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Voicing the Archive
Curator
- Wenny Teo
Co-Curator
- Jo-Lene Ong
Participating Artists
- Clare Chun-yu Liu
- Hester Yang
- Musquiqui Chihying
- Lawrence Lek
- Chris Zhongtian Yuan
Research Assistant
- Lauren Rees
Generously Supported by
- The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global
esea contemporary is pleased to present ‘Voicing the Archive’, a series of commissioned audio-visual works that reimagine stories of early Chinese migration to Britain—a history systematically erased from national narratives and relegated to the margins of official records. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s method of ‘critical fabulation’—which combines historical research with speculative storytelling to restore agency to lives lost in histories of slavery and colonialism—the project invites artists to create new works from archival materials, exploring what can emerge when absence becomes a space for imagination.
Silence can be a plan rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence it has a history a form
Do not confuse it with any kind of absence
— Adrienne Rich, 'Cartographies of Silence'
Often referred to as Britain’s ‘silent’ minority, Chinese communities have been an integral part of British society for more than three centuries, yet they remain largely unseen and unheard in public and political life. It is perhaps no coincidence that the history of Chinese migration, intimately tied to Britain’s colonial past, has been systematically erased from national narratives and relegated to the margins of official records. As the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes, ‘silences are inherent in history... something is always left out while something else is recorded.’
The lives of early Chinese migrants surface in colonial documents only at moments of institutional contact—port registries, shipping records, parliamentary acts—and in accounts of discrimination, forced deportation, and racial violence.
Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s method of ‘critical fabulation’—which combines historical research with speculative storytelling to restore agency to lives lost in histories of slavery and colonialism—the invited artists create new works from archival materials that resonate with their own migratory histories and artistic concerns. Their sound and moving-image pieces explore intimate connections and personal triumphs: from the story of the first Chinese British citizen in 1805, to the vanished multi-ethnic world of Liverpool’s Pitt Street, to the sonic legacies of indentured labour across Britain’s imperial ports.
Through these fragmentary vignettes, narratives, and reimagined soundscapes, 'Voicing the Archive' explores what can emerge when absence becomes ‘a space for imagination.’
Artists and Projects
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'John Anthony (c. 1766-1805)'
John Anthony (c. 1766-1805) explores the little-known history of Chinese employees of the English East India Company (EIC) who migrated to East London in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Their successors would go on to establish the first British Chinatown in Limehouse. Among these pioneers was John Anthony (his Chinese name unknown), an interpreter for the EIC and the first Chinese person to be naturalised as a British citizen. Wealthy and widely respected by both the EIC and London’s Chinese community, he achieved naturalisation through an Act of Parliament in 1805.
As an interpreter, Anthony’s role included overseeing Chinese lascars at a time when the EIC employed seamen from across the globe, including the Chinese Empire. This sound-based work imagines a monologue from John Anthony, informed by various historical sources: his handwritten will from the National Archives, a relevant court proceeding at the Old Bailey, and supporting literature.
Spanning time and space, the monologue presents Anthony reflecting on his life and legacy as one of Britain’s earliest Chinese residents. It also examines the nature and limitations of revisiting history through archival materials. This fictional yet historically grounded storytelling sheds light on the pre-colonial history of Chinese employees working for the EIC in both Canton and London before the two Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860).
John Anthony (c. 1766-1805)
As they say: ‘The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.’ Given my lived experience, I am confident to refute: The world is what it is; men who wish to be something, who strive to become something, have a place in it.
I, John Anthony, was a native of the Chinese Empire. You might wonder what my real—Chinese—name was, but that remains a mystery. Not that I didn’t have one, but that it is not on record anywhere in this country, the then British Empire and the now United Kingdom. Alas, this is a telling example of the limitations in revisiting cross-cultural history with archival materials. You collate information from one side of the story and draw a contour of someone, yet not a holistic picture of them.
Anyhow, this is the outlandish tale of my very life and private reckoning voiced to you.
Suffice to say, my existence was a cultural curiosity. Born somewhere in the Chinese Empire, I somehow acquired an excellent command of the English language and hence found employment as an administrator with the English East India Company in Canton. There and then, the Europeans in their respective factories traded for Chinese products under the strict terms of the Ching court. It would be an understatement to say that it was a scene of mania for tea. Needless to say, that was the case before the two Opium Wars. The good, old days of the powerful Celestial Cathay came to an anguished end and were replaced by the abject decades of foreign invasion, colonisation and internal turmoil. Nevertheless, that was all beyond my time.
