Diasporic Practices and Cultural Identifications of Shanghainese Seamen in Liverpool

Abstract

This article draws on the understudied oral testimonies collected by Guanbao Shen and Ling Li in 1997 and 1998 to discuss the diasporic practices and cultural identifications of Shanghainese seamen in Liverpool, a community that has received less scholarly attention than other overseas Chinese communities. The Shanghainese seafarers are marked by three important characteristics—provenance, profession, and intermarriage, adding to the diversity and uniqueness of their diasporic practices. The discussions revolve around the wider social meanings and purposes of Chinese food-centered practices, return to the home country and negotiation of multiple boundaries among the Shanghainese seafarers. It is argued that the prosaic and festive eating and cooking of Chinese food is employed to (re)create ethnicity, resume the state of relatedness and strengthen the intergenerational bond, and that the return to the origin of birth could potentially disrupt an idealized and imagined conception of the homeland. Shanghainese seamen’s individual and collective negotiation of ethnic boundaries features complicated entanglement and thus permeability and fluidity, which echoes Ien Ang’s call for moving beyond diaspora into hybridity.

“Mr Wang, you are big family, you own children, don’t let him die here, let him die in hospital, children will terrify.”

“No,” I said, “I am Chinese, Chinese get Chinese custom.”

(Shen & Li, 2008, p. 62)

Introduction

The above excerpt comes from a Shanghainese seaman’s account of his conversation in English with a doctor upon his father-in-law’s imminent death under his roof. This seaman married a British woman in Liverpool in 1951 and the passage of time saw the transition of his father-in-law’s attitude towards this intermarriage from initial disapproval to complete trust. On his father-in-law’s deathbed, he insisted that the dying body should be kept at home, all the windows be opened and his children be summoned to kneel at the foot of the bed, hoping to pay his last respects to the dying man in a Chinese fashion.

This seaman is a member of the Chinese seafarer community in Liverpool, who came to Britain as one of the employees of the Blue Funnel Line and other shipping services in the first half of the 20th century. According to Ng, Chinese migration to Britain dates back to as early as 1814 (as quoted in Chan, 1991, p. 16). The first London Chinese community began to build up from around 1885 onwards, centering on Limehouse Causeway, and simultaneously a similar community was developing in Liverpool around Pitt Street (Jones, 1979, p. 397). The initially limited size of the Chinese seafarer community in Liverpool rose to about 502 in 1911, except for the period from 1942 to 1947, when Liverpool was the headquarters of the Chinese Merchant Seamen’s Pool, into which about 10,000 Chinese seamen from Liverpool, London, Rotterdam and the Far East had been enrolled (Broady, 1955, pp. 67–68; for more information on Chinese mariners of the First World War, see James, 2020).

Shanghainese seamen came in the second immigration wave, as the intervention of the Second World War required Britain to turn to Asian seamen to man its merchant ships. Throughout the war, Chinese seafarers comprised 5% of the allied merchant marine and one of Britain’s largest immigrant workforces, tasked with ferrying tonnage between Allied nations (Oyen, 2014, p. 526; Zhang, 2021, p. 139; for the treatment of Chinese sailors aboard British ships, see Foley & Foley, 2018; for that aboard allied ships in general, see Oyen, 2014, H. Lee, 2018 and Zhang, 2021). After the war, many of them returned home or were repatriated after the war, reducing the community to its pre-war proportions. In the year following the war’s end, Britain discreetly deported an estimated 5,000 Chinese naval veterans—300 of them forcibly separated from their children (Castle, 2015; Zhang, 2021). This post-war treatment of Chinese seafarers is described as “recruitment followed by repudiation” by the British historians Benton and Gomez (2007, p. 30), which came as a common practice among the Allied nations (Zhang, 2021, p. 142).

Substantial scholarship has been devoted to the study of Chinese diasporic communities in Britain from various aspects, yet research on Chinese seamen remains an understudied field, “probably on the grounds that they are transient by definition” (Benton, 2003, p. 364). A few studies from the 1950s to the 1980s have explored the development and acculturation of the Chinese community in Liverpool (Broady, 1955; Craggs, 1983; O’Neill, 1972; Wong, 1989). More recently, thanks to Ms. Yvonne Foley, one of the left-behind children, her persistent work as an independent researcher to uncover the hidden history of Shanghainese seamen over the years has drawn wider attention from media, research bodies and scholars, just as Malay seafarers who have settled in the UK and other parts of the world also received sporadic media interest in both Malaysia and Singapore since the 1980s (Bunnell, 2007, p. 422). British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported the little-known history of Chinese seamen through Yvonne’s story-telling in 2015 and 2020 respectively; China Central Television (CCTV) news channel “24 Hours” also carried a special report in 2018. Fong, an artist, filmmaker and academic, led the project “Dragons of the Pool,” which was supported by Heritage Lottery Fund and Edge Hill University and culminated in a multimedia exhibition at the Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead from February 9 to March 18 in 2018. The exhibition presented video interviews of the seamen’s descendants, who are now in their seventies, and invited local people to share their stories of the Liverpool Eurasian community. In 2021, The Guardian published an article by Dan Hancox on the secret deportation from late 1945. In 2023, a two-part documentary The Exiles: My Stolen Chinese Father and The Exiles: Australia’s Asian Deportations, produced and directed by Tom St John Gray, reveals untold stories of racially motivated deportations of Chinese and Malay men from post-war UK and Australia. The aforementioned media coverage and academic efforts afford ample archival records and oral accounts to understand the hidden family stories and national histories and further reflect upon issues of racism, identity, belonging, trauma and exilic experience of the present era.

