“Home is That Which I Adore: Nation, Diaspora, and the Education of Overseas Chinese Women” with Karen M. Teoh

“The concept of home is akin to the concept of identity,” said Karen M. Teoh. It is “always subject to choice and change.”

At her lecture in Henry R. Luce Hall on September 20, Karen M. Teoh, Associate Professor of History at Stonehill College and author of the book Schooling Diaspora, discussed identity formation in the context of “going home.” Her research involves the young “overseas Chinese” who were born and raised in the colonies, but who felt called to return to China out of patriotic duty during the 1940s-1970s. 

“They were returning, so to speak, to a place many of them had never seen to help rebuild a nation to which they felt they belonged,” said Teoh.

Many of the returning women shared similar educational backgrounds. They attended Chinese language, girls schools which were modeled along Western lines, focusing on subjects such as geography, history, and literature, as opposed to traditional rote memorization, but with Chinese cultural orientation. The schools taught notions of gender equality, working outside the home, and national citizenship, while still continuing to uphold “certain conventions of female behavior.” Upon graduation, the students struggled to reconcile these terms. While it might appear that these women were drawn to China by communist ideas about gender equality, Teoh proposed that patriotism was what drove them, not feminism as one might understand it. Because they attended girls schools, they saw themselves more as “non-gendered individuals” who were citizens first. 

The motivations of the women, Teoh said, “reflected not so much an effort to rebel, but an effort to belong.”

One such woman, Bai Xueqiao, ran away from her home in Malaya in 1939 at age twenty-five to fight the Japanese invasion of China. The letter she wrote to her parents, which expressed her love for them but also a strong desire to serve her “ancestral homeland,” made her very famous as a loyal, Chinese patriot.

“Hers is a model account, one that has probably been polished and repolished,” explained Teoh. The average experience was distinctly different.

These migrants were initially welcomed in China as “patriots” and were given special privileges such as dedicated spots in universities and housing assistance. Public sentiment changed under Mao, however, and they fell prey to hostility and persecution because of their “bourgeoise” backgrounds or “perceived lack of authentic Chineseness.” They were considered “useful, but not trustworthy.” It was very difficult for them to return home, and many were forced to sever connections with friends and family abroad. 

“Geography was not destiny,” said Teoh. They were “rejected by the nation they were trying to serve.”

Teoh asked the audience to consider what the concept of “home” means. Can it be claimed or taken away? Is it shaped by geography, culture, identity, or all three?

“You can love your home, but will your home love you back?” asked Teoh. “The act of homecoming is sometimes more gratifying at the point of embarkation and journey than at the point of arrival.”

Teoh’s talk reminds us that identity is ever-changing and is composed of choices as much as circumstance: it is an ongoing conversation between oneself and the place one calls home.

Teoh’s lecture was part of Women at 50Yale150 and she is a Yale College Class of 1999 graduate — which was the first ever freshman class with more women than men. 2019 marks two major milestones in the university’s history: the 50th anniversary of the matriculation of women in Yale College and the 150th anniversary of the first women students at the university who came to study at the School of Art when it opened in 1869. Every school, a host of departments, and dozens of organizations at Yale are designing ways to contribute to the year-long commemoration that will start in September 2019 and continue into the fall of 2020.

Written by Claire Zalla, Yale College Class of 2021.