Welcome To Strictly Facts

Speaker 0:00

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, Dr. Alexandria Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics, and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello, hello everyone, Waguan Pamataguan, and welcome back to another episode of Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, where we explore the stories, the people, ideas, and cultures that shape the Caribbean and our global connections. I'm your host, Alexandria Miller, and today's episode, we're thinking about the Caribbean and our ethnic makeup. We've talked about different languages and different origins of Caribbean people, and one that we have yet to fully touch on is thinking about the importance and influence of Caribbean laborers in the Caribbean and, of course, their descendants. We often speak about, you know, the Caribbean as a place shaped by movement, by people and cultures and space, but even within that story of movement, there are histories that remain less visible, less discussed, and at times misunderstood. Today we're talking about the Chinese influence and impact in the Caribbean. Across the 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese migrants arrived in the Caribbean under systems of indentureship, entering the societies of already transformed by slavery and colonial rule. Over time, these communities built lives across the region, establishing businesses, forming families, and contributing to the cultural and economic fabric of the region. But this is not just a story of arrival, it's also a story of movement between the Caribbean and China, and of course, the Caribbean diaspora at large. It's a story of identity and belonging, of navigating what it means to be both rooted in and in motion at the same time. And it is this story that I think challenges us to think more carefully about how we understand diaspora, not as a single journey from one place to another, but as something far more layered, relational, and also ongoing. And so in today's conversation, we'll explore some of these histories through both the broader historical lens as well as a deeply personal perspective, with the help of my guest joining me today. And so I'm really grateful to have Dr. Nikoli Attai, assistant professor of sociology at Binghamton University. Um, and so, Dr. Attai, thank you so much for joining us. Um, do let our listeners know a little bit more about you, where I know, of course, you call home, um, and what sort of inspired your passion and understanding and interest of the sort of sociological study of the Caribbean, of cultural transformation, etc.

Meeting Dr. Nikoli Attai

Speaker 1 2:52

Yeah, so thank you so much for having me uh on this podcast. I'm just excited to be in conversation with you and to just reflect together, to muse, to think together about uh all the things that make the Caribbean such a complex, nuanced, but exciting place, right? Uh to think about movement, to think about people, to think about histories, to think about, as we say in Trinidad, back canal and drama. That these kinds of things that ground us as a people. So I am from Trinidad and Tobago. I think it feels a bit kind of weird now thinking about my relationship to home and the Caribbean, uh having been out of Trinidad and Tobago or kind of back and forth for over 20 years. Uh I'm currently in New York, and I've had the fortune to live in a few Caribbean countries, to have a relationship, you know, to have connections in spaces like Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Lucia, a lot of the Anglophone Caribbean, and that has really shaped a lot of how I think about the Caribbean, how I think about even the Caribbean diaspora. Right? I lived in Toronto for 12 years before moving to the US four years ago. I went from Toronto to Colorado now to New York. So I've been in a state of movement for the last few years, and that has really colored again how I think about myself as a Trinidadian living in the US, uh, living in diaspora, constantly craving diaspora community, constantly craving people that look and sound like me. And that has also inspired a lot of the work I do, right? Uh my academic wheelhouse is really queer Caribbean studies and thinking about the ways that queer and trans people in particular navigate uh discrimination, homophobia, violence in the Caribbean, in the Anglophone Caribbean, and find ways to live despite this violence, right? And as a way to really nuance the stories we hear outside of the Caribbean about a lot of Caribbean countries being unlivable, right? And my work really asks us to rethink that. So my book, Defiant Bodies, Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean, really takes the time to do that work. I take readers through various spaces that queer people are forming community in Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago as a way to think about these complexities. And my I'm now moving or diversifying my academic uh and just even my own personal interests. Looking at the Chinese Caribbean and these experiences, my granddad was Chinese Trinadian, born in Trinidad, but lived a significant part of his life, his childhood into early adulthood in in China and came back to Trinidad. And I've always been intrigued by the story. And so I've now started really spending some time thinking about what that looks like. And even my own relationship to indent is shift to slavery, to all these very violent uh plantation systems that allow us to live in the Caribbean in the ways that we live.

