Intimate Itinerancy: Sex, Work, and Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya’s Brothel Economy, 1870s–1930s

92 Intimate Itinerancy:

Sex, Work, and Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya’s Brothel Economy, 1870s–1930s

Sandy F. Chang

This article examines the rise and destruction of Chinese women’s intimate labor networks in colonial brothels across British Malaya in the early twentieth century. Drawing on police files, travel documents, petitions, temple inscriptions, and the League of Nations’ trafficking reports, it situates women’s cooperative economies within the global history of Chinese migration. It shows how migrant women’s myriad roles in the brothel economy—as sex workers, seamstresses, servants, and coffeehouse owners—served as crucial linchpins that sustained the Chinese overseas community in colonial Southeast Asia. Chinese diaspora studies seldom include women who engaged in migratory prostitution in their purview, emphasizing instead the circulation of capital, merchants, and contract laborers during Asia’s “mobility revolution” (1840s–1940s). Yet, these women’s experiences of sexual commerce, serial migration, and alternative socialities complicate existing migration narratives by illuminating how gender shaped border-crossing experiences and livelihood opportunities in unexpected ways.

Introduction

At the turn of the twentieth century, Lee Sam, a young Chinese woman born to Cantonese-speaking parents in the kingdom of Siam, journeyed by train across intercolonial borders into the British-controlled state of Perak.1 Settling in Batu Gajah, a booming tin-mining town in the northwestern region of the Malay Peninsula, she labored as a gardener over the next few decades. Like many migrant women residing in the interior, she likely engaged in subsistence farming, tending to cabbages, eggplants, and chilies in her vegetable garden while rearing pigs and poultry. On the precipice of the Great Depression, with a global drop in tin prices, British colonial authorities encouraged Chinese gardeners in Perak like Lee Sam to also cultivate cash crops such as tobacco, groundnuts, and tapioca, hoping to diversify the tin-dependent economy of the hinterlands.2 It is likely that Lee Sam led a modest and somewhat arduous life punctuated by periods of economic hardship and uncertainty. In the summer of 1932, the year she turned fifty-five, her quiet world turned upside down.

© 2021 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 33 No. 4, 92–117.

That year, Lee Sam was convicted of procuring women and assisting in the management of a small brothel.3 She was subsequently transported to Pudu Prison in Kuala Lumpur, in the state of Selangor, to serve a “rigorous” three-month sentence.4 Upon her release, the deputy commissioner of Selangor issued a life-banishment order, an unusually harsh punishment that until then had been highly uncommon for female convicts. In 1920, for example, of the 215 ethnic Chinese who were permanently exiled from Perak, only one was a woman.5 Under colonial law, banishment for life was highly gendered in its application, almost exclusively penalizing men who committed the most heinous crimes. In the second and third decades of the twentieth century, permanent exile was almost always reserved for habitual criminals convicted of physically violent or politically subversive crimes.6

Lee Sam, then, did not fit the profile of a typical colonial banished criminal. Her stringent punishment instead signaled a watershed moment in the history of prostitution and migration control in British Malaya. The exile of a middle-aged woman who was both a gardener and a brothel assistant underscored a shift toward increasingly draconian colonial laws in the 1930s that aimed to abolish the regional sex trade by criminalizing all brothel-related activities across the peninsula.7 Many migrant women, like Lee Sam, struggled through these seismic legal changes, as one vital source of their economic livelihood—the commercial sex industry, which previously had been sanctioned by the colonial regime—became delegitimized.

This article traces the rise and decline of Chinese women’s participation in the colonial brothel economy in British Malaya during Asia’s “mobility revolution” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.8 In the period from 1840 to 1940 approximately eighteen million people from coastal China journeyed on junks and steamships across the South Seas to Southeast Asia.9 Their mobility was spurred in part by the advent of steamship technology, the opening of treaty ports in the aftermath of the Opium Wars, political unrest and economic instability in southern China, and colonial labor demands across Southeast Asia.10 The Malay Peninsula, with its production of tin, opium, pepper, gambier, and rubber, attracted the highest number of Chinese migrants: close to seven million disembarked on its shores.11

While some historians have deepened our understanding of the social lives of Chinese indentured laborers, merchants, artisans, and entrepreneurs, they have tended to cast Asian migration as an exclusively masculine enterprise centered on productive labor.12 This, in turn, renders all other forms of labor—the sexual, reproductive, and affective, among others—invisible and thus inadvertently illegitimate. Much of the labor migrant women performed was not quantifiable and could not be enumerated as evidence

of surplus. Moreover, yoking migration exclusively to the performance of productive work overlooks how the brothel functioned as a key node in the larger colonial economy that was dependent on the capital and labor of the Chinese in Malaya. Colonial brothels, owned and operated almost exclusively by women, not only played a critical role in the reproduction of migrant male labor but also functioned as sites of female cooperative economies, where women like Lee Sam lived, worked, and retired. Lee Sam’s life thus illuminates the myriad roles of Chinese migrant women in British Malaya’s regional sex trade. They worked as prostitutes, entertainers, servants, seamstresses, cooks, coffeehouse attendants, and brothel owners, bolstering and sustaining the migrant community.

This article uses intimate labor as an analytical lens, considering work that attends to the sexual, bodily, health, emotional, and care needs of individuals. The concept of intimate labor, as theorized by Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreñas, is most commonly associated with economic neoliberalism and the feminization of global migration in the late twentieth century.13 Yet intimate labor also has historical applicability, allowing historians to recover previously neglected migration narratives. Adopting a more capacious understanding of labor enables us to move beyond traditional migration paradigms that categorize border-crossing women in binary ways: as free or unfree, exploitative or exploited, and most commonly, agents or victims. Viewed through the lens of intimate labor, itinerant Chinese women in the brothel industry emerge as labor migrants whose economic endeavors, from selling sex to serving drinks, were often imbued with moral implications in ways that challenged the agendas of the colonial state.

For the purposes of analysis, I first examine the vibrant commercial sex industry that stretched across the western coast of the Malay Peninsula in the late nineteenth century, illustrating how Chinese women acted as key stakeholders in the colonial brothel economy. I then trace the vicissitudes in colonial prostitution debates during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, which reconfigured prostitution from the problem of white slavery to one of yellow traffic, culminating in a series of targeted immigration reforms designed to curb Chinese mobility. These legal enactments ultimately led to the destruction of Chinese women’s intimate labor networks across colonial brothels, leading to their exile and disenfranchisement. Lastly, I explore how these women challenged and negotiated the legal abolition of brothels by adopting fictive kinship ties, fostering alternative socialities, and establishing coffeehouses to evade new laws. In doing so, I highlight the dissonance between the moral boundaries invoked by the colonial state and the economic and cultural motivations of migrant women. By foregrounding the moral economy of itinerant women in the colonial sex

trade, this article illuminates the complex choices that shaped their livelihood strategies as they navigated a colonial world marked by steep racial hierarchies and an ever-shifting sexual and legal order.14

Sex, Mobility, and Colonial Brothels in Southeast Asia at the Turn of the Century

In the late nineteenth century, the brothel industry in British Malaya was a lucrative one. Under the Contagious Diseases Ordinance (1870–87), a system of state-regulated prostitution flourished in the Straits Settlements, particularly in Singapore and Penang. In port cities and frontier towns, where the gender ratio of the Chinese migrant community was heavily skewed toward men, commercialized sex was a booming industry. From 1887 to 1894, a total of 2,650 women from mainland China and 1,946 from Hong Kong arrived in Singapore and proclaimed themselves to be “willing prostitutes.”15 Collectively, migrant Chinese women represented the majority of women in sexual commerce in the Straits Settlements, as they worked within an intricate multiethnic brothel network that included Japanese, Tamil, Malay, Eurasian, Arab, and European women. With few opportunities for wage labor or the accumulation of property, migrant Chinese women engaged in a range of brothel-related activities, including sex, domestic work, and business management.

