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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

Hong Kong Material in the FCO’s ‘Secret Archive’: Some Analysis

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There are a fair few files relating to the history of Hong Kong among the large collection of Foreign and Colonial Office archival material still retained by the department, largely held at Hanslope Park. This ‘secret archive’ was finally acknowledged in 2011 following a ruling by High Court judge as part of a suit brought by five Mau Mau members over torture and mutilation during the Kenya ‘Emergency’ in the 1950s. Following the Carey Report on files relating to colonial administration, the FCO has released a series of inventory records providing some details of those files. This post looks at Hong Kong-related material found in the latest two inventory lists to be made public by the FCO, released in March 2014 and 2015. The full lists can be found here, while Excel documents with the Hong Kong-related listings can be downloaded here:

2015_March_Paper_file_inventory_HK

2014_Archive_Inventory HK

The material has an overall date range of 1915 to 2000, with many of the listings relating to large groupings of files carrying such a wide range making more difficult the task of identifying potential clusters of and gaps in the material (such as for more controversial episodes such as the 1967 riots, which may be contained within some of the larger record collections but for which there is nothing obviously related in the 2015 release, for example). Within the 2015 inventory, there is slightly Hong Kong-related material listed than in 2014, with roughly 2,200 fewer items taking up approximately 23 fewer metres of space.

Based on the categories used by those conducting the inventory, this archival material comes in many forms, including everything from loose bundles of paper to envelopes and microform copies. This material even contains some floppy disks and computer back-up tapes, which raise some questions about the potential for future preservation and accessibility if and when this material is made accessible to researchers, since use of this material is dependent on now out-of-date technology.

Hong Kong-related material covers a wide range of topics, with just a selection of them being: immigration files, including asylum applications; Sino-British Liaison Group files, including reports, memoranda, and meeting materials relating to work on the Joint Declaration and handover; documents on ‘counter-subversion’ activities concerning groups such as the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation; and even includes reports and booklets relating to the administration’s mid-1990’s sewage strategy.

Here are some further details about Hong Kong-related material found in each inventory:

 2015
Total Items: 282,349
Total Boxes: 3,368
Linear Length: 454.92m
Date Range: 1915-2000
Formats: Envelopes, Loose Papers, Loose Documents, Files, Folders, Loose Bundles of Paper, Cardboard Map Holder, Diaries, Ring Binders, Bound Report Booklets, Bound Volumes, Books, Microfiche, Microform, Computer Back-up Tapes, Floppy Disks

2014
Total Items: 284,624
Total Boxes: 3,542
Linear Length: 478.035m
Date Range: 1915-2000
Formats: Envelopes, Loose Papers, Loose Documents, Files, Folders, Loose Bundles of Paper, Cardboard Map Holder, Diaries, Ring Binders, Bound Report Booklets, Bound Volumes, Books, Microfiche, Microform, Computer Back-up Tapes, Floppy Disks, Bundle

 

In Honour of Dan Waters, 1920-2016

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By Vaudine England

Since the death of Dan Waters, aged 95, in Hong Kong on 27 January this year, he has rightly been lauded for many things: charm and personality, astounding memory, karate black belt, marathons after 60, and of course being such an inspiration to anyone interested in Hong Kong’s earlier days. His own life was impressive, from being a ‘desert rat’ under Montgomery in World War Two to joining the colonial service in Hong Kong in 1954, in the Education Department. He wrote a best-selling manual to technical education and helped to found the Polytechnic (now University).

Perhaps we can blame today’s political correctness for a refusal to talk about one of Dan’s most important commitments — that of a colonial service officer to a Chinese woman in the 1950s. Either people don’t like to talk about race in case they offend someone, or such an inter-racial liaison is now seen as so utterly normal as to be unworthy of comment. Yet what Dan and Vera did was pioneering.

Along with serving in the auxiliary police and coping with the Shek Kip Mei riots of 1956, Dan worked at the Morrison Hill Technical Institute. There he met Vera Chan, a mature student and also founder and director of Hong Kong’s first beauty and charm school. They married in 1960.