Traversing the world widened by ambition and imagination, I arrived in England in 1799. In the same year my conversion to Christianity took place locally at Shadwell Church, paving my splendid assimilation into British life, the second chapter of my superb trajectory. As an employee of the East India Company, my role presided over caring for Chinese sailors who came and went with the Company’s vessels. With this lucrative work of providing lodgings and food, I accumulated a vast amount of wealth in a short space of time, so much so that multiple properties across London as well as British citizenship came under my belt. In 1805, I was the first Chinese person to be naturalised Briton through a private Act of Parliament, a costly undertaking available only to the privileged. Thus I became a hyphenated entity.
It goes without saying that my very grand achievements and accomplishments could not be more different from the destiny of other Chinese workers. Due to unemployment on land, lack of the English language as well as local residents’ hostility, the lascars suffered from poverty, squalor and criminality on their sojourn in East London, where we were. On the Company’s vessels, they worked deadening jobs mostly as cooks and labourers. Once on British soil, the seamen were daunted by the task of making their return journey to the Chinese Empire, possible only on an East Indiaman. From the 1880s, the sailors began to establish their lives, community and the first British Chinatown here in Limehouse. In the twentieth century, deportation, slum clearance, the Blitz and redevelopment saw all of that go. Alas, such was itself a manifestation of impermanence.
Let it be said that my legacy as one of the earliest Chinese residents in the British Empire was a case of perceived success and social validation. Reviewing my existence posthumously, it is clear to me that I was a model migrant in my own right, negotiating my own longing and belonging, making and unmaking.
My dear Esther, sister of my colleague Abraham Gole, and I were blessed by the institution of marriage, making possible my further integration into the fabric of British life. By way of my dedication to work and excellent character, I was entrusted by the directors of the East India Company and befriended with the upper-class circle. Similarly, the local Chinese community held me in high regard and the respect was reciprocal. In 1804, I supported and interpreted for my fellow Chinese, Erpune, at the Old Bailey against Ann Alsey and Thomas Gunn, who committed thievery. Famously, I introduced breaking a saucer as the Chinese way to swear an oath in court. In 1805, impermanence descended upon me. More than two thousand friends and associates, poor and otherwise, attended my funeral at Shadwell Church, where I was baptised upon arrival and where my journey in this country came full circle. I, John Anthony, thus departed this world of gaiety and ubiety a British subject.
Research and Script: Clare Chun-yu Liu
Voiceover: JJ Yu
References:
Archives give voice to immigrants
https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202310/07/WS6520b2d1a310d2dce4bb937f.html
Act of Parliament
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/changes/chron-tables/private/23
Barkley Rice, The Chinese in Britain
Ann Alsey, Thomas Gunn – Theft (theft from a specified place); Theft (receiving). 5 December 1804.
https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18041205-56
Chinese Communities
https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/chinese
Chinese in Britain
https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/chinese_in_britain.shtml
The Black and Asian Presence in the Tower Hamlets
https://www.mernick.org.uk/thhol/miscellany01.html#note1
The Story of Limehouse’s Lost Chinatown
https://poplarlondon.co.uk/limehouse-chinatown-history/
V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
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Clare Chun-yu Liu is a UK-based Taiwanese artist filmmaker, researcher, and lecturer. She is a Research Fellow at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany, and was a Vice-Chancellor PhD Scholar at Manchester School of Art in the UK. Clare’s work centres on the Chinese diaspora and identity, with a particular focus on lived experience and oral history.
Since the beginning of pursuing her PhD, Clare has been producing postcolonial, cross-cultural, and diasporic Chinese interpretations of chinoiserie through fictional ethnographic filmmaking. She has presented her research at institutions such as Oxford University, Central Saint Martins, and University College London, and her article on the Royal Pavilion Brighton has been published by the British Art Network.
Clare’s films have been screened and exhibited internationally, including at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, EXiS, Image Forum Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, Taipei International Video Art Exhibition, Goethe-Institut Lisbon, and Minsheng Art Museum Beijing. Her works are part of collections at VIDEOTAGE Media Art Collection in Hong Kong, China, and the Asian Film Archive in Singapore.
'An Imaginary Archive of Pitt Street'
How do you remember a street that has disappeared from the map?
