Article

Refugees

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Refugees

Scope and Historical Definition

The term “refugee” in the Malaysian context encompasses a diverse range of displaced populations whose arrivals have shaped the country’s demographic, cultural, and political landscape. The records available to the Society’s literature reveal at least two distinct refugee phenomena: the Indochinese refugee crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s, which brought approximately 250,000 displaced persons from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos to the region, and earlier episodes of wartime displacement during the Japanese occupation of Malaya. The Cham refugee community, drawn primarily from Cambodia and Vietnam, represents one of the most studied sub-groups within the broader Indochinese exodus, with approximately 50,000 Cham arriving in Malaysia between 1975 and 1982 [1, p. 155]. The wartime experience of individuals fleeing Japanese occupation, as documented in personal accounts, provides an earlier and qualitatively different dimension to the refugee question in the region [2, p. 184].

The Cham Refugee Community

The Cham are an ethnic group historically associated with the Champa kingdom, which occupied much of central and southern Vietnam before its gradual absorption into Vietnamese territory. In the modern period, significant Cham populations reside in Cambodia and Vietnam, where they practice Islam and speak a language belonging to the Austronesian family. The refugee crisis that followed the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975 and the subsequent Vietnamese unification of Cambodia in 1979 displaced large numbers of Cham from both countries. Nearly one-third of Cambodia’s Cham population perished under the Khmer Rouge regime, a catastrophe that drove survivors into the refugee camps of Thailand and, subsequently, into resettlement in Malaysia and other host countries [1, p. 155].

The Malaysian government’s response to the Cham influx was characterised by a notable ambivalence. While the state actively attempted to turn away other Indochinese refugees, it covertly accepted the Cham, transferring them at night to remote camps—a practice documented in Terengganu state archives [1, p. 158]. This selective acceptance was not without political logic: the Cham, as Muslims, were more readily absorbed into the existing social fabric of a country where Islam is the official religion. The Malaysian government subsequently categorised the Cham within the Bumiputera (sons of the soil) classification, a policy that facilitated their legal integration but simultaneously worked to dissolve their distinct ethnic identity in the national imagination [1, p. 155].

Despite this state-driven assimilation, the Cham community in Malaysia has maintained a coherent ethnic identity, though one marked by internal divisions. The community is split along national lines: those who fled Cambodia and those who fled Vietnam occupy separate residential areas and maintain limited social interaction with one another. At the International Islamic University in Kuala Lumpur, three separate Cham student associations exist—one for those associated with Cambodia, one for Vietnam, and one for Malaysian-born Cham—illustrating the persistence of national identity within the broader ethnic group [1, p. 159].

Food as Ethnic Articulation

Rie Nakamura’s ethnographic study, based on fieldwork conducted between May 2017 and March 2018 across Peninsular Malaysia, demonstrates that food functions as the primary mechanism through which the Cham community articulates and sustains its ethnic identity in a context where language is rapidly being lost [1, p. 156]. The Cham language, once the primary marker of group membership, is increasingly abandoned by second-generation speakers who prefer Malay. Food, by contrast, remains a reliable and daily practice of ethnic distinction [1, p. 155].

The culinary tradition that has emerged in Malaysia is neither authentically Khmer nor authentically Vietnamese but a rearticulated hybrid, modified for halal requirements and claimed collectively by the Cham diaspora. Key dishes identified as Cham in Malaysia include leas hal (sun-dried shellfish), banh chok (rice vermicelli noodle soup), nom kong (donut), ton lamo (beef sausage), and paynong (banana-filled glutinous rice cake); Vietnamese contributions include banh xeo (a crispy pancake modified to replace pork with chicken) and cafe Yuon [1, p. 160]. Cham cooking relies on fish sauce or fermented salted fish (bohok), a distinction that sets it apart from Malay cuisine, which uses salt, more oil, and coconut milk [1, p. 155]. This culinary difference is not merely gastronomic but constitutes a boundary marker that differentiates the Cham from the surrounding Muslim Malay population.

Nakamura terms the shared consumption of these dishes a “community of gustation,” a space where the national divisions between Cambodian-Cham and Vietnamese-Cham dissolve. Cham food markets and wedding banquets serve as the primary sites where this communal eating takes place, creating a collective identity that transcends the country-of-origin divide [1, pp. 153–154]. The act of consuming Cham foods becomes, for Malaysian-born Cham who may lack fluency in the Cham language, a daily practice of ethnic articulation that sustains group coherence across generations [1, p. 155].

Wartime Displacement

The refugee experience in the region extends well beyond the Indochinese crisis. Personal accounts from the Japanese occupation of Malaya (1942–1945) document the displacement of individuals who fled Japanese forces, a phenomenon that, while different in scale and character from the post-1975 refugee flows, established an earlier precedent for the treatment of displaced persons in the region [2, p. 184]. These wartime accounts, preserved in the Society’s literature, provide a longitudinal perspective on how the concept of the refugee has been understood and enacted in the Malay Peninsula across different historical periods.

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on refugees reveals a shift in scholarly attention from the immediate post-war period, when documentation focused on personal narratives of wartime displacement, to the contemporary period, where the emphasis has moved toward the cultural and social integration of refugee communities in the decades following their arrival. The 1993 account by Dorothy Thatcher and Robert Cross represents the earlier mode of documentation: a first-person narrative of individual experience during the Japanese occupation [2, p. 184]. By contrast, Nakamura’s 2020 study reflects a mature phase of refugee scholarship that interrogates the long-term cultural consequences of displacement, asking not how refugees survived the journey but how they construct identity in the host society over time [1, pp. 153–164].

Nakamura’s work contributes to a growing body of Cham diaspora scholarship that includes studies by Wong (2008, 2013), Weber (2016), and Yekti Maunati (2012), and is distinguished by its foregrounding of food as the operative mechanism of ethnic boundary-making [1, p. 155]. Her methodology—combining semi-structured interviews, market observations, home dining, and wedding banquets across multiple states—provides a granular ethnographic foundation for understanding how refugee communities negotiate identity under conditions of state-driven assimilation. The Terengganu state archive documents she consulted on refugee processing add a political dimension to the analysis, revealing the covert mechanisms through which the Malaysian state managed the Cham influx [1, p. 158].

The records available to the Society’s literature thus document a trajectory from individual wartime testimony to systematic ethnographic inquiry, reflecting both the evolution of the refugee phenomenon in the region and the maturation of academic approaches to its study.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. R. Nakamura (2020). Food and ethnic identity in the Cham refugee community in Malaysia JMBRAS 93(2): 153–64. Read on JSTOR
  2. Dorothy Thatcher and Robert Cross (1993). Refugee from the Japanese : 184.