3. Metodolog´ ıa Box-Jenkins
3.2. Modelos Lineales Estacionarios
3.2.4. Procesos autorregresivos de medias m´ oviles o AR-
Remarkably, the Sisters began receiving orphans immediately. Sixteen children were taken in on the first day.37 The numbers of orphans rose steadily over the years, as Figure 5 below shows: Year Number 1854 (Day 1) 16 1861 93 1862 82 1892 200 1900 212 1901 217 1902 203 1903 166 1904 174 1936 400
Figure 5. Number of Orphans by Year (pre-World War Two).38
The children were brought to the Convent gate at the corner of Victoria Street and Bras Basah Road and received either directly from the person who had brought them, or sometimes found where they had been left. The gate came to be known as The Baby Gate or The Gate of Hope. The historical plaque now at the gate reads (in part):
At this small gate of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ) many babies were abandoned in baskets to be picked up by Sisters of the Convent. This was the origin of the Home for Abandoned Babies. For over 100 years, the orphanage was home to children from poor or broken families...‘39
36 Elaine Meyers, Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus: 150 Years in Singapore (Penang: The Lady Superior of
Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, 2004).
37 Meyers, Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, 249. 38
Numbers for 1854, 1892 and 1936 from Meyers, Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, 62. Numbers for other years from Clement Liew, "The Roman Catholic Church of Singapore 1819-1910: From Mission to Church," (National University of Singapore, 1993). All numbers should be treated with some caution as it is usually not specified if they were the total number of new arrivals for the year, including those who had died, or the actual number in residence at unspecified dates. Note that numbers during and post-World War II are included in Chapter Four.
67 Many came from poor families and were ill or disabled, and the majority were girls. Dying infants were baptised in accordance with church teachings that allowed any baptised Catholic to baptise another individual in danger of death, in extremis, if a priest was not available. In the case of dying children – usually defined as under seven years of age – consent of the child or the parents was not required.40 Those that survived were cared for and educated at the Convent.
To understand why so many children were abandoned, we need to consider the social conditions in Singapore at the time. For many ordinary people, daily life was difficult, with poor housing and health services. As the population of Singapore grew in the early colonial period so, too, did the problems of housing the increasing numbers of immigrants. A severe shortage of housing extended over many years. The overcrowded tenements, poor drainage and water pollution bred disease and contributed to the spread of cholera.41
Added to these difficulties were the social problems of poverty, opium usage and prostitution. The annual influx of Chinese looking for work and the fluctuations of demand for labour led to many immigrants living on the streets, along with destitute European seamen.42 In 1845, at least seventy Chinese beggars died of starvation.43 James Warren, in his study of rickshaw pullers, said they ‗found some solace in the four evils‘, opium smoking, prostitution, drinking and gambling.44 Opium from India was legal, available and a significant source of income for merchants and the government. A Doctor Little, who campaigned unsuccessfully against opium, estimated in 1848 that 20 per cent of the entire population and more than half of Chinese adults were opium addicts.45 While it may not have seriously harmed the wealthier Europeans or Chinese who smoked it, the poor could afford only opium refuse and, once addicted, were reduced to begging, often ending up in prison, the pauper hospital or in
40 Sarah Curtis, "Charity Begins Abroad: The Filles de la Charité in the Ottoman Empire," in In God's Empire:
French Missionaries and the Modern World, ed. Owen White and J.P. Daughton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 101.
41
See particularly Chapter 3 in Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003).
42 Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore, 80. 43 Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore, 80.
44 James Warren, Pirates, Prostitutes and Pullers: Explorations in the Ethno- and Social History of Southeast
Asia. Crawley, W.A.: UWA Press, 2008, 167-168.
45
Robert Little, ―On the Habitual Use of Opium in Singapore‖, Journal of the Indian Archipelago, II, 1848, 1- 79. Cited in Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore, 81.
