The Novel Leads, I Follow (Part 2): some research about the diasporic Chinese in Asia

In my recentish post about novel research, I warned you to expect more about the diasporic Chinese! If you’ve read my novel, The Majesties, you’ll know that the diasporic Chinese – more specifically, the Chinese in Indonesia – feature in a big way. Being of Chinese-Indonesian heritage myself with strong ties to Chinese-majority Singapore, I do tend to think about the global movements of Chinese people. How did we end up in so many places, I often wonder to myself.

The main focus of my new novel (But Won’t I Miss Me?) is motherhood. But motherhood doesn’t exist in a cultural vacuum. As with The Majesties, I felt most comfortable with having the characters be Chinese-Indonesian, though in a different environment and of a different socioeconomic class. I also wanted to establish a loose parallel between the trauma the protagonist experiences and the trauma of racial violence and prejudice that the Chinese in various countries have endured. In the novel, people can’t understand why the protagonist would want to cling to her old, broken-down self – why not move on?

Similarly, there are characters in the novel who decide they want to leave the racial trauma of their history behind. But is true ‘moving on’ even possible? And what is lost, flattened, erased in the abandonment of one’s full past? Again, the novel is mainly about motherhood, but this question, as it pertains to diasporic Chinese racial identity, is the light muzak playing in the background throughout. Or so I intend.

I ended up reading widely about the Chinese in a few different Asian countries. The novel is by no means heavy in historical detail, but there are bits here and there – a scrap of fabric, a bit of ribbon, woven into the work entire.

And what I read was so interesting that I’m sharing some of my resources here – so that you too can go down this rabbit hole, if you choose.

The Chinese in India: Internment

I read The Deoliwallahs by Joy Ma and Dilip D’Souza in my agent’s flat in Bangalore, where she kindly let me hang out for a week after the Jaipur Literature Festival. In the wake of the border war between China and India in 1962, three thousand Chinese-Indians were rounded up and sent to desert internment camps in Deoli, Rajasthan because they were deemed a national security threat. A portion of them were repatriated to China, where they had never actually themselves stepped foot, having lived in India all their lives. The Deoliwallahs recounts the traumatic experiences of several survivors – their painful memories and lasting scars.

An excerpt:

After about five days at the Guwahati jail, they were taken to the railway station. Ying Sheng remembers the huge clouds of flies that swarmed around the Guwahati railway station. With the toilets overwhelmed, people were urinating on the railway tracks, attracting flies. It is a dark memory that has stayed with him for all these years.

The journey to Rajasthan seemed endless. Besides looking out of the window and listening to all the worried talk of the adults, there was nothing to do. The train would stop outside stations so the cooks could prepare meals for them on clay stoves set up on the side of the tracks.

At one such stop, the passengers were not prepared for what happened. A group of 150-200 villagers gathered, holding chappals in their hands, shouting at them to go back to China. The crowd started throwing stones at the train. Ying Sheng and the others rushed to shut the windows.

The Chinese in New Guinea: Abandoned

Next, I endeavoured to find out more about the Chinese in colonial New Guinea. I’d been wanting to learn more about this for a long time, having discovered that a good portion of my friends and acquaintances here in Sydney whom I’d known as “Chinese-Australian” were actually from Chinese families who’d migrated from New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea) after WWII. (It felt a bit like discovering secret long-lost cousins, since Indonesia and PNG are next-door neighbours.)

I read several articles, scholarly and from the news, among them this SBS article and this journal article by Peter Cahill on the Chinese in Rabaul from 1921-1942. (Pro tip: it costs nothing to create a JSTOR account and you can access 100 articles per month for free.)

From the SBS article (which features an interview with Cahill too):

‘[The Chinese] were needed as labourers but not wanted because of the colour bar … Australia inherited them but they weren’t a welcome inheritance because the Germans were sent back to Germany, and the Chinese stayed on and the Australians scratched their heads and said what are we going to do with this lot.’

The result of this racism was that, ahead of the Japanese invasion of Rabaul, New Guinea, European women and children were evacuated, but none of the Chinese. Evacuation of the entire non-native population (European and Chinese) was in fact possible, but the ships were used for copra instead. Official approval for their use in evacuating civilians came too late, after the ships had been bombed.

The Chinese in Vietnam: Discrimination

I’d been excited about reading the novel Chinatown by Thuận (translated from Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý) for a while. Now seemed like the ideal time. (And it was so good! I highly recommend!)

The protagonist’s husband, who leaves her one day never to come back, is ethnic Chinese. And the stigma he bears because of it is mentioned frequently.

In doing further research, I came across an anthropology dissertation by LiAnne Sandra Yu about the persecution of the ethnic Chinese (Hoa) community in Vietnam during the late 1970s and 1980s (and their subsequent ‘re-emergence’). Post-1975, many areas where the Hoa were dominant were branded ‘capitalist’, so the Hoa themselves were tarred with this brush. Chinese-language schools and newspapers were shut down and many Hoa were denied jobs and entry to schools. (Similar things happened to the Chinese in Indonesia after 1965.) Yu gets to know many elderly Hoa who experienced this discrimination firsthand and she describes what they faced.

From Yu’s dissertation:

Mr. Cai was a Chinese language teacher in Cholon before 1975. He taught traditional Chinese poetry as well as philosophy and literature. After the Communist takeover, he was arrested in 1978 on charges of fostering Chinese nationalism among his students. Cai adamantly argues that he was only teaching Chinese literature – and was not at all interested in politics. He was jailed for a year, and then eventually put into a labor camp in the countryside. Released in 1986, he believes his activities are still watched and his phone is being tapped. The police come to his home every few months to question him about his activities.

Not included above: all the reading I did about the Chinese community in Medan, where part of the book is set. I also travelled to Medan in order to get a better sense of the atmosphere and history there.

‘Why Medan?’ people kept asking me.

‘My maternal grandfather grew up there,’ I’d reply.

To be continued…