Speaker 6:00

Thank you so much for that introduction, Nikoli. Um, for our listeners tuning in and wanting to learn more. Um, I know Nikoli personally, but I think again, as he was sort of motioning us towards, one thing that drew me to really having you on the show is your chapter in the book, Um, The Asian Caribbean in the Caribbean diaspora, essays on migration, identity, and literary and cultural representation. Um, and so I think, you know, for our listeners wanting to learn more, that's just one of the many um resources I'll throw up there on our strictly fact syllabus for you all to check

Indentureship Beyond The Usual Story

Speaker 6:37

out. Before diving really into even your own personal history, I do sort of want to foreground us in this understanding as you were talking about of indentureship and colonialism. And so, in a lot of ways, we tend to center and more so focus um conversations about indentorship in the Caribbean on Indo-Caribbean communities or, you know, the movement of people from India um serving as indentured servants in the Caribbean. And I, you know, of course, can understand why, because there's obviously a difference in numbers significantly. And so that's not to discount that importance or anything at all, of course. But a part of the indentured labor that was then transformed or, you know, moved to the Caribbean was also Chinese laborers. And that's something I think we don't always focus on. I think there are, of course, sort of like in the ethos of conversations, oftentimes we talk about, or like I've just heard in passing, right, that um Chinese laborers, usually from the south of China, um, were the ones that came over. I think oftentimes in Jamaica, people talk about being sort of like distant related to the Hakka people in China. But there is, I think, so much more information there. And so I want to know if you could sort of ground us in further histories about um Chinese migration to the Caribbean, of course, starting with um indentured labor, but also there are several, as you were um alluding to, several, you know, generations thereafter.

Speaker 1 8:11

Okay, so you want us to think about again, the these systems that have brought many people to the Caribbean beyond slavery, right? Again, Chinese migration to the Caribbean has an interesting history, just like enslaved Africans, just like Indian and Ltian workers, right? Uh and we see the early migration of Chinese immigrants coming under similar circumstances, right? So some scholars identify four waves of migration to the Caribbean in the 1800s. And so in the 19th and 20th centuries. And other scholars think about three main waves. Right? The first wave was actually and has been documented by scholars like Walter Lecline, who is the foremost scholar of the Chinese Caribbean. You know, I think his work is really important for us to get a really good survey of uh Chinese migration in the region, even in the Spanish Caribbean, the English Caribbean, and so forth. Uh so in 1806, uh, we see uh uh an experiment to bring a small number of Chinese indentan workers to Trinidad, uh, just around 200 workers, but that project failed. When you think about the timeline, this would have been before emancipation uh and so forth, right? So they would have come during enslavement, right, um, and during that plantation system. And that that initial uh wave and that initial experiment failed. But then we see the other uh waves when the larger numbers of uh Chinese indentual workers coming to the region, coming to countries like Cuba, Jamaica, Guyana, and so forth in larger numbers to replace, complement, however you you want to think about it, indentual workers on the plantations. They obviously came in smaller numbers than Indian indentual workers, but came under similar circumstances. And we see uh remnants of this presence across the Caribbean, right? And the people that we see, the businesses that were left, uh the names, the pseudonyms that we hear, and so forth. Right? Uh the second wave's Chinese immigrants working on the plantations again under similar circumstances. Then we see later on, more Chinese immigrants came in a third wave, more of them came voluntarily. And these were the immigrants that you would see the scholarship will show, uh set up businesses. So the the laundromats, the shopkeepers, the other forms of entrepreneurship, right? Um the latest wave, we we still see immigrants coming under various uh activities. So, like in Trinidad for now, for instance, there are a bunch of Chinese people now opening up supermarkets uh and restaurants, right? I feel like in the Caribbean, almost every corner you go on, you could find a Chinese restaurant in a lot of the islands, right? In Guyana as well. Some would say Guyana has the best Chinese food. I I would tend to want to agree. Um, so yeah, so these are the kinds of ways that we see Chinese immigrants coming to the region and historically in the 19th and 20th centuries, and even today we still see that movement of people.