Like brothels in colonial Hong Kong, those in Malaya were homosocial workspaces, managed and operated almost entirely by women.16 In particular, some female brothel keepers wielded immense political and economic power. Kwok Ah Su, an infamous brothel keeper in Penang, owned several properties, and at the time of her death in the 1890s, she possessed a fortune of over $192,000 Straits dollars—an astronomical figure at the time, when midlevel civil servants earned less than $2,000 Straits dollars per annum.17 During her lifetime, Ah Su collaborated with a European man to procure young women for her brothels. She also maintained a close relationship with the Chinese Protectorate—the very colonial department tasked with surveiling and regulating brothel keepers like her in order to prevent abuses such as kidnapping and the employment of minor girls. In 1894, a detective in the Malayan Civil Service described Ah Su in a confidential report as “showing intimacy to Mr. Hare [the Acting Assistant Protector of the Chinese] by her frequent visits to the office and her boldness to sit on a chair, cock up her legs and smoke cigarettes with no one daring to check on her.”18 Such charges of corruption within the Chinese Protectorate were not unusual, and throughout the late nineteenth century, rumors and gossip about bribery abounded among employees at all levels, from assistant

protectors to interpreters and clerks. Despite the state regulation of sexual commerce, well-connected brothel keepers found ways to create aliases for minor girls, expedite the opening of new establishments, and pay fees to colonial officials to look the other way.19

The political influence of brothel keepers was in many ways predicated on the social capital some women accrued in the colonial brothel economy. Donor inscriptions in nineteenth-century Daoist temples in Penang and along the west coast of Malaya, including the states of Perak and Selangor, bore the names of brothels and women who were labeled prostitutes.20 Engravings on the walls of Penang’s Tua Peck Gong Temple, for example, include pseudonyms of women who sold sex such as Dong Mei (Winter Plum), Qiu Ju (Fall Chrysanthemum), and Qiu Yue (Autumn Moon), among others. Brothel names, like Giuxiang Lou (Osmanthus Flower Hall), Qunyu Lou (Jade Hall), Aiyue Lou (Love Moon Hall), and Zhixiang Lou (Fragrant Hall), appear alongside a list of donors from other business enterprises. These poetic references to scented blossoms, the moon, and above all romance, were unmistakably Chinese cultural euphemisms for sex and sensuality. Collectively, these traces of Chinese women in colonial temple inscriptions reveal a dynamic sex trade that spanned the 1,000-mile coast of western Malaya, where some Chinese women who sold sex and operated brothels accumulated a degree of wealth, social visibility, and respectability through philanthropy within the Chinese migrant community.

Selling sex in exchange for money did not preclude migrant Chinese women from playing key roles in religious and sociocultural institutions as donors. As evidenced by the temple inscriptions, female promiscuity was not always incompatible with the religious ethics of Chinese migrant communities. Sexual mores, after all, were often dictated by class. Among the working class, it was not uncommon for a woman to engage in prostitution or have more than one sexual partner over the course of her lifetime. Indeed, many women could and did marry and divorce multiple times. Moreover, married working-class women sometimes continued to sell sex in colonial brothels to support their families.21

In addition to selling sex, low-skilled Chinese migrant women participated in the brothel economy in other ways. In police reports, court cases, and colonial petitions, women who have hitherto remained marginal in histories of prostitution emerge as vital figures whose intimate labor supported the commercialized sex industry. They included women like Lam Tai Yi, who in 1890 worked as an apprentice under her aunt. They offered beauty services, including tailoring and hairdressing, to women selling sex on Campbell Street in Penang, who catered to an upper-class clientele.22 Migrant women like Lam and her aunt were itinerant laborers who lived off-site, but many women also resided in brothels, providing a range of

intimate labors such as cleaning, cooking, and running errands. For the fifty-five brothels registered in Kuala Lumpur in 1894, 696 Chinese women were listed as prostitutes, while 282 women worked as live-in servants.23 Elsewhere across the peninsula, the ratios between women identified as prostitutes and servants were similar.24

While it is possible that servants also engaged in sex work, their separate categorization in the colonial records indicates that at least onethird of brothel workers also performed nonsexual labor. Their prevalence highlights not only the significance of nonsexual labor in sustaining the daily operations of brothels but also the mutual dependence of women’s intimate labor within the brothel economy. The boundaries around what constituted sex work in brothels were, after all, highly porous. In addition to carnal intimacy, women also provided what Luise White called “comforts of home”—food, conversation, and bathwater.25 Colonial social distinctions between the categories “wife,” “servant,” and “prostitute,” thus failed to capture the fluid ways migrant Chinese women moved among them and at times occupied more than one. Catering to a transient, migratory, and disproportionately male population, Chinese women in colonial brothels offered a range of intimate services and domestic comforts.

In addition to mobility between the occupational categories “prostitute” and “servant,” Chinese women in the commercial sex trade also moved physically across the Malay Peninsula from brothel to brothel. While studies of colonial prostitution often focus on the plight of brothel “inmates,” cast as destitute and deprived of agency, this characterization obscures women’s itinerancy as both a livelihood necessity and an economic strategy.26 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Chinese women engaged in serial migratory prostitution, embarking on transcolonial journeys. While serial migration is most commonly associated with the mobility patterns of Chinese male sojourners that are reflected in colonial immigration and police records, it is evident that Chinese women often embarked on similar journeys. Many traversed maritime and intercolonial borders across different empires, from Hong Kong to Burma and from Siam to the Federated Malay States, seeking to maximize their profits in the regional brothel economy.

In the colonial archives, Chinese women undertaking serial migration are rendered legible in the fragments. In these vestiges, one example shows six women from varied southern Chinese dialect groups who departed from Hong Kong together and sold sex at brothels in Rangoon, Malacca, and Seremban over a five-year period.27 In another instance, ten Cantonese women, including Yeung Sz, who was visibly pregnant at the time, boarded a train in Bangkok bound for Bukit Mertajim in Penang, seeking to earn wages selling sex.28 A more revealing case was that of sixteen-year-old Wong Shun Li.

She sailed from Guangxi, China, to Singapore in 1901, working selling sex in brothels in order to send remittances back to her aging grandmother in China. When she became “displeased” with the brothel conditions in Singapore, she traveled to the British-protected state of Selangor to seek new employment at a brothel in Kuala Lumpur. After colonial officials detained her in the new brothel for selling sex as a minor, her grandmother filed a petition through the British Consulate in China to appeal for her release. While colonial officials portrayed Wong Shun Li as a trafficked victim, her grandmother praised her as a dutiful granddaughter who deployed her sexual labor to support her impoverished family. In her petition, the grandmother alluded to a series of family tragedies and economic hardships that had led Wong Shun Li to choose prostitution over marriage. According to the petition, after hearing of the zhan yang (great admiration) for prostitutes in Southeast Asia, Wong Shun Li had sought to make her fortunes in British Malaya.29 If colonial officials drew on the language of criminality, then the grandmother harnessed the familiar Confucian cultural script of filial piety.