Liverpool is home to one of the earliest Chinese communities in Europe. The establishment of the Blue Funnel shipping line in 1866 brought seafarers from Canton, Shanghai, Ningpo, and Hong Kong to its shores. What began as a transient community of seamen gradually took root around the Cleveland Square and Pitt Street area, just steps away from the docks. Here, they found onshore employment and established laundries, boarding houses, grocery shops, and restaurants.
Today, the material traces of these histories have vanished, leaving them invisible in the present day. Narrated through a series of real and fictional archival materials, this ongoing project combines speculative archival research, fictional re-telling, and community workshops to uncover the overlapping histories of the now-lost Pitt Street.
“Pitt Street is an era as much as a place.”
An Imaginary Archive of Pitt Street follows a young woman searching for a man known in her family only as 'Ah Sam'. As she uncovers traces of Ah Sam in the archives, her speculative journey reimagines the histories of Pitt Street and its inhabitants. With 'Ah Sam' being one of the most common Chinese names recorded in UK archives, the sheer volume of entries renders unravelling one life from another an impossible task. Gradually, the parallel lives of Ah Sam intertwine with the layered histories of Pitt Street.
The narrator begins to see the cyclical nature of its history, with events in and around Pitt Street repeating at irregular intervals. The sound piece is structured around a series of 'archival encounters' (a term borrowed from Tina Campt), blending real and fictional materials. Engaging with archives is an intimate yet deeply fraught process, evoking the emotional impact of discovering traces of oneself in history while confronting the invisibility and otherness embedded within the records.
Accidental archives
Building on the more documentary-rooted approach of The Undesirables, this project marks a first attempt at a speculative mode of research and storytelling. Rethinking archival records as “unstable, unsettled, and unfinished” and time as “overlapping circles of relationships” rather than a linear sequence of events represents a critical shift in research, opening up alternative ways of understanding and imagining Pitt Street’s histories.
Beyond the established narratives of Liverpool’s Chinese communities, the project focuses on “accidental” archives and the minor histories they evoke. One example is a collection of CR10 seamen’s identity cards held at Southampton City Archives. This index, created under the Defence of the Realm Act, existed for only three years (1918–1921) and served purposes that remain unknown. A distinctive feature of the index is its inclusion of passport-style photographs. These over 6,000 portraits offer a rare glimpse into the lives of Chinese seamen on British merchant ships in the 1910s while simultaneously exposing the inherent violence of identity photography.
Most of the men appear unsettled by the camera’s gaze, their expressions fixed in a permanent state of confusion or unease. The intrusive presence of identification numbers is inescapable—either written directly onto the photograph, displayed on metal poles in the background, or held as cutouts by the men themselves. These numbers bear a haunting resonance with another community of men: the Chinese Labour Corps, digging trenches across the Atlantic during World War I, where contract numbers replaced names as markers of identity. As one historian notes, “It’s the number on his wartime employment records, his death compensation, and his grave.”
Potential histories
Among the CR10 cards, some seamen listed addresses in Limehouse, London, as well as No. 85 Pitt Street, a Chinese boarding house in Liverpool. While unremarkable compared to Pitt Street’s historic landmarks—such as the first Chinese restaurants, grocery shops, or the Chinese Progress Club—the recurring presence of No. 85 in the records led to several “accidental” discoveries.
Census records reveal that in 1921, two men named Ah Sam (a central figure in the project) lived next door to No. 85. The family managing the boarding house also rented rooms to three Caribbean seamen. This prompted an exploration of their experiences during the 1919 race riots, when black seamen and black-run businesses were targeted in a wave of unprecedented violence across Liverpool and other UK port cities. While little is recorded of the Chinese community’s response during that summer, No. 85 offers the possibility of imagining moments of solidarity within this tight-knit neighbourhood.
Pitt Street’s identity has always been intimately tied to its relationship with the sea and the colonial history of Liverpool as the second city of the Empire. Examining intersections between Chinese and other migrant communities—such as long-established Caribbean and Filipino-run boarding houses, or Singaporean and West African seafarers in the area—offers a way to explore Pitt Street’s “potential” histories that remain unrecorded.
The second part of the project will feature a series of community workshops designed to foster intergenerational dialogue around Pitt Street’s invisible histories and create space to reimagine lives lived in close proximity—connected by shared experiences of migration, displacement, labour, and racialised otherness.
