Across the Nanyang: Intimate Labor and Chinese Female Migrations in British Asia, 1890-1939

This paper explores the history of Chinese female migration across the South China Sea (Nanyang) to colonial outposts in Singapore and Penang as wives, domestic bondservants, and sex workers. At the turn of the twentieth century, modern migration control first emerged as a system of racial and gender exclusion, limiting Asian mobility into the British Empire. While the colonial government in Malaya monitored and circumscribed the movement of Chinese male laborers, it selectively encouraged Chinese female settlement in its territories. Why were Chinese women and children subjected to a different mode of colonial surveillance and regulation than their male counterparts? How were these uneven policy impulses reflective of the colonial state’s gendered preoccupations with laboring bodies and border management in British Asia? Drawing on emigration and marriage records, ship logs, and rescue home documents, this paper attends to the historical relationship between sexual economy and migration control. It revises a long-standing historiographical tradition that views Chinese male sojourners as emblematic of migrations to Southeast Asia. Instead, it repositions Chinese females as central to our historical understanding of labor mobility, border control, and the politics of sex trafficking in this region. By foregrounding the prominence of female labor in intra-Asian migrations at the turn of the twentieth century, “Across the Nanyang” contributes to interdisciplinary debates on migration, gender and sexuality, and imperial citizenship.