feixia dong in Singapore is the prominent Feeha Cheng Seah, a vegetarian hall founded in the 1930s that primarily functions as an old age home for women.

3 Not all vegetarian nuns observe upasika precepts. Hakka and Cantonese vegetarian nuns, in particular, typically retain their sectarian characteristics, unlike Hokkien and Teochew nuns. Nonetheless, they are still broadly perceived as “Buddhist” in the local religious scene.

4 The Cantonese branch of Xiantian dadao (“Great Way of Former Heaven”) is better known as Tianxian jiao (“Sect of the Heavenly Fairies”). Tou Yuen Tong, an important vegetarian hall for the Cantonese community in Singapore, used to be located in Duxton Hill but is no longer in operation today.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was supported by a Heritage Research Grant from the National Heritage Board, Singapore under a research project titled “Mapping Female Religious Heritage in Singapore: Chinese Female Temples as Sites of Regional Socio-Cultural Linkage (Nineteenth Century to the Present)” which was conducted from 2020 to 2022. The author is the Principal Investigator of this project.

Notes on contributors

Ying Ruo Show

Show Ying Ruo is currently affiliated with Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre, supporting the Centre’s research division. She was Research Fellow (2021–2022) and Postdoctoral Fellow (2019–2021) at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.