Of nyonyas and babas

Adrian's and serene's wedding ....

My great grandmother was a peranakan, a nyonya and since then...the heritage has somewhat been watered down quietly. Even though the cultural practices of the peranakan has somewhat slowed down in our family, the different dishes of food (my mum is a great nyonya cook, so were my aunties...) and occasional dress of the nyonya and babas appear at our weddings and celebrations. One dress that has remained with all the ladies and men in the family is the sarong. Anyway, dressing up is still enjoyable and fun when the clan gets together. My kids do anyway...

Here is what wikipedia has to say:

Peranakan

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Baba House Museum in Malacca, Malaysia, an area where many "Peranakan" Straits-Chinese lived.

Peranakan and Baba-Nyonya (Chinese: 峇峇娘惹; pinyin: Bābā Niángrě; Hokkien: Bā-bā Niû-liá)

are terms used for the descendants of late 15th and 16th-century Chinese immigrants to the Nusantara

region during the Colonial era. Members of this community in Melaka address themselves as "Nyonya Baba"

instead of "Baba-Nyonya". Nyonya is the term for the ladies and Baba for the gentlemen. It applies especially

to the ethnic Chinese populations of the British Straits Settlements of Malaya and the Dutch-controlled island of Java and other locations, who have adopted partially or in full Nusantara customs to be somewhat assimilated into the local communities. They are the elites of Singapore, more loyal to the British than to China. Most have lived for generations along the straits of Malacca and not all intermarried with the localMalays. They are usually traders, the middleman of the British and the Chinese, or the Chinese and Malays, or vice versa. They almost always have the ability to speak two or more languages. In later generations, some lost the ability to speak Chinese as they became assimilated to theMalay Peninsula's culture and started to speak Malay fluently as a first or second language.

While the term Peranakan is most commonly used among the ethnic Chinese for those of Chinese descent also known as Straits Chinese (土生華人; named after the Straits Settlements), there are also other, comparatively small Peranakan communities, such as Indian Hindu Peranakans (Chitty), Indian Muslim Peranakans (Jawi Pekan) (Jawi being the Javanised Arabic script,^[1] Pekan a colloquial contraction ofPeranakan^[1]) and Eurasian Peranakans (Kristang^[1]) (Kristang = Christians).^[1][2] The group has parallels to the Cambodian Hokkien, who are descendents of Hoklo Chinese. They maintained their culture partially despite their native language gradually disappearing a few generations after settlement.^[3]