Leni. FOUNDER, CREATIVE & ART DIRECTOR, BRAND MANAGER, KOTD AMBASSADOR. leni@leondumoulin.nl Lara. BRAND COMMuNICATION.
Table of contents
- Children of the Diaspora, honour your legacy. — Moments are Fleeting
- Children of the diaspora: coming home to 'my own country'?
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The Albanian diaspora is as diverse as Albanians themselves, each story framed by the individual histories of families, towns, villages and hardship. This story is mine: My parents lost their jobs in the waves of firings of Albanians that occurred in Kosovo after its autonomous status was revoked. I like to look at photos of them before they emigrated — young, hopeful and in love. I was about 5 years old when my parents went to the U. While my father repaired roofs and my mother sold coffee and donuts in Connecticut, I stayed with my grandparents in Macedonia.
I remember talking to my mother on the phone and not understanding the situation, asking if I could see her just for a few minutes. Getting on a plane, rejoining my parents and learning a new, strange language is a blank spot in my memory. My friends, the other ones born late enough to remember the war — late enough to have seen it and known it — tell stories of immigration that share the same pain of starting from scratch and watching war brew from afar.
That was when Kosovo became real to me, at least. The postwar adrenaline release came much later. Our parents stopped sending 3 percent of their income to the cause. A late bloomer, I learned about the Albanian Rebirth much later, under the instruction of the same teachers who used to teach in school-homes in the years that led up to the war, as well as during the conflict, the education of Kosovar Albanians often took place in hastily repurposed homes.
The national poet, Naim Frasheri, had spent a greater portion of his life away from Albania, dreaming about a brightly burning candle, about a sublime Albanian-ness that would pull us out of darkness. Nearly all the Great Poets lived or had studied abroad, I learned, and they paradoxically defined Albanian-ness for the rest of us. The promise of the candle that burned brightly was the secret religion of Albanians in Kosovo, following them to the first settlements in Germany and Switzerland, even as their passports declared them Yugoslavs.
I doubt when she boarded that plane from India to England she realised the impact that one move would have on the lives of so many people.
Children of the Diaspora, honour your legacy. — Moments are Fleeting
My life would be incredibly different had she not had the foresight, gumption and ability to take herself and her family of four to the west. Children of the diaspora, especially those that are first or second generation immigrants, see emigrating in a different way to others I think. The place our parents or grandparents were so well acquainted with, but to us it is a stranger.
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My grandfather was 10 at the time of the partition in India and Pakistan. The scenes from partition look much like those we see on our TV screens today of Syrians fleeing their country. My grandmother worked and studied day and night, as a teenage mother of two, to get an education and qualify as a teacher so that she could get an employment voucher to come to England. They arrived in November Chinese migrants saw the five-foot-ways as potential and actual commercial and social space — a view that contrasted sharply with the official colonial policy of open walkways for egress and access across the neighborhood.
Much of this Chinese trade took place in regionally-specific, small trading businesses located in the narrow shop-houses. Given that these businesses were often constrained to narrow quarters, space was truly at a premium: Yet the opposite is the case: Rather, such promenades were seen as central to providing unimpeded access across the city and to its spaces.
More directly, such reuse of the walkway space undid the initial ideals of Stamford Raffles and later efforts to create open spaces in the dense city. Yet in the accommodation of and resistance to this demand, the Chinese migrants also reveal another simple truth: Some accommodation was made in regards to British demands for ease of access.
Influenced by Palladian architectural norms and the expansion thereof in an ascendant Rangoon, builders in Penang and Singapore expanded the five-foot ways to allow for greater pedestrian circulation and access. In this mainly male society, for which gender balances remained highly skewed until World War II, simple nuclear families did not form the basis of societal organization.
Much of the organizational structure was based on hometowns, and dialect-based regions more widely.
For example, those from Chaozhou in Guangdong would socialize with others from that town and, more widely, who spoke the Teochew dialect; whereas those from Kaiping in Guangdong would socialize with other town natives and with Cantonese speakers more generally. Dialect, which formed a basis for identity more generally in the Chinese diaspora, thus influenced social life.
Occupational groups were also important: Thus, the five-foot way acted as a buffer space and boundary.
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It marked a space for limiting certain interactions, such as entry into the house of a restricted-membership occupational or origin-based kong. As such, these spaces were not completely public, but to an extent an extension of property or rented space. Whereas the colonial administration considered the five-foot-ways to be public space, Chinese considered the verandahs to be extensions of their own space, with public access — be it as a space for flexible use or as integrated into the building structure as they were in China.
The British considered the space to be public and subject to one form of regulations as circulatory infrastructure. The Chinese, on the other hand, viewed it as private space under their autonomous control. How did the Chinese, then, maintain the image of a public space whilst retaining private control? Architecture and the language thereof provide one clue. But such design also served to reflect a hybridity of function and use. Chinese builders adopted the architectural language of the great public spaces of Europe — the pergolas of Italy, the Palladian colonnades of Mitteleuropa — in smaller form to the five-foot way.
