I pulled out the photo albums I had brought to Canada almost 40 years before. The albums are a photo gallery of Chinese who lived in Calcutta in the 1960s, and who are now scattered in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Australia. I look at a picture of Pearl—my best friend—and me. Pearl‘s father, a government employee, lost his job as a maintenance man at the docks because the Indian government barred Chinese from working in government jobs. Pearl‘s father opted to return to China.
I look at a picture of Chen, my classmate in Chenko Chinese School. Her father worked in a furniture factory owned by an Indian. Chen‘s family received deportation orders. In the picture, Chen posed with a neighbour‘s baby. She was fond of the baby and wanted a picture to remember him by. Pearl, Chen and I promised to write, but the Chinese and Indian governments suspended postal service between the two countries after the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident.
My friends‘ parents did not own properties, but many Chinese in India did. Under the Defence of India Rule of 1962, the Indian central government declared 80 properties owned by the deported or emigrated Chinese as ―enemy property‖ and seized them. Fifteen of the confiscated properties belonged to Chinese who lived in Tangra (Mohan, 2010)
In the album, I look at a picture of Daisy, Susan and me, taken three months before I left for Canada. Daisy immigrated to San Francisco and Susan to Canada. I look at a picture of Sun-Yun, who left for Taiwan a month after I immigrated to Canada, and I look at a photo of Mi, who now lives in Vancouver. I look at other faces in my photo album, faces of people who I remember but don‘t know where they emigrated to and don‘t know where they are today.
The 1962 Sino-Indian Incident, with its aftermath of Indian government-sanctioned harassment and assaults upon Chinese residents, fundamentally changed the Chinese communities in India. Most Chinese in the 1950s and early 1960s wanted their children to graduate from Chinese language schools, marry someone from the Chinese community and work in Chinese businesses. After the Sino-Indian Incident, most Chinese parents sent their children to English language schools so that upon graduation, their children would be able to immigrate to Europe, North America, Australia and other parts of Asia.
My mother initially planned for me to graduate from Chenko, a Chinese language elementary school, and then attend Moi Kong, a Chinese language high school. But in the wake of the Sino-Indian Incident, my mother enrolled me in an English language school when I graduated from Chenko. She planned for me to emigrate.
Forty-eight years later, of my parents‘ 7 children and 21 grandchildren who were born in India and who are still alive in 2010, seven remain in India. The rest have scattered all over the globe: to Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Sweden, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Of the 5,000 Chinese remaining in Calcutta today, every single one has friends or relatives who have emigrated.
Strife has marked the past 70 years of the Indian subcontinent. The two-day ―Great Killings in Calcutta in August of 1946 killed 6,000 and injured 20,000.13 The 1947 India-Pakistan partition displaced 12.5 million and killed 1 million.14 The Indian-Pakistani wars of 1965 and 1971 had a total estimated casualty of 3 million.
On August 16, 1946, Muslims and Hindus in Calcutta clashed. Muslims rampaged through Hindu shops and houses, destroyed properties, and raped and killed Hindus. The Hindus rampaged through Muslim shops and houses, destroyed properties, and raped and killed Muslims.
After the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, Hindus in Pakistan migrated to India and Muslims in India left for Pakistan.
India and Pakistan fought over disputed territories in Kashmir. The war started on August 5, 1965, and stalemated a month later. The United Nations Security Council passed a resolution on September 20, 1965, that called for a ceasefire. India accepted the resolution on September 21. Pakistan accepted it on September 22.
India and Pakistan clashed on December 6, 1971, on the eastern and western fronts. The war ended 11 days later when the Pakistani military forces in East Pakistan surrendered and Pakistan ceded East Pakistan as an independent Bangladesh.
Assamese is the official language of the state of Assam, India.
The magnitude of these losses has overshadowed the displacement of 35,000 Chinese residents in 1962 Sino-Indian Incident.
Not much has been published about the Chinese residents in India during the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident. Rita Chowdhry‘s Makum, written in Assamese17 and published in 2010, is an exception; Payel Bannerjee‘s 2007 article ―Chinese Indians in fire: Refractions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and citizenship in post-colonial India‘s memories of the Sino-Indian war, is another.
My eight-page short story about living through the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident in The Last Dragon Dance attracted attention; Rafeeq Ellias‘ book of photographs, Chinatown Kolkata, and his documentary, The Legend of Fat Mama, touch on the Sino-Indian Incident. Zang Xing‘s article, which explores the identity of Chinese Indians, will be published in December 2010 or early 2011. One section of Zhang‘s article looks at the lives of a group of Chinese who were deported or voluntarily went to China in the wake of the 1962 conflict.
The Chinese Indians in Toronto identify their ethnic heritage geographically based on where they used to live in India In a recent get-together in Scarborough, I sat at a table with a group of
immigrants from Calcutta Chinatown. A man from across the room came up and spoke to my cousin: ―Are you from Ka San (Calcutta City)?
My cousin nodded. ―Yes. I am from the Dhamtala area, near New Market. You?‖
―I am from the Bara Bazaar area. I am Yung Lin-Kong‘s son.‖
―You must be from Sun Yat Sen Street,‖ I interjected.
Yung shook his head. ―No, no. I used to live near the Cantonese carpentry shop, on Black Burn Lane.
―Oh. You must know my second brother, Li Ping-chen. He used to live on Black Burn Lane, on the second floor across from a carpentry shop,‖ I said.
―Yes, yes. I know Ping-chen.‖ He peered at me. ―You are his sister?
―Yes. You must also know my eldest brother, Ping-Yun. He used to work in the family shoe shop on Bentinck Street.
―I immigrated to Calcutta in 1951. I was a kid at that time. My son sponsored me to Toronto two years ago. You could say I lived most of my life in Calcutta.
―You must remember the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident, I said.
―I remember many Chinese were deported or interned in Deoli. Was your family interned?‖
―No. We were not interned.
His eyes glazed. ―We don‘t usually talk about 1962 incident. Anyway, I don‘t remember much about that time. I was really young.
Yung was 17 years old in 1962.
This is a typical response when I ask Chinese Indians to tell me about their experiences of the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident, especially the Deoli internees.
I understand their reluctance as I had the same uneasiness in talking about my experience.
For example, I had wanted to exclude ―Rally at the Ochterlony Monument‖ from my manuscript The Palm Leaf Fan when I submitted it to a publisher. ―Rally at the Ochterlony Monument‖ is the only story about the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident in the book.
I had a vague fear that something might happen if I talked about the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident. This subconscious fear persisted when I was asked to read from the book. I would read ―Rally at the Ochterlony Monument‖ when asked, and then quickly change to another story in my book—one not related to the 1962 incident.
Even now, I react instinctively and want to avoid talking about the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident because of this subconscious fear.
It happened at Tim Hortons when I sat down with Liu, Hua and Chen for our interview. We froze when we saw two South Asian men in uniform at the next table —they turned out to be security guards. Seeing the uniforms as we discussed the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident triggered our fear of Indian soldiers and the anti-Chinese mob: the Indian soldiers who knocked on our doors at midnight to arrest and intern many of us; the Indian soldiers who knocked on our doors to hand out deportation orders; the Indians who taunted ―Mera naam hai Ching Ching Chu…‖ as we ran for home; and the Indian mob who shouted ―Dirty Cheena, go home…‖ before destroying our properties and turning their clubs on us.
A fear that never really goes away .
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