ABSTRACT
This chapter is dedicated to an examination of Chinese Australian women’s experiences of the maintenance of ‘traditional’ Chinese culture as recounted and explained in their own words. By focusing on everyday cultural practices relating to language and food, and more marked traditions linked to annual festivities, this chapter indicates how elements of ‘traditional’ Chinese culture, beyond the Confucian family roles and responsibilities, were reproduced and adapted in unique ways. The chapter also highlights how these cultural practices were linked to a sense of ‘Chineseness’ in the lives of some Chinese Australian women. Through a postcolonial feminist analysis, this chapter positions homes as important spaces in which culture was maintained, and women, particularly mothers, as important and central players in the maintenance and reproduction of culture. While acknowledging obvious links between women’s roles in the maintenance of culture and their gendered position within the Confucian family system, a postcolonial feminist perspective is used to argue that cultural maintenance was an act of empowerment and resistance within the context of assimilation. The information presented in this chapter therefore complicates and challenge understandings of the ‘oppressed Chinese woman’ in the Australian context.