Compared to the more recent accounts that help reveal the voices of the seamen’s descendants, the oral testimonies that Guanbao Shen and Ling Li (two scholars based at Shanghai University) collected from 28 Shanghainese seamen in Liverpool back in 1997 and 1998 stand as an equally important and precious source of information, since they come directly from the narratives and memories of a past generation that no longer exist. The accounts were subsequently published as a book titled Boxia de jiyi: Liwupu lao Shanghai haiyuan koushushi (Memories off the Ship: Oral Histories of Shanghainese Seamen in Liverpool) in 2008. As the authors stated in the book, one of the informants asked for publication 10 years after the interview and a few others wished for publication after they pass away, and these restrictions were not lifted until 2008 (Shen & Li, 2008, p. 11). The interviews were conducted at a time when the informants were mostly in their seventies or eighties and some of them passed away not long after, thus making the book a particularly helpful source to unravel the unobtrusive lives of the Shanghainese community in Liverpool. The oral testimonies mainly include the informants’ birth information and early-year lives, working and living conditions on the ships, settlement and residence in Liverpool, and their feelings towards life in terms of religion, racial discrimination, interpersonal relationships and cultural differences (Shen & Li, 2008, p. 10). The interviews were carried out in Shanghai dialect, which is most familiar to the informants and thus conducive to the articulation of their thoughts. Although the interviewees were under the umbrella of Shanghainese seamen, they actually came from different regions of China, with the majority coming from Shanghai and adjacent areas like Ningbo and Wenzhou, and a few from Tianjin in Northern China and Guangdong in the south. The few exceptions, in spite of different provenances, were deemed part of the Shanghainese community as they interacted and socialized mostly and regularly with the Shanghainese. This group of seamen labelled themselves as Shanghainese seamen because Shanghai was better known to foreigners back then and nearby places share similar dialects to Shanghai. Identifying with Shanghainese not only granted them convenience but also helped them leave a good impression on foreign co-workers. As one seaman explained, “I come from Wenzhou but I speak Shanghai dialect. When foreigners asked me where I come from, I simply said I come from Shanghai because they know nothing about Wenzhou” (p. 353).

The oral testimonies recorded by Shen and Li shed light on unexplored areas of the Shanghainese seamen’s daily lives, yet the language in which the book was written limits its readership to those who can read in Chinese. As a result, this book has rarely been cited in the scholarly discussions revolving around Chinese merchant seamen in Liverpool. Thus, the present study aims to bring to light some of the salient issues that stand out from the interviews by translating key oral accounts from Chinese to English and analyzing them in light of Ien Ang’s and Homi Bhabha’s theoretical approaches towards cultural identity and hybridity. Oral histories and life stories are used as data here because they provide, according to Chamberlain and Leydesdorff (2004, p. 228), “value added” to rich empirical detail and can be used to examine migrant behaviors, attitudes, subjectivities, identities, mentalities and their shifts over time. In addition, oral history situates itself between history and memory (Nora, 1989), and serves not only as a source of history—“the voice of the past” in Thompson’s (1978) terms, but also a signifier of meaning, telling us “less about events than about their meaning” (Portelli, 1998, p. 67). Therefore, this article does not take the oral materials as objective reproductions of (trans)national histories or subjective reminiscences of individual experiences, but rather focuses on the wider social meanings and purposes of the diasporic practices and cultural identifications of Shanghainese seamen, formed and transformed by social changes in both home and host societies. Citations from the oral testimonies have been translated from Chinese to English by the author of the present article, unless stated otherwise. The discussions revolve around the seamen’s social activities in the family and community, which come to the fore in the oral accounts and are utilized to articulate ethnic identifications.

