18. Family history is written in blood
Or, Being Chinese enough to care
In 1946, police officers in Liverpool rounded up Chinese merchant marines as part of an effort to deport them. By the end of July, some 1300 had been sent back to China. Most came to the UK when the Second World War drove up demand for (cheap) experienced sailors. Many had started families. Despite this, once the war ended and economic reality set in, the Chinese sailors were “sent back home”.
The reason we know about this at all is largely due to the efforts of Yvonne Foley. Her father moved from Shanghai to Liverpool to study and eventually work on the merchant ships fuelling Britain’s war efforts. He met her mother at university. They started dating and moved to Hull. Yvonne’s mum became pregnant. And then her father was sent away. Her research into this eventually lead to a plaque being placed at Liverpool harbour, commemorating the work of Chinese sailors.
And the reason I know about this is the story closely echoes an experience within my own family. One of the deported sailors may have been my mother’s dad. My grandfather.
In Montreal, as literally the only Chinese student in my school, it never occurred to me I was different from anyone else. Montreal isn’t colour-blind. It has its own history of deep, systemic racism. But in the small bubble I lived in, my race never mattered.
When I arrived in Vancouver, ethnicity suddenly meant something. It placed me in the established context of the city’s substantial Chinese population. Within a week I ceased to be “Thomas, the guy from Montreal” and became “Thomas, a Chinese guy”. The transformation was swift and complete and non-consensual.
My new identity came with certain expectations that bordered on prescriptive. I would be good at math and science. I’d play an instrument, probably against my will. I’d be a dedicated student. I’d follow rules.
That was from the outside. But just as I was discovering my Chineseness (primarily by being dressed in it like a child struggling against a snowsuit), from inside the group I learned just how Chinese I wasn’t. I didn’t speak Chinese. (My relatives called me fat and foreign devil to my face.) I had never been to China or Hong Kong. I didn’t understand the family dynamics, the customs, or the intense social rituals.
I felt like I’d discovered I was an alien from outer space, who’d been sent to Earth because his home planet didn’t want him.
I can live and work in the UK thanks to the British Nationality Act of 1981. It allowed my Scottish-born mother to pass her citizenship onto her Canadian-born children. Or rather, I can be here regardless of the Act, because what it mostly sought to do was remove the right to automatic British citizenship from children born in the UK to non-UK parents.
I’ve been thinking a lot about citizenship in the wake of a much-criticised deportation flight that would have sent 50 people from the UK to Jamaica. Some had been here since they were children. Some had families. Labelled serious and persistent criminals, some had a single conviction based on drug charges from when they were teens.
As of this writing, they remain in detention after the courts ruled the flight unlawful.
My grandfather was a merchant marine who lived in Glasgow, not Liverpool. There are no official records of men being taken from Scotland for deportation, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever know what really happened to him. I only know he was here. That he fathered three children. And then, around the time many like him were sent back to China, away from their life and families, he disappeared.
Part of the justification in 1946 for deporting Chinese sailors was their use of opium. Between 1942 and 1945 there were 1000 convictions in Liverpool for opium smoking. The vast majority of the convicted were Chinese.
In the 18th Century, the British East India Company became the largest supplier of illegal opium to China. Over the next hundred years it would act with virtual impunity, smuggling in literal tonnes of the drug. In 1839, after pleas to Queen Victoria went unanswered, the Emperor ordered the seizure of all opium in Canton.
In response, the British invaded Canton and demanded economic reparations be paid to the illegal smugglers for their illegal trade. They imposed terrible sanctions on China, including the loss of Hong Kong and its surrounding islands. In an act of vicious irony, they were given favoured nation status. Which meant, most of all, that the opium could continue to flow unabated.
I think about all of this every single day.