The Peranakan Museum in Singapore has gone through an impressive refurb since the first time I visited it in 2018. In particular, the ground floor Origins exhibition included a video of interviews asking various people what Peranakan means to them. Although Peranakan isn’t an identification historically relevant to me as my family are Hong Kong Chinese, I found the mixed heritage and individual explanations of what Peranakan means interesting. I have emailed the museum in the hopes that the video will become available on their website in the future (watch this space).
I tried to take notes of the various identification terms that that were mentioned:
– True Blue Peranakan
– Baba Malayu
– Baba Peranakan
– Arab Peranakan
– Chinese Peranakan
– Indian Peranakan
– Hokkien
– Singaporean
I had wrongly thought that Peranakan was a term that could be interchangeable with ‘Straits Chinese’ or ‘Peranakan Chinese’. Although perhaps historically these may have been accurate as the term described the Chinese who settled in maritime Southeast Asia. Peranakan has developed in its classification over time to include other multiracial settlers in the region, however, in the video there is no reference to the European settlers being part of this identity.
However, I have found references to ‘Eurasian Peranakans’ that include the ‘Kristang’ or ‘Serani’ (the Malacca-Portuguese) and the Peranakan Belanda (of Dutch heritage).
Something of the inherent multiculturalism in Singapore appeals greatly to me as someone who has struggled to identify with a single culture, and so I have made this note as a sidebar to my explorations into my own identity, culture and home.