Ethnic identification is defined by Calhoun (1994, pp. 392–393) as a person’s use of racial, national, or religious terms to identify oneself, and these ethnic terms or general categories provide a universal framework for ordering social relationships. According to Jones (1979), the Chinese in Britain have never been interested in developing social relationships outside their own closed communities, “resolutely maintaining their Chinese culture and continuing to identify with their kinsmen at home rather than with the host community” (p. 389). They worked long hours (mostly running restaurant and takeaway business) to earn money, which is partly used as remittances for relatives back home and partly meant for their old age upon return to the hometown. This idealized prospect of returning to the homeland was disrupted by their forced passage from sojourn to settlement, which came suddenly as a result of “external political events, notably the Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and the Cold War” (Benton, 2003, p. 353). This disruption, along with their intermarriage with English wives, complicated the maintenance of Chineseness in social isolation. Christiansen argues that overseas Chinese draw on racialized constructions of Chineseness to suggest a common diasporic consciousness (Benton, 2003, p. 7), such as blood descent and physiognomic features, yet we are also warned of the risk of essentialist and absolute notions of Chineseness by Ang (1998), suggesting that Chineseness “acquires its peculiar forms and contents in dialectical junction with the diverse local conditions in which ethnic Chinese people construct new, hybrid identities and communities, both in the places where they’re at and, where possible and desired, in connection with each other” (para. 32). The case of Shanghainese seamen in Liverpool amply exemplifies this point. The synergized influence of provenance, profession, intermarriage, time and space renders dynamism and uniqueness to their diasporic experiences and practices. They, first of all, use the label of “Shanghainese seaman” to define themselves while differentiating themselves from seafarers of other provenances. They also draw on cultural symbols to manage intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic relations in the gradual erosion of shared memories and common attributes with the lapse of time and changing social realities. Among the diverse practices, eating and cooking Chinese food in daily life and on festive occasions, trips to the home country and the management of multiple boundaries emerge as significant and meaningful practices of the Shanghainese seamen in their negotiation of cultural identities and thus constitute the focus of this study.

Chinese Food-Centered Practices

Ethnic boundaries could potentially erode as a result of cultural loss, long separation from and faded memory of the homeland as well as evanescent home links. As Lever-Tracy (2000) points out, “insofar as a diaspora is constituted by shared memories and common attributes, these are likely, with the passage of time, to fade and assimilate as it adapts to its diverse environments” (p. 5). It is seen from the oral accounts that most Shanghainese seamen do not celebrate their birthdays and traditional festivals on a regular basis. Chen confessed that

Now I no longer celebrate my birthday as foreigners do, which is down to different customs. I celebrated my 60th birthday. Everyone has a birthday, and Chinese save others the trouble…Neither do I celebrate Chinese festivals, like Mid-autumn Festival and Spring Festival. It may not sound nice, but I am just waiting to die. (Shen & Li, 2008, p. 321)

Chen has a Chinese wife and highly-educated children, but he does not attach much importance to Chinese traditions and customs, probably because he lives alone in a government house that affords him a great deal of convenience, separated from his children, who pay him regular visits (p. 321), and from his wife, who lives with their son (p. 319). Despite the loss of traditional festivities as a general trend, a few informants choose to celebrate western festivals like Christmas and Father’s Day. Xiao, whose story is quoted at the beginning of the article, talked about his celebration of both Chinese and western festivals. “Each year I celebrate Christmas, Easter and other holidays. I also celebrate Chinese New Year, buying groceries and cooking Chinese food, when my sons and daughters would come back for a family reunion” (Shen & Li, 2008, p. 55). He takes good care of his wife and father-in-law, keeps a close relationship with his four children and maintains a harmonious family. His house is bedecked with silk paintings, Buddha portraits and Chinese-style furniture, according to the extra notes given by Shen and Li (2008, p. 50). From these two cases, it seems that whether to maintain the festivities has much to do with the milieu within the family and the intimacy of relations between family members. Generally, most Shanghainese seamen end up in divorce or live alone in either government-subsidized houses or privately-owned houses, thereby the salient cultural loss within the community.

Notably, some informants keep customs that do not have to involve many participants and can be practiced in one’s privacy, such as burning incense on festive occasions (p. 249), burning tinfoil paper on Chinese New Year and Double Ninth Festival (p. 367) when the Chinese would climb mountains and pay tributes to their ancestors as part of the celebration activities,as well as exorcising ghosts with Chinse gods and even pictures of Jesus Christ (pp. 324–325). Moreover, the Shanghainese seafarers demonstrate an almost unified stance towards western religion, claiming that they do not believe in the what they call “British religion” but in Bodhisattva (pp. 99, 241, 249, 286, 352, 375) or Buddha (pp. 175, 265, 367), or adopting an atheist attitude (pp. 231, 299, 383). In spite of the differences, they share the common view that it does not matter as to which faith you follow as long as you do not do something evil. In the exceptional case of Wu, he follows the Church of England—his wife’s belief—and pays regular visits to the church, asserting that “at least going to church will not do you any harm because it teaches you to be a good person” (p. 217). Another important practice that is well maintained, when many others are subject to gradual erosion, is eating and cooking Chinese food. I do not intend to discuss here the use of ethnic differences (cultural images, symbols, myths, values, and the like) for economic and political utility, such as how Chinese food is exploited in the catering business. Rather, I am going to explore the social purposes of Chinese food employed by Shanghainese seafarers on festive occasions and in everyday consumption.