Voice artist: Nadia Anim
Sound design: Jash Yuan
Hester Yang is a London-based Chinese filmmaker, photographer, and co-founder of the screening collective Sine Screen. Her artistic and curatorial practice focuses on alternative approaches to documentary storytelling, exploring themes of memory, historical erasure, migration, and the complexities of diasporic experiences. Her project The Undesirables was selected for the 2023 edition of New Contemporaries and has been exhibited at The Bomb Factory, Output Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, Grundy Art Gallery, and Camden Arts Centre.
Soundtrack for a Silent Film
Through his engagement with Limehouse, Lek created Soundtrack for a Silent Film, an experimental composition that explores the concept of 'disappeared places.' Using spatial audio techniques, the work abstracts and obscures archival materials from the London Metropolitan Archives and the British Film Institute’s Chinese Britain on Film collection. His research centres on Limehouse, both London’s original Chinatown and the setting for a fictional genre of silent-era films that demonised and abstracted the area.
Fascinated by Limehouse’s representation as a kind of ghost story (the Limehouse Chinatown was demonised in fictional works by Sax Rohmer and Thomas Burke before the community relocated to Soho after World War II as the docks moved downstream), Lek connects this to what Mark Fisher termed 'nomadalgia'—the feeling of placelessness in modern spaces. Lek explores this through sound, not by constructing a linear historical narrative, but by creating an immersive sonic environment that evokes the experience of displacement and technological change.
Limehouse, London’s first Chinatown
Limehouse, once a prominent hub for Chinese communities in East London, became home to Chinese sailors who worked for British shipping companies. By the early 20th century, the area had developed into a small but visible Chinatown, with around 2,000 Chinese-born residents. These migrants built businesses—restaurants, laundrettes, and grocery stores—that offered comfort to the seamen. During World War I, Limehouse gained recognition as London’s first Chinatown, its existence immortalised in the racist and exoticised novels Limehouse Nights (1916) by Thomas Burke and The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913) by Sax Rohmer. These writers helped fuel a narrative of Limehouse as a ‘dark underworld’—a place associated with opium dens, gambling, and criminality. By the end of World War II, the Limehouse district had been deserted. The Chinese community scattered, with many relocating to Soho and West London. Subsequently, the Blitz decimated the area’s urban fabric. What was once Chinatown now exists only in traces—street names like Ming Street, Pekin Street, and Canton Street serving as the few remnants of its existence.
'Nomadalgia, the sickness of travel.'
—Mark Fisher, Ghosts of my Life
Reflecting on Limehouse’s transformation and the concept of ‘nomadalgia’—a term coined by Mark Fisher in Ghosts of my Life—Soundtrack for a Silent Film explores the discomfort of constant motion. Fisher uses ‘nomadalgia’ to describe the unsettling feeling of being in ubiquitous, yet anonymous spaces—hotel lobbies, shopping malls, and coffee shops—where one may exist without ever being truly present. Fisher’s critique of modern urban landscapes, which are in a state of constant flux, echoes through Soundtrack for a Silent Film. As cities rapidly modernise, only fragments of the past remain—ghosts of places that once thrived, now lost to progress. These spaces linger in the collective memory, casting an uncanny presence across the cityscape.
By manipulating archival materials from the London Metropolitan Archives and the BFI’s Chinese Britain on Film Collection, Lek creates a haunting, immersive soundscape that evokes the ghostly nature of Limehouse. Like Fisher’s concept of the modern city, the composition exists in the liminal space between absence and presence, drawing listeners into a world caught between past and future. Extending Lek’s ongoing research into Sinofuturism and AI as a wandering technological spirit, Soundtrack for a Silent Film deliberately obscures and abstracts the textual and the rational until they create new sonic territories that exist somewhere between presence and absence, where displacement and technological change are not explained but felt. The six tracks explore Buddhist concepts of impermanence through the degradation and reconstruction of sound. Its ethereal sounds of the sonic journey through—Intro (Outcasts), Mazu, Goddess of the Sea, Hard Times on Narrow Street, Pennyfields Theme, Broken Blossom, Homecoming—invites listeners to experience the ghostly qualities of urban transformation through sound itself.