Dan knew this was important. He wrote Faces of Hong Kong in 1995, dedicating it to ‘all cross-cultural marriages and to Eurasians everywhere’. He wrote about it again in 2005 he came out with One Couple Two Cultures: 81 Western-Chinese Couples Talk About Love and Marriage. This is dedicated ‘to my Hong Kong-Chinese wife, Vera, and to all the cross-cultural couples who readily bared their souls and withstood my inquisitive probing…’ Apart from four books on technical English and education, cross-cultural ties were all he wrote about.

Let’s think about that. The 1950s was a time when Hong Kong had found it could recover from World War Two, from Japanese occupation, and from the fall of British empire elsewhere in the world. It had not yet found the excited money-making impulses of the 1970s, nor were skyscrapers blocking the view. This was a quieter, more ‘colonial’ time and one, importantly, when we are told cross-cultural marriages were banned by the banks, the hongs and the government. Yet clearly they were not forbidden. Whereas countries such as the USA and Canada passed laws to ban inter-racial marriage, neither Britain nor Hong Kong ever did so. Nor, as we see in Dan’s case, were they terminal to a career. Instead, they were just as likely to be a source of joy as any other liaisons.

The paradox strikes again: that where race is made important enough to be examined it turns out to be less important after all.

Dan Waters was an exceptional man in most of his fields of endeavour; he was wide open, inquisitive, fascinated. His ruminations in both books ranged from the picking of guavas in the Mai Po Marshes in the 1960s with his wife’s uncle, to the latter book’s detailed survey of how cross-cultural marriages work. He learned about the Man clan of the New Territories, and their migrations to the West (not only to England but whole villages which moved to the Netherlands and elsewhere), the rise of Chinese restaurants, why nouveau riche Chinese are so loud, and whether such migration ‘works’. Even when a transplanted Chinese marries another Chinese in their new home there are adjustment problems, he wrote, but when the marriage is cross-cultural, bigger worries emerge. There is the risk of the offspring never quite belonging anywhere, unhappily marginalised in Britain but out of place back in the New Territories village too. Writing before the handover of sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to China, he wondered how many Man clan members would want to keep a footprint in Hong Kong.

Dan’s later book began with a traditional Chinese matchmaker’s saying — ‘Let wooden gates match wooden gates and bamboo doors match bamboo doors’. Such a damning indictment of cross-cultural marriage is soon disproved. In fact, as his interviews with 81 partners in mixed marriages attest, the responses of each side in the partnership varied immensely. Some Chinese women wanted a Western husband to escape the constrictions of patriarchal Chinese culture; some of their families were open to it but most were not. Men’s feelings varied too, from wonder at the chaos of it all, to frustration about never being accepted by their partner’s families. Generalising the experience remains nigh impossible.

Dan managed, as so many (male) writers do, to lay the blame for discrimination against Chinese women in mixed liaisons at the feet of Western women. He also notes that of course there were restraints of which he, as a man in love in the late 1950s, was all too well aware: ‘No decent Chinese girl will marry you. All you can expect is a whore or a bar girl,’ he quotes a clergyman saying in the 1950s. Dan’s own boss was clearly against Dan’s plans to marry Vera; Dan was accused of ‘letting the side down’. He recalled too, his friend Michael Wright (the third generation of his family in government service in Hong Kong, now aged 103 in London) having to sign a declaration when he joined the Crown Colony civil service in 1938, to pledge that he would not take a concubine. ‘Up until World War Two, overseas British Banks required their expatriate staff to obtain approval before they married, and everyone knew what that meant…’ (Waters, 2005, p. 51).

Aside from his own case, Dan found more exceptions to such ‘rules’, many of them revealed in this book. The over-riding message is surely one to last beyond Dan’s life — that cross-cultural connection can be a marvellous thing. He described this book as a starting point for what he believed was a sadly under-researched aspect of life and history in Hong Kong. He hoped much more study and publication could be done on this theme of cross-cultural links, and Eurasians in general.

He ended with a quote from an American women who married a Chinese man: ‘Being in a cross-cultural marriage has mostly been a wonderful adventure, and I would do it all again in a second’.

SOURCES:

Waters, Dan, Faces of Hong Kong: An Old Hand’s Reflections (Singapore, 1995).

Waters, Dan, One Couple Two Cultures: 81 Western-Chinese Couples Talk About Love and Marriage (Hong Kong, 2005).

How and Why a Fresh Start to the Study of Hong Kong History Is Being Made

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By Vaudine England.