Food-centered practices are widely performed among the Chinese community in Britain. Beneath this dependence on Chinese food lies deep-rooted notions of the inextricable connection between diet and health in Chinese culture. As Chan (1991) argues, “the importance of balance was emphasized in the Huang Ti Nei Ching which advised man to eat and drink moderately and to adjust the various food and flavors to the season and one’s state of health” (p. 59). Traditionally, Chinese people form the habit of choosing certain food to consume and avoid at different times of the year according to one’s health conditions. When the Shanghainese seamen talked about their accommodation to local life, the majority of respondents mentioned cooking Chinese food and expressed the difficulties in getting accustomed to western food (Shen & Li, 2008, pp. 178, 372). As Lin described,

living with my English wife for so many years, I have been used to the life in Britain except for one thing—western food, which I do not like. I have always been eating Chinese fan cai (rice and accompanying dishes). Sometimes I would have western food cooked by my daughter on Sundays, but after the meal I felt like having eaten nothing at all and had to eat some Chinese fan cai in one or two hours’ time. (p. 178)

In Chinese culture, “food has been used to mark calendric and family events as well as social transactions” since antiquity (Chan, 1991, p. 37). For the overseas Chinese community, Chinese food is the epitome of cultural familiarity in not only festive contexts but also in prosaic, everyday eating. Qiu provided a detailed account of Chinese dishes that are often cooked on important occasions.

To celebrate the Chinese New Year here, I always prepare a rich combination of Chinese dishes for the occasion. The dishes are tasty, all cooked by myself. Roast duck, roast pork, barbecued pork and sliced poached chicken constitute the cold platters, and the main dish is shark fin soup, but I use white fungus instead because shark fin is unavailable nowadays. It is about 12 dishes in total, shared by the whole family. My daughter and nieces know that this is to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Besides, I would prepare special Chinese dishes for birthday celebrations in the family. When I turned 75, they cooked a big meal for me. (Shen & Li, 2008, p. 301)

The combination of cold and hot dishes and the even number of 12 both reflect the notion of balance and harmony, which is highly valued in Chinese culture. From the fact that the informant takes pride in his cooking, we can see that Chinese food is also employed to mark his own ethnic identity and remind family members of their ancestral origin.

Food plays an important role in the process of (re)creating ethnic identity or “food-centered nostalgia” (Holtzman, 2006, p. 367) and serves as a cultural site where displacement, fragmentation and the reconstruction of wholeness can be understood (Sutton, 2001, p. 75). The “wholeness” in Sutton’s definition draws on Fernandez’s description of the “whole” as a “state of relatedness—a kind of conviviality in experience” (p. 76), arguing that the smells and tastes of a lost homeland afford diasporic individuals a temporary return to a time when their lives were not torn asunder or fragmented. For example, pao fan (leftover cooked rice soaked in plain water), as mentioned by the Shanghainese seamen (Shen & Li, 2008, pp. 335, 372, 374), was a typical breakfast in Shanghainese households before the 1980s. The consumption of hometown food in the host country evokes migrants’ memories of the birthplace and provides a temporary haven to relieve the psychological anxieties resultant from spatial and temporal displacement from the homeland, echoing the predominantly positive emotions linked with food-evoked nostalgia, as concluded in a recent study by Reid et al. (2022).

For Shanghainese seamen, Chinese food serves wider social meaning and purpose other than recreating ethnic identity and returning to the state of relatedness, that is, to bridge generational cleavages. It is seen from the oral accounts that Shanghainese seamen make good husbands by financially supporting and taking care of the family, which is also corroborated by the studies of Broady (1955, p. 65) and Jones (1979, p. 389). They also make conscientious fathers. As Lin related, “I have always tried my best to satisfy the needs of my kids. There was a time when he wanted a pair of leather shoes. I had to pawn my wedding ring for seven shillings to buy him the shoes” (Shen & Li, 2008, p. 169). Wang recounted that “I never skimped on kids’ clothing because good clothing gives them decency at school. After all, we are Chinese” (p. 67). Nevertheless, a common issue emerging from their account is that they had no time to teach their children due to busy work schedules (pp. 72, 258, 295, 373), leaving the task to their wives who mostly do not work outside home. Their posterities hardly speak Mandarin, Cantonese or Shanghai dialect, and are substantially Anglicized in many aspects, leading to stark intergenerational differences. The following is Lin’s story.

My son said to me, “make no mistake here, dad. You are from China and you have your Chinese way. You have no idea about the foreign way here. We are studying in the UK, with the expenses covered by the government. You had no parents in China back then and received little education. We went to high school here in the UK. We are different from you.” (p. 372)

In the face of generational cleavages, Shanghainese seamen had to compromise on having their children make important decisions on their own, losing the authoritative “father” role in most traditional Chinese families characterized by a father-son relationship, where “the son was expected to obey, serve, show respect and always defer to his father” (Chan, 1991, p. 24). In terms of the utility of Chineseness, Christiansen (2003) suggests that “Chinese ethnic identity may position itself as an asset to be used or as a burden difficult to avoid” and “for some Chinese parents in Europe, helping their children to overcome linguistic, educational and cultural barriers is a greater priority than the maintenance of their ‘Chineseness’” (p. 175). For the Shanghainese seamen, they seem to have placed their priority neither on helping their children to assimilate nor on maintaining their Chineseness. This is in part due to the nature of the profession of seafarers, which makes it difficult for them to spend time with and instil Chinese values into their children in their formative years, thus the responsibility of education falls upon the shoulders of their British wives. The maternal role of local women in raising the next generation facilitates the assimilation process and leaves less room for the maintenance of Chineseness. In addition, the successive generations have a wider range of options by which to style themselves and are more capable of moving between groups and cultures, thereby disrupting simple and clear-cut definitions of national identity (Song, 2003). The oral testimony is replete with lamentations on generational dissonance and distance—discontent with the younger generation’s infrequent visits (Shen & Li, 2008, 214) and unwillingness to hear fathers recount their past hardships (p. 374), and dismay at young people’s disregard for Chinese etiquettes at the funeral (p. 387). Under these circumstances, Chinese food emerges as a significant and meaningful means to bridge the generation gap.