Diaspora Networks And Associations

Speaker 11:19

I think that brings me to a really important question that you know we don't always focus on when it comes to, and you know, we've sort of been talking about it in in pieces here, but that's the fact of diaspora. Um, and I think oftentimes when we think of diaspora, we think people born in the Caribbean move to foreign, aka global north, whatever, you know, US, Canada, et cetera. And then, you know, sort of maybe secondarily the the way that we move amongst the Caribbean, right? You know, take people like Sylvia Winter, who was born in Cuba, technically, right, but is Jamaican and et cetera, et cetera. Um, but I think there is a very interesting story here when it comes to discussing um Chinese communities, because as you alluded to, even within your own family, um, there is this back and forth relationship with China that I think is less so, and I don't know, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, less so sort of traditional from what we think of diaspora. And so I'd love for you to maybe share what impact that has clearly had, maybe just on the communities themselves. And also, I think maybe apart from that, but also this whole concept of sort of maintaining tradition, I think is really important when we see places like uh the Caribbean or Chinese Benevolent Society, for instance, in Jamaica, right? Um, that I believe was founded in 1891. Like these are all active ways that Chinese communities have, you know, been a part of the Caribbean, but also have um, you know, maintained their identity, their culture in many ways.

Speaker 1 12:58

Yeah, it's really is really fascinating to when you when you notice the kinds of networks that exist and the ways that despite kind of starting off historically in such harsh, restrictive contexts, right, with indentorship and even just the conditions in which indented immigrants are to live. But it's interesting to see again these strong networks regionally, transnationally as well. And as you mentioned, the Chinese associations, right? These organizations that have been created to preserve and archive these histories, these movements, and so forth. Yeah, I immediately started to think about uh an association in Vancouver. I went to Vancouver some years ago, uh, I think it was for vacation or so forth, and I I met a Chinese woman selling in a close store on Vancouver Island. So, not even Vancouver, mainland, but on the island. And she's like, oh my God, I I I know Trindad. I've been to Trindad and she has family there. She spent time in Trinidad. It was almost like her gateway to Canada. So she went to Trindad first and then made her way to Canada. On top of that, there's also a lot of archives housed in Vancouver on the Chinese Caribbean, right? Uh, persons who would have passed through these cities on their way to or from the Caribbean. So I just immediately thought about, again, like how there are these spaces transnationally that hold so much about histories as the Chinese diaspora moves. It really allows us to rethink migration as this one-way movement. And this is a story that I discovered in my granddad's journey.

unknown 14:33

Right?

Speaker 1 14:33

My granddad died when I was eight months. So I never knew this person, right? I only know him through stories, through family archives, as I discussed in the book. And I'm in a period of rediscovering him and recreating this image of who this, you know, this short Chinese man from uh from Guangdong, who that who this guy was, right? And a lot of that history, you know, I've started recapturing through the archive, through family archives, through photos, through memories and so forth. Um, just thinking about these relationships, uh, the ways that people maintain traditions while adapting to the local where they're located. I'm part of this called the Chinese Caribbean Scholarship Network. So it's a network of scholars, artists, writers, creatives, community members from around the world, England, uh, Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, all over the world. When you hear people share stories, you meet people from Jamaica who are family in Trinidad, you hear similar surnames, or whose family would have been in Trinidad or Guyana at some point, or Cuba at some point, and you realize that although a Chinese family may have settled in one space, they have still established or maintained contacts with other species. And again, it just reminds us again how movement works in the Caribbean as a region as well as internationally.

