Implications for the development

The Peranakan Museum Remembered, 2017
–
2018. 
Un like Moldova’s Muzeul Naţional de 
Etnografie şi Istorie Naturală (MNEIN), with a permanent exhibit installed more than 30 years 
ago (installed 1988–94) that has been well documented in published guides to the exhibit, avail-
able with 360 photography online,
9
and even the subject of a glossy published analysis and cri-
tique
10
, TPM is a young and regularly changing museum with little trace of its past exhibits. TPM 
is experiencing its third conceptualization in under 25 years. There is a published guide (2008) 
which documents many of the objects from the collection, but not the exhibitionary layout. Little 
virtual presence remains of its past incarnations. Fewer than six months after its closure for 
renovation in April 2019, the museum’s official website was empty of information concerning 
the organization of the former exhibit, and only scattered pictures of its holdings appeared on 
other sites.
11
I was a bit shocked when I started to compile my reflections about TPM and realized 
that there was no way to “check” my memories, as I have so many times double-checked what I 
had to say about MNEIN. I am fully aware, as I write this, that I might have missed objects and 
information or mis-remembered. At the same time, this possibility also underscores the role that 
museums play for most visitors who visit them only once – or at long intervals. We consider our 
remembered impressions as authoritative, no matter how misinformed our own memory and 
interpretation. 
5
https://www.gov.sg/article/what-are-the-racial-proportions-among-singapore-citizens. Published 
10 December 2019. Last accessed 10 September 2020.
6
Interview with the author Josephine Chia, 7 October 2018, www.channelnewsasia.com/news/com-
mentary/peranakan-chinese-malay-identity-singapore-bicentennial-10745232. Last accessed 10 Sep-
tember 2020.
7
Irene Lim, 
90 Years in Singapore
. Singapore: Pagesetters, 2020, p. 17-20.
8
For example, the Peranakan Association Singapore, https://www.peranakan.org.sg/about/. 
9
http://www.muzeu.md/expozitia-permanenta/. Last accessed 10 September 2020.
10
Ilya Rabinovich, 
Museutopia
. Amsterdam: Alauda Publications, 2012.
11
https://www.nhb.gov.sg/peranakanmuseum/. Last accessed 10 September 2020, when it appeared 
as it did in September 2019.

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Conferință științifică internațională, Chișinău, 22-23 septembrie 2020, ediția a II-a
~ 611 ~
Let me attempt a brief overview:
TPM is housed in a building that was originally a school. Nevertheless, one quickly gains the 
impression of entering a house – an impression that is strengthened if one visits the NUS Baba 
House of the Baba Nonya Heritage Museums – both of which are, literally, houses.
On the first floor, to the left of the ticket office is an introductory exhibit: a large room with 
walls adorned by portraits accompanied by quotes from the subjects about what it means to be 
Peranakan. Interspersed within this room are standing panels which provide a bit more historical 
and contextual documentation. At the far end is a small screen on which is projected a film; its 
approach and content parallels that of the overall room: historical and contextual information 
provided by a narrator, spliced with images and voices of “Peranakan” individuals themselves. 
This room, on the first and subsequent visits, deeply moved me. The Peranakans are introduced 
as the descendants of foreign traders and merchants who married “local” women. The impres-
sion left on me by the text and subsequent photo-testimonials was that the women were powerful 
and independent in their own right. I am not sure how much I filled in, but in my memory, with 
my memories of ethnographies of market women from elsewhere in the world (especially those 
of West Africa, or the Zapotec of Latin America): 
I imagine 
that the earliest Peranakan women 
were free in movement, controlling their own finances and purses, and well-connected through 
their own networks. The voices of twentieth – and twenty-first century women from the hall’s 
walls did not contradict this assumption. Women are prominent in descriptions of family and 
community life.
Another aspect of this initial room which left a deep impression is the highly subjective qual-
ity of Peranakan identity that is communicated. The Peranakans featured in the introductory 
room testify to a great fluidity in the ethnic and linguistic components of Peranakan families. 
What is important is expressed as taking the form of multi-generational family gatherings, par-
ticularly those involving cooking and eating.
Once the visitor leaves this introductory hall and ascends a broad staircase to the permanent 
exhibit, however, the broad and fluid nature of the Peranakan identity becomes strongly cur-
tailed. The focus shifts dramatically from a focus on people and their memories and experiences 
to a focus on material objects. And from the present to the past. There are wedding clothes, 
gifts, and jewelry; home altars and religious objects; a reproduction kitchen with numerous pots 
and storage vessels, and table-settings. It is a beautiful museum, with beautiful objects, well-
displayed. The museology is excellent. It is a museum one wants to spend time in: even my kids 
liked visiting because there is a well-conceived “treasure hunt” which leads children through the 
halls with several iconic objects.
So, the critical gaze that follows is not to say that there are any weaknesses in the museum as 
such. Rather, it is that the disjuncture between the first room and those that follow aroused my 
critical attention.
The story is haunting. The home altars are meant to testify to religious syncretism – but it is 
primarily a syncretism between Chinese ancestor worship, other Chinese religious systems, and 
Christianity that is documented. The ancestors, and particularly the male line, becomes over-
bearing the further one walks through the exhibit. There is no trace of market women in the 
upstairs rooms; only traces of nearly invisible daughters and daughters-in-law, practicing their 
needlework; being adorned in wedding finery; and then led to the marital bed with the expecta-
tion of producing male heirs. The Peranakans become visible in their show of wealth, though 
it is not clear how these boundaries were really determined: we learn that brides’ jewelry was 
often borrowed or rented from other families, but we learn nothing of how far the social circle 
extended. We are 
told
about the importance of the patriline, and the principles of patriarchy, 
but we 
see
very little evidence of male lives. The domestic sphere, as well as the ritual and festive 
spheres, not to mention all the cooking and eating at the center of purportedly 
warm 
family rela-
tions, showcases women and their handiwork.
12
12
Hardwick’s (2008) review of the representation of Peranakan material culture, primarily in books 

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Patrimoniul cultural de ieri: implicații în dezvoltarea societății durabile de mâine
~ 612 ~
Perhaps this brief description will serve to illustrate why my initial impression was that a lot 
about Peranakan lives of the past had been rendered invisible, and that more ethnography would 
improve the museum. I found myself wanting statistical information:
How many “Perankan” families were there? How many are there now? Where did they live 
in Singapore? I wanted sociological information: What occupational sectors did they occupy? 
I 
really
wanted social anthropological data, especially on kinship and networks: How extensive 
were the intermarriages with families in Penang, Melaka, other places? What were the descen-
dants of the brothers of the first Peranakan women called? (Were they also Peranakan?) I also 
wanted cultural data: who was actually present at a meal; how many meals were there per day; 
what were the differences between ordinary/feast foods; how many feasts per year, and so on?
I approached this museum, perhaps, as if it might have been designed by Franz Boas to serve as 
an ever-deepening anthropological resource leading directly from display, to explanatory text, 
to accompanying books … through which the lived reality of culture and its analysis might be 
simultaneously evoked
13
. Never mind that Boas himself had never succeeded!
Perhaps this list of questions will also serve to illustrate why I very quickly thought that I had 
entered a zone of intense cultural intimacy. Perhaps the answers to such questions were known 
–but not by outsiders, who were, moreover, not meant to know. The public memory space of a 
museum is not meant to “reveal all”.
14
Perhaps, as students of hospitality know, to be invited into 
a house as a 
guest 
is simultaneously to be kept ignorant of domestic details
15
.