In the oral accounts, the respondents talked more about cooking Chinese food for family members—children, grandchildren and wives—than for themselves. The Shanghainese seamen made it a routine to cook Chinese food on weekends and on special occasions for the younger generations, who would specially come to the house to join family gatherings. This method, if deliberately employed with the agenda to strengthen familial relations, proves to be effective not only because Chinese food caters to the sensual needs of its eaters but also because the process of eating evokes past memories and creates new memories of conviviality and good times spent with a Chinese (grand)father and assuredly with the whole family. This is similar to Bajic-Hajdukovic’s (2013) identification of how Belgrade mothers use food as a medium to convey memories of themselves as individuals and of the wider family to which their children belong, as well as memories of the culture their ancestors come from. Special dishes that carry distinct ethnic markers are more likely to remind the younger generations of their ancestral origins. The following are two accounts of the experiences of cooking for the family.

My daughter likes Chinese food, and I used to cook for her. Till now, I have been cooking for the family. Every Saturday I am the master chef. Both my daughter and son-in-law would come, and my granddaughters would come on Friday night and stay till Sunday morning. (Shen & Li, 2008, p. 296)

Every time my son says he wants curry chicken, I would go buy chicken thighs and get them ready so that we can have curry rice for dinner together. On Sundays we would eat prawns. There are 26 to 30 prawns in each box, which costs 17 pounds and weighs 4 pounds. A box of prawns can sustain three meals. I usually cook deep fried prawns, removing the shell, washing them clean, and having them deep-fried with a coat of egg and breadcrumbs. Or, we would have stir-fried dishes, a mixture of pork, tomato, chilli, dwarf bean, onion, fresh mushroom and dried mushroom. It is always one dish and one pot of rice, separated in eating. (pp. 193–194)

The plain language in which the activity of cooking Chinese food for the family is narrated suggests the prosaicness and triviality of the respondents’ daily life, yet it strikes the reader/listener with their vivid memory of minute details and great delight taken in the mundane task of cooking. There is also an overflow of deep love for the family and sincere wishes to construct intimacy, which is not expressed or claimed in any overt manner.

Therefore, the diasporic practice of cooking Chinese food within the seafarer community remains relatively intact amid the gradual erosion and loss of other major traditions and customs. It plays a meaningful and useful role in the (re)creation of ethnic identity and in the return to a state of wholeness/relatedness that helps negotiate lived experiences of fragmentation and displacement from the homeland. It is also employed as an effective means to bridge generational cleavages and to construct intimacy with successive generations. Similar to food practices, diasporic homecomings also feature in the Shanghainese seamen’s efforts to construct ethnic and cultural identity.

Return to the Homeland

The word diaspora often invokes the imagery of traumas of separation and dislocation and also serves as potential sites of hope and new beginnings (Brah, 1996, p. 190). In the case of Shanghainese seamen, they left the home country to seek their fortune when it was, if not stricken by war, undergoing a hard time, and came to terms with their settlement with the establishment of families in the host country. Naturalization was taken as an option for different purposes, including convenience of work (Shen & Li, 2008, p. 98) and children’s better education (p. 146), or came as the result of feeling undesired by both the home country and the host country (p. 232). Some of them were able to make trips back and forth between the two countries before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, depending on the routes of the ships that they were manning. Most of the returns to the homeland, if ever successfully made, took place after the reform and opening up of China in 1978, which allowed non-Chinese citizens greater mobility to enter the country. As revealed in the oral materials, most informants expressed the wish to go back to China, yet they might not be able to do so due to practical limitations, such as financial ability and health conditions. Among those who managed to go back, some went to search or visit parents’ tomb, as explained by Xiao and Wang.

I’m going to Shanghai again this year to continue searching for my parents’ tomb. I wasn’t able to go back in the past, but now I have only one wish, that is, to know at least whether my parents are lying vertical or horizontal in their tombs. When I find them, I’m going to renovate the tombs. That’s my only wish. (p. 56)

When I went back to China in 1991, I went to pay respects to my parents in Fenghua, Ningbo. My wife told my kids that I was getting old yet healthy enough to move around and go back, just in case no chance was left me. We Chinese people always have to visit ancestral tombs and pay respects. (p. 77)

The diaspora, as argued by Anthias (1998), tend to privilege “the point of ‘origin’ in constructing identity and solidarity” (p. 558). The practice of returning to the homeland and paying respects to ancestors represents both a desire and a channel to trace and identify with one’s origin, as seen from the choice and articulation of words—“go back,”“only wish,”“parents,”“ancestral” and “we Chinese people.” In the meantime, the tomb symbolizes the past, still and static, as part and parcel of the imagined “home.”

