Month: April 2016

Lives Lived, Choices Made

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By Vaudine England

It’s all very well having grand theories about Race and Empire and Gender and Class, but what of actual real stories, the lives that people lived, the choices they made? I recently met a woman from a conventional middle-class Australian background, who had come to Hong Kong in the late 1960s; within days of arrival she had met, fallen in love with and would soon marry the wealthy scion of a cosmopolitan Chinese family, with roots in the Republican movement of pre-war China. Ideas of taboos of race or gender fall by the wayside when such comfort levels exist, yet still this woman’s choice was impressive.

Most individual stories of cross-taboo linking are impressive. From a far different time, take the love match between Shearman Godfrey Bird, an English army officer, aged just 22, in Canton, in late 1858 or early 1859. He met 18-year old Amy Chun and would bring her to Hong Kong and, in 1867, on to England and finally, two years later, to Ontario Canada. When Shearman died in 1873 he left Amy a young widow, with eight children to raise in an alien world.

Thanks to one present-day descendant, Naomi Ridout, we now know much more about this relationship and how, in late 1850s Canton and early 1860s Hong Kong, it was to some extent accepted. (Naomi gave a talk about this in Hong Kong in August 2014, and is pursuing many aspects of related researches.)

Shearman Godfrey Bird was the fourth of 15 children of a rural vicar, with an extended family full of senior military men, architects and civil servants. Young Shearman was sent to China in 1857 as part of forces due to fight the Second ‘Opium’ or ‘Arrow’ War. Luckily, he wrote – of the mosquitoes, the prickly heat, the military actions and treaty ports. He started learning Chinese, at the same time as he was busy helping to burn down Chinese villages; he took up photography, bird hunting and sailing and then, he met Amy. No marriage certificate was ever found but the two claimed marriage on 1 June 1859. Amy was baptized as an Anglican in 1863, after two of her children had already been baptised.

Making informed guesses due to a lack of documentation, Naomi believes Shearman resigned his commission (in 1862) because the relationship had become or was about to be made formal and/or public. Informal relationships were the norm (such as the Imperial Maritime Customs boss Robert Hart’s Chinese partner who bore him several children but was later left behind in China when the soon-to-be ennobled Hart went home on leave to find a ‘proper’ wife). Shearman chose to marry his wife with formal Anglican rites — even at the cost of his military career, his prospects and his finances.

Meanwhile, Naomi has been rather cleverly delving into the history of Amy and her family, finding out that she was no ‘flower boat girl’, but of at least equal social standing to the man she married. She appeared to bring some class standing and certainly wealth to the union; perhaps her father was a compradore, indeed perhaps he was Ch’en Ya-chiu, the compradore for Augustine Heard in Yokohama, Japan.

Life for the young couple, in both Canton and Hong Kong, was not easy. His diary reveals, however, how the social life possible for a mixed race couple of those times was both rich, yet limited. There was a round of dinners, picnics and teas, almost invariably with members of the Protestant missionary world. One exception to this was the friendship between Shearman and Amy Bird and the Sharps: wealthy broker Granville and his wife Matilda, of Matilda Hospital fame. The Sharps knew Revd Fred Turner of the London Missionary Society, a noted opponent of the opium trade, and the Turners were Shearman and Amy’s neighbours in Canton. Matilda was herself an adventurous woman, a linguist in French, German, Dutch and eventually Cantonese. Granville was a stalwart of the Hong Kong Club thanks to his career as an accountant in several banks and then a bullion and bills broker. The Sharps would later help Amy the widow, when money was short.

While still in Hong Kong, the day-to-day details of a mixed-race marriage are hard to find. The children were baptized at St John’s Cathedral where Shearman acted as auditor of cathedral accounts alongside his day-job in the Surveyor General’s department. In 1865, his brother Sotheby arrived from Taiwan; it was Sotheby, not Shearman, who played a founding role in the architects’ firm Palmer & Turner. Shearman’s working life (and pay packets) were improving but not his health and by 1867 he was heading homewards with Amy, five children and an Amah. The life in Canada that began in 1869 saw a total of eight children reared almost single-handedly by Amy, all of them integrated into Canadian or English society. None returned to China. Amy had arrived in Canada when the country was less than two years old, surely one of the first Chinese women to move there.

