Author’s Experience

Given below is the author’s own personal experience in Kolkata.

“ My parents left Moi Yen, China, in the 1920s and immigrated to Calcutta, the city with the largest concentration of Chinese immigrants in India. My father learned the craft of shoe making. He opened three shoe shops and prospered.

We lived in the Chinatown of Calcutta. My family and I were not interned in the aftermath of the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident. But we lived through this period when our Indian neighbours turned against us. The Indian government published anti-Chinese nationalistic rhetoric that depicted the Chinese as enemies, and Bollywood movies showed Chinese men as moustache-twirling villains and Chinese women as prostitutes. The rhetoric stirred up mainstream Indians, who invaded and destroyed Chinese properties, attacked Chinese in their homes or on the streets and in general tormented Chinese Indians.

The Indian government deported many Chinese families from Calcutta. In 1962, I was in grade five attending Chenko Chinese language school. I had over 25 classmates. In the graduation photograph of December 1963, I count 12 graduates. Of the Chinese families who left India for China, the Indian government had deported half, the rest went voluntarily. ( pg73 )

The Indian government passed a law that made government jobs off limits to the Chinese. Many Chinese worked in the docks and shipyards of Calcutta and lost their jobs. Chinese carpenters who worked in private tea or furniture factories also lost their jobs because of the anti-Chinese atmosphere. Others left Calcutta when their businesses declined due to the mainstream Indian boycott, or after their properties were destroyed.

The majority of the Chinese who lived in India emigrated. This continues even today.

I left Calcutta for Toronto in 1972. In Canada, as I busied myself in studies, work and making new friends, my memories of Calcutta Chinatown in the aftermath of 1962 Sino-Indian Incident receded to the back of my mind, behind a closed door, until one day the door opened.

I browsed the DVD section of the Mississauga Central Library. I came across Deepak Mehta‘s 2002 Bollywood/Hollywood, a movie about a young, handsome rich Indian, played by Rahul Khanna, who lives in Toronto and mistakes an Indian woman, played by Lisa Rai, for a Spanish call girl. Khanna hires Lisa to pretend to be his fiancée.

I checked out the DVD.

I laughed at the Bollywood clichés. The hero, heroine and supporting dancers prance around in an apartment, with Toronto‘s downtown skyline framed by the windows and screen doors to the balcony. Truths come out and tears flow. The movie winds into the predictable happy ending, and the whole cast smiles and dances around the happy couple. A transvestite dressed in a Chinese-style gown, with a vaguely Chinese-like hairdo, minces and waves a Chinese fan and sings.

Mehta reuses an old song from a 1958 Bollywood movie, Howrah Bridge. In that film the dancer also wears a similar Chinese dress, her face made up to look like a Chinese with upward-slanting eyes. She waves a Chinese fan at male dancers who dress in vaguely Western sailor outfits, and coos, ―Mera naam hai Ching Ching Chu, Ching Ching Chu Chu, Ching Ching Chu….―Hallo, mister, how do you do?” she asks. The setting is a cliché of a club where prostitutes pick up sailors with that line. ( pg74 )

The song sent me back to Chattawalla Gully in 1962 and 1963, where I and my friends sprinted for home as Indian boys ran after us and mocked, ―Mera naam hai Ching Ching Chu, Ching Ching Chu, Ching Ching Chu…‖12 (My name is Ching Ching Chu) and threw stones at us.

I remember Mr. Ma, the principal of our Chinese school language school, cancelling all extracurricular sports like basketball and table tennis, so that we could go home before dark. I recall my mother finding a knife on my brother, Fu, and taking it from him. Chinese boys had decided to carry knives after a group of Indian youths had beaten several of them.

I remember my mother and her friends huddled behind locked doors, recounting which Chinese shops had been broken in to, who in the Chinese community had been beaten up that day, and listing the names of Chinese families who had been sent to Deoli Detention Camp. (Li, 2006)

At family and social gatherings, the Chinese speculated on why the Indian government deported one Chinese family but not their neighbours. We wondered why the Indian government arrested and jailed one Chinese family, and interned another. The members of the Chinese community in Calcutta believed that the Indian Secret Service spied on Chinese Indians. I remember the whispers around the mahjong (gaming) table:

―Chen and his family received the deportation order today. Ahya, I told old Chen not to go to the Chinese consulate. He didn‘t listen.

―I heard loud banging on the Tsang family‘s door last night. The soldiers came and took them. I bet the secret service police saw Old Tsang talking to Old Wong, who went to the Chinese consulate. The secret police are everywhere and they watch you all the time.‖

―The Liang family is going back to China. Mrs. Liang told me that Mr. Liang is certain that someone follows him everywhere. He thinks the Indian Secret Police spies on him. Mr. Liang went to the Chinese consulate‘s Chinese New Year celebration every year. He said he liked the food there. Mr. Liang thinks that anytime now, the soldiers will come to arrest him. So he‘s decided to go back to China next month. Everyday someone is arrested or deported or just leave. Soon we won‘t have enough people to fill the mahjong tables in the club house.

What is to follow will be posted later.