"In the field of Overseas Chinese Studies, it is rare to have such a personal but theoretically informed account that sheds light on both the intimate life of family dynamics and the public life of nation-building. This in-depth case study of one stophouse owned by a Malaysian Hakka Chinese family could breathe new life in this sub-field of specialization by legitimizing similar autoethnographic studies." (Jayde Lin Roberts, SOJOURN - Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Vol. 37 (3), November 2022)

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

Educating the young is major story of Chinese petite capitalism, and of the Chinese diaspora generally. At High Street shop, the daily takes from the counter were creamed off, the books were cooked, in order to send the children to the university. These were expressions of a great investment in the children’s education. The reasoning is: the children’s achievement is the parent’s achievement, the children’s success reflects on the parents.

Children of tiger parents need to constantly gauge between what they want and the personal wishes of the parents. The two are not easily reconciled, a fact tiger parenting often ignores. There is love and indulgence, as the parents pressure and motivate their children and make sacrifices. Tiger parenting is not a smooth-running narrative, but offers a fascinating window to the moral payoff, the contradictions, of petite capitalism – when we examine it from the children’s point of view.

The parents in the High Street shop sent their children to study the Chinese medium school; the aim was to socializing them in Chinese cultural values and to acquire the literary skills. Ironically perhaps, what the children learned in the school were a mixture of modern texts – the works of Lu Xun and Lao She of the May Fourth Movement – and traditional works of traditional philosophy and dynastic history – Confucian Analects, Sima Qian’s Shiji. On the whole, the modern texts won over. The result was to install in the young a modern sensibility admixed with traditional learning. The ethnography follows the development of a young mind and describes the surprising detours and sources of influences, from pop music to Hollywood films to modern Chinese literature and the British Council Library.

Chapter 7: A Lesson on Borrowing

Given the structural weaknesses of their businesses, petite capitalists are short in cash and the banks are rarely interested in them as customers. Borrowing – transactions of debt and credit – is matter of survival, and a source of great anxiety. Borrowing and lending show up the tension in the way petite capitalism operates. Failure to borrow affects the shop’s liquidity, borrow too much puts the shopkeeper in debt not easily serviced. In the world of petite capitalism, lending and borrowing affect one’s social reputation – not only one’s financial position.

In this sense, the ideas of good debt and bad debt have their roots in a particular social logic. At the High Street shop, borrowing was necessary but it also said something about one’s moral character – ‘a good businessman need not get himself into debt’. Margot C. Finn’s The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914 offers a useful guide to the issue. In eighteen-century Britain, the giving and receiving of gift or credit defined an individual’s moral worth. It is not so much borrowing, but the abuse of the gift economy by incurring debt and the risk of default, that destroys reputations. The High Street shop’s credit and debt relationships showed a similar tension. The shop owner created a depositing-taking system and it required that some got paid, and not others. The financial juggling turned the system into something like a Ponzi-scheme – with disastrous consequences.

Chapter 8: Wholesale: the road to ruin

Wholesales was a calculating decision; it was also something forced on the shopkeeper. Wholesale overcame the systematic ‘littleness’ of a petite capitalist enterprise – by taking a financial risk, by shifting to high-volume trade, by seizing on the opportunity arising from the rural market.

To finance wholesale, the shop devised a deposit-taking system. High interests were paid to depositors, and the money was rechannelled to holding stock, and to service the credit offered to the retailers. Wholesale worked, when a rapid cycle from sales to retailers to their debt repayment was sustained. With high costs of borrowing. no cash could lie idle and retailers had to pay their debts on time. The financial go-around was stressful and demanded careful management. When the wholesale collapsed, it led to the demise of the High Street shop itself.

The petite capitalism dream turned to nothing. Yet, the family had worked hard, it had been frugal and sensible. The owner had his social connections; he had successful sought financial resources from outside the banks that denied him. In petite capitalism, personal qualities and individual efforts matter, but of greater force are the market, the competition and the wider structural circumstances. A capitalist system evolves, and in the process picks its winners and losers. The collapse of the High Street shop is a case of Schumpeter’s creative destruction: entrepreneurship is tragic and its result volatile, innovation rewards some and punishes others.

Chapter 9: Family Legacy

The funeral of the shop owner was indicative of many things. It was the end of a family legacy, it showed up the sham of an economic form that relied on kin and friends now demanding to have their money back; the sentiment of guanxi was tinted with self-interest.

The family was faced with a new reality. Yet the pull of duty and nostalgia was strong. The siblings toyed with idea of carrying on the business but it went nowhere. The demise of the High Street shop is an illustration of the lament: ‘great wealth can’t last beyond three generations’. But for descendants legacy can be a burden. This is, objectively, a matter of Chinese patrimony. Chinese patrimony distributes inheritance among male descendants. Over time, many are cutting into the cake, and each individual holding gets diluted. Often the senior male – the father and/or the eldest son – takes control of the family estate. The complexity of Chinese patrimony posed a serious problem to the family descendants at the High Street shop.

The question was asked: What do I want for myself? The High Street established itself in contemporary Malaysia, it operated in a modern setting. The ideas of legacy and filial loyalty were de-anchored and moderated; they retained their emotional force, but they were not longer prescribed by the traditional script. And the push towards education had gave new opportunities and career choices. Tiger parenting’s high regard for education had planted the seed of self-realization, of seeking existence more financially rewarding, more personally fulfilling, than the dusty shop of their parents.

Souchou Yao is a writer and critic based in Sydney, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is a former Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. His major works include Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, practice and the myth of Chinese enterprise (2002), Singapore: The state and the culture of excess (2007), and The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a small, distant war (2016).

This book tells the story of a Chinese family owned shophouse in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, through the lens of petite capitalism. Neo-Marxist in spirit, literary in tone, it recounts the triumph and despair of a family in its struggles against the financial frailty and structural limitations of a pervasive economic form of the Chinese diaspora: the small family business.

The daily realities of the Chinese shophouse are captured by the art of ethnography and the author’s own memories. The book examines Chinese petite capitalism afresh by bringing into focus issues not usually covered by writers on the subject—the concept of petite capitalism, the architecture of the Asian shophouse, the Hakka kinship, ‘tiger parenting’ and Chinese childrearing, the culture of debt, family legacy, and Chinese inheritance.

The book reveals the business acumen for which the Chinese diaspora are renowned as part truth and part myth. Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ haunts the small Chinese family business where hard work and individual efforts are helpless against the ever-evolving nature of capitalism.

Souchou Yao is a writer and critic based in Sydney, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is a former Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. His major works include Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, practice and the myth of Chinese enterprise (2002), Singapore: The state and the culture of excess (2007), and The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a small, distant war (2016).

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