The intentions, sentiments, and desires of women like Wong Shun Li remain unknown and perhaps unknowable; their voices are largely absent in official records. Yet this very uncertainty about whether she was a “trafficked” victim or a voluntary migrant is itself instructive. The blurriness of such categories is an apt reminder of the discrepancy between how the colonial government defined sex trafficking and how some female migrants or their kin may have perceived these border-crossing experiences. Moreover, these silences that fill the archives orient historians toward the limits and possibilities of a radical reimagining of migration stories, one that circumvents the rigid and ultimately unsatisfactory narrative framework of coercion and consent.30

Only on rare occasions were migrant women’s forceful claims of agency documented. Ho Kwai Min, who traveled from Hong Kong to Singapore to sell sex in 1940, repeatedly insisted that she had traveled of her own volition. Given a choice between entering into a loveless, arranged marriage—in her own words, “having to wash [her prospective husband’s] face and clothes”—and “com[ing] into society” as a prostitute, Ho chose the latter. She eventually married a client and continued to work in a brothel after her marriage, retiring from prostitution only when her daughter turned nine. In her later life, she maintained that she had exercised “free will” when she engaged in migratory prostitution, emphatically stating that “whether my life is good or bad, it’s my decision.”31

As the cases of Wong Shun Li and Ho Kwai Min illuminate, women selling sex in urban centers sometimes left brothels of their own volition in search of more appealing labor opportunities elsewhere. For Chinese women, then, itinerancy was as much a livelihood strategy as it was for

their male counterparts who labored on plantations and under trade apprenticeships in colonial Southeast Asia. Like sojourning men, Chinese women through their remunerative activities supported themselves and their kin, both in Southeast Asia and back in their home villages in China. Migrant women performed a range of intimate labors affiliated with the sex industry and by no means remained in brothels.

As the western coast of British Malaya underwent a rapid economic expansion in both tin and rubber production in the late nineteenth century, attracting hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Indian migrants, colonial brothels burgeoned. Brothel-keeping was a profitable business and one of the easiest ways for women to accumulate capital during this period.32 Migrant women crossed multiple political borders and navigated complex colonial jurisdictions, participating in a range of brothel-related activities from one city to the next. However, in the first decades of the twentieth century, they encountered a series of colonial legislative reforms that not only circumscribed their mobility within the peninsula but eventually eroded their intimate labor networks within the brothel economy. In the next section, I examine shifting colonial discourses on prostitution that served as a precursor for the incremental progression toward brothel suppression.

From White Slavery to Yellow Traffic: Reconfiguring the “Problem” of Prostitution

In the late nineteenth century, more than four thousand Chinese women were added to the brothel registry in the Straits Settlements, while only five European prostitutes were listed.33 Despite the miniscule number of European women in the sex trade, they nonetheless elicited disproportionate concern from government officials, missionaries, philanthropists, and journalists. This was by no means unique to the Malay Peninsula. Historians have spilled much ink on the presence of white women selling sex in European colonies of Asia and Africa, and the colonial racial order their sexuality threatened to disrupt.34 After all, the availability of their sexuality “distorted the ways whiteness could be represented politically,” as both a marker of racial superiority and a justification for long-term colonial rule.35 Thus, while colonial officials treated Asian women selling sex, and especially the Chinese, as culturally normative and therefore difficult to regulate, they considered European women identified as prostitutes in the colonies as an aberration to be reckoned with.

From 1870 to 1877, the Straits Settlements implemented a controversial state-sanctioned system of prostitution under the Contagious Diseases Ordinance that treated women in the sex trade as vectors of disease and a population that required regulation. Across the British Empire, from India to

Singapore, variations of these laws came into effect throughout the 1860s and 1870s, mandating the registration of brothels and the compulsory medical examination of prostitutes.36 Its passage was motivated by concerns about the high levels of venereal diseases among European military troops, as well as by the maintenance of white prestige through the promotion of a racial hierarchy of brothels and their patrons. In particular, European women were subjected to individuated surveillance.

The policing of European prostitutes was part and parcel of a broader white slavery panic that swept across Europe and the Americas in the late nineteenth century.37 In the Straits Settlements, and especially in Singapore as an emerging entrepôt, sensationalist reports of white slavery at the turn of the century captured the public imagination. The 1912 publication of The White Slave Market, penned by Olive Christian Mackirdy and W. N. Willis, described encounters with “white girls in the dens of infamy” during the authors’ travels to Singapore.38 Filled with wildly exaggerated anecdotes, the book included dubious accounts of thousands of European girls from Germany, France, Austria, and Russia, tricked into selling sex along Malay Street. To the embarrassment of the colonial government, Singapore was cast as the “Babylonia Hell of the East,” where “poor, painted creatures bedecked in their tinsel, sit sipping coffee, smoking cigarettes, and accosting passer-bys.”39

While the colonial government was quick to deny instances of white slavery in the Straits Settlements, insisting instead that such anecdotes were spiced up to generate sales for the book, the publication nonetheless tarnished the reputation of the port city. In 1913, a year after the book’s publication, Governor Arthur Young ordered the termination of all European brothels. Not only were European women suspected of migrating as prostitutes barred from entry into the Straits Settlements, but by December 1915, the government had issued a free passage home to all remaining white prostitutes in the colony. With the assistance of the Russian Consul General, the colonial government repatriated a total of thirty-two European women in 1916, including twenty-nine Russians, two Romanians, and one Frenchwoman.40 Soon after that, colonial officials confidently proclaimed the sight of white women in the city’s brothels as “a thing of the past.”41

Around the same time, the Japanese government, seeking to protect its reputation as a modernizing empire, collaborated with colonial officials to repatriate all karayuki-san, or Japanese women working in the brothels of Southeast Asia.42 By 1920, of the 182 Japanese prostitutes and brothel keepers listed in the city, half had been deported to Japan, while those remaining had turned to domestic work to support themselves.43 The overlapping repatriation of Japanese and European prostitutes underscores how women’s sexuality was frequently used as a litmus test to evaluate civilizational

progress and imperial prestige. The presence of these groups of women posed a threat to the standing of Britain and Japan on the global stage; both nursed increasingly bold imperialist ambitions in Asia.

While the second decade of the century saw the exodus of Japanese and European women who sold sex from the colony, other brothels, most notably Chinese-owned ones, were left alone by colonial officials to operate. But in the 1920s, the enduring presence of Chinese brothels led colonial officials to target prostitution as a uniquely “Chinese” problem. Moreover, growing international anti-sex trafficking campaigns dovetailed with transnational “yellow peril” paranoia, both focusing on Chinese women as victims as well as perpetrators of the colonial sex trade. These twin forces ultimately led to the abolition of brothels across the Malay Peninsula, with devastating consequences for many migrant women.

The Abolition of Brothels and a Colonial Experiment in Demographic Engineering

At the turn of the century, yellow peril represented a gamut of socioeconomic, racial, and political anxieties about Asian immigration to the “West,” which was imagined as an “invasion” or a “flood.”44 These fears relied on an ideological separation between European and Asian forms of mobility: the former were seen as “free migrants” or “pioneers,” while the latter were considered “unfree” and trafficked in underground criminal networks. While historians have written at length on how the yellow peril panic operated in white settler societies and colonies, justifying an era of exclusionary immigration laws targeting Asians, much less consideration has been given to how these racial exclusions operated in a plantation colony like British Malaya. Characterized by an absence of a large white settler population, such colonies were oriented toward resource extraction and labor exploitation for the mass production of commodities like rubber, opium, and tin.

