A sewing class in progress at one of the convent schools, c.1950s.

Someone once asked me, “What did you learn to cook at home economics classes?”

In reply I proudly rattled off: fried rice with hotdog cubes, minced chicken on egg tofu, and spaghetti with sauce made with tomato ketchup. Imagine my embarrassment when a fellow (and older) food writer said that she had learned to make meat pies, mee siam and all sorts of kueh-kueh.

How did a 13-year-old get to make all these complex adult dishes at school while I was entrusted to cook with only processed and ready-to-eat ingredients? One crucial factor set us apart: time, or rather different periods of time.

I studied home economics in 1999, while she took the course back in the 1970s when it was known as domestic science, a name that was eventually replaced because it suggested a narrow focus on nutrition and sanitation.

Between the 1930s and 1997, home economics was taught in Singapore schools to train girls to be good homemakers. Depending on the era and the nation’s immediate needs, a “good homemaker” could mean different things – as defined by the prevailing syllabus set by the education authorities.

In the 1970s, for instance, being a good homemaker meant having the skills to just cook and clean. In the 1980s, it expanded to include being a good mother and raising a child. Then, in the 1990s, as more women joined the workforce, good homemakers became prudent consumers of outsourced and commercialised housework.

In “studying” home economics a second time around as research for this essay – reviewing textbooks, minister speeches, newspaper reports and oral histories – what became apparent was not just changes in cookery styles and ingredients over the years, but also official definitions of the “ideal” Singaporean woman.

Read the full article in Biblioasia (Vol 12 Issue 4)
Read PDF here

I have always wondered why in my family, it is my father and my grandfather who cook. Now, we are not Americans, we are Singaporean Chinese, but like the story of many Chinese in the United States, my grandfather and his kinsmen from South China sought jobs in a foreign land. Women didn’t tag along, so the men cooked for themselves.

I wondered if this was the case for the American Chinese. Indeed, this was what sociologist Rose Hum Lee observed in her 1956 study on the marital relations of Chinese families in San Francisco. She noted that the husbands brought home groceries and taught their wives cooking. This was unthinkable in a patriarchal Chinese society.

Well, the men in America were no typical Chinese. They came to the United States in their youth and reached adulthood without too much womanly concern for their welfare, until the US government loosened its grip on Chinese immigration in 1947. Prior to that, the Chinese were the most hated community in the United States, because of reasons illustrated in the following picture. They were perceived as economic enemies who monopolized the industries, leaving the white men jobless. The results were institutionalized discriminations that I argue attributed to the egalitarian division of labor in Chinese’s marital homes as observed by Lee.

A grotesque octopus monster (left) working tirelessly in every industry, leaving the white men (right) jobless. (The Wasp, March 3, 1882 illustration from Yellow Peril!)

In 1882, United States enacted the Exclusion Act to restrict Chinese immigration to the United States. Prior to that, the Chinese community was already a predominantly male society because Chinese female immigrants were thought to be prostitutes, and therefore denied entry. Married Chinese men had little chance to reunite with their wives, while the bachelors could not start a family. Because these men could not demonstrate heterosexual norms, there were doubts on their sexuality. The early Chinese immigrants in the United States sustained the image of lesser men.

This feminine stereotype was reinforced by the economic restrictions imposed on these immigrants. White laborers who felt threatened by the competition from Chinese workers protested against enterprises that employed the Chinese in preference to whites. Violent anti-Chinese riots forced the Chinese into low-end wage labor in restaurants, laundries, and garment factories. Since cooking, washing and sewing had prevalently been women’s work, the Chinese men in these professions were thought to be “belonging to a feminized race.”

Racist stereotypes of Chinese men found their way into trade cards. The following image is one of the many that feminized these men. Notice the laundrymen had rosy cheeks and lips, as if they had put on make up. They also have long and delicate fingers like women’s.

Chinese laundrymen with rosy cheeks and delicate fingers like women’s. (Courtesy of Anderson Gallery, Drake University)

In the 1900, union leaders called for the preservation of “racial purity” and “western civilization” to spark anti-Asian legislation. They succeeded. American citizenship was granted exclusively to white males up until 1870, after which men of African descent could become naturalized, but Asian men were denied US citizenship up to 1952. Because the masculinity of a citizen was first inseparable from his whiteness, as the state denied the Chinese citizenship, it formally excluded them from the institutional and social definitions of maleness.

