Sequins and Ginger

The black experience,’ as a singular and unifying framework…became ‘hegemonic’ over other ethnic/racial identities.

– Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities.”

Although Stuart Hall was speaking with respect to the context of Britain, his remark has resonance in the Caribbean region. Discourses of Caribbean identity, nation and society have thrown intense light upon a Caribbean experience suffused with African influences. Indeed, we cannot get away from a knowledge that the largest immigration of peoples into the Caribbean between the sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries, were African. We cannot evade the reality penned by O. Nigel Bolland who declares: “African cultural influences are pervasive in the Caribbean and they are widely shared by people who are not of African descent.” Furthermore, scholar Rex Nettleford observes: Caribbean islands such as Trinidad, Cuba, Guyana and Jamaica cannot “escape the fact of the African Presence in the national cultural ethos.” Yet, this paper is not an attempt at academic escapology. Rather, this paper proceeds with an understanding that “hegemony [whether historiographical or otherwise] is never permanent,” for the power that is inherent in certain members of a society having greater visibility, more robust representation and more muscular vocality, can shift.

This conference becomes part of a negotiation process for such shiftings. This paper, therefore, creates a space for the spotlight of scholarly inquiry to shift and shine upon other actors on the Caribbean stage. It is a paper, which takes up the subjective position and experiences of the “overseas Chinese” in the Caribbean. I reference primarily, two episodes – one set in Cuba and the other in Trinidad – from director and producer Cheuk Kwan’s 15-episode documentary series entitled “Chinese Restaurants” – a series that takes Kwan on a journey to thirteen countries around the world as he explores the Chinese Diaspora through the icon of the Chinese restaurant. I examine performance – specifically enactments of citizenship. Using May Joseph’s conceptual framework of citizenship as an embodied condition “acquired through public and psychic participation,” I argue that through the portal of the Chinese restaurant and beyond Chinese kitchen doors in certain islands of the Caribbean, the “overseas Chinese” identity can be seen as pivoting on public participation in forms of masquerade or mas playing in order to act out roles as Caribbean citizens.

The experiences of the “overseas Chinese” deserves attention, for the majority of the Chinese who migrated to the Americas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from South China yet, according to Wang Gungwu not all Chinese, especially those from provinces “in north and west China which never produced such [overseas people]…care for…or even know who or what [the overseas Chinese] are.” While the English term “overseas Chinese” seemingly implies any Chinese people residing outside the People’s Republic of China, the issue of citizenship becomes a key factor in distinguishing very specific Chinese interpretations of Chinese who went overseas.

Walton Look Lai observes that the Chinese came to the Caribbean in two distinct historical periods, not including immigration since the 1980’s. Chinese people first came as indentured laborers in the 1850’s and 1860’s and a second wave of Chinese arrived as free migrants from the 1890’s to the 1940’s. This second wave is significant in two ways. First, this second influx of immigrants gives us a foothold in understanding early conceptions of the term “overseas Chinese,” for these immigrants constitute a Caribbean subset of “overseas Chinese” who were known as the Huaqiao. The Chinese term “Huaqiao” or “Hua-ch’iao” refers to a politically charged identity. Between 1893, when the overseas travel ban was lifted by China – allowing Chinese people to officially journey outside China – and the mid 1950’s, the Huaqiao were Chinese people who had political recognition and approved residence abroad. The Huaqiao were regarded as important political extensions of South China and they were rallied to enter China’s government politics and become vital forces in gestures of revolution and nationalism. Kathleen López writes: “the Chinese in Cuba and throughout the diaspora…had to imagine themselves as part of a Chinese nation before they could fully participate in the nationalist movement.” Today, the term “Huaqiao” now refers specifically to those Chinese who live abroad but retain Chinese citizenship, while the Chinese term “Huaren” describes Chinese living outside China who attain naturalized citizenship in the country in which they reside. It is clear here that the notion of the “overseas Chinese” is not an uncomplicated one and delimitation of the term is required for the scope of my current inquiry. This leads me to the second way in which Chinese immigration during the 1890’s to 1940’s is significant.

The second wave of Chinese immigration to the Caribbean is also important because as Look Lai documents: “most of the modern West Indian Chinese are descended from…this group.” The Chinese use the term “Huayi” to refer to “overseas Chinese” descendants who were born and have grown up outside China. In this paper the term “overseas Chinese” refers to the “Huayi.” I focus on Huayi subjectivity, that is, the playing out of being a native Caribbean Chinese citizen.

This matter of being Chinese in the Caribbean is given space in works by those like Flora Fong and Cheuk Kwan. In Cuban Chinese artist, Flora Fong’s 2005 painting entitled “De China al Caribe” or “From China to the Caribbean” (see figure 1), she uses the “rén,” a Chinese character meaning “person” (see figure 2). In doing so, she emphasizes the human, experiential dimension of migration and hints at the personal stories of being Chinese that can be told by Caribbean Chinese persons. So too, Hong Kong-born, Canada-based documentary director Cheuk Kwan engages with what it means to be “living Chinese” in the Caribbean. Kwan probes the Chinese restaurant – which is as much a part of the Caribbean as sun, sea and sand – to uncover personal stories of Chinese migration, culture, survival and identity. Kwan writes: “As a group we may be called the Chinese Diaspora but as individuals we all have our own identities. My restaurant stories…deal with the…highly personal nature of this identity…” Kwan points his camera at Cuba and Trinidad – the two Caribbean islands in which Chinese laborers were brought to work on sugar plantations while African slavery was still operative. It is to these islands that I now direct my own lens.

Fig. 1. Painting by Cuban artist Flora Fong, De China al Caribe [From China to the Caribbean]. 2005.

Fig. 2. The rén, a Chinese character meaning “person.”