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

Lutchmee and 
Dilloo: A Study of West Indian Life
(1877) written by the colonialist author John 
Edward Jenkins, who created a cunning, greedy and cruel Chinese shopkeeper 
called Chin-a-foo. The gambling and opium den kept by Chin-a-foo at the margin 
of the plantation ruins the health and lives of estate labourers, thus posing “serious 
threats to estate management” (Lee-Loy, 
2010
, p. 20). The novel’s depiction of the 
Chinese reveals that, as labourers introduced to replace African slaves and serve “as 

---

1 3
The Chinese Caribbean diaspora and performative subjectivity…
a potential buffer class between the whites and the blacks” (Lai, 
2005
, p. 56), they 
were accepted by the white elite only if they continued to work on the plantations. 
The Chinese departure from agricultural life to engage in trading, believed to be 
detrimental to the economy of the colony, accounts for their unfavourable represen-
tation in the writings of white authors, including those appearing in newspapers (see 
Lai, 
2005
, pp. 63–68).
The negative stereotype of Chinese shopkeepers was also adopted by the Afri-
can and Indian Caribbean writers who stepped onto the literary stage around the 
1930s, a period when the anticolonial and nationalist movement emerged in the 
Caribbean. The distorted image of the Chinese in these writers’ works has politi-
cal implications. In the twentieth century, the nationalist discourse in the Caribbe-
an’s long-lasting struggle for independence was based on “a narrative of national 
oppression” and “a long history of resistance to exploitation” (Lee-Loy, 
2010
, pp. 
70–71). The first wave of Chinese immigrants consisted of indentured labourers 
who had endured colonial oppression and exploitation. However, the Chinese-Car-
ibbean people had no deep roots in the plantation experience because they shortly 
upgraded their contract-worker status. Thus, by the 1890s, they had “taken up their 
new roles as economic trader middleman within the class/colour hierarchy of West 
Indian plantation society” (Lai, 
1998
, p. 210). Therefore, the Chinese, having been 
closely associated with the trading industry, have long been viewed as “distanced 
from other Caribbean people in terms of common interests or experiences” (Lee-
Loy, 
2014
). In the literary works of African and Indian Caribbean authors—such 
as Alfred Mendes (1897–1991), Ralph de Boissière (1907–2008), Samuel Selvon 
(1923–1994), Sylvia Wynter (1928-), V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018), Earl McKenzie 
(1943-), and Alecia McKenzie (1962-)—Chinese shopkeepers are often represented 
as outsiders to Caribbean society economically, politically and culturally. They are 
depicted as parasites on the local economy and exploiters against whom the major-
ity working class must fight for national independence. These writers construct the 
image of the Chinese other to reinforce their sense of belonging and their authentic 
Caribbean identity.
Since the 1980s, a number of Chinese-Caribbean writers have emerged whose 
writing leads to the formation of a Chinese-Caribbean literature. They include 
Easton Lee (1931–2021) and Kerry Young (1955-) from Jamaica, Willi Chen 
(1934-) from Trinidad, Severo Sarduy (1937–1993) and Zoé Valdés (1959-) from 
Cuba, as well as Jan Lowe Shinebourne (1947-) and Meiling Jin (1963-) from 
Guyana. What might be puzzling about these Chinese-Caribbean writers is that, 
as they emerged, they tended to downplay their Chinese descent and heritage. 
Willi Chen, for example, said in 2002 that “he is more interested in capturing the 
lives of Indo- and Afro-Trinidadians in his work than those of the Chinese on the 
island” (Lee-Loy, 
2014
). Meiling Jin did not begin marketing her work as a Chi-
nese-Caribbean author until around 2012, and prior to that, she simply presented 
herself as a Caribbean author (Misrahi-Barak, 
2012
, p. 10). Shinebourne pub-
lished her early novels