The corridor ran the length of the world and you weren’t there
– Ron Butlin, Ryecroft
Kingston, Jamaica, 2013. Devon Chang and I stand on a balcony looking over the dirt and dust of Barry Street. There are few Chinese here now. Black women kneel on the pavement selling their hotchpotch of goods, ragga music blasts from speakers above the cacophony of car horns. It is an edgy place. The public car lot where we have left Devon’s car is run by street gangs who charge to wave vehicles into parking spots. They are skinny boys passing a vodka bottle between them who, Devon tells me, will quickly turn nasty if anyone refuses their service.
‘All of this used to be Chinese,’ he says sadly as we walk towards the temple, looking for signs of the old Chinatown. It is a scorching day and I am without a hat, the sun already burning my neck and shoulders. I feel a little dizzy. I am four weeks pregnant, still stunned by the knowledge there is a tiny thing inside me, already growing, leading my body in its strange woozy, fluttery dance. He carries on. ‘The bakeries, the laundries. Washing lines hung across the street. People lived above, hopping from roof to roof to each other’s houses. You see the signs?’ He points to the white Chinese characters painted on the blue wall of a store. They are faded and chipped.
I don’t tell him that what I really want to know about are the gambling dens tucked away behind these shops and down alleyways, where my father played sixty years ago. I’m not sure if this is a secret history, one Devon might not know or not want to share. He points along the road. ‘These buildings were cafés and groceries. All Chinese. Can you imagine?’
Yes, I think, I can try.
♣
The Chinese in Jamaica are a close community who pride themselves on their success in business. Most made their money as shopkeepers. Now Devon runs a bakery that makes a third of the island’s bread. They are also highly conscious of their ancestry and culture. ‘We’re more Chinese than the Chinese in China!’ he says as we enter the tall temple, disused for years now, guarded by two peeling stone lions at the front, and round the back, the live-in caretaker, who only wakes when his black Dobermann barks and snarls at us.
We climb the dusty stairs. ‘Years ago newcomers in need stayed here,’ he tells me, waving his arms around the temple’s spacious first floor. I picture the rows of single beds where men just off the boats would sleep. No women at first – wives sometimes came later. All of them were ethnically Hakka – ‘guest people’ – migrating thousands of years ago from northern China to the south, many later migrating again overseas. There are eighty million Hakka worldwide, living in every continent. I find out all the Lowes in Jamaica come from two Hakka villages in Guangdong, travelling to Jamaica first as indentured labourers after slavery, and then in the early twentieth century, many, like my grandfather, joining relatives, escaping poverty.
‘Migrating is in our Hakka blood,’ Devon says, and I think of my grandfather and father’s migrations, two gambling men swapping hands they knew for ones unknown, and how migration is so much more than a physical relocation, but a transference from one realm of being to another – a translation of oneself.
Despite the community intimacies of the Chinese, the proximity of Yallahs to Kingston, where most of them live, the close generational ties of families, only one person can be found who remembers my grandfather – a woman called Marjorie Chong, who now lives in Canada. The network of the Chinese Benevolent Association helped me trace her. She remembered the old shop in Yallahs and the man she knew as Lowe Shu-Bak, meaning ‘uncle’ a common term of respect. She also remembered Lowe Shu’s son, Ralph, who went to England.
I am strangely dazed to hear this – a stranger’s memory suddenly solidifies the lives of my father and grandfather, the details of which have slipped and slid around my head for years. It makes them more than just a story. But the absence of more memories of my grandfather also confirms what I have always supposed – he was an outsider, moving from one isolated rural village to another, separated from the wider Chinese community, and, I suspect, largely unbound by its manners and mores.
Devon is part Chinese and part black, like my father. He tells me that this mix is accepted now but as a child some elders looked down on him for not being pure Chinese. They called him ship yit diam, meaning ‘eleven o’clock child’ – the clock’s hand stuck, not reaching twelve, not quite good enough. Half-Chiney and half-brain were other terms. I wonder if this is the answer, or part of an answer, to why my grandfather treated my father so badly – because he wasn’t pure Chinese, because he was half black?
♦
Today I am visiting the Chinese cemetery, where, to my great surprise, my grandfather is buried. Apparently all Chinese on the island are buried there and the work of the CBA make them easy to trace if you know a name and a year of death. It’s less easy to trace Hermione. The records of her birth and marriage have been destroyed in a fire. Not this time, but another time, I’ll have the heart to look up the records where I know her ancestors will exist – the island’s slave registers.
The cemetery is a sprawling field of knotted pink bindweed and white graves, their marble headstones long ago stolen by the gangs whose territory is just the other side of the cemetery’s walls. There are above-ground tombs strung with makeshift curtains, claimed by vagrants who sleep their days away on the cool stone shaded from the sun. I’m with a group of CBA volunteers involved in long-term restoration work – rebuilding the crumbling walls, cleaning graves, setting new headstones. We are accompanied by Mitchell and Delroy, burly men with gold-tooth smiles. They are security guards to protect us from thieves and shoot-outs.
