Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1: Introduction: Petite Capitalism – what drives it?
The Chinese immigrants brought their traditional art of healing with them to British Malaya. The author’s grandfather set up an herbal medicine business in Ipoh, then his son opened a shop in Kuala Lumpur. The Chinese medicine trade was typically owner-operating, and relying on family labour. As a petite capitalist enterprise, the small family business suffered from systematic problems of the economic form. It is small in capital, it is small in operations and turnovers, and a social shame is cast on the owner for his meagre wealth and social reputation. The social shame – as the petite, the ‘littleness’, of petite bourgeoisie or petite capitalists suggests – afflicts on the shopkeepers and shapes their ambitions. For some, however, the sense of ‘littleness’ becomes a drive, an anxious endeavour to improve his circumstances. The ethnography of the High Street shop traces the impact of such a contradiction: the almost feverish efforts of the family to create a better life for itself, and the real and imaginary social judgement of its poor status and community standing.
The way of social and economic improvement is complex, with detours of disappointments and emotional pain. Alienation of the young as well as the fantasies and overreaching of the adults too are a part of the story of the Chinese diaspora. At the High Street shop, the concept of petite capitalism proves it usefulness. It shows the inner life of a Chinese family and its economic existence, and it puts sham to the ‘rag to riches’ narrative made much of by the Chinese diaspora themselves.
Chapter 2: The Shop on High Street
The colonial shophouse is petite capitalism in architectural form. The merging of the place of work and the place of residence in a single space is rich in effects and cultural implications. Devotion to work is also devotion to the family; commitment to the family must ipso facto a commitment to work – there’s no greater virtue in the Chinese petite bourgeoise ideal. In a philosopher’s tour of the shophouse, Bachelard’s reading of the colonial shophouse reveals a spatial organization that exudes family harmony, the joyful necessity of work, ethical behaviours consistent with the values of a family striving for economic betterment.
The chapter is an ethnography of the shophouse, it is also an ethnography of work as virtue. Family and personal virtue is significant not only because it aids production; but because it fosters harmony and makes family life fulfilling. During a ‘tiger balm’ evening, the family got together in the domestic manufacturing of a home product, with the aim to take a slice of the market of the famous brand. The ‘tiger balm’ evening was something of nostalgia for the author. It shows the double-face of the Chinse shophouse, where oppressive work demands and family love co-existed together in a single place.
Chapter 3: Making Money with Friends and Kin
The foundation of Chinese petite capitalism is its social character. Relationships spin out from the shophouse to the neighbourhood and beyond, from its owner to a web of connectedness that was, as the legend goes, good for business. And yet the Chinese family business takes on a social and cultural form, and the economic take of things may be falsifying. One cannot expect the Chinese petite capitalist to read Montaigne and Aristotle. For Montaigne’s friendship of ‘two hearts in one’ , and Aristotle’s concept of friendship of virtue, both decry the moral vulgarity of social relationship’s usefulness. The problem lies in the Chinese diaspora’s near obsession with guanxi connections: the art of making money with friends and kin.
For the Chinese shopkeeper, doing business the guanxi way confirms to a traditional precept. It gives satisfaction by transacting with people you already know; it is social and cultural appropriate. In the process a cultural legitimacy is glossed over the act of profit taking. Among the Hakka herb dealers in Malaysia, guanxi dealings are full of the cultural ideal that self-interest and mutual considerations are in perfect accord.
This reliance on guanxi is enhanced by the Hakka kinship. The anthropological debate sways between kinship as a social or a genealogical category. The Hakka kinship verges towards the social rather than blood connections. Among the Hakka shopkeepers in Malaysia, the practice was to include people as kin whose ancestors came from the same ancestral village in China. It expands the base of kin members and it fosters kin solidarity.
Chapter 4: Women’s Fate
In traditional China, Confucian ethos prompted the domestic confinement of women as virtue. Home-based industries, like silk production, depended on female domestic labour and benefited greatly from this cultural ethos. Something was added to the Confucian ideal of family harmony: the natural right of men to demand the labour of wives and daughters in the domestic mode of production. The role of female labour – and gender relationship in general – in Chinese petite capitalism owes its genesis to this cultural ideology.
At the High Street shop, the owner eschewed the belittling of women; the wishes of the wife and daughters were not neglected. At the same time, men and women, husband and wife, shared their labour and had a common interest in the prosperity of the business. This lessens the neo-Marxist argument about the exploitation women’s labour power in Chinese petite capitalism. Against this, however, were expectations about the role of women in contrast to the sons’. A certain idea of feminine virtue prevailed. The wife and daughters were identified with the domestic life, daughters were married well, while the sons had to find their way in the world.
At the High Street shop, the stressful calculativeness, the frugality, the expectation of work – men and women experienced them differently. Since women were tied to domesticity and marriage, their careers and mental life often suffered.
Chapter 5: Shop-floor Heroes
The work relations at the Chinese shophouse evens out the extremes of Marxist exploitation and management benevolence. The shopboys were sent by their parents to learn the herbal trade; they did low-grade work and were paid a minimum wage. The idea of apprenticeship was a ruse. Nonetheless for most, moving to the city was life changing. It broadened their social circles, they turned street-wise, they picked up new tastes and new ideas. That they did not all become small traders tells an interesting story of the shopboys.
They came to the High Street shops in their teens, and they were eager to broaden their horizon. Their lives are illuminated by the work of social historians, such as Christopher Hosgood’s study of the Edwardian retail trade in Britain. H G Well’s novels are filled with feeble men trapped in their jobs and need to escape – Mr Polly, The Wheel of Chance. At the High Street shop, the shopboys were full of guile and imagination. Most saw through the boss’s paternalism and his demand for loyalty and subservience. Their position at the shopfloor had given them an insight into their relationship with the boss and his family. But the situation is more convoluted than what a class analysis can put forward. The urban experiences were too varied, too alluring, to provide an uniform sense of class resentment. Faithful to their inner prompting, some drifted into city jobs, some took up petty thefts, while one or two became small traders in fulfilment of the petite capitalist dream.
Chapter 6: Tiger Parenting