In British Malaya, a region that had an “open” immigration policy until the 1930s, the specter of the yellow peril operated less as a racial threat of an “Oriental invasion” than as a demographic crisis hinged on the vast disparity between men and women in Chinese communities. In gendering the yellow peril, colonial officials saw a male-dominated immigrant population prone to social vices and divided political loyalties as the main threat. The shortage of Chinese women in the colony was thus imagined as the catalyst for rampant prostitution and sex trafficking, as well as a hindrance to the project of grooming immigrants into loyal British subjects.

Throughout the 1920s, terms like “yellow traffic” and “yellow peril” emerged in colonial discourse, which blamed the dearth of Chinese women

in the colony for the bustling brothel economy. The Slave Market News, a Christian illustrated newsletter published from 1924 to 1936, frequently disseminated information about trafficked Chinese and Japanese girls “rescued” from a life of degradation and drudgery in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia.45 In a 1922 article in the Straits Times, an anonymous contributor highlighted the distinct demographic differences between Malaya and the rest of the British Empire: “The total Chinese population of Singapore is given as 217,000 and of these about 216,000 are males. . . . The problem in Singapore belongs neither to India nor Ceylon and no man who wants to face it honestly will draw red herrings across the path of discussion. We have an abnormal, and, in fact, an unnatural ‘social complex’ to deal with. We have a population that holds totally different views . . . on questions of sexuality morality. There is no question of [the existence of] white slave or yellow traffic.”46 So prevalent was this belief in yellow traffic that even the secretary of state for the colonies, L. S. Amery, confidently asserted that prostitution in the Straits Settlements was “an exclusively Chinese problem.”47

In response to the sex-ratio imbalance within the Chinese community in Malaya, the colonial government implemented a two-pronged policy based on the recommendations of the Social Hygiene Committee. First, it amended the Women and Girls’ Protection Ordinance in the Straits Settlements, restricting the entry of foreign prostitutes and initiating the closure of all brothels in the colony over a three-year period.48 By 1931, the policy of suppression had been extended to the rest of the Malay states, rendering illegal a wide range of brothel-related activities, from soliciting to living off the income of prostitutes.

In conjunction with brothel abolition, colonial officials also aimed to promote Chinese female immigration in hopes of creating a stable, selfreproducing Chinese laboring population. To incentivize Chinese female settlers, the secretary of Chinese affairs in the Federated Malay States in 1926 proposed giving temporary plots of land to newly arrived female migrants for subsistence farming and poultry rearing. These garden reserves, he hoped, would encourage women to settle with their families in the interior of the Malay Peninsula and deter them from selling sex as a livelihood strategy.49 Moreover, in a radical attempt at demographic engineering, in 1928 the government passed the Immigration Restriction Ordinance, which was replaced by the Alien Ordinance in 1933, officially bringing an end to the policy of free immigration.50 The ordinances were explicitly gendered, imposing immigration quotas for Chinese male migrants, while enforcing none for women. The effect was dramatic. The number of Chinese female migrants rose rapidly, accounting for nearly 50 percent of the total annual Chinese immigration in the years following 1933, and for the first time the sex disparity within the Chinese population began to level out.

These interventionist policies accelerated the widespread transformation of the regional sex trade and the urban landscape. When Bruce Lockhart, a former British civil servant, returned to Malaya after a decade in the mid-1930s, he noted the absence of Singapore’s once famed red-light district: “Malay Street . . . brought me face to face with the new Singapore. Gone was Madame Blanche with her collections of Hungarians, Poles and Russian Jewesses—the frail army of white women . . . from the poorest population of Central and Eastern Europe. . . . Gone, too, were the long rows of Japanese brothels. Today all this tolerated sordidness has vanished.”51 The closure of brothels not only altered the demographic makeup of the city, leading to an exodus of European and Japanese women; it also disbanded the intimate labor networks of Chinese migrant women who had relied on the brothel economy for their survival. As prostitution was driven underground during the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese women, both sinkeh (newly arrived migrants) and Malayan-born settlers, found other ways to profit in sexual commerce. Many attempted to evade colonial surveillance by establishing coffeehouses and unorthodox households as sites for clandestine prostitution.

Coffeehouses and Communal Houses as Sites of Evasion

While the number of brothels in the port cities of British Malaya dwindled in the 1920s, they thrived in the hinterlands, springing up in various protected Malay states. In 1894, for example, there were only eleven registered prostitutes in the entire state of Perak, nine Chinese and two Japanese women, in just three brothels.52 Yet by 1931, as the Kinta Valley became the most productive alluvial tin-mining region in the world, there were a total of 197 brothels and 651 registered prostitutes listed in official records.53 The development of the tin-mining industry no doubt attracted many women migrating for prostitution, since the discrepancy in sex ratios in towns heavily populated by men, such as Batu Gajah, created favorable economic conditions for women selling sex to earn a living wage.

From the outset, however, brothels in the interior Malay states stood in stark contrast to the densely populated, two-storied buildings that dotted Chulia Street in Penang and Malay Street in Singapore. Brothels in the protected states were often makeshift and thus more difficult for colonial officials to identify, register, and, in the aftermath of abolition, remove. In a 1931 report submitted to the League of Nations Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, British officials described “colonies of hutment brothels” around the towns of Kuala Lumpur, Seremban, and Ipoh, that were frequented by Chinese laborers from the nearby plantations and tin mines. These hutments were, according to officials, crowded spaces typi-

cally inhabited by many tenants, with only one “known” prostitute. Since by legal definition brothels were sites in which two or more prostitutes resided, these hutments could not be officially removed in the aftermath of abolition, much to the frustrations of colonial officials.54

Not surprisingly, the colonial state’s attempt to identify who was a prostitute in hutment brothels was met with challenges. After all, a “known prostitute” was not a fixed social category or personal identity to which migrant women subscribed. Rather, it merely described one form of work some women performed during their lifetime.55 Chinese women were thus able to turn the narrow colonial legal definition of a brothel to their own advantage. As long as women sold sex individually or operated a brothel disguised as a lodging house, they could evade the colonial crackdown on brothels.

Establishing communal lodging houses was one of many ways migrant women responded to the disenfranchisement of their intimate labor networks. Throughout the 1920s, sex work also spread to other sites of leisure and entertainment, with kopi-tiam/kedai-kopi (coffeehouses),restaurants, and cinemas operating as sites for “sly” prostitution. In 1922, W. T. Chapman, the secretary for Chinese affairs in the Federated Malay States, observed the proliferation of “sly” prostitution among Chinese women in the interior, who plied their trade in coffeehouses with lodging units upstairs.56 In an effort to sanitize coffeehouses, as a precursor to the large-scale effort to abolish brothels, Chapman urged that licenses to public spaces of entertainment only be granted after the Chinese Protectorate had inspected the sites and verified that they were not used for “immoral purposes.”57