A dear friend and colleague from a past journalistic life — educated, erudite and well-informed — delighted in saying: ‘I hate history!’ Why bother with stories of days gone by when so much is happening, right now? she asked. She would only allow tales from the past if they carried direct relevance to the here and now; it was not a bad discipline after all.

So when the idea for a new, revitalised and freshly funded approach to studying Hong Kong’s history came up, it seemed worthwhile. Because if there was ever a time when the history of Hong Kong should be looked at anew, it is now.

Thanks to funding from the Hatton Trust, the Hong Kong History Project was established in January 2015. It is based at Bristol University under Professor Robert Bickers, with a link to HKU’s history department, and aims to stimulate new research into many aspects of Hong Kong’s under-covered past. It fundings young Hong Kong students’ PhDs, and has begun a series of international seminars of experts on Hong Kong to see where the gaps are and where fresh work should be focused.

It also has a website: hkhistory.net, which carries a Bibliography on Hong Kong Studies, and regular ruminations on aspects of Hong Kong’s past. This is only the beginning. With more funding hoped for, and a growing critical mass of scholars and writers turning their attention to post-Occupy Hong Kong, the project has legs and will run.

Dr Ron Zimmern of the Hatton Trust said: ‘Hong Kong is what it is today as a consequence of its history. The 100 years since 1850 was a formative period, where many individuals and families contributed to its success, and one where much remains to be researched and discovered.’

But why bother with history here, and why now? Because it is ‘contested’, as academics love to say. Amid the current battle for hearts and minds, we are being bombarded with new versions of Hong Kong’s history, directly linked to notions of what might or might not be our future.

From the north comes the mantra that Hong Kong ‘has always been a Chinese city’, or is ‘just a Chinese city’. The tale is of humiliation by rapacious Westerners and the resurgence of Chinese pride through the communist victory of 1949, culminating in the joyous return of Hong Kong to the motherland. The old-fashioned British narrative wasn’t much better. It would have defended the British empire in all its wonders to behold, its allegedly beneficent pursuit of ‘free trade’, its brilliant contributions of justice, faith and charity.

The problem for post-1945, and particularly for post-1949 Hong Kongers is that there have been few versions of history in the popular imagination that steer a path between these two dead ends.

There is a Hong Kong history, about, by and for Hong Kongers, but it struggles to be heard as old imperialisms joust over past humiliations and conquests. It lies in the details of Hong Kong’s actual lived pasts, its peoples and families, the conflicts and compromises of communities.

Carl Smith made a start on this when he set to work collating index cards on every person of the China Coast, not only the foreigners but all the varied Hong Kong people who made this place their home. Who actually were the people of Hong Kong, why and how did they get there, how did they get ahead, how did they live together. After Carl Smith came Dr Elizabeth Sinn, still the doyen of Hong Kong history, and scholars such as Christopher Munn, Jung-fang Tsai, John Carroll, Tak-wing Ngo and more.

Great stories languish untold from our past, and special individuals, such as Daniel Caldwell the British interpreter who actually married his Chinese love, instead of just keeping a concubine; or Sir Hormusjee Mody, the Parsee millionaire who made the University of Hong Kong a reality; or Ng Akew, the ‘protected’ woman who became a property-owning businesswoman; or Mr Belilios, the Jewish eccentric who commuted by camel and founded schools for girls. The list of incredible Hong Kong characters could go on and on.

Lots of ordinary people built daily lives of compromise in neighbourhoods such as Taipingshan or Shek Tong Tsui that were home to South Asian seamen and Chinese pig-traders, to Muslim Malay traders, Irish policemen and Australian ship pilots. This was a rich world far more interesting and diverse than simple ideas of a British colony, or a Chinese city. Hong Kong was also a haven for the Philippine independence government in exile under Aguinaldo in the 1890s, an inspiration and source of funds for republican revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, and would soon save the life of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh when France wanted his head in the 1940s. It has long been the channel between South East Asia and China, for people and wealth in both directions.

