Stories From the Chinese Community in Brunei Darussalam (2023a)

Oral stories are frequently based on lived experiences that reveal snippets of time spent in communities which have produced a lasting impact to a sense of personal being and history. Using oral interviews conducted and transcribed between 2019 and 2020, cultural lives in families, schools, and workplaces of first-, second-, and third-generation Chinese who live in Brunei are examined through their vivid autobiographical reminiscences that are shared with an audience. Drawing on narrative genre theory, this chapter studies the narrative form of these oral history texts to highlight the life stories of ethnic Chinese narrators that address their connections to time and place, which include societies and communities at specific historical junctures. In enacting history-telling, the transcribed texts are analysed for their relevance in articulating the personal and cultural voices of ethnic Chinese diaspora who occupy the social peripheries of a Malay-dominant Bruneian nation situated within the larger Malay world in Southeast Asia. Their sociocultural connections forged across various communities and time attest to their resilience as a simultaneous minority, diasporic, and transnational group of people whose histories trace sociocultural continuities and, at times, discontinuities within local and global contact spheres.