The Chinese Caribbean diaspora and performative subjectivity in Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s The Last Ship

Performativity of family storytelling
The performative nature of family storytelling is revealed as it “performs the task 
of anchoring a sense of ‘self’ through tracing ancestral connections and cultural 
belonging” (Bottero, 
2015
, p. 535). According to Jaber F. Gubrium and James 
A. Holstein (
1994
, p. xvi), “storytellers not only tell stories, they do things with 
them.” Self-identity is shaped by family storytelling, which constructs storied 
narratives of the family’s past. If we understand identities as “the names we give 
to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the nar-
ratives of the past” (Hall, 
1990
, p. 225), we can clearly see that family stories 
are significant for the process of “identification and categorization, self-under-
standing and social location, commonality and connectedness” (Brubaker, 
2004
, 
p. 4). As a creative and imaginative practice of memory, family storytelling “pro-
vides meaningfulness beyond the here and now, providing selves in the present 
with a geographical and/or temporal ‘place to stand’” (Kramer, 
2011
, p. 392). By 
remembering the past, it develops “a self-narrative that starts, not at one’s birth, 
but with one’s forebears” (Lawler, 
2014
, p. 55).
In the novel 
The Last Ship
, Clarice performs the practice of family storytelling, 
a cultural heritage of the Chinese diaspora, to overcome the identity confusion 
created by her changed name and status in the new geographical, cultural, and 
political context of British Guiana. She searches for self-definition and attempts 
to reformulate her Chinese identity by narrating her family history. She tells her 
children and other people repeatedly that
Me family was royal Chinee! Emperor Chengzong was me family! Dey send 
we here to build this country! In Hong Kong, Xian Gang, we build plenty 
big property; this is why they send we here, to build this country! (Shine-
bourne, 
2015
, p. 22)
Me family, we was not Hakka Chinee, we was Punti; we had property we 
build in China and Hong Kong we used to rent; we was rich rich, we wasn’t 
poor. We didn’t come to B.G. because we ain’t got money; British gov’ment 
send we to B.G. to help run the country. Dat is why dem help me Uncle 
Arnold get rich. Me family come from Chinee royal family. […] You see dis 
picture here? Dis me ancestors, he name Emperor Chengzong. You see what 
he wearing? Dat is he yellow dragon coat. Me whole clan, Chung clan, all a 
we work fo’ this emperor. From ahwe, he get plenty soldier and civil serv-
ant, an we look after he. He give we castle to live in, land to farm and plant, 
in a place name Heilongjiang. […] We was his own people an’ he treat we 
good good; he say we is he own family; he give we this scroll with he pic-
ture, an we bring it pon de boat to B.G. (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 66)
As Wendy Bottero (
2015
, pp. 535) notes, family stories can provide “ontologi-
cal security in the face of social dislocation, or weakening family connection.” 
In the context of diasporic splitting and dislocation, family storytelling func-
tions as a powerful tool for establishing connectedness and affinities, anchoring 
the unsettled self, and constructing belonging, thus contributing importantly to 

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self-understanding and self-making. Clarice, tracing ancestors and family roots 
across borders along the route of colonial migration, constructs the accounts of 
her family’s origin to find coherence in life and a sense of self. Quite often, “the 
process of ‘discovering’ a family’s past includes a significant degree of inven-
tion” (Lambert, 
1996
, p. 138). Clarice actively uses her imagination to invent glo-
rified stories about her family history, which is revealed ironically at the end of 
the novel when her granddaughter Joan, during a visit to Hong Kong, discovers 
that the Chungs “were Hakkas, like everyone that went to the colonies,” and the 
scroll of Emperor Chengzong is simply mass-produced “tourist rubbish” (Shine-
bourne, 
2015
, pp. 150–151). However, the invention of family histories remains 
meaningful and effective for the negotiation and development of diasporic sub-
jectivity. The stories Clarice makes up about her family not only help her and her 
offspring deal with being Chinese in the Caribbean but also encourage their self-
esteem and self-respect, as her son Frederick admits:
He was proud of her because she came from China, she was a genuine Chi-
nese, she could still speak some Chinese words, her history in China was a 
great one, her family were linked to a Chinese emperor, they even owned a 
scroll picture of him that he had given to them. [...] He likes to tell people 
about it; it made him feel like a real Chinese. (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 71)
The novel as a whole may also be read as a performance of family storytelling. 
Narrated from the perspective of Joan, it starts with her “return[ing] to Canefield 
to research Clarice’s history” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 10) and ends with her going 
back to “Hong Kong to find the passenger list of 
The Admiral
, because it had gone 
missing from the archives in Guyana” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 149). Unlike Clarice’s 
story, which focusses on the family history of ancestors in China and early settle-
ment in British Guiana, Joan’s story stresses the family’s Caribbean history more, 
covering the experiences of the Wong family from the 1870s to the early 2000s. 
Joan’s family history research provides “a way of beginning the task of understand-
ing the complexities of subjectivity and social location, and of rethinking identity 
as neither eternally fixed and essential, nor endlessly fluid and freely self-fashioned, 
an always incomplete inventory of the self” (Nash, 
2002
, p. 49). In the process of 
performing her family history, Joan writes herself into the family narrative in a pro-
cess of identification and self-understanding. Her active and practical performance 
of family storytelling is a personal journey of self-exploration. Her discovery dur-
ing a return to China disrupts the dominant discourse and cherished assumptions 
in Clarice’s version of the family story in a surprising and unexpected way, thus 
reshaping her previous understandings of belonging, self and identity.