Race, Labor, And Everyday Violence

Speaker 15:56

I think oftentimes there is this ethos of Mr. Chin or Miss Chin, who owned the shop. And, you know, due to whatever, you know, systemic and socioeconomic um strata, there are obviously hierarchical things there, right? Um, but one thing that I don't think is always a part of the conversation is also the challenges that particularly these uh, you know, earlier generations faced within the Caribbean, right? Um there's obviously a discussion of, you know, social hierarchy from the point of European colonizer to the black person, right? Um which is true. I'm not no, we're not challenging that here. But also, you know, the movement of indentured laborers also created its own sort of dynamics within the Caribbean between black and, you know, whether that be Indo or Chinese Caribbean people. I don't know if our listeners tuning in watched or read Black Cake, um, which is a novel that then there was or is still on Hulu. Um, you know, they they recreated it in part on Hulu. Um, and that I think was a really interesting point for me that I thought, wow, it was interesting that they tied the sort of um challenges between black and Chinese Caribbean people within the show, albeit a little bit briefly. And so I just sort of wanted us to spend a little bit more time um acknowledging that violence, um, you know, particularly of that, you know, Chinese shopkeepers experience the sort of like racialized representations and dynamics that also existed.

Speaker 1 17:38

Oh yeah. Yeah, and then I think the plantation system, these colonizers did a great job at stratifying, right? And placing us in kind of messed up relations to each other. And this plantation system still persists, right? And you see, you hear a lot of these sentiments around uh the immigrants, like the Chinese. Oh, yeah, the Chinese just coming and setting up all the business and they're making all the money, and uh what about the black man uh and stuff? They didn't have to work as hard as us and stuff like that. You hear all these things, right? But at the same level, you hear stories within the Chinese Caribbean community about the labor that uh these families put into ensuring that these businesses were successful and not necessarily successful in the captain's sense, right? But when you hear the stories of the hard work uh these people had to do, right? You know, continue to do. Uh, like you would go into a Chinese restaurant, for instance, today, and you would see under the counter, the kids are sleeping under the counter while the parents are working, the kids come home from school and work and work in the in the restaurant or in the shop or in the laundromat and stuff like that. Um, but you sit and think about again that that labor, right? Um, that the family's putting into it. It allows you to think differently about the capitalist stratification of people to really sit and focus on again how hard that work is, right? Especially if you're in a context, especially I think a lot about the the new Chinese who are coming and setting up the supermarkets and the restaurants and stuff in the last, let's say, like 15, 20 years. They come to a country, no community, they can barely speak English, like we talk about the English Caribbean. Um, you know, they have to, you know, kind of just function on their own and rely on their very small networks. So, yeah, um, and that violence has always been a part of just our communities in general in the Caribbean, but there are really interesting stories that you hear about the violence that the Chinese community has endured over time, right? When we think about racialized violence, not necessarily as physical violence, but uh being outcast and all these things, and which is a large part of a lot of the stories we hear, not only in Chinese communities and Indo-Caribbean communities and black communities, right? That racialized violence is a part of our history that we continue to contend with. And that's actually something that I discovered in my granddad's story. When I was, you know, looking at other resources and stuff, is a lot of a lot of these stories across the Caribbean that racialized violence is a big part of the Chinese-Caribbean experience. So, for example, my granddad being mixed, right? Being Chinese and uh Trendalian, his mother would have been either indigenous and black or Venezuelan and black, could have been indigenous from Venezuela, but but mixed. And having gone back to China, would have experienced a lot of ostracism because he wasn't pure Chinese. And my uncles, they would always tell me that when he came back, he would always say you can give him a million dollars, he will never retail because of how hard life was out there. Right. So that's on one end, but you also see it happening on this side, right? Where you you see people making fun of the Chinese shopkeeper or taunting them, taking things from the shop. And in this day, they're social media. So I've seen a lot of videos and stuff like that of taunting these people, right? And violence, again, and that's a form of violence. But in doing this work with my granddad, uh, so one of the photos that I opened, the chapter with which you would have seen was my granddad, and maybe you could probably put it up if I don't know if you share, like in the syllabus, you can share, right? Is a photo of my granddad in his supermarket in Rima, so the town where where the family settled eventually, right? Uh you see him in the supermarkets, and you know it says that he's smiling, and the customers coming up and stuff. But when you read the article later down, the writer focuses on some of the violence that's happening at the shops being uh robbed, uh, persons coming in those days with cutlasses and sticks and stuff like that. And they they asked him how he felt about that, and he said, well, one, he's next to the police station, but he's he he also knows karate, right? So this actually sent me down a rabbit hole to sort of find the original article, which was housed in the at the University of the West Indies and the special collections.

