P. Su
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According to Lee-Loy, major factors have led to a lack
of interest in articulating
a Chinese-Caribbean identity in the early literary works by Caribbean authors of
Chinese descent. These factors include “the suppression of ethnic difference in
Caribbean narratives of nation” and “the grounding of Caribbean nationalism and
national identity in a narrative of anticolonial oppression” (Lee-Loy,
2014
). The
negative perception of the Chinese as an “antinationalistic petite bourgeoisie”
(Lai,
2005
, p. 73), together with the anticolonial and nationalist sentiment preva-
lent in Caribbean society, produced Sinophobia, which led to recurrent violent
attacks on Chinese people and their property. Consequently,
Chinese-Caribbean
writers, most of whom grew up in the period of the rising nationalist movement,
deemphasised their Chineseness to avoid being regarded as outsiders.
The change came in the 2000s as China’s economy improved and its global influ-
ence began to increase. From then on, many Chinese-Caribbean authors have begun
to acknowledge their Chinese heritage by foregrounding the Chinese history and
experience in the Caribbean. Jan Lowe Shinebourne followed this trend to explore
the meaning of Chineseness in a Guyanese context. In 2004, she added her middle
name Lowe to the cover when she
published her third book
The Godmother and
Other Stories
, and she has continued to use this name for her subsequent publica-
tions.
The Last Ship
, a novel published in 2015, is a family story that mainly follows
the lives of three generations of the Wong family in the Caribbean, spanning the
years from 1879 to 2000. In response to the fact that Chinese females have rarely
appeared in literary
works written by white, African and Indian Caribbean authors,
not even as minor characters, Shinebourne retrieves the silenced history of Chinese-
Caribbean immigrants by investing in the female side of the story. Written non-
chronologically, the novel begins with the life in British Guiana of Clarice, who took
the last ship,
The Admiral
, to bring indentured Chinese labourers to this colony, and
who later became the matriarch of the Wong family. By representing the experience
of Clarice, Shinebourne writes the legacy
of Chinese indentureship, especially the
female side of the Chinese plantation experience, back into Caribbean history, thus
reconstructing the colonial experience. The involvement of the Chinese in the Car-
ibbean’s colonial history has been neglected not only in the official history written
by imperial powers but also in the revised history about former Caribbean colonies
written by postcolonial writers. Clarice’s story reveals many lesser-known histori-
cal elements: the arduous journey indentured Chinese labourers endured when they
were shipped to the Caribbean
area in the nineteenth century, their lives’ struggling
and suffering during the early settlement, as well as their move out of indentureship
and into retail trade in the late nineteenth century. Through depictions of early Chi-
nese immigrants, Shinebourne shows us that the Chinese have a shared root in the
plantation experience and colonial history with the Blacks and Indians: “As soon
as they came off the boat, they were put to live in
wooden huts on Soesdyke estate,
where the Cheung brothers became labourers like the blacks and coolies. They had
to work in the open in the canefields exposed to the blazing sun and driving rain”
(Shinebourne,
2015
, p. 25). According to Lee-Loy (
2014
), the erasure of the Chi-
nese-Caribbean people’s grounding in the plantation experience has played a criti-
cal role in presenting “Chineseness as other to Caribbeanness” in Caribbean literary
works. By retrieving and stressing this shared root, Shinebourne justifies the integral
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The Chinese Caribbean diaspora and performative subjectivity…
place of the Chinese in the Caribbean community and legitimises their Caribbean
identity.
However,
The Last Ship
, presenting the Chinese diaspora’s identity struggles,
provides no stable idea of Chineseness and drives the reader to think deeply about
the question: “What does it mean to be a Chinese in the Caribbean?” This article,
therefore, explores the complicated nature of Chinese-Caribbean identity by looking
at the diasporic experience and identity-searching journey of the Chinese-Caribbean
women depicted in the novel. Shinebourne’s narrative not only challenges the con-
cept of Chinese identity as inherent and static but also represents the subjectivity
of Chinese-Caribbean people as performative. The performances of naming,
family
storytelling, and culinary practices have contributed to the performative feature of
the Chinese diaspora’s subject formation.
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