Key References
Case, S. (n.d.). Lilied Tongues and Yellow Claws: The Invention of Limehouse, London’s Chinatown, 1915-1945. Available at: Link
Seed, J. (2006). Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900-40. History Workshop Journal, 62(1), pp. 58-85. Available at: Link
Brown, H. (2022). The Story of Limehouse’s Lost Chinatown. Available at: Link
London Museum (2024). Limehouse: London’s First Chinatown. Available at: Link
Lawrence Lek is a Malaysian Chinese artist, filmmaker, and musician who integrates architecture, gaming, video, music, and fiction into a continuously expanding cinematic universe. Known for pioneering the concept of Sinofuturism, Lek creates immersive installations that explore spiritual and existential themes through the lens of science fiction. Recent solo exhibitions include NOX, LAS Art Foundation, Berlin (2023); Black Cloud Highway, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2023); Nepenthe (Summer Palace Ruins), QUAD, Derby (2022); and Post-Sinofuturism, ZiWU the Bund, Shanghai (2022). His work has been featured in major biennales and film festivals, including the 24th Biennale of Sydney (2024), the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi (2022), Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2022), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2022), the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice (2021), and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023, 2018). As a musician, Lek composes soundtracks and performs live audio-visual mixes of his films, often incorporating elements of his open-world games. His soundtrack releases include Temple OST (The Vinyl Factory, 2020) and AIDOL OST(Hyperdub, 2020). Lek has received numerous accolades, including the Frieze Artist Award (2024), the 4th VH Award Grand Prix (2021), the Jerwood/FVU Award (2017), and the Dazed Emerging Artist Award (2015). He lives and works in London.
That dark, sugary sea
That dark, sugary sea is a sonic exploration by London-based artist Chris Zhongtian Yuan, created in collaboration with trumpeter Kevin G. Davy and vocalist Cath Johnson. Using a modular structure, the piece weaves together trumpet compositions, vocals, outdoor noises, and found orchestral sounds, all crafted and edited through improvisational techniques.
Accompanying the listening experience is a text by Qu Chang, whose fragmented notes draws from Chloe Lee’s blog post, journal articles, recipes, and poems. The project stems from Yuan’s encounter with Dr. Chloe Lee’s research at the National Archives, which uncovered the little-known presence of Chinese migrants aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948. Lingering as a faint memory for two years, Yuan’s work seeks to imagine the kind of music that might have been playing aboard the Windrush. Collaborating with long-term partners, the project employs improvisation techniques and a modular structure to weave together archival materials, live fictions, loneliness, and pleasure.
That dark, sugary sea
The Glentanner,
The Inchinnan,
The Whirlwind,
The Flora Temple,
The Cora,
and other trans-Pacific ships.
Out of over 1,000 people aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948 (it passed through Trinidad, Jamaica, Mexico, Bermuda and finally arrived at the Port of Tilbury near London —editor’s note), […] I was surprised to see that the Passenger list also records East Asian names. Individuals like Edwin Ho, who participated in friendly boxing matches onboard and found work in Telford in the Midlands, or Clinton Wong, a member of the RAF, who was based at RAF Sealand, which is now MoD Sealand near Chester. What could we make of these other stories – that some might not associate with Windrush-generation migration – and what might they tell us about the journeys of migration that predated the post-war period? (a)
As a possible solution to the post-Emancipation West Indian plantation problems that lasted from the 1850s to the 1866, approximately 18,000 Chinese entered the Caribbean during this period. They were given contracts for three and then five-year periods with no repatriation to China. (f)
732 voyages:
358 to Cuba,
274 to Peru,
63 to the main colonies of the West Indies,
37 to other destinations. (b)
Chinese,
Maltese,
Black and White Portuguese-speakers from Madeira,
Cape Verde and the Azores,
African Americans and Africans,
East Indians. (c)
The journey took between 10 and 20 weeks, depending on the destination. (d)
The arkatis, or sergent-recruiters, hired by the British, often exaggerated the positive elements beyond the kala pani (the dark waters) and lured Indian peasants into migrating. (e)
The dark waters.
