Leaving the Estates

We may not know how many simply walked off the estates before their terms of service ended – and were never caught and brought back to complete their indentures. It’s possible that Estate managers decided to cut their losses on the passage money out, didn’t want the deserters back, because they were more trouble than they were worth, that these were the unemployed, the unskilled of the cities who had no intention of working on the land. We do know that many went into business of one kind and another as soon as they completed their indentures.

We know most of the indentured were men, a few were women, widowed in what amounted to civil wars, and there were some families. It’s understandable once they had worked out their indentures; many men married or took common-law wives from the local population. Dr Look Lai notes that the children of these unions were more Creole than Chinese . . .

Most readers already know that on leaving the estates many Chinese became shopkeepers. Dr Look Lai tells us that by the late 1850s – that is, almost as soon as the first arrivals of 1853 had completed their indentures, the village shopkeeper was, more often than not, Chinese.

This was a truly extraordinary feat when you remember that of the very first arrivals in 1806, in 1809 only 30 of the 192 who arrived on the “Fortitude” were still here and when Emancipation came in 1834 there were only about two or three Chinese in Trinidad. Yet to this day many village stores are owned and operated by Chinese – in fact a local comic strip features a recent Chinese immigrant serving customers in the local shop (think about it).

The success of the Chinese surprised and astonished visitors to Trinidad. Dr Look Lai quotes a missionary’s report on the Chinese after indenture in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries:

“All come here penniless. Today some are extremely rich merchants, and the others at least comfortable in their roles as small shopkeepers or big traders. In the heart of the smallest village if you find a shop be sure it is owned by a Chinese.”

Others became market gardeners after leaving the estates – probably because these were agricultural workers before ever they left China. In “Child of the Tropics” Yseult Bridges (n?e Guppy), telling of her childhood in Port-of-Spain in the 1880s, remembers seeing a Chinese vendor, with his distinctive pigtail, carrying two large baskets filled with produce he’d grown in his market garden balanced at the end of a pole he carried on his shoulder. Today, the President of the Trinidad and Tobago Agricultural Society is Wendy Lee Yuen . . .

The Chinese man Yseult Bridges saw in the 1880s and 90s might have served his indentures on an estate in Trinidad, but it’s just as likely that he came here from British Guiana (today Guyana) the Colony which received most of the indentured Chinese in the British West Indies. When they were free of their indentures they, too, attempted to set up shop in villages and townships, and cultivate market gardens but the Portuguese, already freed of their indentures for several years, were by now firmly entrenched and not to be dislodged however hard the Chinese tried to set up in the business of trading, of shopkeeping and market gardening.

Those who could afford to do so returned to China. For the rest, it appears the Chinese in the West Indies kept in touch with each other because when they heard how well their fellow countrymen were doing in the retail trade in Trinidad, the Chinese who worked in British Guiana came here to swell the numbers of the Chinese community.

More came direct from China where the Empire was crumbling into disorder and anarchy and those who could, emigrated. Many went to the goldfields of California working for low wages until the United States; fearful of the “Yellow Peril” (American miners felt the lowly-paid, hard-working Chinese were a threat to their jobs – and their wages) the US Senate passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, barring all Chinese immigration – a ban that stayed in force until 1943.

Even so, thirty years after indenture, in 1891, there were only 1,006 Chinese living in Trinidad.

Just as today West Indians in Europe and North America get together in West India Associations, Clubs and Societies and where there is a sufficiently large West Indian population these associations divide into Trinis, Jamaicans, Bajans, Guyanese, to help each other adjust, to settle down in a new country and to keep in touch with their roots, so, in Trinidad, the Chinese formed Associations.

There are to this day (if I read Dr Look Lai aright) the Chunghsan, Toishan, Sun Wui, Sam Yup, and the Hakka Fui Toong On Associ-ations. Why so many Associations for a comparatively small section of the population? (In 1990 there were less than 5,000 Chinese. There could well be even less today with so many emigrating to the developed world due to the alarming rise in crime and kidnapping in recent years.)

We all know there are more people (1.3 billion) living in the People’s Republic of China than in any other country, not so many realise that the People’s Republic is only the third largest country in the world (after Russia and Canada). With so many people living in so vast a land it shouldn’t surprise us to learn there are seven official languages. Once you know that, you understand why there are at least five Chinese Associations in Trinidad, that each Association caters for immigrants from different regions and languages, or dialects, in China.

Next week, the role of the Associations, the saga of John Lee Lum – and other eminent Chinese.

annehilton@rave-tt.net