68 suicide.46 Brothels and taverns were numerous and while some prostitutes were European women from Central and Eastern Europe – there were no British women as this was strictly banned –most prostitutes were Chinese or Japanese, servicing the very large numbers of single Chinese men.47 Prostitution (other than by European women) was seen by the colonial authorities as a necessary evil, since there were so few women in the colony – in 1860, the ratio was one female to every fourteen males.48 Brothels were regulated, and there was a system of medical inspections to try to reduce the incidence of venereal disease.
Geographers Martin Perry, Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh argue that mortality rates in colonial Singapore were indisputably high within the immigrant and indigenous communities, ‗even by Asian standards‘.49 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, crude death rates
within the municipal area averaged over forty per thousand, only falling to below thirty per thousand in the mid-1920s.50 The biggest killers were malarial fevers, tuberculosis and beriberi, although cholera, typhoid, smallpox and bubonic plague were also common.51 Despite most health hazards in Singapore being largely man-made – caused by overcrowding, inadequate infrastructure, opium-addiction and so on – health services were minimal, although the Chinese community did run its own medicine institutions, halls and clan-based recuperation centres. The official view of the colonial government on providing medical and health services was that the population was largely transitory and that individuals came to Singapore at their own risk.52 This laissez-faire approach worked for free trade and thus profits, but meant that social services were minimal. In historian Edwin Lee‘s assessment:
The British understood the need to invest in infrastructure and Singapore was their showpiece, an artefact of colonial design and engineering skill…(In contrast) schools, hospitals, and homes for the people were either not enough or not up to standard.53
46 Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore, 81.
47 James Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870-1940 (Singapore: Singapore
University Press, 2003). For a discussion of European women, see 75-76.
48
Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San, 34.
49Martin Perry, Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh, Singapore: A Developmental City State (Chichester: Wiley,
1997), 40. The authors do not specify what they mean by ‘Asian standards’ in this context.
50 Perry, Kong and Yeoh, Singapore: A Developmental City State, 40-41. 51 Perry, Kong and Yeoh, Singapore: A Developmental City State, 41. 52 Perry, Kong and Yeoh, Singapore: A Developmental City State, 57. 53
Edwin Lee, "The Colonial Legacy," in The Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, ed. Kernial Singh Sanhu and Paul Wheatley (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989), 40.
69 Ironically, other than in the crowded slums, Singapore‘s climate was relatively healthy, and the wealthy of all races suffered mainly from over-indulgence of food and alcohol.54 The
Straits Times newspaper in 1861 wrote, ‗we are the healthiest community in the East and attribute no small share of it to our activity and love of outdoor sports‘.55 Turnbull has written
that Singapore‘s early Christian burial grounds ‗are perhaps the dullest in Asia because nearly all prominent Europeans lived to retire to Britain‘.56
The children left at the Gate of Hope were not so fortunate. Many were near death and died shortly after being left. It is difficult to know the precise circumstances that led to children being left at the Convent. A visitor to the Convent in 1897 reported that five-sixths of the orphans were Chinese.57 The Chinese were certainly the largest race by population, making up 61.2 per cent of Singapore‘s population in 1860, and 67.1 per cent in 1891.By the 1920s, between 10 and 15 per cent of rickshaw pullers had families in Singapore. Large numbers of single Chinese women had fled war-torn China, and the Chinese and British authorities began to adopt a more relaxed attitude towards female immigration.58 The large increase in numbers in the orphanage between 1904 and 1936 may simply have been due to the increased number of families between these years.
A detailed examination of burial registers for 1924 has shown that recorded numbers at the orphanage are likely to substantially underestimate the number of babies abandoned at the Convent gate since the number of babies dying was significantly higher than those that survived.59 Researcher Genevieve Wong studied the register for the Bidadari Christian Cemetery in Singapore, the cemetery where children from the orphanage, having been baptised and given French Roman Catholic names, were buried. Of the 960 bodies buried, in total, 584 were infants aged between zero and one year, indicating the very high infant mortality rate of the time.60 Of these infants, 480, or over 80 per cent, were from the Convent.61 This does not necessarily suggest that babies left at the gate were not
54 Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore, 80. 55 ―The Fives Club‖, Straits Times, 17 August 1861. 56
Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore, 80.
