Tag: 1960s

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.

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).

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’.