Speaker 21:50

We love our times over here.

Speaker 1 21:52

I knew, right? So, you know, I went in and uh I I found I found all the magazines, right? So from the Bombidos Trade Review. So my goal was I was in Trinidad for maybe like three days. My goal was to just go in and go out, get that, get a proper photo of the article. But then, you know how archives work. I started sifting through. And in the magazine, the magazine ran for about three years, was a short run. There were these features on shopkeepers. And in these features, you saw a lot of commentary on violence, on shopkeepers being murdered, about being beaten, uh, have being forced to close their shops. And this was in the 1960s and 70s, right? So I was really intrigued by that too. I'm like, wow, like you get a sense of how these people are living, despite this idea that they come to the Caribbean with more clout, right? With more social capital and stuff like that. Because of that plantation stratification, right? And that's actually something I want to sit with and analyze and just sit with these stories to get a better picture of what that violence looked like. I mean, we talk about the 1960s. That is what, how many years ago? Like 60 years ago, right? But that violence still, for a large part, looks the same, right? It's probably even more violent now with like guns and technology, right? That is available now and stuff like that. So that violence is still something important for us to think about in the region.

Speaker 23:16

Yeah, I I would agree. And I think, you know, as you were saying, right, change over time, but also I always sort of not laugh in a make fun of way, but you know, the fact that, like, for instance, Jamaica's national model being out of many one people, right? But then when we have these instances where people are of mixed ethnic backgrounds, it becomes a whole nother dynamic in terms of, um, as you were saying, right, how people are perceiving them. Um, are you Chinese? Are you black? You know, you're both or of multiple, right? But you know, it's suddenly you're not black enough or you're not Chinese enough. And that goes for everybody. We're not that doesn't necessarily solely apply to us, but I think um, in a lot of ways, these things are sort of interesting dynamics that I think definitely need to be teased out a lot

When Politics Turns Xenophobic

Speaker 24:10

more.

Speaker 1 24:10

So I think as you talk about these dynamics, you know, Caribbean politics is also a whole other wheelhouse, right? But there's a space where you get to see all these contentions here itself, right? As we say in Trinidad, you know, all the titles being washed in public. Uh, so that the government has changed in the last year. The party that forms the government is considered to be the Indo-Trinadian party. Before that was the Afro-Trindadian Party, or how it was perceived in power for 10 years. There was a big shift overnight where the then Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, stepped down and he appointed a Chinese Trinadian guy, Steot Jung, as Prime Minister. Jung called the election like the day after. So he was Prime Minister for like four days, right? But at that moment, you see a lot of the xenophobic sentiment coming out and the ways that uh he was being framed as a Chinese Trinidadian, but not Trinadian enough because he's Chinese, but he's also Indo-Chinese. His mother, one of his parents, his mother is Indian, right? And so there was this rift between all the races, right? And because the party was seen as a traditional, traditionally black party, the country didn't know what to make of this Chinese man now coming in. And then there was a lot of conversation around, yeah, the Chinese are the ones with the business, they're the bankers, they're the ones who are funding the parties, they have money, they they have a lot of prominent positions. So a lot of those conversations were coming up, right? Um, so it had me thinking a lot about what happens when someone like this rises to a very public position uh and is kind of steps out of the proverbial shop or the laundromat or theirs to contribute to the nation in ways that he's not probably seen or to be allowed to was an interesting moment. So I think people can even go back and look at some of those things on social media as another way to see how people are making sense of uh this community, right?