Conditions on the ships were similar to those on slave ships. In 1856-57, the average death rate for Indians travelling to the Caribbean was 17% due to diseases like dysentery, cholera and measles. After they disembarked, there were further deaths in the holding depot and during the process of acclimatisation in the colonies. (d)
“Victoria grandfather, Ho A-yin, come over from China to work for Lainsi up at Kamuni creek. Lainsi pay the passage from China and, in return, they work for him in the charcoal pit. If any of the boys wanted to leave, Lainis would kill them and throw them in the pit. All except Ho. He escape. He walk through the bush day and night, day and night, until he come to the Demerara”. (g)
Coolies across
North America,
Latin America,
Southeast Asia,
and Oceania,
Shipped by the British,
the French,
the Portuguese,
the Spanish,
and the Dutch
—all of whom had their own coolie systems. (h)
Most coolies were recruited by local Chinese agents (“brokers” or “crimps”) hired by their colonial customers, with the indentured labourers held in barracoons, and then shipped out of Macao. Free emigrants, on the other hand, left via Hong Kong and travelled to mostly British colonies such as Malaya, Australia, and North America. (h)
Brokers, crimps.
Macau, Hong Kong.
The dark waters.
“Then suddenly it struck Lowe that for the years he’d been coming, all they talked about was home. The treacherousness of the Chinese there, the horror of the conditions that drove them away. It was as if the bitterness they carried could only be directed at the crimps, those Chinese who had sold them per head like rats to barracoon agents, owners of receiving vessels. It was as if that betrayal was greater than any humiliation they had suffered while chained up in those barracoons and beaten daily until their wills were broken, greater than the punishments doled out by the captains of foreign ships during the crossing, where many of the ships fell apart in the ocean—only one third of them ever survived the passage—their bones scattered, sunken in beds in the middle of the Atlantic. They never talked about the man markets that greeted them on the Island once they arrived, how they were made to stand naked so the throng of planters could prod their open jaws and hanging testicles before buying them, how planters chopped off their glossy imperial queues and emblazoned, in bold and red letters on their skins, the initials of plantations. It seemed as if nothing could be as bad as that, as bad as being sent to this bondage by your own.” (i)
“Virulent stories”,
“Woeful conditions”. (i)
About 96 percent of the Chinese who migrated to the Americas in the nineteenth century came from a small region in southern Kwangtung (Guangdong) province, a 7,000 square mile cluster of districts (counties) within a semicircle around the triangle of cities on the Pearl River Delta: Macao, Canton and Hong Kong. (c)
Most Chinese American communities, therefore, including the West Indian Chinese, are basically “Cantonese” in origin. (c)
Trini Char Siu Pork
marinate 3lbs pork shoulder with
1 star anise 1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp salt 2 tsp JGM Chinese seasoning
1/2 tsp red food colouring/char sui powder
bake the pork in 400℉ for 1 hour.
slice and stir-fry it with 1 tbsp. minced garlic
2 tsp grated ginger
3/4 cup ketchup or char sui sauce/oyster sauce/plum sauce
3 dashes dark soy sauce
1 tsp sugar
2 tsp JGM Chinese seasoning
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tbsp. scorpion pepper sauce or chopped pepper - optional
2 chopped peppers (j)
“The most desirable accommodation to a China man, is good eating, especially solid animal food, as beef or pork; animal food, in short, is their greatest luxury, and a liberal supply of that article, is more likely than any thing else, to reconcile them to their new situation.” (Excerpt from a letter written by Kenneth MacQueen, a British office appointed to seek the possibility of moving Chinese workers to Trinidad) (a)
“The older immigrants never talked about the condition of the lives they lived there on the Island, how planters rarely abided by the contracts they had signed back in Whampoa, in the pigpens. They never talked about Chinese on plantations who walked off cliffs from overwork, who hung themselves with pigtails looped round tree limbs, who tied stones to their feet and jumped in rivers or sat on banks waiting for the water to take them, how those that escaped the plantations were hunted down and strapped to rafters and left there swinging, for birds to pluck. They never talked about how the Negro and white people looted and burned down their shops, heaped hostilities on them.” (i)
In Trinidad, they became
handicraftsmen,
barbers,
tailors,
bakers,
carpenters,
goldsmiths
and woodcutters. (k)
In light of the paucity of Chinese females, many chose to marry and co-habit predominantly with local black and coloured women. These inter-racial unions also included Portuguese, Indian and in the case of Trinidad, Venezuelan Mestizo immigrants, which led to the emergence of a mixed Chinese group that was more “creole” or West Indian in culture than Chinese. (f)
The lack of a collective organization of enunciation made it even more difficult for the Indian and Chinese diasporic groups to claim a full-fledged self-awareness. Instead of revisiting and rewriting original slave narratives as African American writers did in the 1960s, Indo and Chinese Caribbean writers, and those interested in these diasporas, went straight to the fictionalization of history. (e)
Fictive memories, soft identities.