Leading Eurasian figures and some Chinese had joined the motley mix of Baghdadi jews, Scots, Bombay Parsees, English and Irishmen and Calcuttan traders in the highest councils of government as well as trade by the early 20th century. After Ng Choy came names such as Robert Kotewall, Lo Man-wai and Shouson Chow. The mixing had been there from the start in trade, in sport and at the freemasons lodge. Now it was sanctified by government. Dynasties were beginning to emerge, as were divisions, within the Chinese and Eurasian communities and, perhaps least understood, within the world seen from the outside as ‘British’.

The more one attempts to define that word, the harder it becomes. Sir Paul Chater was simply the biggest man around town from the late 19th and into the twentieth century. He devised the Praya Reclamation scheme which created the Central Business District and then did the same for Wanchai (Praya East). He co-founded Hongkong Land, the Hongkong and Kowloon Wharf and Godown Company, Hongkong Electric, the Jockey Club, and more. He was chairman of the Hong Kong Club and knighted by the Queen. Yet in the 1920s, when Governor Cecil Clementi was lunching with him, the Governor’s ADC Charles Drage (later working for British intelligence) referred to Chater in his diary as ‘that coloured magnate’.

The so-called British hong, or trading company, Hongkong Land had, for the first full half century of its existence, no Englishman on its board of directors. There was always one Scotsman from Jardines, but every other figure — for 50 years — was Parsee, Jewish, Armenian or Eurasian.

In 1940, the Hong Kong government suddenly ordered all ‘British’ women and children onto ships to be evacuated via Manila to Australia. But what about the wives of Portuguese, Eurasian or Chinese volunteers in the Hong Kong Regiment? Many had British passports but were somehow not British enough. Assumptions about colour are not enough to explain this; it was about identity in the broadest sense, suddenly squeezed into a bureaucratic straitjacket. This, incidentally, is the subject chosen by the first Hong Kong History Project beneficiary in Bristol, Vivian Kong.

When Hong Kong faced the Japanese invasion in World War Two, Eurasian, Chinese, and Portuguese Volunteers fought heroically for Hong Kong. They saw their own communities divided between those who fled to Free China in Chungking as resistance fighters, and those who stayed in Hong Kong to later face charges of collaboration for leading Chinese community relations with the occupying Japanese power. Names such as Kotewall and Chow were later exonerated by the British, who stressed they had asked their local colleagues to deal with the Japanese for the benefit of occupied Hong Kong. British colony though it was, people of many races and nationalities chose to fight and died for it. Britain for all its faults did leave behind a more open society; arguably, from recent events, this is more revolutionary, its impacts only beginning to mature.

So was the colonial era all completely bad? Surely the verdict is mixed. (Its postal boxes are rather cute too.) Is Hong Kong just a Chinese city? Not exactly that either.

So here’s another version of our history: this place became a city because foreigners came, along the trading routes linking Europe, Eurasia, east Africa, the Malabar coast, through the spaghetti junction of South East Asia, to China and beyond. World trade linked those adventurers to Chinese intermediaries, in Canton and other coastal centres. A couple of decades later, more respectable Chinese come to Hong Kong to get a life in this polyglot town. They came to escape unrest and distress on the mainland. They still do. Then, the Free Port, and the freedom to live relatively untrammelled lives in more secure surroundings was key. They came because Hong Kong was not China.

Fast forward to the 1980s-90s, which the writer/investigator Stacy Mosher called that ‘golden period when Hong Kong was no longer a colony and not yet an SAR – when it was a “territory” in which the native-born had recently become the majority, and had come to think of themselves first and foremost as “Hong Kong people”.’

That’s when a lot of Hong Kong parents were getting together to start having some of the children who are now winning district council seats under a yellow umbrella.

Now say history doesn’t matter.

***

This article originally appeared as ‘Great Stories Languish Untold from Hong Kong’s Past’ in The Correspondent (January-Februar 2006), 33-35.

Lethbridge Onward

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By Vaudine England

Lethbridge’s article, ‘The Yellow Fever’, had concluded with an image of how the different, mostly non-Chinese peoples of Hong Kong interacted, or not:

‘The full flavour of the European community is to be savoured at a gala occasion… at the City Hall. Then the various layers, tier upon tier, are exhibited in the foyer: befurred and bejewelled Continentals, leading matriarchs, gilded youths and bright young girls back from Swiss finishing schools — the whole range from taipan to pong paang. It is only then that one notices the heterogeneity and subdivisions of the European community and the fact that once dispersed each group goes its separate way and will rarely coalesce with others again. There are many social circuits in Hongkong — few connect. If they are brought together, it is by crisis or ritual…’

As within such groups, so it was between this and larger, other groups.

