Shop on High Street

Souchou Yao is a writer and critic based in Sydney, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is a former Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. His major works include Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, practice and the myth of Chinese enterprise (2002), Singapore: The state and the culture of excess (2007), and The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a small, distant war (2016).

• 1. Introduction: Petite Capitalism: What Drives it?.- 2. The Shop on High Street.- 3. ‘She’s not Your Kin, But She is Your Aunt’.- 4. Women’s Fate.- 5. Shop-Floor Heroes .- 6. Tiger Parenting.- 7. A Lesson on Borrowing.- 8. Wholesale: The Road to Ruin.- 9. Family Legacy.

“In the field of Overseas Chinese Studies, it is rare to have such a personal but theoretically informed account that sheds light on both the intimate life of family dynamics and the public life of nation-building. This in-depth case study of one stophouse owned by a Malaysian Hakka Chinese family could breathe new life in this sub-field of specialization by legitimizing similar autoethnographic studies.” (Jayde Lin Roberts, SOJOURN - Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Vol. 37 (3), November 2022)