About two weeks ago, the embattled new leader Dr George Norton of the beleaguered Social Cohesion Ministry wrote this of Chinese in Guyana: “Guyanese through the length and breadth of the country join today (January 12) to celebrate the 164th Anniversary of the arrival of the Chinese – a day so significant that His Excellency President David Granger saw it fit that it be designated as Chinese Arrival Day.”
Such a sentimental declaration is most welcome, especially when considering that anything Chinese has been subsumed in the larger African-Indian ethnic landscape of Guyana. I suspect similar sentiments will be given to the Portuguese.
That said, there is a concern and more so a caveat as to why the regime prefers a separate Chinese Arrival Day when May 5 is designated as Arrival Day for all post-emancipation ethnic groups. Whatever might have been the reasons for doing so, I have drawn a personal sense of satisfaction from the aforesaid declaration. I am currently working on two projects worth sharing, I think, since they resonate with Chinese experience in the region.
Oxford University Press has invited me to compile and explain published studies on Chinese indentured experience in the Caribbean and Latin America for their bibliographies series, which is an innovative online research tool in Atlantic history. Each Oxford Bibliography article provides a skeleton for research that guides readers through the most essential sources on a given topic. This invitation comes on the heels of finishing an extensive bibliography for the same press on indentured Indians in the Caribbean.
In researching published studies of indentured Chinese, I realize that no less than 200,000 Chinese were brought to the Caribbean and Latin America as indentured servants following slave emancipation, except in Cuba where they laboured alongside African slaves. A majority of these Chinese were taken to Cuba, Peru and British Guiana, while a minority of them were taken to the British Caribbean and Dutch Guiana. British Guiana received an estimated 13,541 between 1853 and 1879.
The experience of these indentured souls in British Guiana can be gleaned from Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s novel The Last Ship, which I reviewed and was published in the journal Caribbean Writer. I wrote this: “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… 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.”
One glaring disappointment in the literature of indentured Chinese is that there is no founding text or comparative analyses of them in the region. Their history is not only plagued by the cancer of insularity, but also pushed into a shameful margin of the entire regional historical existence. I urge that this existence must be teased out by paying more attention to them so that a new dignity and perspective can be fostered.
Towards that end – which brings me to my second project – I am working on writing a short history of Chinese Field or Hong Kong, known today as No 72 Village. If you do not know, Chinese Field is located about five miles from the town of Corriverton in Upper Corentyne, Berbice. I am not sure when this community was formed, but Dr Comins’ report in 1893 stated there was a well-established and striving Chinese community in this agricultural village. This was a rarity in this region, which was comprised mainly of Indians and Africans.
Why they were brought or chose to indenture to this village will require more research. Historians like Cecil Clementi, Walton Look Lai, Brian Moore, and Trev-A-Quan mentioned Chinese Field in their work but I doubt whether they visited the village. Had these authors visited they would have seen and mentioned at the time of their writing that there was one surviving family which is now practically gone. Their departure through death and migration, as well as their abandoned dwellings tells a fascinating story of a fascinating family which deserves further exploration, some of which cannot be revealed here for the sake of family privacy and copyright reasons. What I can say is Chinese Field remains an enigma in the saga of Guyanese heritage history.
I am convinced that if more attention is given to the Chinese we can move, with pride, beyond the fundamentals of their history in Guyana and not be wrapped up merely in nostalgic celebration of the past. I think this will add to the understanding what my colleague and literary scholar Khal Torabully calls the “humanism of diversity,” an evolving experience “through which the original/voyage is engaged in a complex process of retrieval and negotiations with diversities.” Is the Social Cohesion Ministry there? ([email protected])
