An Account

Chapter 9 Chen’s account  ( 1 )

My father immigrated to India in the 1930s. He settled in Shillong and opened a shoe shop. I was born in 1945, eldest of six children. I apprenticed with my uncle in another town while I was studying there. I went to school in the morning and worked in my uncle‘s shoe shop in the afternoon and evening. I learned to make shoes when I was 9 or 10. I quit school and returned to Shillong when I was 12 years old. My father needed me to help out in the shop.

When the Chinese in Shillong read in the English newspapers that Chinese soldiers fought with Indian soldiers, we didn‘t believe it. Some said, ―The Indians are fighting with the Communist Chinese in China. It has nothing to do with us. We should be all right.

The local Indians started yelling at the Chinese to go home. They threw stones at Chinese shops and beat up the Chinese. One day a group of students came to the street where many Chinese had their shops. They came to this shoe shop owned by a Hakka. The students shouted anti-Chinese slogans and wanted to drag the Hakka to the street to beat him up. The Indian who owned the shop next door came out and shouted at the students, ―Hey, these people were born here in India. They are not from China. They are one of us. They speak better Hindi and Khasi than you and have better manners than the lot of you. Our children fly kites together, go to school together and play together. You leave them alone and go home.‖ The police came and the students left.

The Chinese in Shillong waited for the war between China and India to be over so they didn‘t have to be afraid—afraid of losing lives, afraid of losing friends and relatives and afraid of losing our properties and businesses.

Then the arrests started. I remember the night the police came. It was one in the morning. I heard shouting. I heard banging on our door and I heard my parents rushing around. They hid money and valuables in little cubbyholes and cracks in the walls. We had half the money sewn into our clothes, and we had pillowcases full of clothes and food ready. My parents woke us. Then they opened the door.(46)

The soldiers lied to us. They said, ―You don‘t need to take that much with you. You don‘t need to take money with you. You will be released in no time. Meanwhile, the government will look after you, food and all. Don‘t worry.

When the Japanese invaded China my mother and her sister escaped to Singapore. Then the Japanese invaded Singapore. They escaped to India just before the Japanese invasion. She met and married my father just before WWII ended. My mother had the experience of concentration camps. She didn‘t believe the Indian soldiers. She knew we would be away for a while. I think we were the most prepared Chinese in Shillong. My mother had packed clothes and dried food for each of us.

The soldiers arrested my whole family: my two brothers and sisters, my parents and me. They put us in the local jail with the Chinese they arrested in Shillong. My father didn‘t know what happened to our shop. He heard the Indians had looted all the Chinese shops. He heard that the government people went in and took everything. He heard that the government people sold the goods in our shops, and he heard that the government people sold the whole shops to the Indians, goods and all.

There were some Chinese from the Hill Stations in jail with us who were married to native girls. The soldiers arrested the husbands and gave these wives and children a choice, whether to go with their husbands or fathers or stay at home. Most chose to stay. These poor Chinese worried about their shops and restaurants all the time and wondered if their native wives and pan-sien5 children were all right.

 When a Chinese man married a non-Chinese woman and had children, the other full-blooded Chinese called these half-Chinese children pan-sien, which literally mean ―half-surname.

 The Chinese sometimes call themselves ―Thong people‖ or ―Tang people in Mandarin. Tang derived from the Tang Dynasty in the seventh century, the golden age in Chinese history.

We, over 2,000 Tong6 people, were put on a train. It took us seven days and nights to get to Deoli. We stopped often, you see. We stopped to let the freight trains pass, we stopped to let the army trains pass and we stopped to let the passenger trains pass. We also stopped three times a day, usually at a station, so we could cook food. We carried firewood and food like rice on the train. We also stopped at night, usually by a deserted section of a train station. (47)

We were quite crowded on the train. We packed onto hard wooden benches, my neighbors‘ elbows digging into my ribs. The older people really suffered as their backs and bums went numb from sitting on a hard surface for so long.

One night a group of us young people tried to find a spot by the track to lie down, but that was difficult because soldiers patrolled the platforms and the tracks. They carried kerosene lamps and guns. Why do you need guns to guard a group of women, children and mostly old men? Where can we go? What can we do? The soldiers waved the lamps as they walked back and forth on the platforms, which disturbed our sleep, when we could sleep at all. Then there were the mosquitoes. I once just closed my palms gently together and I killed three mosquitoes. They were that thick.

At our meal stops we had to hurry to find bricks or stones to build our cooking fires. Once we had the fire going, the soldiers would get vegetables and sometimes meat for the meal. The funny thing was, the soldiers ate with us. I guess we were good cooks.

One day the train stopped at a station for cooking. I heard shouting, which came closer and closer. I saw about 200 Indians coming towards us. They waved sickles, machetes, sticks, shoes and chappals (rawhide sandals). The Indians shouted for us to go home, shouted that India should get rid of us. The soldiers stopped the shouting crowd. They said, ―These are Chinese born in India. They are not Chinese soldiers captured at the frontier. If you don‘t go away, we will shoot.‖

The crowd went away, still shouting. I heard their voices getting fainter and fainter as they went away.

One day I heard a woman screaming on the train. She went on and on. She was pregnant, you see, and she gave birth to a daughter. This daughter is now in the United States.

When we reached Deoli, the train unit commander handed us over to the army station. We entered a world from the movie setting in Bridge on the River Kwai. Barbed wire fences everywhere. Bright lights lit up the barbed wire fences. Armed soldiers watched over the camp from watchtowers, probably afraid the Chinese might escape during the night. (48) ".