27. ENTER THE DRAGON
The Chinese arrive in the Caribbean
Long before the first Madeirans arrived, and thirty two years before Emancipation (in 1806, in other words), a small group of Chinese arrived in Trinidad. They'd been introduced as an experiment in solving the anticipated problem of a labour shortage on the estates. But such a shortage had not as yet materialised and the Chinese were appalled at the work they were given. The whole experiment was a disaster. They’d come a very long way – about 9,000 nautical miles – to accomplish very little.
But they kept coming, mainly between 1854 and 1884, as indentured labourers. Largely from the Guandong area of Southern China, they were part of a huge diaspora of a group known as the Hakka, fleeing conflict with native Cantonese (the Punti), a disastrous failed uprising (the Taiping Rebellion) and catastrophic social unrest. Most went to Cuba (120,000) and Peru (100,000) and about 18,000 eventually settled in the Caribbean (mainly Jamaica, British Guiana and Trinidad). In total, over 7 million Hakka fled the area during the nineteenth century.
The British, having recently defeated the Chinese, precisely in Guangzhou, home of the Hakka, in what were referred to as the Opium Wars, were well positioned to scoop up fleeing Hakka.
Hakka on the move
Despite many differences, there were several similarities between the Chinese and the Madeirans, two disparate cultures that barely crossed paths and yet shared elements of like-mindedness. They both saw their new countries not simply as places of refuge but as opportunities for growth and success. A British interpreter writing in 1852 noted that “the absorbing aim of the Chinese immigrant is to better his condition”. The Chinese were spectacularly unsuitable for the task of working in the cane fields and, like the Madeirans, they fled them as soon as they could and forged new career paths.
THE FORTUNE IN FOOD
In so doing, they became very important in shaping the food profile of the Caribbean: they were instrumental in food production, as farmers and bakers; in the sale of food, as shopkeepers, grocers and hawkers; in the sourcing and supply of produce, especially from China, as wholesalers and merchants; and in the establishment of Chinese food as a popular Caribbean cuisine as restaurateurs.
It was the food business that often provided the financial wherewithal for second and third generation Chinese to gravitate toward the professions: law, medicine and accountancy.
FARMING THE LAND (DIGGING OUT OF POVERTY)
Many of the Chinese initially became farmers and peasant cultivators; they grew corn, potato, ground provisions, sweet potatoes as well as carrots, turnips, cabbages and watercress, grown in the water flowing under the sugar mills. In Trinidad, they were called “the best gardeners in the colony”.
The first immigrants carried little with them, but as time went on (and more and more women joined the Hakka exodus), they introduced a range of traditional Chinese crops: bitter melon/gourd or caraille, Chinese cabbage/bok or pak choy, Chinese eggplant, Chinese mustard greens/gaai choy, Chinese yam, christophine/chayote, snow peas/mangetout, yard-long beans/bodi.
The locals seemed unable to pronounce the name of Chinese yam and so, in Trinidad, they simply called it ‘the Chinese’, or in the patois that was broadly spoken, de la chine. Over time, this was truncated into the word dasheen. Its bushy leaf is the key ingredient in the local callaloo.
It wasn’t all a vegetarian’s feast. Several became pork butchers (not surprising, considering the importance of pork in so much of Chinese cooking); others reared cattle. They also became oyster farmers in San Fernando, Trinidad, and even experimented with rice growing.
BAKING A NAME FOR THEMSELVES
China is not a country that immediately comes to mind (mine anyway) as having a major bread culture; but, deep in the recesses of pre-history, two cultures have been credited with an early understanding of fermentation and yeasts: Pharaonic Egypt and the Zhue Dynasty around 500 BCE. And the Chinese immigrants brought these baking skills with them. They started small with mom-and-pop home baking, using small stone ovens, often making pao’s and buns, but they rapidly usurped the Portuguese and became the region’s bakers. By the 1930s, over 40 per cent of the bread business in Jamaica was Chinese owned. They were equally dominant in British Guiana, especially after riots in Georgetown forced many Portuguese to flee the country.
Tang’s Bakery in the mid-1920s in British Guiana became one of the largest bakeries in the Caribbean, employing over 200 people. It made cakes and pies as well as bread, some of which was delivered very early in the mornings – in wicker baskets mounted on bicycles – to nearby restaurants, cakeshops, hotels, homes and outlets that sold their product. Their vast and inventive product range included items such as Scorch buns or ‘bull stones’ and Chester or ‘crepe soles’ (old bread ground up and mixed with sugar and lard) as well as the popular penny loaves (called ‘Antiguas’), platted loaves (a traditional Portuguese shape) and sandwich loaves. They also offered a form of bread pudding, guava tarts and (traditional Chinese) black-bean cakes called ‘towsa’.
SHOPS R US
Many also entered the retail trade, once again, in several instances, replacing the Madeirans. In many places, going to a shop meant going to a Chinese-owned one. In Jamaica by the 1930s, they owned over 1,200 groceries; and up to today the Chinese community there remain the major force in the modern grocery trade.
Despite their distinctive appearance (pigtails!), they often quickly adopted the customs, language (to the extent that in some areas they served their East Indian customers using a smattering of Bojpuri and Hindi) and eventually the attire of their customers, many of whom remained wary and distrustful. No matter, they extended credit to these customers, illegally opened their doors to them after hours and on holidays, by and large were seen as fair traders (a reputation that eluded the Portuguese), offered a wide range of goods and, in the remote areas where many settled, were often the only game in town (speaking of which, they introduced a wide range of Chinese gambling games as well.)
The Chinese village shop was part grocery and dry goods store, part hardware store, part apothecary and part clothes emporium. (They left the rum shops to the Portuguese). There you could buy cooking oil, butter, flour, rice, sugar, cloth, thread, hats, kerosene, matches, rum and a wide selection of provisions: okra, green beans, star apples, pineapples, bananas, coconuts, bunches of green plantains, as well as live chickens and pigs. Many also sold a variety of local and Chinese snacks. These varied from crab backs to English pastries to various Chinese tarts and cakes (all made at home, which was usually above the shop).
By the 1860s, Georgetown, Port of Spain and Kingston each had large, increasingly prosperous, ‘Chinese Quarters’. If you couldn’t find what you wanted there, it probably didn’t exist. And if you couldn’t make it to one of their shops, Chinese street hawkers or vendors, mostly on foot, some on bicycles, went from house to house in the suburban centres selling bundles of callaloo, bok choy, freshly roasted peanuts and even, occasionally, fresh chickens.
THE CHINA CONNECTION
This involvement in the retail/grocery business, initially mainly oriented to the creole customer, catalysed trade links with a network of wholesalers in Guangzhou. Starting in the early years of the twentieth century, these links opened the door to the importation of the salted, pickled preservatives and condiments so vital to Chinese/Hakka food: dried shrimp, soy, hoi-sin, mushroom, black-bean and cha’siu sauces, sesame oil, etc. Numerous retail stores specializing in Chinese foods opened in the main cities, such as Kong Sue in Georgetown. They offered foo chuck (bean curd), funcee or vermicelli, Chinese dried mushrooms, mook gnee (wood ears), lapchong (Chinese sausage), Chinese teas, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and a variety of other specialist treats.
And this unlocked the full extent and range of Chinese cooking.
And while I have you, if you haven’t as yet bought my book (with many, many more details both of the history of the Chinese immigration and the food), here’s a handy Amazon link. Mixing Memory and Desire
If you’re not partial to buying from Amazon (I wonder why that might be?), go direct to my publisher. the Link’s attached