The ubiquity of coffeehouses owned and operated by Chinese women during this period, across villages and town centers in British Malaya, can be attributed to several factors.58 First, the low start-up and operational costs of these small-scale enterprises meant that in times of financial difficulty they became a viable way to obtain supplementary income. Wong Ah Ho, for example, left her village in Kaiping, China, for Malacca in 1935 and opened a coffee stall to supplement the meager wages she earned telling fortunes and performing séances at the temple.59 Second, intimate labor in coffeehouses, whether preparing beverages, cooking food, providing conversation, or soliciting sex, offered migrant women more flexible work options than did “official” brothels in the cosmopolitan port cities of Singapore and Penang. In the tin-mining towns, particularly in Perak, where there were few wage labor opportunities for women, operating a coffeehouse was more profitable and less strenuous than the backbreaking and sometimes dangerous work of dulang washing [panning].60 Coffeehouses also fulfilled an economic demand in tin-mining towns, providing food and domestic intimacies for the large pool of unmarried, laboring Chinese men. Lastly, in the late 1920s

and 1930s, as brothel suppression became the official policy across British Malaya, migrant women who were squeezed out of the brothel industry turned to coffeehouses for work. Many continued selling sex, using coffeehouses as a strategic site of evasion from the interventions of a colonial state keen on channeling the labor of female migrants to the household or to productive industries, such as mining or construction.61

In response to the government’s encroachment on their intimate lives and livelihood strategies, migrant Chinese women also established communal female residences and adopted fictive kinship ties that mirrored colonial ideals of domesticity. One residence of this sort, located in the northern state of Kedah, illustrates the adaptive strategies Chinese women used in the face of brothel abolition and labor precarity. In a building located on Jalan Langgar in the city of Alor Star, a coffeehouse operated on the ground floor; the upper levels were divided into several cubicles, with “beds in each, but no luggage of any sort” to indicate permanent residence.62 However, a number of Chinese women and girls lived in the adjacent building, and a handful of them managed the coffeehouse.

Among the female residents in the communal home were three middleaged Chinese women who all claimed to be the wives of Hoh Yi, an engine driver who supposedly labored in the southern state of Selangor. Perhaps most noteworthy is that during a government inspection officials observed that one woman was blind, another was “witless,” and the third, Lau Tai Yi, was a brothel keeper who managed the operations of both the coffeehouse and the lodging units. Living with them were several other women, including one who had formerly been registered as a prostitute in a brothel in Penang. When brothels were outlawed in the Straits Settlements in 1927, she likely had relocated to the Unfederated Malay States to circumvent the legal restrictions on prostitution in the colony.

Many communal lodging homes were established with the intention of operating as a brothel in disguise by blurring the boundaries between spaces of work, home, and leisure. Female residents performed fictive kinship relations that modeled the heteronormative household promoted by the colonial government—one defined by conjugality and family formation. They did so in part to deflect the suspicions of government officials who were intent on sanitizing British Malaya through the removal of brothels. But beyond serving as a strategy of deflection, coffeehouses and lodging homes were also crucial institutions, both socially and economically, for unattached Chinese migrant women who had no conjugal relations or children of their own. Like Cantonese amahs in domestic work, many secured their own welfare in Malaya through rituals of sworn sisterhoods and the creation of vegetarian halls.63 Similarly, coffeehouses sometimes served as a form of social insurance for disabled and elderly migrant women, as

demonstrated by the presence of blind and “witless” women in Jalan Langgar. These women relied on the pooled income of others who engaged in a range of intimate labors, including but not limited to prostitution, for their survival in British Malaya. Seen in this light, these spaces functioned as cooperative economies for migrant women; they offered an alternative form of intimacy and sociality to the heteronormative familial model upheld by the colonial state.

Throughout the 1920s, these living arrangements for migrant Chinese women flourished in the interior Malay states. Under colonial law, it was illegal for men, but not women, to live on the earnings of prostitutes, so women selling sex and working as servants and coffeehouse attendants could collectively pool their earnings as an economic strategy. Thus, when the 1927 Women and Girls’ Protection Ordinance and its equivalent in the Federated Malay States in 1931 outlawed these communal spaces of work, home, and leisure, women who depended on these arrangements—namely, the elderly, the impoverished, and the disabled—were the most adversely impacted.

Lee Sam: Brothel Worker, Gardener, and Stateless Subject

In the years preceding Lee Sam’s arrest, the global drop in tin prices wreaked havoc on the tin-mining industry in Malaya. In 1931, Perak’s labor force in tin mines decreased by more than one-third.64 The layoff of tin miners was part of a broader economic displacement that resulted in the repatriation of more than fifty thousand Chinese workers in the Federated Malay States from 1930 to 1932, with Perak bearing the brunt.65 The economic hardships endured by Chinese migrants in Perak were exacerbated by the abolition of brothels in 1931, which closed down a vital source of economic opportunity for women. For Lee Sam and others, subsistence farming in the 1930s was likely not enough to lift them out of their impoverished conditions, particularly after the Department of Agriculture ordered the removal of Chinese agricultural squatters. Participating in the illicit brothel economy was one way to collect additional wages.

The criminal file of Lee Sam provides historians with few clues to the extent and duration of her involvement in the local brothel economy. Her participation may have been after the collapse of the tin market in the late 1920s, but it could have been much earlier, perhaps during the proliferation of coffeehouses and other service-oriented industries in Perak. As an assistant and procurer for a small establishment, she probably recruited newly arrived women in the city and neighboring villages to sell sex in one of the hutments that lined the town center. Perhaps she also scrubbed pots, pans, and dishes, swept floors, and ran errands for the women and their

clients in the brothel. That she continued to labor primarily as a gardener even while she worked for the brothel suggests that the wages she earned were meager and insufficient to support herself and her family, if she had one. Indeed, the “scars on her left cheek and back” and her frail frame of a mere seventy-one pounds seem to attest to a life of strenuous physical labor and malnourishment.66

While we may not know the full scope of Lee Sam’s involvement in the small brothel, her arrest and banishment nonetheless help shed light on the sweeping efforts of the colonial regime to expel Chinese vagrants and beggars, as well as unattached elderly women affiliated with the brothel economy. The criminalization of brothels resulted in a surge in the banishment of Chinese women across Malaya. From 1923 to 1929, no banishment orders were issued for Chinese women in the Federated Malay States. In 1932, a year after the enactment of the Women and Girls’ Protection Ordinance, nine women from Perak were exiled to China for offenses related to brothel keeping.67 That same year in the Straits Settlements, fifty-six women, including thirty-seven Cantonese, were banished; the oldest woman was sixty-nine years old.68 Eight years later, a total of fifty-eight Chinese women were deported for brothel-related offenses across Malaya, compared with sixteen men.69 The number of Chinese women banished for trafficking and brothel-related offenses was almost always more than double that of men. This represented a dramatic reversal of colonial banishment patterns from earlier decades. Across the Malay Peninsula, from Penang to Taiping, Chinese women, who formed the bulk of the brothel economy, experienced an upheaval in their economic livelihoods during the 1930s.

After Lee Sam’s imprisonment, she was scheduled to be deported from Kuala Lumpur in October 1932. What happened after her release from prison, however, is far from clear. Here is where the paper trail concerning her fate ends with a strange twist. After the police in Selangor, where she served her sentence, filed for her banishment to Kedah (the state of her birth), the latter government refused to accept her. The British adviser in Kedah pointed to a section in the 1910 Banishment Enactment that prohibited a person banished from one Malay state to be transferred to another. The banished were instead to be sent back to their home country. Banishment, as the colonial law at the time implicitly suggested, could not be applied to a Malayan-born subject, irrespective of race, who had no home country to return to. Banishment, it turned out, was not supposed to be applied to a person like Lee Sam at all.

