/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS-JAMAICA: Charting A Chinese Diaspora

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Howard Campbell

KINGSTON, Jun 25 2002 (IPS) - Two years ago, when the husband-and-wife team of Patrick and Loraine Lee released their first book, “Canadian Jamaican Chinese”, they immediately set their sights on another tome that would track down Jamaicans of Chinese extraction living in various parts of the world.

The Lees are well under way to making the February, 2003 deadline for their second book, which is yet to be named. They were recently in Jamaica hooking up with Chinese families to gather information on relatives living as far away as Madagascar, Monaco and Australia.

“We’d like to get about a 1,000 families and so far we have 600,” says Loraine Lee. “We’ve been trying to get people from the United States and Canada to help us by the Internet but that hasn’t been easy so we had to come here.”

The Lees – who are in their mid-50s – have lived in Toronto, Canada for the past 28 years and operate Huntsmill Graphics Limited there. It was their company that distributed “Canadian Jamaican Chinese”, a book that contains information on more than 500 Jamaican families of Chinese origin living in Canada.

With their second book, they chose to go one step further and document the movement of Chinese-Jamaicans around the globe. The Lees plan to stick with the format used in “Canadian Jamaican Chinese”, which includes group photos and the personal history of each family.

Though not trained genealogists, the Lees took their fascination for the history of the Chinese-Jamaican from Patrick’s father, Lee Tom Yin, who came to Kingston from China in 1930.

In 1957, Lee Tom Yin compiled the book “Chinese In Jamaica”, a collection of most of the Chinese families living in this country at the time. Loraine Lee says the book remains a seminal source for Chinese-Jamaicans interested in tracing their family tree.

“People are asking us to reproduce ‘Chinese In Jamaica’ since they saw photos of their parents and their grandparents in it,” says Loraine Lee. “But that would not be financially feasible so we decided to do this one.”

According to Patrick Lee, when his father’s book, which was published in Chinese, came out, there were slightly more than 10,000 Chinese living here and many still had ties to the province of Canton, whence most of them came.

The last census report done in Jamaica, in 2001, showed that there are just about 4,000 persons of Chinese extraction living in Jamaica, in a population of 2.6 million. Many left during the mid- to late-1970s, when food was scarce and shopkeepers were attacked.

Unlike her father-in-law, whose familiarity with his contemporaries aided his project, Loraine Lee says it has been tough getting information from families.

“A lot of them don’t see it as priority and Chinese can be very reticent, they are very private people,” she says.

The first wave of Chinese arrived in Jamaica in the late 1870s as indentured workers. Many had come from Panama where they had been working on railroads but left due to an outbreak of cholera and yellow fever.

By the early 1940s, the Chinese population in Jamaica had grown to more than 12,000. Most of them established themselves as managers of small businesses such as grocery shops and haberdasheries but in the 1960s they had moved into the mainstream and played a major role in the commercial sector as well as the development of this country’s music business.

In the 1970s, when the middle class felt it was being targeted by the socialist policies of Prime Minister Michael Manley, there was a strong migration by Chinese-Jamaicans to Canada, where Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had opened his country’s doors to immigrants.

Some of the people in that mass migration were reportedly among those who left for professional reasons to live in places like Spain and Germany. They are the ones Patrick and Loraine Lee are trying to find in order to complete their book, which they hope will be as valuable as Lee Tom Yin’s “Chinese In Jamaica.”

“One of the main reasons we are doing it is because his book is still used as a source at the university (of the West Indies, Mona campus),” says Patrick Lee. “It’s important for posterity.”