INTERTWINED HISTORIES

Having relocated from China to South Africa in 2009, I have become aware of my own ethnicity and have been questioning what it means to be a Chinese immigrant in South Africa. My personal story compels me to consider the ways that other Chinese immigrants have lived through this process of self-configuration. This chapter has been inspired by my frequent encounters with Chinese collectors in South Africa and the limited representations of individual stories. I weave together the story of Chinese immigrant collector Shengkai Wu (Figure 2.1), also known as David Wu, and an object biography of a postage stamp cover that he had acquired in South Africa.

In so doing, the intimate connection between the collector, Shengkai Wu, and the object itself is revealed. Together, they are seen to create an entangled space, one that reveals some of the complexities of the circulation of people and things in the movement between China and South Africa. The space is constructed, firstly, through the biography of the stamp cover as a source of knowledge that reveals historical details of Shayuchung postal history and a South African Chinese family in the 1940s. Secondly, the space is channelled through Shengkai Wu's own narrative about his stamp-cover collecting practices. Importantly, the life histories of objects and people cannot be collected separately, for people and the things they cherish are intertwined in complex ways that are difficult to disentangle.

STORIES AND OBJECT BIOGRAPHIES

Shengkai Wu's perception of the stamp cover derives from his lived experience of interacting with this object. In an interview, he describes the stamp cover as having a life of its own, sustained by the process of circulation. It was his fate, he says, to be able to encounter it and eventually achieve ownership of it. This understanding resonates with the scholarly interest in object biographies that has emerged over the past few decades.

The creation of object biographies, as a methodology, draws from material culture research that traces the life history of an object from its creation to present day (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986; Gosden and Marshall 1999). These often-untold stories illustrate the fact that objects, such as the stamp cover discussed here, present an often-overlooked microscopic perception that provokes us to contemplate traces of history. Igor Kopytoff (1986) proposes the need to interpret objects fully at multiple points, such as processes of production, exchange and consumption.