A new project about the diverse legacies of early Chinese labour migration to the Caribbean and Latin America features stories of those who trace their roots back to mainland China.
Hannah’s story
Hannah Lowe, poet, writer, teacher, academic and founding member of the Chinese-Caribbean Studies Network, grew up in Ilford, Essex, as daughter of a Jamaican Chinese father and a white British mother. As a child, she knew nothing about her father’s background, and it was only some years after he passed away in 2001 that Hannah began to uncover the story of his paternal family’s journey from China to Jamaica, and her father’s own journey from Jamaica to the UK.
Hannah spoke about her experience to a hybrid workshop at the London School of Economics in April, part of a new collective research initiative on ‘Legacies of Chinese Labour in Latin America and the Caribbean’, recently launched under the auspices of the LSE’s Anthropology Department.
Hannah’s Hakka paternal grandfather, Lowe-Shu-On, decided to leave Guangdong in southern China to seek his ‘fortune’ in Jamaica sometime between 1918 and 1920. Once there, he set up a grocery shop, as did many other Chinese on the island. Through her research, Hannah discovered that her ancestral village in Guangdong, Lowe Shui Hap, was home to many Chinese who left for Jamaica. Now, through the agency of a distant US cousin of Hannah’s, the village has become the centre of a company importing and distributing wines from California’s Napa Valley.
Hannah’s father was born in Jamaica in 1925 to a mother who was a young black woman from a poor rural family. He was one of eleven siblings, most of whom he didn’t know, since his father’s various ‘common law wives’ were all over the country. Aged seventeen, Hannah’s father decided to try his luck by emigrating, first to the US as a farmhand where he stayed until 1946. He then returned to Jamaica but because of the country’s economic downturn under the effects of the second world war, he decided to emigrate to England. So in March 1947, he arrived in Liverpool on the SS Ormonde, predating the Windrush’s arrival the following year.
By this time Hannah’s father had already been married, divorced and had a daughter in America. In England, he married again, and had a son. Hannah’s mother, Betony, was his third wife, some 23 years his junior. She was a primary school teacher and was the economic mainstay of Hannah’s early childhood. But it was her father who was the most exciting, if elusive, parent. He was a professional gambler, and a ‘card sharp’ who spent most nights gambling in London’s east end, and was sometimes abroad, probably indulging his passion for gambling. Hannah remembers he was never seen without a deck of cards in his hand, endlessly practising skills for his various tricks. Even while watching the TV with his family, he would keep his cards on the go.
Hannah’s father was also a committed socialist who made a habit of giving away the money he earned from gambling to anyone in need he came across. So although he apparently earned quite a bit of money, he never managed to bring much home.
Hannah grew up in a white cultural environment. To avoid awkward explanations about his absence, she told her schoolmates that her dad was a night watchman. Why did she have a black dad? Hannah just wanted her dad to be like other dads. Why were the cupboards in their kitchen full of spices and sauces that he used for cooking, unlike the food her mates at school ate?
Hannah was never given the opportunity to understand why her dad was so different because neither he nor her mum told her anything about his background. Some years after his death in 2001 Hannah began to develop an interest in her Jamaican Chinese heritage. Poetry became her way of accessing deep emotions of pain, loss and longing opened up by her father’s death.
The Project
Hannah’s story was one that emerged in a workshop on the ‘Legacies of Chinese Labour Migration to the Caribbean and Latin America’ held at the LSE in late April this year. The family stories of some of the workshop participants illustrate something of the diversity of experiences and themes involved in the complex legacies of this relationship between China, Latin America and the Caribbean.
The workshop was funded by the LSE and the British Academy. It brought together some twenty participants from Argentina, Costa Rica, Colombia, China, Germany, Spain, Portugal and the UK, with more joining online, from Brazil, Sweden and the UK.
