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Language Matters | The ‘comb up’ Samsui women who worked in construction in Malaya and lived in coolie houses

  • They worked in the Pearl River Delta’s silk industry, earning money that let them choose not to marry, before migrating to work as labourers

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People walk past a mural by artist Sean Dunston of a Samsui woman holding a cigarette on the side of a building in the Chinatown district of Singapore. Photo: AFP

A larger-than-life mural of a Samsui woman, cigarette in hand, on the exterior of a Chinatown shophouse in Singapore, has been the subject of public debate the past month.

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Discussion has centred more around its alleged normalisation of smoking, and less on Samsui women’s contribution to the modern state.

Samsui women – who originate in the district of Samsui, Cantonese for “three waters”, in the coastal province of Canton, today’s Guangdong – are synonymous with the construction of 1930s Malaya. Their roots are, however, found in the rise of industrialisation in late 19th-century China and modernised sericulture – the cultivation of silkworms and extraction of silk for making fabric – which brought employment in the Pearl River Delta to poor women.

With financial independence, women chose not to get married – avoiding obligations to husbands and in-laws. Instead they joined sworn spinsterhoods of sor hei, a Cantonese term 梳起 meaning “comb up”.

This referred to the practice of combing one’s hair up into a bun, a symbol of married women, rather than wearing their hair in braids, and was an act accompanying the ritual vow marking these women’s joining of the sisterhood.

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The phrase zìshūnü in Mandarin, translated as “self-combed woman”, is also used for these women.
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