[…]by the end of the 19th century in these two colonies the Chinese had carved a niche for themselves as a “middlemen minority” group in the area of shopkeeping and small businesses.(f) They implemented a system of clubs and associations. This networking would allow the Chinese to attract new waves of migration in the twentieth century. (e)
This assimilation, however, often associated with economic success, did not fail to generate anti-Chinese sentiment (see the anti-Chinese riots in Jamaica in 1918 and 1938, for instance). (e)
🥁
The foreground is London, where Gladys, a Chinese Guyanese woman, lives with her husband and son[…] British Guiana (BG) is still referred to as “home,” and they all would like to “go home.” The violence and the hatred they confront in London, symbolised by Gladys’ attack by the landlord’s vicious dog, only finds its equivalent in the violence that is being unleashed in British Guiana (the 1960s were a time of confrontation between the Indo Guyanese and Afro Guyanese). Home country and host country are thus reflected in a mirror. As Gladys’s husband says, “Black against East Indian and we Chiney in between. Gawd. Things proper bad. . . The old BG done. . . Better to stay here.” (g)
How can a Chinese individual living outside China grapple with the dual domination of his native country and of his host country? (e)
The idea of China has long gone beyond the borders of China itself. (e)
Fictive memories,
soft identities,
In dark waters.
“All right! Stay at home then! Turn into a coolie! You used to be a coolie and I manage to turn you into a civilized person, now you want to turn coolie again. . . . this is the West Indies, not India, not Africa, not China, the West Indies! We are British!” (l)
“You just have to open up another shop, quick. You have to pretend things not so bad. You can’t show them we weak. You have to just accept it as bad luck. Man, you can’t stop to think. They going murder we in this place”. (i)
Notes
(a) “Legacies of Chinese indenture aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948”, Chloe Lee, The National Archives, 31 May, 2023
(b) Coolie Ships of the Chinese Diaspora (1846-1874), John Asome, 2020, Proverse Hong Kong
(c) “Imperialism, Indenture and Diaspora: the origins of the West Indian Chinese Community”, W. Look Lai, 1998
(d) “Indentured labour from South Asia (1834-1917)”, striking-women.org
(e) “Looking In, Looking Out: The Chinese-Caribbean Diaspora through Literature— Meiling Jin, Patricia Powell, Jan Lowe Shinebourne”, Judith Misrahi-Barak, 2012
(f) "The Chinese in the Caribbean during the colonial era" in Cruse & Rhiney (Eds.), Caribbean Atlas, 2013
(g) Song of the Boat Women, Meiling Jin, 1996, Peepal Tree. Cited from (e).
(h) “The Rise and Fall of Chinese Indentured Labour”, The Gale Review, 2022 (i) The Pagoda, Patricia Powell, 1998, Hartcourt Brace & Company. Cited from (e).
(j) Recipe based on Trini Cooking with Natasha’s YouTube tutorial, www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8gsbEkcZbM (k) “The Chinese Have Influenced the Caribbean in a Powerful Way”, 2021, exceptionalcaribbean.com
(l) The Last English Platation, Jan Lo Shinebourne, 2002, Peepal Tree. Cited from (e).
Chris Zhongtian Yuan (b. 1988, Wuhan, China) is an artist based in London, UK. Yuan’s practice recomposes vernacular sonic and spatial materials, playfully and intimately exploring the intersections of the domestic and the institutional, the diasporic and the conceptual. Working across video, sound, performance, sculpture, and installation, their work centres on the concept of ‘Punk filmmaking,’ examining space, relationships, and context. Recent solo exhibitions include Surplus Space, Wuhan (2024); Reading International, Reading (2023); Macalline Art Center, Beijing (2023); V.O Curations, London (2022); Art Review, London (2021); and 1815, K11, Wuhan (2020). Recent group exhibitions and screenings include Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou (2024); Somerset House, London (2024); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2023); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Somerset House, London (2022); OCAT Institute, Beijing (2021); Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2021); Videoex, Zurich (2021); Hubei Museum of Art (2020); York Art Gallery, York (2020); and the Venice Architecture Biennale Greek Pavilion, Venice (2018), among others. Yuan graduated from the Architectural Association in London and is currently pursuing a PhD at Kingston School of Art.
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