57 ―The Convent: Impressions of a visitor‖, Straits Times, 14 December 1897.
58 James Warren, Rickshaw Coolie: A People's History of Singapore 1880-1940 (Singapore: Singapore
University Press, 2003. 1986), 217.
59 Genevieve Wong, "Grave Matters: The Burial Registers in Singapore," BiblioAsia 8, no. 4 (2013). 60
Wong, ―Grave Matters‖: 20.
70 subsequently well cared for – rather it is more likely to be evidence that most were near death at the time of abandonment.
The issues of poverty, prostitution and poor public health services described earlier almost certainly led to some children being abandoned or orphaned. Poor families, realising that a child was near death, may have abandoned a child at the gate simply in the hope that the nuns might be able to give them better care, or knowing that at least the child would be properly buried. Cultural factors, however, also seem to have played an important part in why children were taken to the orphanage. Wong estimates that 467 of the 480 buried infants from the Convent were Chinese.62 Of these, two thirds were girls – 311 girls and 156 boys.63
There was little value placed on girls in Chinese society, which was male-centred and patriarchal – the cultural ideal was for a man to produce as many sons as possible to continue the lineage. The Confucian ideology of veneration of ancestors meant that sons were important to carry on this tradition, while daughters were predestined to leave the family on marriage and to break all connections with it. James Warren argues that daughters were considered ‗outsiders‘ or virtually slaves, and that common sayings such as ‗a boy is worth ten girls‘ reflected and reinforced this devaluation of females.64 Even when married, a
woman had no say in family matters (except towards the end of her life when she was a mother-in-law or widow); she could neither inherit nor hold any property except her dowry, and she was restricted to the roles of domestic labour and childbearing. Women were believed to be harbingers of evil and misfortune: disease, barrenness and death could all be ascribed to a wife.65 Warren has also argued that the peasants of Southeast China (where most Chinese in Singapore were from) ‗have had an especially long and tragic history‘ of female infanticide, with girls being abandoned in caves, drowned, or left to die in the fields.66 Alternatively, many older girls ‗owed their lives to their parents considering them a possible source of further revenue through sales or pawning as domestic servants to wealthier families
62 Wong, ―Grave Matters‖: 22. 63 Wong, ―Grave Matters‖: 22.
64 Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San, 29-30. 65 Warren, Rickshaw Coolie, 227.
66
Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San, 30. See also Ann Waltner, "Infanticide and Dowry in Ming and Early Qing China," in Chinese Views of Childhood, ed. Anne Behnke Kinney (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i, 1995).
71 or other ―benefactors‖ who made money on them by reselling them into prostitution in Singapore‘.67
Historian Anne Kinney, commenting on traditions of female infanticide in China,wrote:
With good reason, the concept of female infanticide is particularly repellent to the Western postmodern reader. Nonetheless, before we judge our premodern Chinese counterparts too severely, it is instructive to remember similar examples of such practices in Western culture.68
Historian Hugh Cunningham, who has written extensively on the historiography of childhood, noted that in the mid-nineteenth century, over 100,000 babies were abandoned every year in Europe.69 He also argued that there is some evidence to suggest that girls were more likely to be abandoned than boys.70 He noted that in parts of France in the nineteenth century, the birth of a boy was treated with gunfire and the birth of a girl with ‗cruel disappointment‘, and that mothers without sons would say that they had no ‗children‘ even if they had several daughters.71 Orphanages and foundling hospitals existed across Europe, and Cunningham concluded that ‗the history of abandonment points up the fact that there were constantly being born large numbers of children whom parents were unable or unwilling to rear, and that families would hand over these children to other agencies where they were available‘.72
In Singapore, in addition to the issues described above which predisposed a greater number of girls being handed in to the Convent, there were also superstitions about the so-called ‗Tiger girls‘ – girls born in the Year of the Tiger, which occurs every twelve years in the Chinese calendar. The astrological Chinese calendar allocates an animal to each year, in a cycle of twelve years, and it was believed that a person‘s characteristics were determined by the animal of the birth year.73 Girls born in the Year of the Tiger were considered to be fierce, rebellious, ill-tempered and unpredictable. Good Chinese wives were quiet and compliant,
67
Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-San, 31.