That clear delineations existed between different racial groups in Hong Kong has been and remains clear however. More than 98 percent of the Hong Kong population has been, and remains, Chinese. Within that term are of course many further variations, between Cantonese, and many other Chinese sub-groups and languages. As Professor Bickers notes in his Scramble for China, diving deeper into the divisions within shows that once the Treaty Port system and British extra-territoriality was established, some Chinese chose to take British papers for practical benefits. Many Chinese living elsewhere under British rule, especially in South East Asia, followed the opportunities under British rule back to the the Chinese mainland. They faced not only prejudice but exclusion at the hands of their fellow ethnic Chinese, and could sometimes leapfrog those compatriots by virtue of British rule.

Beyond the Chinese, since 1841, substantial groups of Europeans, Indians, Portuguese, Malays, Americans and others have co-existed, along with a growing Eurasian community. Within each of these groups, divisions exist too. Even to this day, some expatriate British people believe their experience of Hong Kong — privilege on the Peak, government housing, servants, boarding school and holidays in the East — is the universal expatriate experience. Instead it was and is perhaps the minority. Through the tales of the ordinary lives, a far richer story would emerge.

At some point in any study of Hong Kong’s racial and cultural mix, that idea of ‘melting pot’ has also to be tackled. While busy looking at Eurasians, the clearest example of cross-cultural mixing available, the melting pot idea seems to work. (Within the Eurasian community too existed virulent divisions and competition between leading figures and families, which have affected how its history has been written to this day.)

Beyond that small group however, does the mixing idea hold? Stephen Fisher in his 1975 thesis is quite firm: ‘Hong Kong has never been, and never will be, a melting-pot of these ethnic groups’ (p. 9).

Instead, the model is that of the plural society, first and best espoused by J.S. Furnivall in his Colonial Policy and Practice in 1948. This is where distinct ethnic groups maintain their own ethnic identify, cultural traits and social institutions. While co-existing alongside each other, they do not integrate with each other. To this day, debate is fast and furious on whether this is a good or bad thing – should we all try (pretend?) to be just like each other or able to become just like each other, to fulfil some ideal of universal culture? A kind of political correctness is sometimes attached to having friends of many colours or cultures, regardless of how deep or sincere is the link.

Furnivall had no such illusions in an earlier era. Surveying what he called the ‘medley of peoples’, including indigenous, Indian, Chinese and European, in colonial societies of Burma and Java, he wrote:
‘It is in the strictest sense a medley, for they mix but do not combine. Each group holds by its own religion, its own culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As individuals they meet, but only in the market place, in buying and selling. There is a plural society, with different sections of a community living side by side, but separately, within the same political unit. Even in the economic sphere there is a division of labour along racial lines’ (1948, p. 304).
Fisher says Smith’s contribution to the definition was in the primary role he gave to institutions in forming those separate communities, and in further clarifying that ‘in a plural society, the political rule or rather domination, is exercised by a culturally distinct minority’ (Fisher, p. 12).

SOURCES:

Bickers, Robert. The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914. London: Allen Lane, 2011 (and Penguin 2012).

Lethbridge, Henry. ‘The Yellow Fever’. Far Eastern Economic Review (2 May 1968).

Fisher, Stephen F. Eurasians in Hong Kong: A Sociological Study of a Marginal Group. PhD Thesis, University of Hong Kong, 1975.

Furnivall, J.S. Colonial Policy and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948.

Furnivall, J.S. Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944.

Smith, M.G. The Plural Society in the British West Indies. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965.

Introducing Vivian Kong

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Born and raised in Hong Kong, Vivian Kong moved to Bristol to take up the Hong Kong History Project Doctoral Studentship in 2015. After the completion of her BA and MPhil degrees at the University of Hong Kong, she embarked on her PhD study of the pre-war British community of Hong Kong at the University of Bristol under Professor Robert Bickers.

