Diary of an NUS Museum Intern: Christal Wee
Note: Diary of an NUS Museum Intern is a series of blog posts written by our interns about their experiences during the course of their internships. Working alongside their mentors, our interns have waded through tons of historical research, assisted in curatorial work, pitched in during exhibition installations and organised outreach events! If you would like to become our next intern, visit our internship page for more information!
Christal Wee is a fourth-year student studying Geography at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. As a Baba House Outreach Intern, she helped put together a new syllabus for the Baba House's Docent Training Programme and conceptualised a virtual tour series for Instagram based on past exhibitions.
During the Circuit Breaker period, my father had just finished his research on our family history and how our first ancestors came to Singapore in the 1800s, settled down and began a local Singaporean life. My father spoke with pride about our family being Straits Chinese and while I had always known I was Peranakan, all I knew about it was that we ate Nyonya food at Chinese New Year and sometimes we wore the Sarong Kebaya during special occasions. Alongside my love for museums, especially living museums, I decided to check out the NUS Museum internship at the Baba House. This has to be one of the most unique periods of time we are living in. I never imagined myself graduating and entering into the workforce in this manner! Sitting in my bedroom/living room, attending team meetings over Zoom and even going on virtual museum tours. Nonetheless, it has been an enriching experience.
Connecting with my family:
I’ve always associated Peranakan culture with material wealth, beautiful houses in Katong and the delicious cuisine. However, from my recent dealings in cultural geography, I learnt that culture is not about the spectacular, but more so the routines and the ordinary-ness of daily life. The instance of the Baba House could not be a more perfect example of this. Thinking about my own family, yes we were Peranakans, the first ‘Wee’ of my family had indeed hailed from China in the 1820s, settled in Singapore and likely married a local lady. But we didn’t have a family home - my grandfather’s village was long gone. We didn’t have any heirlooms, no big ancestral portraits or stunning furniture. What we had were my great-grandfather’s humble ayam sio and chap chye recipes, my grandfather teaching us how to play Chubit-chubit semat, learning some Baba Malay words at a young age and listening to my grand uncles and aunts speaking about Ah Kong. These nuggets of oldness was part of my Peranakan culture that I began to appreciate while researching on themes such as language, entertainment and games, and cuisine for our upcoming Docent Training Programme.
Another task I undertook was to examine the past exhibitions from the Baba House and develop the content into a virtual tour on Instagram. While the first and second floor of the Baba House are curated to display domestic life and living conditions of the family home in the 1920s, the third story gallery presents a space for contemporary projects and conversations about the house and its architecture and conservation, the Peranakan lineage, history and evolution, and even wider dialogue on the Straits Settlements. The exhibition that resonated most with me was Chris Yap’s "Fingerbowls and Hankies":
“[My grandparents] lived a life that was not lavishly wealthy, but very honestly grounded in traditions. Those are the memories, the ‘oldness’ that I hold tightly to.” - Chris Yap
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