Diasporic homecomings are often ambivalent, if not wholly negative experiences (Tsuda, 2009), and the Chinese seamen returning home had similar experiences. During the trips, there were joyful tears at the sight of relatives (Shen & Li, 2008, p. 360) and happy moments of birthday celebration and family reunion (p. 368), but disappointment with the poor healthcare services and sanitary conditions, sense of loss and estrangement, as well as feelings of being a traveler and an outsider, predominate in the accounts. Wang related his experience of how he was treated at a store in China.

In Britain, Chinese people have a good reputation. There have been few or even no cases of robbery, drug trafficking and murder that involve Chinese people. I’m not saying how nicely the British treat us, but at least in a normal way. It’s just that we were received with more contempt in China when we went back. I’m Chinese. When I went to the store, I asked, ‘can I have a look at this please?’ The reply I got was “that is a sample, sample.” As the shop assistant was busy reading newspapers, my shopping there was just a hassle to him. If I wasn’t there, he could read newspapers and tell jokes uninterrupted. I could do nothing but leave. (p. 190)

Several respondents communicated their amazement at the rapid changes taking place in Shanghai and found that the “home” in their memory and imagination was no longer there. Confronted with the changes, they felt out of place during the trips (pp. 140, 217). As Tu recounted, “during my stay in China, I didn’t take the bus. I like walking, and more walking would familiarize me with the place. If I had to meet with someone, I knew no other place but Park Hotel. Perhaps I will go back to China next year” (p. 229). Park Hotel, completed in 1934 and located on West Nanjing Road of the downtown, was the highest landmark in Shanghai in the 1930s. Tu, who was born in 1929, went to Britain in 1950 and must have remembered Park Hotel as the symbol of Shanghai. Shi’s story sounds more disheartening and distressing.

No matter what, I’m Chinese and my root is in China. I’m in the UK right now, but it doesn’t mean I have no desire to go back to China. The thing is that people like me are not needed in China. When I went back to visit the relatives in 1990, I could read the Chinese characters but was unable to write them, not to mention reading the simplified characters. I went to look for my aunts, but I could not recognize the younger ones, and the older ones were dead. (p. 140)

To put Shi’s feelings in metaphorical terms, he felt like a drifting piece that finds itself no longer able to fit into an altered puzzle. In addition to visiting ancestral tombs and relatives, travelling also constitutes a major purpose of trips back to China. Some took the trip alone and some took their family with them; some joined travel agencies and stayed in hotels, and others stayed with relatives. Their birthplaces—Shanghai and nearby areas—were not the only destination. They mostly travelled across the country, visiting major cities and places of interest. Shi described his trip to China with his wife.

In 1990, I went to China with her. When I went there in 1956, I stayed for only a few hours. She also wanted to see the Great Wall. We stayed in hotels because we couldn’t get used to living with relatives. She said there was no privacy. Anyhow, I couldn’t recognize the younger generation, and the older ones have passed away. We stayed for a week more in Shanghai than in other places and joined group travels. Then we left for Beijing, Xi’an and Guilin, where we took a plane to Hong Kong. (pp. 143–144)

The narration clearly shows that Shi assumed the same role of traveler as his British wife, paying visits to places that are new to him, including the much-changed birthplace of Shanghai. Instead of taking actual trips to China, Song often made imaginary trips to the homeland through videos recoded by his friends and relatives. Making non-factual trips to the home country by immersing oneself in the visual satisfaction of unmet desires resembles paying regular visits to Chinatown, which is “a miniature replica of an imagined ‘China’” (Christiansen, 2003, p. 5) yet provides an alternative means of incorporation into the host society that does not conflict with cultural distinctiveness (Zhou, 1992).

My favourite programme is “Dajiang Nanbei” (Across the Country), showing many beautiful places. I suppose if I had money, I would visit my relatives in mainland China. I would stay for quite a while so that I could see around. In China, Shanghai has the best buildings, such as Oriental Pearl Tower in Pudong New District. One of my younger brothers who lives in Hong Kong visited our elder brother in Shanghai and made a video. Shanghai Race Club turned into People’s Square now. City God Temple is also in the video. A building has 43 floors. Now, a tall building has been erected on the ground where I caught crickets when I was a kid. Watching this video and then throwing my mind back to my childhood is something to savour. (Shen & Li, 2008, pp. 122–123)

The word “something to savour” in the last sentence is a loose translation of “youweidao” in the original transcript, which carries with itself multi-layered meanings. It means, first of all, “of something that is interesting and delightful” and at a deeper level “of something that evokes one’s imagination and contemplation.” In every sense of this expression, the informant tries to build a connection between things that belonged to his childhood memories and things that have been altered or newly sprung up in changing times. To some extent, the unconsciously and meticulously constructed connection serves a certain purpose—to ease and absorb the impact of overwhelming transformations made to the imaginary “home,” which has already been fading away on its own with the passage of time. The practice of watching videos about the home country and the (pleasant or unpleasant) experiences that the informants narrated above fulfilled their wishes and longings for returning, yet their conception of the “home” constructed from past memories is disrupted in a way by what they witnessed and experienced during the trips. As Brah (1996) rightly argues, for diasporic communities, the “home” in the place of origin is “a place of no return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of ‘origin’” (p. 188), as the imagined “home” is a mythic place imbued with the desire of diasporic imagination rather than the real place. The ruthless realities, the sense of being a traveler and an outsider rather than a partaker as well as the feeling of estrangement, make the “home” both a place of no return and a fading idea that exists only in imagination and memory. This leads to the next question: how do the Shanghainese seamen negotiate ethnic boundaries in the host society in order to construct their cultural identity?