Family Silences And Rebuilding Memory

Speaker 26:06

Um, I want to take us back a little bit because you were talking about recreating your grandfather's story. Well, this is not an archives question because I think archives are fun, and that's that's a whole nother nerdy historian in me thing. Uh, but I think it's another aspect of archives in a different way to be recreating history um through memory, right? Through asking your relatives, as I know you do within this book chapter, um, to be, you know, finding bits and pieces here or there and put, you know, pulling them together to see what you can make of and understand of those who came before us. And so I'd just love for you to share a little bit about, you know, the impact of maybe silences and the challenges you've had in sort of recovering um these silences and how your family has sort of navigated, tracing your own roots.

Speaker 1 26:59

Yeah. Yeah. One silence I grew up with around my granddad was that he never passed on a lot of his Chinese customs and traditions and stuff, and he was for a large part separated from a larger Chinese community.

unknown 27:18

Right.

Speaker 1 27:19

So I think that that that in itself was a large silence in the family. So for instance, he never taught them to speak the language, he never taught them some of his customs and practices. They grew up Catholic, right? He insisted on the kids be baptized as Catholic. My grandmother's Indo-Trinadian, she's 98 or 99 right now, uh, which is a whole other interesting history, right? And they were sending the Adventists, and so the kids were baptized Catholic. Again, he divorced himself, and I think it goes back to him saying that, you know, he would never go back to China because of what he experienced. So that was a way for him to silence that part of his life. But I'm told that, you know, he would he would still maintain his own customs or practices on his own, right? But not in involve the family, the language and all these things. So I think that that was one silence that remains apparent in the family and in like the stuff I've been discovering and stuff. And he also died pretty young, right? And he he died, what, 43 years ago. The lack of his physical presence again also created a lot of silences. But he lived on, he lives on in memories and the like I think a family event won't go by without reference to grandpa and his cooking and he was a disciplinarian, right? Um, the ways that he held the family together and stuff like that. But I feel too the violence he experienced both in Trinidad and in China spoke a lot to why there are these kinds of silences. And another thing, too, I think him being disconnected from a larger Chinese community in the ways that other people in urban areas may have been, he also grew up in rural Trinidad. So if you're familiar with the map of Trinidad and the northeast tip of the island, in a small town called Matlot, right? Um, which was disconnected from the rest of the country for quite a while. That's where he was from. Then they settled in villages coming down, Kumana, the village where my dad and everyone was born and stuff like that. Largely Afro-Trindadian village. So you're this one little Chinaman in a black village, right? So I think your life looks completely different. Although he had the shop, he, you know, wasn't the Chinese man with the little shop selling everything that a typical Chinese shop looks like, uh, from razor blades to alcohol, right? Um, so I feel that that also kind of colored a lot of the experience. So we even didn't grow up, at least, you know, my generation, me being one of the last grandkids, we grew up pretty disconnected from that Chinese history. And which in itself I think is also another silence.

Speaker 29:50

It's interesting to hear you say that for me, you know. I've heard other people sort of say similar things. And this is me coming at it from a perspective of, you know, obviously like not being within that circle, but I've heard, you know, to not to put my Meet the Mitchell's, you know, cap on, but thinking of like Tamichin and Tessan Chin, um, and hearing them sort of say sort of similar things that they have one Chinese grandparent um that, you know, was a big influence on them, but you know, was a little bit sort of divorced from that history as well, right? Um, and how that sort of then shapes your positionality and your understanding of your history. And I think, you know, even to go back to the the point of archives, right, the difficulties in even being able to trace that, right? Um, which I found really interesting as part of your work because, you know, what may not be, you know, in a sense of like a genetic ancestry test or what may have you, right? There are still these sort of finite and more or, you know, different ways of of sort of understanding where we come from and how you make, you know, use and power of that, of that history as part of your life.

