Torn between identities

Walton Look Lai, historian attached to the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, for the past ten years, has seen the evolution of this intermingling.

Look Lai, is the editor of the cd-rom database entitled The Chinese of Trinidad and Tobago since Independence 1962- 2006. A who’s who and social portrait, which is part of the Chinese Bicentennial celebrations 1806-2006, remembers a time when this cohesion did not always exist

“In the 40’s and the 50’s there was not too much evidence of a deep interest (shown by Chinese) in what was going on in the country, they were really interested in their families and their businesses” Look Lai said.

“However,” he said “as it happens with any immigrant community, as the generation progresses and the intimate experiences they have with their surroundings deepen, the more the balance adjusts itself away from their parent’s cultural traditions.”

He added that this was the typical immigrant story that even applied to West Indians who have migrated to the United States of America who’s children sometimes do not consider themselves West Indian.

When asked how dangerous this phenomenon was, he replied that “different people place value on different things” but added that as a historian he could not help but realise the validity of the identity tension that occurs within the immigrant youngster who is torn between deciding whether he or she should identify with their parents ethnic history or where they were born, and the root of this conflict is immigration. He said that the answer to this dilemma is based on individual choice and that there was no common answer to the question that every Trinidadian has to answer for themselves since the majority of the ethnic groups now living here were originally from another land.

In the case of the Afro-Trinidadian community Look Lai believes that the memory of their ancestral heritage, as compared to the other immigrant groups, is far removed because of the length of time that has elapsed since they were brought here through slavery.

He said members of the Indian community, can still remember a grandmother who came off the boat and some members of the Chinese community still remember the voyage that brought them here.

He said that “the relative loss of memory that has taken place within the Afro-community helps in understanding why someone can say I am a Trinidadian but I am not an African, which to me makes no sense but it is understandable because of that big loss of time.”

“There are however intelligent members of the African community who understand the value of identifying with things African without feeling the need to say that I am this and not that because really in the final analysis you are both” he said.

He added that every Trinidadian should cherish the mixture of their ethnicity and nationality since this was what “a proper multi-cultural appreciation was all about, everyone realising their new-world, hybrid identity and celebrating everybody else.”

He feels that the tension that exists between the various ethnic groups in Trinidad and Tobago occurs when a particular ethnic group is predominantly confined to one step of the social ladder, and that the questions of social structure and wealth as it relates to multi-culturalism in this country is troubling.

“One has to be realistic enough to understand that the society is not equal and when we have a multi-cultural society that is not equal, friction will creep into the relationships among the various ethnic groups, when you are talking about economics and wealth there is that reality that regardless of what kind of hybrid you are, you have a certain place in the social structure” he said.

He believes that the politics of the country has always been dominated by the two mass, working class elements, the Afro- Trinidadian and Indo Trinidadian groups, with the smaller ethnic groups left, to a large extent, outside the political arena.

“Those members of the small ethnic groups who have the ear of the political directorate” are the chosen few and are not interested in group articulation or elevating the agenda of their ethnic group” he said.

Look Lai is an accomplished author who has already written two books, one was done as his PhD thesis at the New York University, published by John Hopkins University Press (1993) and entitled “Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar; Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918.”

While doing research for this book the historian stumbled across several Chinese documents that had not been made available to their public or even academic audiences.

This spurred him on to write his second book which was published by The Press University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica (1998) and entitled The Chinese in the West Indies 1806-1995: a Documentary History.

The cd-rom on the who’s who of important Trinidadian Chinese individuals will be released next month. It contains profiles on 170 people in 12 occupational categories. Another one of his books entitled Essays on the Chinese Diaspora in the Caribbean a collection of essays on the Chinese in all the Caribbean territories: Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, Suriname, Martinique and Cuba is also scheduled for release next month.

Look Lai retires at the end of this month and will dedicate the next year to his writing.