My grand-father sailed on the ship 
Red-riding Hood:
part of a straggly band
of yellow humanity.
They severed the string
that tied them to the dragon,
and we grew up never knowing
we belonged
to a quarter of the world’s people.
[. . .]
One day I learnt
a secret art
Invisible-Ness, it was called.
I think it worked
as even now, you look
but never see me.
Meiling Jin
Last week Guyana celebrated Chinese Arrival Day – 166 years since the first arrival of Chinese immigrants on January 12, 1853. Between that date and 1879, 14,000 (85% men), arrived in 39 ships from Hong Kong to work as labourers on the sugar estates of British Guiana. The first vessel, The Glentanner, brought 252 people, who were distributed among plantations at Windsor Forest, Pouderoyen, La Jalousie and Essequibo.
That history is very well known. It is that arrival that is hinted at by the poet Meiling Jin in the extract, above, but although she moves on to reflect her own perspective of exile, “otherness” and the issues experienced as a minority group in England, the Chinese immigrants, through their descendants, their heritage and presence, are very far from “invisible” in today’s Guyana.
Instead, the presence and the influence of the Chinese in contemporary Guyanese society are highly visible and very significant. This is so in the history of human development, and the contribution to nation building by the descendants of those who arrived in the nineteenth century. It is also quite vivid in the contemporary life of the country through the growing number of new and recent arrivals from China in what has been a significant new wave of immigrants, workers and investors who have come to Guyana during the past two decades.
The Confucius Institute at the University of Guyana (CIUG) has a place in the recognition of these factors of demography, commerce, industry, language and social interaction. The CIUG, after four years on the campus, has been becoming more involved in the life of the university and the local community. In commemoration of Arrival Day, it took the opportunity to contribute to public awareness, to knowledge and scholarship, to a better understanding of the Chinese in Guyana. Several issues have developed in recent years, and the CIUG is contributing to public understanding as well as to information and ideas about the Chinese presence in Guyana. In addition to classes in Mandarin, the institute is more involved in the academic life of the university and research into the Chinese heritage of the nation.
In the post-indentureship era, there has been considerable human, social, industrial, political and national development as Guyana advanced as a nation. The Chinese factor has been important. Some of the areas of Chinese contribution and influence are well known, while others are fairly unsung, or have remained in the margins of national consciousness.
The post and extra-plantation experience of the former indentured workers, both those who completed their contracts and those who ran away from them, are very varied. Many, after leaving the estates, went into commercial activities, to the point where they developed a high reputation as shopkeepers, to the point of stereotype. But this went on to become a substantial contribution to commerce and entrepreneurship. As Chinese descendants moved into the professions, they made contributions to law and education, as well as politics.
In cultural areas, contribution to cuisine has always been most famous. Vivian Lee was a pioneer in the recording industry and in the field of filmmaking. But a major contribution has been in the world of sports. Chinese Guyanese once dominated the field of hockey, especially throughout the 1950s, 60s, 70s and up to the 1980s. They were foremost in the clubs, the national competitive leagues and overshadowed all other ethnic groups in the national hockey teams. Guyana was very well represented in those years. National teams dominated by players of Chinese descent led Guyana to Caribbean regional championships. The country spent a long time at the top of the sport in the Caribbean.
In table tennis, some of Guyana’s best years in the Caribbean regional championships were those when Guyanese Chinese were prominent. The nation was again very well represented by regional champions such as Doreen Chow Wah. Other areas included squash in which Chinese were also prominent.
There is also a significant collection of writers and works in Guyanese Chinese literature, including not only writers of Chinese ancestry, but a corpus of what may be called Guyanese Chinese literature (in terms of the focus, content and preoccupations).
One of the most prominent poets is Brian Chan, but despite his ethnic belonging, he has created poetry with other concerns. He is primarily a modernist, with poems tending to be experimental and existentialist. His first collection of poetry was Thief With Leaf (1988), which won the Guyana Prize for the Best First Book of Poetry in 1989. He went on to be short-listed in the Prize for Fabula Rasa in 1994, and The Gift of Screws in 2010. Chairman of the Jury Victor Ramraj described his shortlisted book thus:
“Brian Chan’s The Gift of Screws has a speaker who is ruminating in middle-age on a range of epiphanies of a lifetime. Whether observing a caged lioness or paying tribute to his spouse who has been “elbower and hand-holder; compass and/carriage,” he considers the various ways we recall and reconfigure the past in poetic fictions, and how these remembrances are driven by the hope that “the sheer everydayness of our miracles/outweighs the nonesuch of the ordinary.”
According to Peepal Tree Press which has published Chan, “His work is challenging and experimental, exploring not only experience, but the fictions we create in making sense of experience. He moved to Canada in the 1970s and his poems explore a territory in which Guyanese memories filter into the Canadian present.”
Chan developed as a poet alongside another prominent Guyanese writer of Chinese ancestry, Jan Lowe Shinebourne (previously published as Janice Shinebourne). They both began to show their talent as fledgling writers in Expression, a publication put out by a group of new emerging writers around 1970. Apart from Chan and Shinebourne, this included Mark McWatt, N D “Wick” Williams and John Agard.
Shinebourne, from Rose Hall, Corentyne, is of both East Indian and Chinese extraction, and this has informed her novels – particularly The Last English Plantation, (the Indian colonial experience) The Last Ship (specifically about Chinese arrival, indentureship and its aftermath) and Chinese Women (a kind of fantastic, point-of-view narrative of a Guyanese Muslim obsessed with a Guyanese Chinese woman).
Peepal Tree describes Shinebourne as one of “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 a novel on Chinese in British Guiana.
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. They are not related but are from different regions and from different classes and clans. However, they are all expected to perform manual labour on the plantations.
Shinebourne’s first novel won the Guyana Prize for Best First Book of Fiction, 1987. Chinese Women (2010) was shortlisted for the Prize and described thus in the citation by Ramraj: “Shinebourne’s novel goes back to the social background in the post-plantation communities in Berbice touching on class and race relations. But it is a somewhat post-modernist narrative told by the hero who, from his Berbice background was possessed by a fascination for Chinese women. The novel is about his pursuit of one of them and his encounters in Guyana and many years later in England. It is very much a work of narrative point-of-view which makes the narrator-hero very elusive and untrustworthy. In fact, it is more than hinted that he spent many years in the Middle East and was secretly working as a world terrorist. This takes the focus a bit away from the Caribbean Chinese heritage.”
Jin, whose poem is quoted above, is among the most interesting yet little known. She was born in Guyana in 1956 of Chinese parents who fled the country at the height of the racial conflicts in 1964, settling in England. She writes of her initial unhappiness as a racial minority in London, of lesbianism, and of her Chinese heritage.
Her first publication was Gifts from My Guyanese Grandmother (1986) a collection of poetry, which explores her Guyanese Chinese roots. She was deeply impressed with her first visit to China in 1981, which influenced her later writing. Her first collection of short stories was Song of the Boatwoman, published by Peepal Tree in 1996, and shortlisted for the Guyana Prize. She currently lives in London.
The most recent Guyanese writer of Chinese ancestry to appear is Scott Ting-A-Kee, a graduate from the English programme at the University of Guyana. His work is the most steeped in Chinese culture, mythology and cultural ethos. Ting-A-Kee has researched the roots both in China and the Caribbean and these investigations inform his writing. Red Hibiscus (2018) is his first publication.