In the months following her release, Lee occupied a liminal status as a stateless subject. Banished from one place and rejected both by the state of her birth and the state of her residence, she represented a conundrum for the governments of Perak, Kedah, and Selangor. The colonial correspondence

surrounding her case was marked by a chaotic confusion, a political volleying back and forth, among three states, none of which wished to claim legal responsibility for her. In mistaking Lee as an immigrant from China and thus an alien, rather than a Malayan-born Chinese woman and therefore a British-protected person, the colonial regime rendered her an abandoned subject with no home to which she might return.

The bureaucratic conundrum in Lee Sam’s banishment is instructive of the racial politics that underwrote prostitution regulation and migration control. While both Malayan-born and sinkeh Chinese were commended for their contribution to the development of Malaya and at times praised as an “industrial backbone” of the region, their status in the peninsula was nonetheless ambiguous. For Lee Sam, despite her birth in Kedah, her Chinese descent marked her in many ways as an “essential outsider.”70 This mistake was not merely a bureaucratic accident; it had been spurred by the rhetoric of yellow peril and the conflation of the colonial sex trade with the “problem” of unfettered Chinese immigration.

This misidentification underscored the ill-defined legal rights of subjects, nationals, and citizens, particularly of the Chinese in colonial Malaya. That same year, in a separate case overseen by the Supreme Court of the Straits Settlements, colonial chief justices debated the effects of banishment law on “overseas Chinese and local-born Chinese” and pointed to the difficulties in establishing a distinction between the two.71 For Lee Sam, despite her status as a British-protected Malay subject, it was her being Chinese that ultimately mattered in the colonial state’s decision to banish her from her homeland for life.

At the same time, in the highly transient world of colonial Southeast Asia the relationship of migration, nationality, and subjecthood was complex and a source of great confusion. While the colonial government aimed to construct sociolegal distinctions between “alien” and “indigene,” itinerant Chinese women like Lee Sam sometimes muddled these categories through their border-crossing journeys. Moreover, the political borders they crossed sometimes shifted during their lifetimes. At the time of Lee Sam’s birth, Kedah was a part of Siam, but by 1909 it had fallen under British indirect rule. The colonial confusion over the fluid political boundaries of the British Empire and thus Lee Sam’s citizenship is laid bare in the criminal file by the ink blots, scratch marks, and corrections to her place of birth. It was first recorded as Siam, which was subsequently crossed out and replaced with the city Kulim in Kedah; chaos over her banishment ensued.

Across the British Empire in the 1920s and 1930s, at the height of antivice campaigns, the extralegal status of brothels was subject to renewed scrutiny, resulting in protracted and heated debates in the metropole and the colonies among feminist abolitionists, missionaries, medical doctors,

British parliamentarians, and colonial administrators.72 By the early 1930s, across British Asia from India to Hong Kong to Singapore, a policy of tacit brothel toleration was replaced by a policy of active and aggressive suppression.73 These sweeping legal changes, celebrated by a leading women’s moral-reform organization as an “abolitionist victory,” had profound and enduring consequences for Chinese migrant women like Lee Sam, whose lives had become intricately linked to the colonial brothel economy.

Thus, Lee’s life was both exemplary and exceptional. From a comparative, transcolonial perspective, her life mirrored that of many women who participated in the brothel economy across the British Empire and who were, according to Stephen Legg, “civilly abandoned” by the colonial state in the 1930s.74 Yet the specific, localized context of Lee’s life as a Malayan-born Chinese woman living in a tin-mining village also distinguished her experiences from those of women plying their trade in the brothels of Falkland Road in Bombay.75 In British Malaya, the discourse around the colonial sex trade during the 1920s and 1930s was underpinned by racialized assumptions that conflated prostitution with “yellow traffic,” treating it predominantly as a “problem” of unfettered Chinese immigration. Lee Sam’s sentencing, like many others, was ultimately part of the broader racialization of prostitution and imperial crackdown on the commercial sex trade.

Conclusion

Lee Sam’s story straddled multiple scales. It was at once personal, local, and regional, but also imperial and transcolonial.76 Her conviction, dispossession, and eventual statelessness were the result of sweeping legal changes that targeted Chinese women during an era of economic precarity and mass migration. Her shift in fortunes in many ways embodied the disenfranchisement of women working in the colonial brothel economy. As this article has argued, Chinese women in the late nineteenth century were key actors in the brothel economy in British Malaya, establishing labor and social networks, accumulating wealth, and navigating the shifting legal regimes of prostitution control in the peninsula.

The prosperous colonial sex trade, with migrant women at its center, however, underwent a massive transformation in the 1920s and 1930s as renewed debates about prostitution led to a large-scale crackdown on the regional sex industry. During these two decades, colonial officials, feminist abolitionists, and international anti-sex trafficking campaigners recast the “problem” of prostitution from an issue of white slavery, common in the earliest years of the twentieth century, to one of yellow traffic. This discursive shift, where global yellow peril paranoia intersected with anti-sex trafficking campaigns, and its attendant policy transformations had profound impacts on the lives of women working in the brothel economy.

As the colonial state consolidated power and exerted greater surveillance and control over the lives of Chinese women, it targeted brothels precisely because they blurred the boundaries of home, workplace, and sites of leisure. The liminality of the brothel, which was both a site of labor and a place of interiority, unsettled colonial demarcations of public and private.77 Thus, colonial officials made the abolition of brothels a part of their social and moral reform agendas throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The 1930s ultimately wreaked havoc on the livelihoods of women who had depended on the brothel for their survival, leading to their dispossession and displacement from the colonial state. Nonetheless, migrant women adopted creative strategies to thwart the changing legal regimes by forging alternative familial bonds and exercising entrepreneurial skills as the sex trade was driven underground into coffeehouses.

By looking at a range of intimate labors migrant women performed, this article has highlighted the limitations of migration histories that have hitherto portrayed Chinese women as either left-behind wives or marginal figures in Asia’s mobility revolution.78 Instead, I have uncovered a dense network of itinerant Chinese women by weaving together seemingly disparate narratives of female migrants, from seamstresses to prostitutes, coffeehouse attendants to domestic servants. Their fragmented stories, strewn across archives in various geographical locales, in both the metropole and the colony, in the colonial and the vernacular, invite a new retelling of Chinese migration histories that insists on the importance of women as labor migrants in their own right. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese women traveled, worked, and forged new relations across the Malay Peninsula; their intimate labors served as crucial linchpins that sustained the overseas migrant communities. Through their distinctive gendered community formation, they navigated an era of economic precarity and growing state intervention in sex work, and in turn defied colonial categorical distinctions between prostitute and servant, ingénue and procurer, trafficked victim and free migrant.

Notes

Warm thanks to those who offered their generous comments on various versions of this article, including Philippa Levine, Jack Neubauer, Sarah Mellors, Jeffrey Guarneri, Joanna Batt, Elizabeth O’Brien, Christina Villarreal, and Snehal Shingavi. Special thanks to the Journal of Women’s History special issue editors, Julia Laite and Philippa Hetherington, and the reviewers, for their insightful suggestions. Research for this article was supported by the International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Sciences Research Council and a Doctoral Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

1Lee Ah Sam was born in Kedah, which was part of the province of Monthon Syburi, which was under the control of Siam (present-day Thailand) until 1909, when it was transferred to the British with the signing of the Anglo-Siamese Treaty. Five years prior to the treaty, in 1904, the British colonial government initiated the construction of a railway that would connect Kulim, Kedah—Lee Ah Sam’s birthplace—to the Federated Malay States (FMS) Railway via Bukit Mertajam in the province of Wellesley. See “Connection of Kulim to FMS Railway,” The National Archives at Kew (hereafter TNA), CO 273/302/33480.