68 Anne Behnke Kinney, Chinese Views of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i, 1995), 7. 69 Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, 2nd ed. (Harlow, England:
Pearson Longman, 2005), 92.
70
Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, 104.
71 Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, 104.
72 Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, 125. See also Juliane Jacobi, "Between
Charity and Education: Orphans and Orphanages in Early Modern Times," Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 1-2 (2009).
73
For a detailed history and explanation, see Shigeru Nakayama, "Characteristics of Chinese Astrology," Isis 57, no. 4 (Winter) (1966): 443-54.
72 but these ‗tiger girls‘ would cause trouble in the family and would not make good, obedient wives.
Philosopher Judith Butler famously proposed that gender is not a ‗natural fact‘, but rather a social construction that we all perform, a display that we constantly act out through a wide range of behaviours.74 She also argued that since gender is a social construct, ‗performing one‘s gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect‘.75The personalities of girls born in the Year of the Tiger were regarded as inherently predestined and unchangeable. They would perform their gender ‗wrong‘, and instead of being gentle and submissive, would be argumentative and headstrong. The potential for disruption to family harmony was so great that, for some families, abandonment was considered a prudent solution. This superstition has been so strong that even today in Singapore there are significant dips in the number of babies born in Tiger years as couples choose to avoid births in these years if possible.76
Superstitious beliefs were also evident in other forms. Lucy Lum, writing of 1941 Singapore in her autobiography, recounted the story of her sister, the unfortunate object of these beliefs, who was subsequently adopted out to a woman who could not have children:
‗This seventh child will be born in the year of the snake‘, Popo (grandmother) told us...After the astrologer had studied the charts for my mother and her number-seven child, he had issued a grim warning: ‗Your daughter is a tiger,‘ he said. ‗The readings say that the life-water of this expectant grandchild will not be compatible with its mother‘s. This snake-child will cause three deaths in the family. It carries strong venom. It must not enter the family home‘. He said that the new baby must be given away.77
Similarly, Janet Lim, whose family lived in China before moving to Singapore, writes of her elder sister in 1923: ‗she was never named. Soon after her birth she was given away to a Convent because of a prediction by the gods that if she lived at home I should die.‘78
74 Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist
Theory," in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 270-82.
75
Butler, ―Performative Acts and Gender Constitution‖, 279.
76 See Daniel Goodkind, "Chinese Lunar Birth Timing in Singapore: New Concerns for Child Quality amidst
Multicultural Modernity," Journal of Marriage and Family 58, no. 3 (1996). See also Cheryl Tan and Magdalen Ng, "KKH doctor on babies born in the year of the Tiger," Sunday Times, 10 January 2010.
77 Lucy Lum, The Thorn of Lion City: A Memoir (London: Fourth Estate, 2007), 64. 78
Janet Lim, Sold for Silver: An Autobiography of a Girl Sold into Slavery in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Monsoon, 2004), 13.
73 There was also a widespread belief that the ghost of a dead person could inhabit the family home. Historian Henrietta Harrison, writing about the interactions between Chinese families and Catholic orphanages in China, noted that children who died young could not be worshipped as ancestors, and thus it was believed that the spirit of the dead child would be a wandering ghost, who might return to inhabit the body of a younger sibling.79 Christian baptism, with the child going to a special Christian heaven, ‗fitted easily into the repertoire of techniques for dealing with ghosts‘.80 Many of the babies left at the Convent‘s gate were near
death and it is likely that at least some were abandoned to avoid their death occurring at home and therefore bringing bad luck, although it was also the case that some families were so poor they could not afford a burial.81 Similarly, many of the orphans were disabled and thus considered to be both a burden and unlucky. Because of the preferential valuing of boys, boys