Kelvin E. Y. Low. Remembering the Samsui Women: Migration and Social Memory in Singapore and China. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014, xiv+252p.

Abstract

Remembering Women: Migration and Social Memory in Singapore and China Kelvin E. Y. Low Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014, xiv+252p.The term refers to a specific location in Pearl River Delta region in Guangdong province, southern part of China, where many members of diaspora trace their ancestral homelands. While geographic benchmark is certain, of is open to interpretation and representation from many angles. On one hand, it is a matter of fact that a significant number of migrated from that particular place to work in largely in construction industry and to a lesser extent in households and factories. On other hand, this migration is a subject of imagination and deliberation as to who should be included under category Samsui Women and kinds of roles they have assumed in relations to Singapore and China. There were who hailed from elsewhere in China, taking advantage of label of in order to gain access to job markers where was a niche. Also, there have been various state projects focusing on and their contribution to shaping identities of Singapore as nation.This book is laudable research on how issues and discourses have been revolving around women. The author, Kelvin E. Y. Low, is a sociologist at National University of Singapore. He has succeeded in meeting objective he sets in book, revealing experiences of and arguing that the many reconstructions of their past are utilized by state, other institutions, and stakeholders towards achieving vested interests in promotion and maintenance of a national identity (p. 7).The primary sources Low has collected are rich, including interviews with documentaries, art works, and events. To uncover what forces determined telling of stories and representation of images concerning he has appropriated concepts of history and as social reconstruction, national identity, and personal narrative. The presentation of findings and discussions are soundly laid out in six chapters: Chinese Migration and Entangled Histories, Politics of Memory Making, Local and Transnational Entanglements, From China to Singapore, Beyond Working Lives, and Women, Ma Cheh, and Other Foreign Workers.Chapter 1 is an introduction to subject matter and argument, with a succinct account of historical backdrop against which various waves and types of migrants made their way to Singapore. Low rightfully reveals interconnectedness of different sets of networks as well as different spaces of locations spanning China and Southeast Asia, in what he argued as a stunning case of entangled history. The pictures are variegated and complicated, but Low makes it clear that at intersections between British expansion and migration, decline of silk industry and anti-marriage practices in Guangdong led to migration of to thus adding a distinctive female layer to political and social settings.Chapters 2 to 6 are in-depth examinations of from multiple angles. In Chapter 2, Low shows how Singapore as a new nation-state has crafted its reproduction of and memory whereby have been portrayed as Chinese migrant women, pioneers, feminists, and elderly women to meet both national engineering and social imagination for what kind of heritage has been established in Singapore. …