2Loh Kok Wah, “From Tin Mine Coolies to Agricultural Squatters: SocioEconomic Change in the Kinta District during the Interwar Years,” in The Underside of Malaysian History: Pullers, Prostitutes, Plantation Workers, ed. Peter James Rimmer and Lisa M. Allen (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 1990), 72–97; 90–92. 3“Banishment of a Female Chinese Named Lee Sam from Selangor to Kedah,” Arkib Negara Malaysia (National Archives of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur; hereafter NAM), 1957/0307312W.

4In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly consolidated Federated Malay States (FMS). The FMS comprised the four Malay states of Selangor, Perak, Negri Sembilan, and Pahang, which had been British protectorates from 1874 to 1888.

5Annual Reports of the Federated Malay States, 1920–1938, William Blythe Collection, University of London, School of Oriental and Africa Studies Archive, PP/MS/31, Box 1, File 5, 5.

6The 1888 Banishment Ordinance and the 1890 Secret Societies Ordinance were frequently invoked by colonial officials to thwart rising Chinese nationalism and political activities deemed overtly “revolutionary” or “anti-imperial.” See Ching Fatt Yong and R. B. MacKenna, The Kuomintang Movement in British Malaya, 1912–1949 (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 1990), 19. 7The 1930 Women and Girls Protection Ordinance abolished brothels in the Straits Settlements, rendering all brothel-related activities illegal. A similar enactment was passed the following year in the FMS. See “The Women and Girls Protection Enactment,” TNA, CO 717/77/4.

8Sunil Amrith, Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 4–6. 9Southeast Asia accounted for 90 percent of all overseas Chinese migration from 1840 to 1940. For more on the challenges of calculating Chinese emigration from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, see: Adam McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940,” Journal of Global History 5, no. 1 (2010): 95–124.

10Shelly Chan, Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 1. 11McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context,” 98–99. The Straits Settlements and the Malay Peninsula were by far the most popular destinations

for Chinese migrants, the numbers going there exceeding those going to the Dutch East Indies (4–5 million), Siam (4 million), French Indochina (2–4 million), and the Philippines (750,000). 12McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context,” 98–99. See also Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang, eds. Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Philip Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); and Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Eastern University Press, 2003). Some scholars have offered socioeconomic explanations for the lack of Chinese female mobility overseas. See, e.g., Sucheta Mazumdar, “What Happened to the Women? Chinese and Indian Male Migration to the United States in Global Perspective,” in Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology, ed. Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 58–76. Lai Ah Eng’s important research focuses on the lives of Chinese peasants, factory workers, and prostitutes in colonial Malaya but examines it as a separate issue from broader migration patterns. See Peasants, Proletarians, and Prostitutes: A Preliminary Investigation into the Work of Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986). My intervention builds on a notable exception that challenges the male-oriented migration paradigm in Chinese-language scholarship: Fan Ruolan, Yimin, Xingbie Yu Huaren Shehui: Malaiya Hauren Funu Yanjiu 1929–1941 [Immigration, Gender, and Overseas Chinese Society: Studies on Chinese Women in Malaya, 1929–1941] (Beijing: Zhongguo Huaqiao Chubanshe, 2005). 13Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). See also Nicole Constable, “The Commodification of Intimacy: Marriage, Sex and Reproductive Labor,” Annual Review of Anthropology 38 (2009): 49–64; Thu Huong Vo-Nguyen, The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture, and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); and Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002). 14My use of moral economy refers to the ways social norms intersect with economic exchanges, underscoring the mutual imbrication of cultures and economies. I borrow the framework from Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Hung Cam Thai, and Rachel Silvey, “Guest Editors’ Introduction: Intimate Industries: Restructuring (Im) material Labor in Asia,” positions: asia critique 24, no.1 (2016): 1–15. Their framework differs from the classic political anthropology’s understanding of moral economy in Southeast Asia, which refers to peasants’ participation and subsequent revolts in the moral economy of patron-client relations. See James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976). 15“Women and Girls Protection Ordinance: Debates 1894,” TNA, CO 273/197/18487.

16Elizabeth Sinn, “Women at Work: Chinese Brothel Keepers in NineteenthCentury Hong Kong,” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 3 (2007): 87–111; 87–88.

17“Petition of Ng Then Wi, Chinese Protectorate Detective,” TNA, CO 273/197/1799.

18“Petition of Ng Then Wi.” 19“Petition of Ng Then Wi.” For more on bribery charges and the Chinese Protectorate becoming a “disgrace and sink of corruption,” see “Staff of the Chinese Protectorate Singapore,” TNA, CO 273/154/15888. 20I thank Dr. Wong Yee Tuan for first directing me to these inscriptions at the Tua Peck Gong Temple during my research in Penang in the spring of 2017. For a full list of donor inscriptions along the west coast of Malaya, see Wolfgang Franke and Tiefan Chen, Chinese Epigraphic Materials in Malaysia, vol. 3 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaysia Press, 1985), 1021, 1025, 1100–1102. 21“Interview with Ho Kwai Min, 1992,” National Archives of Singapore, Accession No. 001393, Reel 10.

22In re Lam Tai Ying (1890), 4 Ky 685. 23“1894 General Return of Registered Brothels and Women of Straits Settlements and the Protected Native States,” TNA, CO 273/197/18487.

24“1894 General Return.”

25Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 7.

26James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 27“1931 Report of Federated and Unfederated Malay States,” United Nations Archives (hereafter UNA), R3061, File 11B/38154/38154.

28“Special Provision for the Repatriation of a Chinese Woman Named Yeung Sz to Canton,” NAM, 1957/0243324W.

29“Li Shi Applies for the Release of her Granddaughter, Wong Shun Li, from the Federal Home,” NAM, 1957/0102892W.

30On the inadequate framework of coercion and consent in trafficking histories, see Elisa Camiscioli, “Coercion and Choice: The ‘Traffic’ in Women and Children between France and Argentina in the Early Twentieth Century,” French Historical Society 42, no. 3 (2019): 483–507. 31“Interview with Ho Kwai Min, 1992,” National Archives of Singapore, Accession No. 001393, Reel 1.

32Warren, Ah-ku and Karayuki-san, 59.

33“Women and Girls Protection Ordinance: Debates 1894,” TNA, CO 273/197/18487.

34Harald Fischer-Tiné, “‘White Women Degrading Themselves to the Lowest Depths’: European Networks of Prostitution and Colonial Anxieties in British India and Ceylon ca. 1880–1914,” Indian Economic & Social History Review 40, no. 2 (2003): 163–190; Ashwini Tambe, “The Elusive Ingénue: A Transnational Feminist Analysis of European Prostitution in Colonial Bombay,” Gender & Society 19, no. 2 (2005): 160–179; Philippa Levine, “‘A Multitude of Unchaste Women’: Prostitution in the British Empire,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 4 (2004): 159–163.

35Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), 232.

36Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics; Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980).

