Three domestic workers, two internment camps and a war: a journey from Singapore to British India
Abstract
On 11 December 1942, reacting to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, British authorities arrested three Chinese women doing domestic work in the Japanese Consulate in Singapore. Along with many Japanese and other members of the Japanese empire living in Malaya and Singapore, they were taken to British India and interned for most of the Asia-Pacific War. This article explores their attempts to appeal against their wrongful internment, providing a unique and personal account of individuals fighting against wartime bureaucracy. It also taps into larger issues related to colonialism, migration, identity, war, and civilian internment, and the trying conditions of wartime incarceration. The debate over how to deal with the women speaks to tensions between contemporary notions of citizenship and the fluid identities of those who migrated from China to Southeast Asia in search of economic improvement.
Summary
This article reconstructs the wartime experience of three Chinese women—Chu Poh Guet, Tong Guet Kim, and Sim Yoke—who were arrested in Singapore in December 1941 while working as domestic servants in the Japanese Consulate and subsequently interned in British India for most of the Asia-Pacific War. De Matos uses their case to examine the intersection of colonialism, migration, identity, and civilian internment, arguing that the women’s story exposes the “gendered, classed and racial architectures” underpinning wartime detention practices in the British Empire (p. 24). The women, migrants from Fujian province who had likely arrived in Singapore in the 1930s, were mistaken for Japanese at the moment of arrest and transferred through Saint John’s Island to the Purana Qila internment camp in New Delhi, then to Deoli in Rajasthan, where they remained until their release in late 1944 (pp. 27–28, 32).
The core of the article traces the women’s repeated attempts to secure their freedom against a backdrop of bureaucratic inertia and competing imperial interests. Their July 1942 petition to the camp Commandant, their inclusion on the Japanese government’s repatriation lists for two Anglo-Japanese civilian exchanges, and their 1944 demands for release or employment each reveal how the women strategically deployed their hybrid identities—emphasizing Chinese nationality to British and Chinese authorities while appealing to Singaporean connections with the Japanese Consul-General—to navigate a system that had no clear category for them (pp. 30–35). De Matos frames this as a form of “strategic identity switching,” drawing on Siew-Min Sai’s work on contested citizenship in colonial Singapore, and argues that the women’s agency in contesting their internment is a significant but overlooked dimension of wartime civilian experience (pp. 38–39).
The article also situates the women’s story within broader patterns of Chinese female migration to Southeast Asia, noting that the 1928 Immigration Restriction Ordinance and 1933 Aliens Ordinance in Singapore shifted migration demographics toward women, who increasingly took on roles as overseas providers and domestic workers (pp. 25–26). De Matos contends that the women’s experience is representative of a much larger population of pre-war migrants whose lives were disrupted by colonial competition and racialized warfare, and that their story contributes to a necessary “reappraisal of prototypical, ‘masculine’ narratives of migration” (p. 40).
Key Findings
- The three women were arrested on 11 December 1941, three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and surrendered S$81 (Chu), S$57 (Tong), and S$189 (Sim) to the Malayan Police Department before being transferred to Saint John’s Island (p. 27).
- At Purana Qila, New Delhi, 106 internees died by the end of 1942, primarily from dysentery, diarrhoea, and beri-beri; the women reported suffering from malaria and being “in very weak conditions” by July 1942 (pp. 29–30).
- The first Anglo-Japanese Civilian Exchange took place in September 1942 at Lourenco Marques (Maputo), involving approximately 1,800 civilian Japanese; the women were excluded despite being listed by the Japanese government (pp. 30–31).
- The 2,101 remaining civilian internees from Southeast Asia and Japan were transferred from Purana Qila to Deoli, Rajasthan, in April 1943—fifteen months after their arrival in New Delhi and twelve months after being promised better accommodation (p. 32).
- The women were formally released from internment in November 1944 and arrived in New Delhi on 3 December 1944; their surrendered Singaporean dollars were returned in rupees on 3 May 1945 (pp. 35–36).
- British Indian authorities ultimately reclassified the women from “internees” to “evacuees” in postwar repatriation discussions, a terminological shift that implicitly acknowledged the internment had been in violation of the 1939 Foreigners Order (pp. 36–37).
Conclusion
De Matos concludes that the women’s wrongful internment, while perhaps a lesser fate than the Sook Ching massacres and forced labour in Japanese-occupied Singapore, nonetheless inflicted its own physical and psychological scars, and that their three-year struggle against wartime bureaucracy reveals the fundamental tensions between individual identity construction and transnational politics in an era of solidifying borders and multiplying nation-states. Their story, she argues, is “invisible in the historical literature” because the horrors of Japanese treatment of POWs overshadow Britain’s treatment of civilians, yet it is representative of the broader entanglements of colonialism, migration, and war that displaced countless pre-war migrants (pp. 38, 40).
Context
- The article draws primarily on two archival collections: the National Archives at Kew (TNA), particularly FO 916 series files on the welfare of Japanese internees in India, and the National Archives of India (NAI), specifically the External Affairs Department proceedings on Chinese internees (pp. 24, 30–36).
- The study contributes to the historiography of civilian internment in British India by centring the experiences of non-Japanese internees who were mistakenly detained, and to the literature on Chinese female migration to Southeast Asia by providing a case study of women whose diasporic identities were both a resource and a source of confusion within wartime bureaucratic systems.