Negotiation of Multiple Boundaries

Ethnic boundary is “a fundamental condition of migrant society,” around which economic and political structures have been erected (Christiansen, 2003, p. 178). In the case of Shanghainese seamen in Liverpool, boundary-making takes place at different levels, between different groups and in different locales. It is manifest in the management and negotiation of social relations within the community, intra-ethnic relations with Chinese of different provenances, inter-ethnic and inter-racial relations with the larger host society, and also transnational relations with the Chinese in the home country who share the same ancestral origin.

Just like the collective memory of “eating bitter” (experiencing hardship) among older Hong Kong Chinese migrants in England, which “metamorphosed into a ‘badge of honor’ or identity” excluding people who have not experienced that pain (S. Lee, 2015, p. 217), Shanghainese seamen also identify themselves as hardworking and law-abiding seafarers—a badge of honor that differentiates them from less industrious British co-workers (Shen & Li, 2008, pp. 60, 108, 120, 190, 235, 245, 275, 358). As Wang proudly proclaimed, “we Chinese people work very hard, follow the rules and make few mistakes, whereas foreigners are so different from us, simply worlds apart, so the company has complete trust in us” (p. 60). In accordance with their own self-perceptions, the Chinese immigrants have been regarded as “the embodiment of public order” and widely respected as cultivated people from the earliest years of their settlement in Liverpool (Broady, 1955, pp. 66–68). Their comparatively sound socioeconomic conditions and untroubled adjustment help them maintain cordial relations with their British neighbors, except for occasional incidents and clashes (Broady, 1955). The Shanghainese seamen’s self-identification as being hard workers evidently functions as a badge of honor for themselves. It is also noteworthy that such self-identifications, perhaps without the seamen’s knowledge, feed into the much-contested model minority discourse emerging around the British Chinese, which is in itself a specific form of contemporary racialization that creates and sustains racial marginality (Kibria, 1998), highlights invisibility in public spheres (Parker & Song, 2007, 2009) and everyday lived experiences, such as in youth health and physical cultures (Pang, 2020), as well as reproduces notions of insularity and a lack in creativity (Yeh, 2014, 2020).

Within the overseas Chinese community in Britain, Shanghainese seamen also draw a clear line between themselves and others of different provenances, particularly Cantonese. They claimed that they did not interact much with the Cantonese due to differences in dialects, customs and values (pp. 166, 266, 275, 300, 311). Even among the Shanghainese, they have formed sub-groups, with the central one consisting of approximately 14 members, who would meet on Monday mornings and exchange information over a cup of tea (p. 28). The Shanghainese seafarers have similar migration trajectories and work experiences and share common attributes, but they differ from each other in terms of personality, marriage, family relations and financial standing. Their intermarriage with British women and the subsequent formation of Anglicized families have greatly influenced the boundary-making process. They found themselves entertaining largely different lifestyles, cultural values and moral judgements from their wives, with some coming to terms with their other half through constant compromises and mutual understanding, and some ending up in divorce due to failed attempts to overcome the discordances. As Li recounted, “the divorce with my first wife is due to irreconcilable lifestyles. As the old saying goes, ‘different philosophies lead to different paths’” ( p. 245). This attests to Ang’s (1997, p. 63; 2001, p. 198) argument that, due to distinct and sometimes conflicting values that prove difficult to circumvent and reconcile, any intercultural exchange will always face its moment of incommensurability, which disrupts the smooth creation of a wholesome synthesis or consensus. A general impression from the oral account is that the Shanghainese seamen’s intermarriage with local women exerts either catalytic or counteractive influences on their adjustment and acculturation. A stable and happy marriage (family) is conducive to the migrant’s integration into the host society or at least facilitates the selective acceptance of its cultural values, yet a broken marriage leads to a keener sense of incommensurability and erects dichotomies of self/other and Chinese/British as irreconcilable opposites. This is consistent with Song’s (2009) study, which problematizes the assumed link between intermarriage and integration and argues that the minority spouse’s racial awareness may be even heightened as a result of their direct contact with members of the mainstream society. Therefore, the ethnic, cultural and psychological boundaries of diasporic individuals are multiple, permeable and dynamic, bearing out Barth’s (1969) contention that identity formation is the interplay of external forces and individual voluntary choices.

