Read an exclusive excerpt from “I Am Not a Tourist: Conversations on Being British Chinese” by Daisy J. Hung (Published by HQ, HarperCollins), out now:
Portraits, plaques and memorials will always tell an incomplete story – a reminder to remember rather than a complete picture. They also highlight glaring gaps – in this case, it’s the stories and histories of Chinese women in Britain. It was difficult to find information about these women among the early migrants. A BBC Radio 4 episode in the Chinese in Britain series shared the story of Song Ling Whang. At the start of the 20th century she made the 6,000 mile journey from China to Britain on foot. According to the programme, ‘She walked with a group of other young people following the route of the trans-Siberian railway line to Europe, performing acrobatics and making paper flowers to earn their way.’ Incredibly, she did this on traditionally bound feet.
In the same British Library exhibition where I saw Shen Fuzong’s papers, there was a description honouring ‘Chinatown’s matriarch’, Emily Hoare, also known as Emily Chung Ting, who was ‘a significant figure in Liverpool’s Chinatown in the early 1900s’. Her father was a Singaporean seafarer and her English mother ran a laundry. She could communicate in Chinese and English, so she helped Chinese seafarers with their medical and legal matters. Other early Chinese women in Britain include performers like Lady Yhou Fang Queon, who visited Britain in 1824 to be presented to the British public, but sadly died from illness; Kowhan, who provided testimony regarding her employers’ divorce in a House of Lords appeal case in 1846, the earliest reference to a Chinese female servant in British documents; Mrs A-Hok, considered the first Chinese Christian lady to visit Britain in 1890; and wives and family members of diplomats.
The Ming Ai Institute has collected over 200 interviews of British Chinese people, creating an impressive collection of oral histories of people from all walks of life. If our British history books won’t include British Chinese voices, then other efforts are needed to document our journeys.
Our own family histories aren’t always fully understood and are just as worthy of investigation. Interviewing my parents for this book gave me a valuable opportunity to explore the past. My maternal grandfather, who died before I was born, wrote a short memoir dated from 1974, six years before his death at the age of seventy-two. It’s laid out in vertical columns of beautiful Chinese script that I can’t read, enclosed within an ornate red border. I must rely on a family translation to understand its contents, which focus almost entirely on his career trajectory, describing his perseverance through challenging circumstances to run a silk business and then a timber company in order to support his family.
His wife, my maternal grandmother, does not have a written memoir. Instead I’ve had to glean my mother’s and her siblings’ memories. My mother refers to her as the ‘second wife’, known in the past as a ‘concubine’. I only met my maternal grandmother when I was a baby. She died the year after I was born, so I have no memory of her – only sepia-toned photographs of a stranger resembling my mother. She was the second, lower-status wife, escaping poverty by entering an arranged marriage into a family for the main purpose of producing a son. Despite my grandmother fulfilling her ‘duty’, bearing a son as her firstborn and then four daughters, their family was treated differently. As my mother said, they were ‘second-class citizens’.
My maternal grandfather loved and financially supported them, but managing interpersonal dynamics across two families was complicated. My maternal grandmother stayed in Hong Kong while three of her adult children moved further away, to Canada and England. One day in 1981 they received a call that their mother had fallen into a coma. My mother and her two siblings immediately flew back but got stuck in Tokyo due to a delayed flight. From their hotel room they called to check on her condition, but they were too late. If the flight hadn’t been delayed, they’d have been by her bedside. Instead, she was in the morgue. She was weeks away from emigrating to Canada to begin a new life at fifty-seven years old, but she didn’t make it. Though I never had a chance to develop a relationship with her, I know she lives on in me, and one of the Chinese characters in her name has become my youngest daughter’s middle name.
My eldest daughter’s middle name honours my paternal grandmother. I had a strong relationship with my paternal grandmother, but we couldn’t communicate with each other beyond the usual pleasantries: ‘Are you hungry?’, ‘How is work?’ or ‘How are you feeling?’ For us, physical presence and proximity were enough: holding hands during our evening walks around her quiet suburban neighbourhood, giving her fist-pounding back massages at her request, watching her cook my favourite foods to learn her techniques. I didn’t know that the last time I pulled away from her driveway, insisting that she go inside the house (but knowing that she wouldn’t close the door until after she saw my car drive away), would be our final goodbye. Arriving in England in the autumn, I had plans to return the next summer. She died that winter, six weeks after my grandfather, seemingly of a broken heart.
Our family histories and our collective national memory need to be preserved and acknowledged in a way that fills absences and guards against erasure, rather than perpetuating it. For centuries, Chinese people have come to Britain to make it their home – intentionally or not, legally or not – but are often seen as perpetual foreigners, not part of the fabric of British society. Despite Chinese communities largely being overlooked and disregarded in British history, they’ve shaped this country’s story, their labour and their lives enriching the British Empire, and they continue to push for recognition and rights. British Chinese history is British history
About the author
Daisy J. Hung is a diversity practitioner, writer, and artist, advocating for social justice across personal and professional spheres. She is the Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division at the University of Oxford. Daisy was longlisted for the Penguin Random House WriteNow 2020 competition, and was selected for the inaugural HarperCollins Author Academy programme in 2021 and The Greene Door Project’s mentoring scheme in November 2021.
Photo credit: Yunseo Cho