Speaker 1 31:06

Yeah, because thinking about my family archives, one thing that allowed me to start thinking about this history differently was the things that I found in the archive. So, just for some context, in in the chapter I write about these letters that my granddad wrote to his mother over years. As from a child to young adult, there were some other letters in the box that my uncle gave to me with the stuff. But these letters to his mother really piqued my interest, right? I remember when I got these, I cried all summer just reading these letters again, because every time I opened it, I'm like, oh my god, like I feel like I was sitting with my granddad as a child at various points in his life and stuff. But it made me think a lot about just fugitive forms of expression and writing and uh documentation because I started to imagine what his life may have been in Trinidad, leaving Trindad in China, um, in a context where he may have had to hide these letters. So, because the story goes that he never sent these letters to his mother when he wrote them and he kept them safe until he got back to Trindad. I'm assuming he may have given them to his mother, and I'm not sure, right? So again, there's another silence in the story that I'm I need to find out, right? But it it had me thinking about how do we keep these stories safe? Uh, how do we preserve them literally, like in his case, how did he keep these letters safe, right? I'm I'm told that my grandmother has the letters somewhere. My aunt couldn't find them when I was home last time, kind of doing some digging. But the actual physical letters, right? That were written, what, in the 1920s and 30s, up until 1945, around then when he retained the trend. So, yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that. And how, well, in this case, like in the Chinese Caribbean, but even in just in our communities uh that are defined by so much nuance, right? So much volatility, that what it means to preserve these kinds of stories as uh an active process.

Speaker 33:08

And the importance for us, right, to be able to pass that down. I think about that all the time, right? That like, you know, there are things that people might not think our generation cares about, right? But we do in a lot of ways, whether that's by digitizing them, um, but you know, sort of in a lot of ways keeping that spirit, that history of who we are alive and present and you know, passed down to the

Food, Music, And Cultural Footprints

Speaker 33:33

future. I have to ask this question um because I think I'm always intrigued in, you know, what ways people pair our history with popular culture. And, you know, to me, when I immediately think of Chinese history being part of the Caribbean, there are, you know, certain figures in reggae that I think of, right? You can think of VP Records, Randy, and Miss Chin um as being sort of stewards of music in that way. Um, there's also the Curry brothers who, you know, owned a record store in Kingston, you know, one of the sort of foreboding record stores and producers of of early reggae. But for you, what are some of your favorite ways of seeing Chinese Caribbean really um history as it's presented in our popular culture?

Speaker 1 34:24

And like I want to think about that from like from the very grassroots level all the way up to kind of more of this colorly stuff. Um, but I think like if we look at popular culture like broadly, like we look at like the food, food cultures in the Caribbean are really informed by the Chinese presence, especially I think in like Trinidad, Guyana, where a lot of our food again is informed by these histories. Uh like Jamaica in Trinidad, if you mention someone like Chinese laundry, right? Um, Anthony Chowlin on a big uh name in Trinidad in the music industry who has mentored and helped so many artists, right, locally. Uh, there's been a lot of Chinese Trinadians as well who have held prominent positions in the society over the years, for the private sector, the public sector, and so forth, right? But I think if we even look at like even other creative ventures happening in the Caribbean is another space. So I mentioned this Chinese Caribbean Scholarship Network that I'm part of. We held a symposium in Toronto last year, um, where we brought together an array of international scholars, creatives, uh writers, and so forth. So just sit together for two days in Toronto at Oakard University just to talk about all things that make the Chinese Caribbean what it is. Right. And there we were able to see uh people doing some really amazing work on preserving these histories and sitting with the culture and all these things. So we had writers, we had uh creators, artists, scholars, and so forth. So I think that even there as a resource, you could find some really interesting work, people from Suriname, uh, Belize, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad. And what I appreciated about that to it decentered the typical islands or countries that we'd hear, right? The Trinda, the Jamaica, the Guyana, Cuba, where we think about the Chinese presence to really include other regions, other languages, Martinique, uh, and so forth. We actually had a person from Martini come who couldn't speak a lick of English. So it was an interesting experience having to get to translate for them, for them to translate for us, and so forth. But again, it showed the importance of really acknowledging how this presence looks across the Caribbean beyond the familiar territories that we that we

What These Histories Ask Of Us

Speaker 1 36:43

know.