Her interests in studying the Britons there originate from her MPhil research on the evacuation of British families from Hong Kong in 1940. While examining the public response towards the compulsory policy, Vivian noticed that many Britons there had already developed a local identity in Hong Kong, which contributed to their nostalgic comments about their lives there and reluctance to leave the city despite the threat of a Japanese invasion. She became interested in how they identified themselves and how their experience living there affected the way they perceived Britishness, and how they viewed British subjects of Asian descent in Hong Kong.

By reconstructing the lives of Britons in pre-war Hong Kong and their interactions with other communities there, Vivian’s doctoral research aims to explore the relationship between colonialism and Britishness. She is eager to examine how Hong Kong Britons’ colonial experience shaped their view of imperialism and Britishness. She is also interested to see how Britishness was defined by different communities in the colony, and what Britishnesss meant for them. While using a variety of written sources such as official documents, newspapers and memoirs, Vivian also employs oral histories in her research. She is currently recruiting former residents of Hong Kong who spent their childhood in pre-war Hong Kong to participate in her research.

Combining her research with public engagement has always been an important aspect of Vivian’s work. She has a blog hk1940evacuation.wordpress.com where she shares the findings of her MPhil research, and in the future, her PhD research. The blog has put her in touch with not only surviving former residents of Hong Kong who were willing to bring in their insights and stories, and readers who wish to find out more about their family histories, but also interested readers hoping to learn more about an untold aspect of Hong Kong history.

On Henry Lethbridge (Part 2)

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By Vaudine England

I’m still hoping to be proven wrong in claiming that just two serious articles were published in the 20th century on the subject of Eurasians in Hong Kong. The first was Sir Challoner Grenville Alabaster’s ‘Observations on Race Mixture in Hong Kong’. The second is Henry Lethbridge’s ‘The Best of Both Worlds?’, in which Eurasians were described as ‘a natural by-product of the colonial era’. His main point was to note how dramatically the position of Eurasians had changed since the end of World War Two. Their position, he wrote, was in many ways ‘now an advantageous one, despite the fact that the great pre-war Eurasian families seem to have declined in political and economic importance’.

The first assumption Lethbridge knocks on the head is the old stereotype that Eurasians are usually the product of lower class liaisons. Even if it was ever wholly true, he said it was now — in 1968 — certainly no longer true. Lethbridge noted it was Eitel who saw Eurasians as ‘almost exclusively’ the product of liaisons between European men and brothel workers, most of whom were allegedly Tanka boat women. Modern scholarship has discounted this and as Lethbridge observed, ‘prostitutes normally do not seek to raise a family now are they usually sought as marriage partners. It seems likely, then, that our Eurasian population derives from all dialect groups and races in Hongkong and not solely from some wayward females of the boat population.’

He then surveyed the available data on Eurasians, noting once again how incredibly sparse it was (and is). A few exceptions stand out of Chinese men marrying European women (Sir Ho Kai Ho and Alice Walkden) but the majority of pre-war mixed marriages were entered into by soldiers, sailors and technical workers. Higher status men such as taipans and managers at ‘The Bank’ were prevented from formalising whatever local liaisons they might have enjoyed, by rules of the job. Lethbridge noted the earlier generations’ bigotries and prejudices: ‘Government, for example, discouraged a cadet from choosing a Chinese wife because it feared that his position in public service would be exploited by his wife’s kinsmen; businessmen and bankers worried that a junior would give up the healthy sports of cricket and golf, generally go “native”, and thus be eliminated from the European merry-go-round.’

I wonder if Lethbridge didn’t have his own prejudice against white women, at least in history, as they are continually blamed for the worst of attitudes. No doubt some European wives were jealous, petty and insecure; perhaps many were provincial suburbanites. But can it be true that the majority were so pathetic, and that the women in weak European marriages were entirely to blame, for the alleged greater attractiveness of the Orient? Cannot the men be blamed too? In Lethbridge’s piece: ‘the greatest resistance to mixed marriages came from European females whose usual custom was to snub or patronise Chinese girls and cold-shoulder their husbands.’ Was it only European females who snubbed and patronised local women? Hard to believe. And what about how European women were themselves snubbed and patronised, by both European and Chinese men, and perhaps some women too?

Perhaps we must blame the lack of data for the prevalence of so many sweeping statements on the subject. However, the more closely I read Lethbridge on the subject, the more I wonder about him — or was it simply the male analytical culture of that time — as he again promulgates the view that ‘Certainly many corseted European wives found svelte young Chinese women a sexual threat to their marriages, and reacted violently…’ What violence he had in mind is hard to imagine. And what of the sexual threat posed by svelte (and/or voluptuous) European women to the sanctity of some Chinese marriages?