I wonder if one can generalise to the extent that almost every Eurasian story has such elements of challenge, and survival. We don’t know what Amy really thought about her position in colonial Hong Kong and what she had to handle as a widow in Canada; perhaps the two young lovers blundered into something they had no idea would be so hard or perhaps it was perfectly manageable. Looked at from the outside, it seems another story of courage, adaptation and triumph. But until we find more personal private papers giving us the voice of these participants form another time, we won’t ever be quite sure. Let’s hope more descendants such as Naomi Ridout are out there, working on it.

Hong Kong Studies and Frank Dikotter’s Work on Race

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By Vaudine England

If talking about race has been hard, how much harder has it been to accept that racism in statecraft has never been the sole preserve of white people. Not only Western imperialists have been racist; the Chinese were, and are, too. Proof of this is found, if any were needed, in the work of Frank Dikotter, back when he was still at SOAS. His analysis of ideas going into the republican revolutionary era showed how startlingly race-based Chinese nationalism has always been.

‘Myths of origins, ideologies of blood, conceptions of racial hierarchy and narratives of biological descent have indeed formed a central part in the cultural construction of identity in China,’ wrote Dikotter in The China Quarterly. That racism has so often accompanied nationalist passion is hardly a new thought; however, amid globalization, ‘racial identities and racial discrimination have in fact increased in East Asia’. The problem, he added, was that little work has been done on the detail and deployment of racial frames of reference in China. It’s another one of those taboos.

Dikotter has gone some way to remedy this, highlighting the use of language (volk in German, and the gradations of zu, zhong, zulei, minzu and zhongzu in Chinese) to denote racial hierarchies. In China, he noted, racial categories began to replace ethnocentric senses of identity in the last decade of the 19th century. He cites the charming thoughts of Tang Caichang (1867-1900): ‘Yellow and white are wise, red and black are stupid; yellow and white are rulers, red and blacks are slaves; yellow and white are united, red and black are scattered,’ to make this shockingly clear. Of course there was a political purpose for republicans to stress racial unity as they sought the end of the hitherto vital unifying force of dynastic rule. By the end of the republican period, sure enough, people in China had come to identify themselves and others in terms of race.

Yet many in China accused of racial thinking proceeded to blame it on western imperialism. They did so partly in the wrong belief that racism is somehow a single variant ‘which is universal in its origins (the West), its causes (capitalist society) and its effects (colonization)’, wrote Dikotter. The historiography of how the word ‘yellow’ came to be associated with the Chinese is fascinating, long before the republicans became active fashioners of their own identity, which was specifically based on race.

‘Racial identities during the late imperial period, in other words, were neither generated by a self-contained system called “Chinese culture”, nor imposed through “Western hegemony”. They were created through cultural interaction with a variety of schools of thought … leading to a variability of racial narratives which cannot be reduced to a single model called “Chinese racism”.’ Dikotter added: ‘the racialization of collective senses of identity has actually increased within both state circles and relatively independent intellectual spheres, particularly since the erosion of Communist authority after the Tiananmen massacre’. Failure to look race in the face when racial nationalism is rising remains problematic.

One can bring this right up to date by trying to answer the simple question: how many Americans (or Britons, or Swedes) are there in Hong Kong? The question revolves around which set of numbers you choose to use. Ask the American consulate and you’ll get a number for how many people in Hong Kong hold a U.S. passport. Ask the Hong Kong government’s immigration department and you’ll get a number for how many people use a U.S. passport to enter and leave the territory. Ask the Hong Kong government’s census and statistics department  and you will get a number for how many non-ethnic Chinese people in Hong Kong hold U.S. nationality.

The first number you get will be the highest — after all, lots of Hong Kongers have a U.S. passport which they rarely use but keep in the top drawer for insurance. The second number will be smaller, and the third number the smallest of all.

The most recent example of this was when the missing bookseller apparently taken out of Hong Kong in December 2015, Lee Bo, was described as ‘first and foremost a Chinese’ despite his British passport.