I argue that the Chinese men’s immigration to the United States produced what Raewyn Connell called a “contradiction within masculinity.” Hegemonic masculinity guaranteed Chinese men a dominant social position within their community, but subordinated their manhood to the white American males. To hang on to their masculinity and legitimize their professions, the Chinese reconfigured a manhood that was non-sexist and non-patriarchal. Lee’s observation that the “husbands enjoyed their protective roles and not a few declared they gained satisfaction in being accorded status,” proves that the men had not been strip of their manhood, but conceived a modernized gender relation.

Additionally, these men developed masculinity in an all-male institution that presented domestic cooking as a task appropriate for men. The 19th and early 20th century Chinese immigrants, like the men we see in the picture below, prepared their own meals. Men raised in such environment would consequently think it is normal to hold the cleaver at home.

Chinese men in 1900 San Francisco preparing their meals during the Bubonic Plague (Harper’s Weekly 1900 illustration from The Coming Man)

The wives in Lee’s study on other hand, grew up in families that received financial support from their fathers and brothers who were working in the United States. Academics coined married women who were left behind in China the “separated wives”. Past literature show that the separated wives assumed total family governance during the prolong absence of their husbands. Having been raised by separated wives, I argue that the women in Lee’s study expected the same independence and power in their own marital homes.

When these women were finally permitted entry to the United States, they too were implicated by the restrictions imposed on their husbands. Because the standard of living in the urbanized society was high, and Chinese men were banished from employment in government and private sectors, the wives had to supplement their husbands’ income. Newly arrived Chinese women typically worked in restaurants and sweatshops for long hours, leaving them little time to fulfill their domestic responsibilities. The need to re-divide the household chores between men and their wives, coupled with their reconstructed gender expectations, would ultimately contribute to the unusual kitchen dynamics Lee observed.

Bitch Winter Issue

This issue of the Portland-based feminist magazine tackles women’s food production and consumption roles. What is refreshing about this magazine is that many of its contributors take on a scholarly approach, calling on histories, data and stakeholders’ interviews to challenge the readers’ existing knowledge of the topics at hand. Yet the articles are not typical of scholarly papers—incessant and sometimes sleep-inducing. Most stories run only a couple of pages, an appropriate length for a casual read over a cup of coffee.

The piece that I find most intriguing is about a group of women who quit their jobs to collect, categorize and utilize coupons in the most efficient and tactical ways coupons can possibly be used. The larger issue revolving around couponing is that it challenges the age old idea of shopping as trivia and the women responsible for it as frivolous and wasteful. Full-time couponers demonstrate wisdom and economic muscle, no less than the working women, and as a result they save thousands on child care, commuting, and grocery bills yearly. Most importantly, couponing proves the economic value of household chores that is so often ignored by the tax-paying segment of society. How homemaking is different for these women compared to their home bound mothers and grandmothers is that it has become a financially viable choice as opposed to a duty imposed upon them. But what I wish the author had also discussed is the types of food discounts available on the coupons. My fear is that the choices are limited to nutrients-deficient processed food and that couponing further drives the domestic diet towards a high-in-sodium/fat one if modernity hadn’t already done that. In other words, couponing isn’t as empowering as it appears to be. Instead, it has given manufacturers and retailers more intimate control over where consumers spend their buck.

Another piece worth deliberating is the death of homemade meal as a result of women’s liberation. The writer links it to the post-war modernism belief that technology is the key to achieve social improvements. Convenience and efficiency were prized and sold to families in the form of wartime innovations like household appliances and ready-to-eat food. The reason the latter became successful, besides convenience, was the hygiene fetish of the time, in reaction to the outbreaks of food-borne illnesses. Supermarkets’ sterile food prepared with chemicals was seen safer to eat than fresh produces. Unfortunately, the writer’s failure to discuss other reactions to these new technologies, such as rejection or consumption in ways unintended by the creators, suggests that women in the early twentieth century were vulnerable subjects of political agenda and market trends, rather than individuals who could independently weigh the values of tradition, nutrition and taste against convenience.

But besides the lack of an alternative view in some of the articles—perhaps an editorial decision to keep them short and approachable—this issue of Bitch pushes its readers to think hard about present day’s food phenomenon and their underlying gender issues that are not always obvious to the casual readers.