Surely what we’re talking about here is the attraction of the Other. And perhaps a way in which the discourse of the 21st century on this subject can be conducted is without the ready cliches of the 1960s.

Usefully, Lethbridge analysed available census data from 1901 and concluded that ‘in the past a large number of Eurasians were re-absorbed or married back into the Chinese population — and thus lost a separate identity’. Those identifying as Eurasian were a small minority and either married among themselves or into the European community. ‘Thus there was a constant tendency for the Eurasian community to lose members to either the Chinese or Europeans. The decision to move toward one or other of the predominant groups or to remain Eurasian was a delicate one and was governed by a large number of factors.’

Lethbridge pointed out that there is no biological or any other evidence to suggest the products of mixed marriages deserve any sense of aversion — on the contrary — however, prejudice can create peculiarities. He was then happy to conclude that mixed marriage was becoming ever more prevalent. Ultimately, he put this down to how Europeans and Chinese are gradually beginning to see each other as less alien or depraved.
‘In the 19th century Europeans regarded Chinese as members of an effete and moribund nation, doomed to disappear before the play of world evolutionary forces. But China has regained its position as a great Asian and world power — if anything the Chinese now suffer from an overdose of ebullience.’ And whereas most Chinese met in the West in the past were labourers, now they were students and professionals as well as restaurant workers. ‘Likewise, a growing percentage of Hongkong Chinese is discovering that members of the pink-skinned race are not radically dissimilar from themselves.’ Eurasians could now be seen as a product of a more balanced, healthy ‘cultural give-and-take’, helped along, no doubt, by ‘a decline in the feeling of white superiority, once fostered by concessions, extra-territoriality and the existence of the British Empire’.

Lethbridge was hopeful, in 1968, that future mixed marriages and their offspring would grow up in worlds less obsessed by problems of ancestry; he believed industrialisation made ancestry increasingly irrelevant. Of course prejudice persisted, restrictions remained, ‘Yet racial exclusiveness and bigotry are luxuries that few can afford in a commercial community’.

Amusingly, as I wrote this piece, I bumped into a bold blonde friend at Hong Kong University. She had been walking out recently with her Chinese husband and had enough Cantonese to understand the crunched little old Chinese woman who assailed her husband to congratulate him vigorously on his ‘big face’ in scoring such a Western prize as his partner. That’s almost half a century on from Lethbridge’s comments and helps puncture a few more myths, (not least that one about how of course we are all less racist and sexist than in the past!)

An interesting point for further thought is that Eurasians, first as a product of empire, would learn to garner empire’s benefits: ‘In the past being a Eurasian was a state of mind; and, paradoxically, the Eurasian maintained his identity through the privileges he enjoyed over the Chinese, privileges which marked him off as being different, for by working for a European firm he could command a higher salary than if he was pure Chinese’. However, now, he said, it was the apparent end of empire which promised to liberate Eurasians even more.

SOURCES:

Lethbridge, Henry J. ‘The Yellow Fever’. Far Eastern Economic Review (2 May 1968).

Lethbridge, Henry J. ‘The Best of Both Worlds?’ Far Eastern Economic Review (10 October, 1968), 128-130.

Lethbridge, Henry. ‘Caste, Class and Race in Hong Kong Before the Japanese Occupation’. In Marjorie Topley (ed.), Hong Kong: the Interaction of Traditions and Life in the Towns, 42-64. From a Weekend Symposium 25-26 November 1972. Hong Kong: Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, June 1975.

Eitel, E.J. Europe in China [with an Introduction by H.J. Lethbridge]. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983 (1st ed Kelly & Walsh 1895).

On Henry Lethbridge’s ‘The Yellow Fever’ & ‘The Best of Both Worlds?’

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By Vaudine England

In my last blog I expressed a hope to be proven wrong in claiming that just two serious articles were published on the subject of Eurasians in Hong Kong in the 20th century. The first was Sir Challoner Grenville Alabaster’s ‘Observations on Race Mixture in Hong Kong’. The second came almost half a century later, thanks to the sociologist Henry Lethbridge, just about the only writer in English to consider all those lesser-known but vital aspects of Hong Kong history. By these I mean the existence, condition and status of poor white people; of Eurasians; the way of life in Hong Kong during Japanese occupation; and his broader work on many aspects of class and race in Hong Kong.