In short, China claims its own. Foreign passports mean little if a person is deemed Chinese, and Chinese nationality law is race-based. A very few exceptions exist, where a white person (virtually never a brown or black person) is granted a Chinese passport as a special favour. They do not obscure the point that an ethnically Chinese person is seen as Chinese by the state, wherever they are and whatever passport they hold. That warm, fuzzy notion that a person is whoever they define themselves to be — for example when a Eurasian chooses to identify as Chinese, or not; or when someone born as a man chooses to identify as a woman — can simply be thrown out the window.

SOURCES

Dikotter, Frank. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press , 1992.

Dikotter, Frank. ‘Racial Identities in China: Context and Meaning’. The China Quarterly, No 138 (June 1994), 404-412.

Race and Hong Kong Studies

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By Vaudine England

The thought behind a lot of these ruminations in this blog is that the subject of race in empire, specifically with relation to Hong Kong, has been grossly under-covered to date. Some Dutch academic friends wonder if it is the Britishness of Hong Kong studies — how else to explain, one wondered, the contrast between the huge swathes of scholarship done by the Dutch on ‘their Eurasians’ (the Indos) and the minuscule body of work on the mixed race products of British colonies? Perhaps regarding Hong Kong, the gap is also because the whole idea of studying Hong Kong from a Hong Kong point of view (rather than a Peking or London perspective) only gained traction in the last 20 or 30 years, just when the tides of so-called political correctness militated against any straight look at a topic as murky as race. It has also been the period when scientists of many kinds have insisted that race does not exist.

Not only has being a Eurasian meant a lifetime of taboos; talking about it, studying it, has been shrouded in taboo too.

This thought was thrown into sharper relief when I came across an article I’d kept from a decade ago, by the evolutionary developmental biologist Armand Marie Leroi. It was published in the New York Times as ‘A Family Tree in Every Gene’ on 14 March 2005, and in the Asia edition of the International Herald Tribune the next day as ‘Genes Rebuild Our Ideas About Race’. The difference in headline is already provoking; was the New York editing desk scared to put ‘race’ in bold type?

Leroi was prompted to write by a commentary in The Times of India which feared the loss of endangered tribes around the Andaman Islands in the tsunami of end-2004; this would destroy increasingly rare ‘Negrito racial stocks’, it said. Technically correct, the description jumped out at Leroi in a world long defined by the belief that race is not a scientific concept, but a social category. That belief is now threatened by fascinating advances in genetic research which, he said, were beginning to show that races do, after all, exist.

Leroi recounted how it took three decades to disprove the statement by Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin — that the genetic difference between a European and an African was barely bigger than that between any two Europeans. Leroi said Lewontin had left out the impact of correlations between genes which enabled the reconstruction of large-scale genetic topographies. Of course human beings have always been ‘irredeemably promiscuous’, as Leroi charmingly put it: ‘We have always seduced, or coerced our neighbours even when they have a foreign look about them and we don’t understand a word’. But just as the Pennines and Himalayas can both be described as mountain ranges despite huge differences in scale, so too can races be defined: ‘The billion or so of the world’s people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race. At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well…’, wrote Leroi.

None of this is intended to reach new definitions of racial purity; rather the opposite. Leroi wrote that genetic research on people of mixed race ancestry would provide for the greatest scientific advances, in trying to find out what makes blue eyes blue, or not. Such ‘admixture mapping’, where following genetic strands is made easier by the variations, is exciting and would help understanding of the differences that make up the rich human tapestry.

Wrote Leroi: ‘Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic cultural or political differences. But it is a shorthand that seems to be needed. One of the more painful spectacles of modern science is that of human geneticists piously disavowing the existence of races even as they investigate the genetic relationships between “ethnic groups”. Given the problematic, even vicious, history of the word “race”, the use of euphemisms is understandable. But it hardly aids understanding..’

Of course one could argue that in some Asian polities, there’s been a bit too much race all along! The British colonial administrators appeared to experience no qualms when blithely mixing in some Indian Chettiars to do the accounts for the Burmese, or the Chinese ‘coolies’ to work the mines and Indians to tap the rubber trees with the Malays who were too ‘lazy or mystical to work. Having identified races as real after all, a new more blunt scholarship of such events might follow.

Source note: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/opinion/a-family-tree-in-every-gene.html