The Mixed Museum at the ICCS 2025 Conference on Cohesive Societies
In June 2025, The Mixed Museum’s Director Dr Chamion Caballero travelled to Singapore to represent the organisation at the International Conference on Cohesive Societies (ICCS) 2025. Invited as a guest of the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, she joined over 1,100 international delegates to explore pressing global questions of identity, inclusion, and cohesion in an increasingly divided world. In this blog, Dr Caballero reflects on the conference’s themes, the concept of ‘glorious hyphenation’, and how stories like those of the mixed-race Chinese writer Han Suyin reveal the deep and often overlooked historical entanglements between Britain and Southeast Asia.
Images: The Mixed Museum's Director, Dr Chamion Caballero, at ICCS 2025.
Cohesive Societies: TMM Director’s reflections from the ICCS Conference 2025
In June 2025, I had the privilege of representing The Mixed Museum at the third International Conference on Cohesive Societies (ICCS) in Singapore. With attendance supported by the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth (MCCY), I joined more than 1100 policymakers, scholars, creatives, and civic leaders from 50 different countries for three days of rich exchange and discussion under the theme Cohesive Societies, Resilient Futures.
The conference opened with a keynote by President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who spoke on the role of education in levelling inequalities and fostering inclusive societies. He also spoke directly to the digital world, urging those shaping media and social platforms to centre fairness, trust, and transparency in the digital systems that increasingly shape our everyday lives.
Such concerns resonated throughout the conference. Across keynotes, panel discussions, roundtables, and workshops, participants voiced anxieties about how online platforms are creating new fractures while amplifying existing social divisions. Yet, there was also a strong recognition that digital tools, when handled with care and accountability, might be harnessed to foster connection, cohesion, and understanding. Delegates I spoke with were interested to hear about The Mixed Museum’s work – such as our initiatives in sharing knowledge about the ‘brown babies’ of WW2 and bringing members of this community together – as a prime example of how digital platforms can be used positively to build connection.
‘Glorious Hyphenation’: Singapore and Beyond
The presentations and conversations over the three days were incredibly rich and thought-provoking. I was particularly struck by Dr. Aaron Maniam’s use of the term ‘glorious hyphenation’ to describe his own lived experience as a Singaporean of mixed racial, ethnic and religious heritage, one many other Singaporeans share. During my stay, I managed to view The National Museum of Singapore’s excellent exhibition Once Upon a Tide. In commemoration of Singapore's 60th year of independence later this year, the exhibition uses the history of the Singapore River as a powerful lens into the country’s broader national, multiracial, and multicultural history, including its period as a British colony.
In the early days of The Mixed Museum, I was once asked if a museum dedicated to Britain’s mixed-race history was too niche to be of wider public interest. Maniam’s framing made it clear that hyphenated identities are not a niche phenomenon but an ordinary mode of life for many people. His talk immediately brought to mind the work of The Mixed Museum’s Artist in Residence, Kinga Markus. Featured in our By the Cut of Their Cloth digital exhibition, Kilburn-based Kinga’s art frequently explores her mixed Singaporean-Sri Lankan-Polish-British heritage, reflecting on themes of identity and belonging, of herself and her parents.
Preparing for the visit to Singapore, I came across the remarkable life and work of physician and writer Han Suyin for the first time. Born in China in 1916 as Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou, Han – the daughter of a Chinese father and Belgian mother - was a self-described Eurasian who embodied the kind of transnational, cosmopolitan life many imagine as uniquely modern. Educated in China, she would go on to study medicine in Belgium, and, during the second world war, she moved to London with her husband, military attaché Tang Pao Huang, where she continued her medical studies at the Royal Free Hospital. Left widowed in London when Huang, who had returned to China, was killed during the Chinese Civil War, she moved to Hong Kong in 1949 to work as a doctor.
Her novel A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952), set in postwar Hong Kong, is a semi-autobiographical exploration of her passionate affair with married journalist Ian Morrison. Though born in Australia, Morrison moved to Britain at the age of six and was educated in the British public school and Oxbridge system.
As in real life, their fictional counterparts meet in Hong Kong where their affair takes place, though both had connections with Singapore. Morrison was based in Singapore as a correspondent for The Times during the time of his affair with Han affair, where he lived with his wife and children.
After the affair ended with Morrison's death in the Korean War in 1950, Han moved to Malaya in 1952 with her second husband, Leon Comber, a British colonial police official. While living in Johore, she opened a clinic in Singapore in Chinatown’s Upper Pickering Street and was actively involved in social and educational causes, becoming a well-known public figure in the country. Her sympathies towards the communist Malayan National Liberation Army and criticisms of the British security forces in Malaya contributed to Comber losing his job; the pair divorced in 1959. Her third husband was Vincent Ruthnaswamy, a colonel in the Indian army, whom she met in Nepal and married in 1971. She settled in Switzerland in her later years, where she died at the age of 95.
In Han’s 1952 novel, her Eurasian identity, the couple’s interracial relationship, and the overarching theme of transnationalism are central, woven into the narrative in ways that resist simplistic interpretations. However, when the story was adapted into the 1955 Hollywood film Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, much of this complexity was erased. Morrison was rewritten as an American and - ironically for a film where prejudice against interracial relationships is a key theme – Han herself was portrayed in yellowface by white actress Jennifer Jones. Along with the problematic casting choice, the film repeatedly diminishes the nuanced exploration of mixed identity and interracial relationships that defined Han Suyin’s fascinating original work.
Why These Stories Matter
At The Mixed Museum, we are keen to look deeper into the relationships between Han Suyin, Ian Morrison and Leon Comber, alongside other notable historical and public figures with mixed British-Singaporean heritage, relationships or family life, such as Leslie Charteris, the Singapore-born creator of The Saint, whose father was Chinese and mother English.
These are not niche stories. They are a central part of understanding the deeply entangled histories of Britain and Southeast Asia, serving as a powerful reminder that heritage – both individual and national - is always more complex and interwoven than first appears. What stood out at ICCS 2025 was a collective willingness to engage with that complexity, and to see it not as a threat, but as a strength. The conference’s open, optimistic embrace of multiculturalism and social cohesion felt both timely and, from a UK perspective, quietly radical. The conference's aims and dialogue were a reminder of what’s possible when diversity and inclusion are embraced as a foundation, not a flaw, in national stories.
TMM extends our sincere gratitude to the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth and the ICCS 2025 organising team for their support and facilitation of Dr Caballero’s participation in the International Conference on Cohesive Societies 2025.
Learn more
Read the report on the ICCS 2025 conference
Watch the ICCS 2025 panel event featuring Dr Aaron Maniam talking about 'glorious hyphenation'
Learn about Han Suyin at the Open University for an accessible biography, through Florence Kuek’s doctoral research on her autobiographical writing, via this InSession Film post exploring the Hollywood adaptation of A Many‑Splendoured Thing, or Lost Ladies of Lit podcast episode discussing Han's literary legacy.