In 1968, he penned two pieces for the Far Eastern Economic Review. One, entitled “The Yellow Fever”, announces that the subject of Europeans in Hong Kong was just as worthy of study as the Chinese. His second piece, “The Best of Both Worlds?”, honed in on the subject of Eurasians.

Let me digress from Eurasians for a moment to ponder: could an article headlined “Yellow Fever” even be published today? Nowadays we may forget that for many men, a major motivation in coming East was to sample the alleged delights of Oriental women, an interchange aided by vast ignorance and no little amount of money from one side and guile from the other. It is not unusual to seek cross-cultural partnership, regardless of money or duress being involved. But only one generation ago, men who expressed such appetites enthusiastically were seen as having caught a dose of Yellow Fever; this was not the same as Going Native, but might of course lead to it.

Lethbridge did not take as his task an analysis of white male behaviour in the mystical cornucopias of Wanchai or beyond. No. He was concerned that Europeans as a group had not been given the study they deserved, nor their interactions with Chinese that were, naturally, producing Eurasians. He noted how Hong Kong, by the 1960s, had become a mecca for Western social scientists obsessing over China, its society and culture. Few of these scholars paid any attention, then, to the life of foreigners in the Chinese world. Lethbridge firmly rebuffed the assumption that Europeans simply led European lives. He said European life in Hong Kong ‘is not necessarily a stale replica of life in Europe and the United States. Something is lost and something is gained on the way. The transformations that occur are always interesting and sometimes bizarre.’ Look around and we can probably see what he meant.

First he sought out numbers, and concluded that the European population in Hong Kong in the late 1960s was between 25,000 and 30,000, inclusive of about 7,000 British troops. Among those ‘Europeans’, British were by far the largest sub-group, followed by Americans, Dutch, German, French and Italian in that order. He also noted that these numbers were likely to be more accurate, coming from a By-Census, than pre-war numbers garnered by counting the amount of night-soil collected.

As in the sparse accounts of 19th century Hong Kong life, Lethbridge saw European society as layered with internal divisions: ‘Status seeking, the display of conspicuous consumption and the desire for exclusiveness, have not declined to any notable extent.’ However, the growing size of the foreign population of Hong Kong, with tourism and American troops, was allowing more people to ‘live full social lives without feeling obliged to enter their names in the visitors’ book at Government House or having to cultivate taipans’. (Phew!)

That post-war decolonisation feeling (if not yet reality in Hong Kong) had stripped the former ruling class of its special allure; Europeans were now more diverse, had starkly different interests and were able to pursue less constrained or conventional interests than ever before.

‘Yet, paradoxically, Europeans pre-war were probably more aware of and knowledgeable about things Chinese than they are today,’ said Lethbridge. He pointed out that pre-war Europeans often took short leaves in China, had relatives or friends working up the coast, and in the absence of jet travel spent far larger chunks of their lives in Hong Kong, which was more intensely Chinese. He was writing, of course, when travel from Hong Kong to China was almost impossible, during the Mao Tse-tung era, before the late 1970s opening. He also enjoyed describing how the lower class Briton transplanted to Hong Kong almost invariably enjoyed a jump in status where Hong Kong became a kind of Surbiton with servants. He also noted, amusingly, that frustrated expatriate wives took as often to the brush as to drink ‘so that there are more exhibitions of bad paintings, on sale at conceited prices, than anywhere else in the world’. Army or missionary families existed, as always, in their own enclaves.

Meanwhile, Americans were having to move on from their earlier condemnation of Hong Kong imperialism now that the only alternative was communism on the mainland. ‘Hence Hongkong has acquired virtue. Like a reformed tart, it has changed its status: it is now part of the “Free World”.’ Among the cultured French, Germans, Italians, not forgetting the Dutch who ‘used to the tropics range widely in their pursuits’, were growing numbers of what Lethbridge called Australasians. Presumably he meant those of us from New Zealand and Australia, ‘who are less caste-bound and class-conscious than their English cousins’.