Speaker 36:43

Wonderful, wonderful. Uh, I want to end us on um sort of a more reflective note, right? We've been talking about the importance of, you know, connecting various pieces, whether that be our history, diaspora, you know, the violences of colonialism in a lot of ways that have sort of tried to separate us. Um, but what do you ultimately hope our listeners take away with the sort of hopefully a greater understanding of Chinese Caribbean history and why these stories matter for how we understand who we are as a people and how we're evolving?

Speaker 1 37:24

I actually want to go back to that uh comment or the conversation we had about the ways that various Caribbean people are stratified in relation to each other because of, again, the violence of the plantation history, this on these ongoing legacies of colonization, and this idea that the the Chinese Caribbean, you know, they're somehow better than other people, right? Again, because of how they entered, they them have been able to set up business, to get involved in in the regional landscape in different ways, right? Uh that despite this, that we need to sit with the the histories that brought the Chinese Caribbean to the Caribbean, but even other people, it allows us to think the Chinese, the Indians, the Africans, right? Uh, the Spanish, the Venezuelans, uh, and so forth. And remember that oftentimes these histories are very violent, right? Um, and sitting with this violence allows us to see each other relationally, see each other as human, right? And to, I guess, kind of demystify a lot of these ideas we have about particular people. So, yes, while Mr. Chen might be the businessman in the in the in the area, right? And Mr. Chin might be the one who seemed to have all the money, right? What are the ways that Mr. Chin and the Mr. Chin's out there, Mrs. Chin's, right, have what are the ways they've had to navigate uh these histories, right? And not necessarily only violent histories, right? It's not like a pity party, but they've had to navigate these histories in ways that allowed them to create really beautiful uh things for us to appreciate that define us as Caribbean people, again, from the music, the food, the other forms of popular culture, and so forth. And again, it's important for us to really just sit with these histories as a way to decolonize our minds, right? Um, and attend to these, again, these legacies of plantation that continue to affect us. And let's find ways to relate to Mr. Chin across difference, right? To understand again these histories. Mr. Chin's history may not look the same as uh the descendant of a four million slave African, right? Or uh another immigrant. But it it is in these spaces of difference that we can really find ways to relate to each other. And um actually, as I say that, I think uh thinking about popular culture, thinking about the kinds of ways that we think about these histories, another good resource is there's this documentarian by the name of Jeanette Kong in Toronto, uh, who's been doing really interesting work on the Chinese Caribbean. She has quite a few documentaries, many of which I think you could access either through libraries or online somewhere. Um one of her documentaries is called Finding Mr. Chin. Uh, and it's a really interesting story uh thinking about the Chinese experience in Jamaica. It talks about a lot of this violence, a lot of the uh xenophobia, and a lot of the very complex histories. So, again, another important resource that we can consult. But yes, I think Mr. Chin and the Chinese Caribbean teach us so much about ourselves as a people to some fancy encumbered by the scarce of uh colonization and the plantation.

Resources, Syllabus, And Goodbye

Speaker 40:53

Thank you so much for sharing. I will, as always, our listeners know, I'll be sure to add those to the Strictly Fact syllabus. Um, but moreover, I think Nikoli, I'm really grateful to have had you on Strictly Facts, sharing with us about this history, about your own family history. Um, and as I said, for our listeners tuning in, if you'd like to check out Nikoli's piece, which of course I'll link as well. The overall manuscript is called The Asian Um Caribbean in the Caribbean diaspora essays on migration, identity, and literary and cultural representations. Um, and so for our listeners again, I will link that. Nikoli, again, thank you so much for being here with us. And for our listeners, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Till next time, look how more.