Through constant negotiation of ethnic and cultural boundaries, the Shanghainese seamen are situated in the state of what Ang (2003) calls “togetherness in difference” or “hybridity,” which is of great significance “in a world in which we no longer have the secure capacity to draw the line between us and them, the different and the same, here and there, and indeed, between ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’”(p. 141). In his definition of the Third Space, Bhabha (1994) argues that “the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but rather on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity” (p. 56). Hybridity, the in-between space, provides individuals a vision to examine both the self and the other and observe the center from the margin. In their oral testimony, the informants reflected upon the lack of solidarity among Shanghainese seafarers (Shen & Li, 2008, pp. 81, 163, 195, 251, 252, 364) and in the larger overseas Chinese community (pp. 132, 136, 379). They examined the UK and China from a comparative perspective, seeing the merits and demerits of both cultures on matters of settling domestic financial issues (pp. 66, 295), attitudes towards consumption (p. 374), living conditions (p. 300) and the role of women in marriage (pp. 70, 94, 273). Living in the UK, a home-away-from-home place, furnishes the seafarers a vantage point to observe the place of origin from a distance, as seen in one respondent’s comments on why China has not become a developed nation. He attributed it to the jealousy of Chinese people, short-sightedness of some leaders and resistance against changing the way things are done in the country (p. 147).

The hybrid in-between space is marked by ambivalence and fluidity, where “it is no longer possible to say with any certainty where the Chinese end and the non-Chinese begin” (Ang, 2003, p. 147). Just like the interior decoration in one informant’s house, you could see typically Chinese-style ornaments—china, brush painting, palace lantern and ginseng liquor, and in the meantime, you could see the presence of English plants and paintings. The items are mixed together to create a general impression on the viewers. It is not possible to say with certainty which style it is exactly and perhaps the phrase “a blend of Chinese and English styles” would come as a particularly apt description. In addition, it is uncertain what items will be added and which ones will be removed as time goes by, largely dependent on what ornaments are available out there and what the house owner has in mind. In the same manner, the Shanghainese seamen have entered relations with different people, Chinese and non-Chinese, with the larger environment, with time, with space, with memories and with past selves, leading to invariably unsettling and evolving identifications.

Conclusion

This article has analyzed the diasporic practices of Shanghainese seamen in Liverpool, focusing on the eating and cooking of Chinese food, return to the homeland and negotiation of boundaries, and explored how these practices as contested sites have influenced their ethnic and cultural identifications. First, despite a conspicuous movement towards the loss of major traditions and customs within the community, Chinese food-centered practices have been well retained and actively utilized to serve wider social meanings and purposes mainly in the process of (re)creation of ethnic identity and return to the state of relatedness and, most noticeably, dissolution of generational cleavage and alienation. Second, the actual and imaginary trips made to the homeland fulfil the respondents’ longing for return on the one hand, and could potentially disrupt the imagined and mythic “home” and make it a place of no return on the other. Finally, in the management of intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic relations in different times and locations, Shanghainese seamen are situated in a hybrid space where boundaries are multiple and permeable. From the discussions, we see that Shanghainese seafarers, as part of the wider overseas Chinese community, share with other members common attributes and collective memories, yet their provenance, profession, intermarriage and unique stories also give diversity to their diasporic experiences and practices. According to Benton and Edmund (2014), “while ‘overseas’ Chinese may share an ethnic label, they lack the uniformity ascribed to them and are split by class, sub-ethnic variation, language, place of origin, period of arrival and reason for migrating, with successive generations tied ever more faintly to the ‘homeland’” (p. 1169). Therefore, we need to be vigilant of the danger of essentialist and reductionist definitions of Chineseness. Diasporic identification(s) is the product of the interplay of arbitrary external forces and complex individual selection, possessing various shades and diverse forms. Just as the Shanghainese seamen project different destinations for their cremains, some yearn for the sea (Shen & Li, 2008, p. 321), some look forward to the home country (p. 369) or the birthplace of Shanghai (p. 300), and some simply wish for a peaceful spot in their sons’ back garden (p. 313).

Aspects of Shanghainese seamen’s diasporic practices and cultural identifications that I have outlined above contribute to studies on the Chinese diaspora in two main ways. The first concerns the neglected oral testimonies from 28 Shanghainese seamen in Liverpool timely collected by Shen and Li when the informants were in their seventies or eighties. As the language in which the book was written and the place in which it was published have limited its circulation and readership, this article throws light upon the accounts and offers a critical analysis of how the Shanghainese seamen construct their ethnic and cultural identity through different practices. These discussions help us understand the commonalities that this particular group share with the larger diasporic Chinese community and the divergences deriving from their provenance, occupation, intermarriage and individual migratory trajectory. The second contribution of this article lies in the linkage that it helps build between the Shanghainese seamen and their descendants. As mentioned in the introduction, an increasing amount of attention has recently been given to the voices of the left-behind children, which enable us to understand their life stories, especially how their lives have been influenced by the loss of their fathers. The oral accounts presented in this article present the descendants a picture of what their fathers went through in their acculturation process in post-war UK and what attitudes they held towards their families. What follows on from this for future studies is to examine whether and how these asynchronous dialogues and shared memories could potentially influence the descendants’ coming to terms with this traumatic experience. An investigation into the intergenerational differences in diasporic practices and cultural identifications could form another line of enquiry for future scholars.