The aim was to form a multi-disciplinary international network of researchers, film makers, artists and writers, working on different aspects of the relations between Latin America, the Caribbean and China since the early migration of so-called ‘coolie’ labour from China in the early nineteenth century.
Our lively discussions were organised under five main headings, linked by the common theme of migration: Indenture, race, politics; Development and extractivism; Labour and diplomacy; Literature and film; Translation, representation, and diaspora. They spanned a period from the early nineteenth century to the present. Some participants made comparisons drawn from their work on China’s presence in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Now, as China’s relations with Latin America hit the headlines in debates about international relations, heritage tourism and extractivism, this workshop promises to lead to diverse projects in the future, including documentary film, a website and funded research projects, opening a window on a hitherto under-explored aspect of China’s relations with Latin America and the Caribbean.
Lloyd’s story
Lloyd Richard Fonseca Anglin’s family story takes a very different turn. Lloyd is a writer and academic from Costa Rica working in the field of visual culture. His paternal great grandfather migrated from Jamaica to Costa Rica in the early twentieth century. There he founded what became a wealthy family-based enterprise, with sons and grandsons who were educated in major universities in the US and became successful civil engineers and landowners in Costa Rica.
Lloyd’s Costa Rican Chinese cousin Esteban had a different family trajectory. Esteban’s Chinese grandfather decided to leave his Chinese wife and young son in Guangdong to migrate to Costa Rica in the 1930s, to seek his fortune. He settled on Costa Rica because other people from his village had gone there. Without papers and money, he had to stow away on a boat to make the long journey.
Eventually he reached the district of Tucurrique where other Chinese migrants had already opened some shops. There he met Esteban’s grandmother, a woman of means, originally from Catalunya, with whom he had four children, including Esteban’s father. However, the grandmother lived in extreme poverty because the ‘Chinese man,’ as Esteban called him, gambled and drank.
Esteban’s father was particularly resentful of his own father for having wasted his life gambling and drinking. But he was extremely proud of being Chinese and had the reputation for being a tough guy, whose threats were enough to make villagers do what he wanted. He was also an excellent dancer and football player. Indeed, his motto was that in life you needed to learn to dance and fight. Such was his appeal that many local women wanted their daughter to marry a Chinese man.
Esteban’s father finished school early in the third grade, so as an adult without much education he tried his hand at various jobs to keep the family going. He was a man with a powerful sense of his own authority. He knew what was right and what was not right and brought his sons up to be courageous. So, Esteban grew up with his three siblings, all known in the village as ‘the Chinese kids’, fearing their father.
As with Hannah’s father, Esteban’s father never shared anything about his own Chinese background with his children. In fact, it was only when a cousin showed him a letter from their grandfather’s abandoned first wife in China, that Esteban became aware of the origins of his Chinese heritage.
Migration, abandonment and identity
These family memories open up a path to shared interests, some of which were briefly addressed in our workshop:
- The links between the early histories of indentured Chinese labour migration.
- The socio-economic and political conditions in southern China under the impact of colonial competition between the European and US powers.
- The later routes of voluntary migration of Chinese labour.
- The correspondence between these migratory routes and hugely divergent understandings and imaginaries across space and time of and between China, the Caribbean and Latin America
- The place of intermediaries, including translators and interpreters in contributing to and/or bridging such divides.
- The histories of capital accumulation, labour exploitation and extractivism.
- The uneven instances of racialised violence against ‘the Chinese’ throughout Latin America between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
- The cross-generational transmission of experiences of abandonment, silence, seduction, physical and moral authority and prowess and their part in the creation of family legends.
- The visual and literary representation of these experiences.
We are in the process of seeking funding to develop a website as the hub of shared information and experiences, including photographs, videos and links. We welcome interested LAB readers to contact us with their own experiences and narratives. You can write to: Harriet Evans, H.Evans5@lse.ac.uk
Main image: Xavier Murphy, a Jamaican now living in Florida, traced his Chinese family and other relatives. Read the story here.