Being Chinese: Voices from the Diaspora (2003)

Wei DjaoTucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003, xxi, 240pp, US$22.95 (ISBN 0-8165-2302-9)The Chinese diaspora is a global phenomenon. However, previous studies have rarely approached this subject from a global perspective. Wei Djao's book is based on her interviews with descendants of Chinese emigrants who moved from China to other countries in five different continents between 1842 and 1949. Through the personal voices of these interviewees, this work provides inside views on the Chinese overseas in a worldwide context, especially on their lives and identities.The book begins with a historical survey of Chinese emigration from its earliest phase to its modern period. Especially between 1842 and 1949, millions of Chinese emigrants spread to all inhabited continents as purchased coolies, contract labourers, self-financed migrants and even illegal immigrants. Many of them suffered from poverty and racism in foreign lands but stayed and survived there as tenacious members of the Chinese diaspora. In this historical survey, Djao skilfully assimilates previous scholarship and presents a concise introduction to the history of the Chinese overseas.The major body of the book is composed of the personal stories and family histories that the 22 interviewees poured out as their answers to Djao's two research questions: how do they live, and how are they Chinese? It is worth noting that the interviewees have lived in about 16 different countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas and Oceania, and their families had settled there for at least two generations (sometimes as many as five or six generations). Their ethnic backgrounds range from the pure Chinese to those with three-eighths Chinese, half German, and a bit of English and Irish blood and those who are Chinese, part Europe, and part Latino (pp 59, 134). Most of the interviewees and their ancestors lived in non-Chinese societies as ordinary people. But the everyday life of these common people epitomizes the history of the Chinese dispersion in the past 150 years.The early migrants mentioned in this book include the Chinese farmer who was brought by the British to India for tea transplantation and the young woman who went from northern China to work on a coffee plantation in Peru in the early 20th century. Among them there are not only the paper son who immigrated to Cuba as a fictitious child of another immigrant-turned-citizen but also the paper daughter adopted from China by a Chinese family in Hawaii, a practice that has rarely been recorded. In one tragic case, one illegal immigrant travelled on an American steel ship by bribing its captain but was thrown into the furnace and incinerated by the same officer when the American Coast Guard came aboard to search the ship (p 98). More common tragedies for these Chinese are varied forms of racist discrimination, such as the pre-war prohibition on Chinese immigration to some western countries, the anti-Chinese laws and violence in contemporary Southeast Asia and the seldom heard practices directed against the Chinese in India around the Sino-Indian border war of 1962. While many Chinese in Southeast Asia have chosen to protect themselves by acquiring residence in western countries, others have fought for their rights through participation in domestic politics. …