The Dialectics of "Disputatiousness" and "Rice‐Eating Money": Class Confrontation and Gendered Imaginaries among Chinese Men in West Malaysia

Abstract

Chinese owners of Malaysian truck transport firms characterized Chinese drivers in 1979‐80 labor disputes as "disputatious," "cheating," and making "rice‐eating money." They presented themselves as a stigmatized, besieged, ethnic‐trading minority. My later fieldwork from 1985‐92 revealed that drivers used an embodied pedagogy of learning through labor to critique owners' accounts and their own exploitation, even though as "crude" men they shared with "mannered" owners male‐specific mobilities vis‐à‐vis Chinese women. Reflections on these fieldwork findings challenge prevailing discursive and post‐Marxist turns within ethnography. [diaspora Chinese, Southeast Asia, strategic totalization, embodied pedagogies, class analysis, gender, ethnic politics]

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