Commercialization and privatization continued; columns still separated properties. Shop-house-inspired public housing built by the Singapore Improvement Trust in the period around World War II — notice the narrow exteriors, columns, and re-appropriated five-foot-way. A similar dynamic grew to exist in the less common back lanes.
Children of the diaspora: coming home to 'my own country'?
Now, unlike the ubiquitous five-foot ways, back alleys, lanes, and accesses were not quite as common across the urban landscapes of Singapore and Penang. Brenda Yeoh notes that such developments often required significant destruction and reconstruction of housing stock amidst a shortage in the city; furthermore, the disruption required was simply unfeasible for every block in already-crowded cities.
It is true that public health and sanitation problems in the colonies at this time were rampant, escalated by crowded conditions. Malaria and hookworm were widely acknowledged problems; cholera outbreaks occurred frequently in both cities. Yet for Chinese migrants such areas, reminiscent of similar constructions in China, were again an opportunity for the extension of property and space, for social, economic, and cultural purposes alike. Side lanes and back alleys were not uncommon in some parts of China; see the alleys in longtang neighborhoods of Shanghai, hutong in Beijing, or back streets in the cities of Guangdong.
Commercialization occurred, and alleys came to serve as boundaries between different dialect groups and different social networks. Yet a certain separation came to exist. Five-foot ways and back lanes, then, can be understood to lie along one axis of the morphological hybridity of the spaces of Chinese migrants in Penang and Singapore.
In a sense, Chinese migrants in Penang and Singapore Anglicized these spaces while maintaining their traditions. It is my intent to turn to another point of tension in which morphological hybridity appeared: It is in these spaces — products of the colonial flowering of the two cities, housing for the migrants in question, and nexuses of the trade and social networks that enriched Singapore and Penang and tied them to the Empire and China alike — that such mixing yet again created new spaces.
Fundamentally, the shop-house is a type of row-house indigenous to the British cities of colonial Malaya: Generally, they are two or three storeys tall. Architecturally, such buildings are varied — the consequences of which I shall soon discuss. For now, it is beneficial to outline the stages of shop-house architecture. The Urban Redevelopment Authority of the Singaporean government defines five stages to the development of these structures, to one of which individual houses may align: These styles span the period between and World War II, and contain various levels and types of British and Chinese influences in their morphology.
These rows usually run the entirety of the city block. A shop-house was often truly packed to capacity. As waves of Chinese laborers, mostly single young men, poured into Penang and Singapore, housing stock was often unable to meet demand. Thus, arrangements were made within extant stock — often in shop-house form — to accommodate as many people as possible in small shop-houses.
Such is shown in the fact that the colonial census considered shop-houses single residences rather than the composition of living spaces Chinese migrants considered them to be. Disease was not a small matter for the cities of Penang and Singapore in this period. Both cities, the latter especially, were plagued by disease in the late 19th and early 20th century, resulting in significant mortality in migrant communities. I have already discussed malaria, 91 but in this case tuberculosis and cholera — as diseases spread by direct human-to-human transmission — are far more prevalent.
High rates of tuberculosis contraction and death plagued shop-houses, especially in Singapore; a lack of ventilation and close-crowding created situations in which the disease spread far more rapidly than may have been predicted.
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Such issues were highly prevalent for the Chinese migrants, who suffered from diseases and deaths and created specialized hospice districts in Singapore, and the colonial authorities who controlled them. Thus new regulations came to be. Some historians claim the Chinese resisted these measures or had such rules imposed upon them to their resentment.
Most migrants were happy to see some improvements taken towards reducing the horrific tolls disease imposed upon their populations. By the Depression, the situation had become so serious that cemeteries were overcrowded and in many circumstances unable to maintain full traditional burial rites, such as segregation by home region; mortality among Chinese children in Singapore was five times that of Europeans.
These regulations were implemented as much as possible into shop-house design. This implementation aroused both tensions and solutions, for prior architectural norms were disturbed. Let us first focus on air wells. Such constructions were admittedly initially intended as ventilation methods, but they also served to delineate space.
Density regulations also required spatial reorganization; new regulations promised more space, but also removed the only viable housing options in cities with massive shortages. How, then, were these challenges handled? I shall use new shop-house construction to highlight hybridity in these two solutions — for in this period, shop-houses were constantly constructed to meet exploding Chinese and other population growth, and many of these were constructed by entities promoting or involved in the creation of new laws, such as the Singapore Improvement Trust.
Builders of new shop-houses phased out cubicles and allowed for more space through several methods. Houses in the Southern Chinese city of Quanzhou also varied in height for spatial purposes; Guangdong became a key source for linear forms of spatial accommodation. Air wells and ventilation methods were built in similar trends. Let us begin with courtyards, common across the Chinese architectural tradition.