Jan Shinebourne is only a handful of authors studying and writing on Chinese in the Caribbean. She is originally from Guyana but has lived in England since 1970. The Last Ship is her most recent novel on Chinese in British Guiana. The Chinese are one group of indentured labourers brought to British Guiana in the second half of the Nineteenth Century to replace slave labour.
Shinebourne’s slender novel revolves around a young Chinese woman, Clarice Chung, along with a group of other Chinese people who arrive on the last ship to British Guiana in 1879. These Chinese people are not all related but are from different regions and from different classes and clans. However, they are all expected to perform manual labour on the plantations.
“As soon as they came off the ship, they were put to live in wooden huts on Soesdyke estate, where the Cheung brothers became labourers like the blacks and coolies. They had to work in the open in the canefields exposed to the blazing sun and driving rain, and in the sugar factory where there were many accidents that left people permanently injured, even limbless” (p 25).
The Chinese labourers are able to abandon plantation life and open businesses. While some Chinese families become prosperous in the main towns of New Amsterdam and Georgetown, Clarice Chung, the young Chinese woman, remains around the sugar estate as a shopkeeper serving poor estate workers.
She eventually becomes a matriarch and is not interested in becoming rich but in maintaining her Chinese heritage in British Guiana. She tries to maintain Chinese customs. Even though she speaks Creole, she refuses to speak it with her family. Clarice Chung’s determination to maintain Chinese culture and customs in British Guiana is based on the belief that she is a “pure Chinese person, a Punti with a royal ancestor, descended from Emperor Chengzong” (p 73).
She reminds everyone that she arrived in British Guiana “through the sense of obligation to the Christian missionaries, who they repaid by promising to build churches…and convert the Hakkas (indentured Chinese) to Christianity” (p 73).
Instead, she is indentured and eventually leaves the plantation and becomes a shopkeeper. Clarice Chung extends her determination to her immediate family and prefers that her children marry “pure” Chinese and that the marriage should be according to Chinese not Indian nor African customs, the two most influential ethnic groups in British Guiana.
Clarice Chung realises that her wishes are not possible in British Guiana where Chinese of “pure” background are rare. She allows her children to marry someone with at least some Chinese background but is adamant about the new in-laws obeying and practicing Chinese “ways” in her extended family home.
Clarice Chung dies half-way through the novel but her Chinese matriarchal legacy lives on. While most of her children leave their plantation environment, one of them remains and runs the shop. But Clarice Chung’s legacy is more psychological than physical. She was always concerned about how “pure” the future generations of Chinese in her family would be. The family believes that “Clarice Chung continued to live like a ghost in the minds of the family she had left behind” (p 83).
However, her legacy is severely affected by political turbulence and the introduction of cooperative socialism in the 1970s, which tears at the fabric of Chinese business and safety in British Guiana. A majority of Chinese, including the wealthy urban class and the younger generation, are forced to emigrate. Those who remain live a sheltered, alcoholic existence.
Clarice Chung’s legacy is further diluted because the younger Chinese engage in inter-marriage along class and ethnic lines as well as because the Chinese stopped coming to British Guiana as indentured servants after 1879.
Jan Lowe Shinebourne has produced a remarkable novel based on three fundamental factors. The first is that the Chinese indentured experience and beyond has rarely been addressed or examined non-fictionally.
The second is that Chinese inter-cultural relations are practically unknown in Guyana, especially since a majority of them have migrated. In this novel, we are informed of the social complexity among the Chinese from an inter-generational perspective. Not all Chinese are the same, nor are they as united as thought by wider Guyanese society. They are divided by class and environment (rural and urban).
The third is that the novel shows how Chinese immigrants have struggled with issues of cultural retention and cultural assimilation in a foreign land.
The book is easy to read despite the web of family relations and expectations from one generation to the next from 1879 to about 1980. How the characters deal with issues from one generation to next while having no contact with their former homeland and little support from the wider British Guianese society (especially the rurally based Chinese) will amuse and entertain readers. First published in Caribbean Writer 2016. ([email protected])