37Julia Laite, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: Women’s Labour Migration and Sex Trafficking in the Early Twentieth Century,” International Review of Social History 62, no. 1 (2017): 37–65; Jessica Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Gunther Peck, “Feminizing White Slavery in the United States: Marcus Braun and the Transnational Traffic in White Bodies, 1890–1910,” in Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History, ed. Leon Fink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 222–241; Eileen Boris and Heather Berg, “Protecting Virtue, Erasing Labor,” in Human Trafficking Reconsidered: Rethinking the Problem, Envisioning New Solutions, ed. Kimberly Kay Hoang and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (New York: International Debate Education Association, 2014), 76–81.

38Mrs. Archibald Mackirdy [Olive Christian Malvery] and W. N. Willis, The White Slave Market (London: S. Paul, 1912), 54–55.

39Mackirdy and Willis, White Slave Market, 123–124. 40“1917 Prostitution in the Colony,” TNA, CO 273/457/282. 41“Mr. Cowen’s Summary of His Report on Public Prostitution in Singapore,” Women’s Library, London School of Economics (hereafter WL), 3AMS/D/40/01, Folder 1.

42“1924 Letter from Consul General of Japan to Bishop C. J. Ferguson Davie,” WL, 3AMS/D/40/01, Folder 1. On the expulsion of Japanese prostitutes from Singapore, see also Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San, 164–165. For a classic study of karayuki-san in Southeast Asia, refer to Yamazaki Tomoko, Sandakan Brothel No. 8: An Episode in the History of Lower-Class Japanese Women, trans. Karen F. Colligan-Taylor (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999). 43“1924 Letter from Consul General of Japan to Bishop C. J. Ferguson Davie.” According to the records, forty-four were listed as housekeepers, twenty-six as servants, and seven as owners of their own businesses.

44The term “yellow peril” was first coined and popularized in the German Kaiser Willhelm II’s commissioned painting Die Gelbe Gefahr in 1895—the same year that Japan defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War. See Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 123.

45“Slave Market News Cuttings,” WL, 3AMS/D/20, Folder 1. 46“Shirking Realities,” Straits Times, December 22, 1922. See also “‘Yellow’ Slave Traffic,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, January 20, 1921, 6.

47“The Social Evil in Malaya,” WL, 3AMS/D/40/02, Folder 1. 48“1927 Social Hygiene,” TNA, CO 273/539/5. 49“Female Chinese Immigration and its Bearing on the Scheme for Vegetable Garden Reserves and on the Problem of Social Hygiene in FMS,” NAM, 1957/0240794W.

50“1933 Restriction of Chinese Immigration,” TNA, CO 273/590/3. 51R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Return to Malaya (London: Putnam, 1936), 122. 52“1894 A General Return of Registered Brothels and Women of the Straits Settlements and Protected Malay States,” TNA, CO 273/197/18487. 53“1931 Report of Federated and Unfederated Malay States.” UNA, R3061, File 11B/38154/38154.

54“1931 Report of Federated and Unfederated Malay States,” UNA, R3061, File 11B/38154/38154.

55White, Comforts of Home; Judith R Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 56“1922 Memorandum on Sly Prostitution in Kuala Lumpur and other Large Towns in the Federated Malay States,” NAM, 1957/0224251W. 57“Cancellation of Non-Renewal of Licenses of Coffee Shops, Eating Houses, and Other Similar Places in the Case of a Successful Prosecution or Representation from the Chinese Protectorate that the Shop is Used for Immoral Purposes,” NAM, 1957/0224251W.

58By the 1950s there were more than two thousand coffeehouses in Singapore alone. See Khairudin Aljunied, “Coffee-Shops in Colonial Singapore: Domains of Contentious Publics,” History Workshop Journal 77, no.1 (2014): 65–85; 70. 59Wong Ah Ho, oral interview by Saunders Chang, 21 and 24 February 2017, Penang, Malaysia. 60Tan Ai Boay, “Bei yiwang de gongzuo nuxing—da xiaotiao shiqi de rongyao ya jingji kejia liu la nu, 1929–1933 [Forgotten Women Workers—The Hakka Dulang Washers in Perak, Malaya during the Great Depression from 1929 to 1933], Overseas Chinese History Studies, no. 2 (June 2015): 56–66. See also: “1935 Death of a Chinese

Woman named Chan Lan as the result of falling in a mining cave at Wang Tangga,” NAM, 1957/0484387W.

61On the professionalization of domestic work in the 1930s, see Kelvin E. Y. Low, Remembering the Samsui Women: Migration and Social Memory in Singapore and China. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015); Andria Crosson, “From Female Sojourner to National Icon: The Samsui Women of Singapore” (unpublished thesis, University of Texas at San Antonio, Department of History, 2005). 62“Two Girls, Her Daughters, Have Been Taken by the Protector of Chinese to Home at Sungei Patani,” NAM, 1957/0408629W. 63Marjorie Topley, “Chinese Women’s Vegetarian Houses in Singapore,” in Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine, and Money, ed. Marjorie Topley and Jean DeBernadi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), chap. 6. 64Francis Loh Kok Wah, Beyond the Tin Mines: Coolies, Squatters, and New Villagers in the Kinta Valley, Malaysia, c. 1880–1980 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988), 28–31.

65Of the fifty thousand Chinese repatriated during this two-year period, thirty-three thousand were from Perak. See Loh, Beyond the Tin Mines, 29. 66“Banishment of a Female Chinese Named Lee Sam from Selangor to Kedah,” NAM, 1957/0307312W.

67“Summary of Annual Trafficking Reports in the Federated Malay States 1932,” UNA, R4677, File 11B/2425/2070.

68“Summary of Annual Trafficking Reports in the Straits Settlements for 1932,” UNA, R4677, File 11B/2425/2070.

69“Statistics compiled from “Summary of Annual Reports in the SS, FMS, UFMS, 1939–1940,’” UNA, R4712, File 11B/39012/38959.

70Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid, eds., Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). 71“Banishment of Ho Cheuk Khuan, Kuala Lumpur,” in “1932 Review of Chinese Affairs, Part I,” TNA, CO 273/579/5. For more on the difficulty of determining subjecthood, nationality, and citizenship in colonial Southeast Asia, see Sunil S. Amrith, “Indians Overseas? Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya, 1870–1941,” Past and Present 208, no. 1 (2010): 232.

72Jessica Pliley, Robert Kramm, and Harald Fischer-Tiné, eds., Global AntiVice Activism, 1890–1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and “Immorality” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

73Julia Laite, “The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene: Abolitionism and Prostitution in Britain, 1915–1959,” Women’s History Review 17, no. 2 (2008): 207–223; Ashwini Tambe, Codes of Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

74Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scales, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 41–94. 75Ashwini Tambe, “Brothels as Families: Reflections on the History of Bombay’s Kothas,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 8, no. 2 (2006): 219–242. 76On scalar analysis of prostitution, see Stephen Legg, “Transnationalism and the Scalar Politics of Imperialism,” New Global Studies 4, no. 1 (2010). https:// doi-org.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/10.2202/1940-004.1103. 77Philippa Levine, “The Cordon Sanitaire: Mobility and Space in the Regulation of Colonial Prostitution,” in Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia, ed. Sonita Sarkar and Esha Niyogi De (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) 51–66. 78See, e.g., Shelly Chan, “Rethinking the ‘Left-Behind’: A Case of Liberating Wives in Emigrant South China in the 1950s,” in Proletarian and Mass Migrations: A Global Perspective on Continuities and Discontinuities in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Amarjit Kaur (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and Huifen Shen, China’s Left-Behind Wives: Families of Migrants From Fujian to Southeast Asia, 1930s–1950s (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012).