Only up close do I see that some graves are almost completely concealed by the tangles of vine and pink buds. ‘You know what we call this weed?’ Patty Hogarth asks me. She’s the secretary of the CBA and has been helping me negotiate Kingston. ‘Rice and peas!’ She laughs. ‘But it’s our number one enemy! Swallowing our ancestors’ graves.’ As we walk, she hands me a map of the whole cemetery, divided into sections – babies, children, old section a and b, new superior, wealthy, honorary, free. ‘Your grandfather is in New Superior,’ she says. I wonder what this means. Then she hands me an aerial photograph of five graves, one circled in red pen. ‘This one is his,’ she says. Below the image are his English and Chinese names. ‘For your records,’ she adds seriously.
There are loud bangs – the sound of a car backfiring, I think, but Mitchell and Delroy are suddenly on guard, tense, glaring around. ‘It’s gunshots,’ Patty says, pointing to the wall. ‘Over there. But it doesn’t sound too close.’ The gang violence that has sullied Kingston for decades is linked to old political rivalries between the PNP and JLP, rival gangs allegedly funding political campaigns. The gangs have deep roots in Jamaican society, making money through protection and selling drugs, but some of the proceeds are invested in creating a parallel state – building schools and clinics and handing out food and money to the poor. Not everyone thinks the gangs are bad.
We keep walking, nervously, finally stopping at a row of indistinguishable graves. Daniel Jin, another volunteer, walks the line, counting and referring back to his map. ‘It’s this one,’ he says, standing at the foot of a dilapidated grave, bent over, pulling the tough handfuls of pink flowers from it. I stand beside him above the tomb that holds my grandfather’s bones. ‘He died 25 January 1969,’ he says. ‘Do you want to write his name on?’ These are temporary markers until the headstones are replaced. He hands me a pen.
‘This is an amazing day for you, huh?’ says Patty. ‘What an honour, to pay your filial duty to your grandfather.’ She lifts the camera hanging around her neck. ‘Let’s take some photos.’ I smile as the camera snaps. And here we are – three generations out of four: my grandfather, me, the speck of an unborn child.
♠
‘What was your dad’s Chinese name?’ Devon Chang asks me, when I show him a photo of my father – a young man, sharply dressed, standing on the front step of a house somewhere in London. From nowhere I remember that my father did have a Chinese name but it’s lost from my memory. But surely he had enough names. Ralph, his real name. Chick, Chin, Chan, his nicknames. It was years before I asked how he came by them. I don’t know why they called him Chick, my mother said, but she remembered Chin was for the old song ‘Chin Chin Chinaman’. There are in fact at least two old songs with that name, both by white composers, both reworking stereotypes of the Chinese. In the 1917 version ‘Old John Chinaman’ is a subservient launderer with an appetite for gambling. It might be related to the 1898 version, about a down-on-his-luck launderer who gets caught cheating:
Chinaman no money makee
Allo lifee long!
Washee washee once me takee,
Washee washee wrong!
When me gette catchee cheatee
Playing piecee card,
Chinaman they allo beatee
Kickee welly hard!
Chan was better, my mother said. Chan for Chan Canasta, off the telly. He was a card magician. Amazing hands. Chan Canasta was actually Chananel Mifelew, a Polish immigrant, made famous in the 1960s by his appearances on the BBC. Always dressed in a dinner jacket and bow tie, Canasta was gracious, humble and well spoken – he believed that making an occasional mistake gave his act more credibility. He was a ‘mentalist’, skilled in feats of mental magic, able to predict which cards his celebrity audience had picked from a deck, or recall the precise number of vowels on any given page of Shakespeare. He spent hours refining his memory. My father must have been given his moniker because he too had an eidetic memory and in the old days, like Canasta, was well dressed, refined, eloquent. Strange now to think that the old man who shuffled through our house in crumpled clothes, his hair uncombed, who searched the kitchen bin for dog-ends, might have once, like Canasta, been the epitome of charm.
♥
On my last day in Jamaica I take the bus to Golden River in Above Rocks, the place we found Auntie Fay all those years ago, but also, Dolores tells me, the place where Hermione gave birth to my father. The bus swerves dramatically up the hill, higher and higher, the road turning rugged, tall trees bending precariously on the banks, the views on either side of the thick forest, shadowy, deep-green, the air suddenly cooler, thick with the scent of the vegetation. We are closer to the sky swirling purple overhead, half set on a storm.
Years after my father died, Sam described a dream he was having nightly – a kind, consoling dream I envied. In it, our father, a young man back in Jamaica, was climbing the lush mountain footpaths. ‘He can’t turn round,’ my brother said, ‘but I know he’s home again and I know he is happy.’ Only now does it occur to me that Golden River looks like the place of my brother’s dream. Far away from James Lowe, perhaps these mountains were my father’s sanctuary. A sudden movement in the trees catches my eye, but there’s nothing there except the wind driving through the leaves.
I came to Jamaica to find my young father, as though the young man might help me make sense of the man I knew. I came to find something of my grandmother and grandfather too. But high up in these mountains, it dawns on me – they are no more here than where they have always been: in my mind, residents of my imagination, imbued with idiosyncrasies of manner and expression, voices I can hear, almost as real to me as my own face in the mirror. They live their lives in the landscape I’ve created, the one I recognise, fashioned in that house in Ilford thirty years ago where johnny cakes fried on the stove and my father sang calypso. It was there that Caribbean men came to the door in Ashgrove Road asking for Chick or Chin, exchanging their greetings – Long time no see. Knowing this, what am I left with? A father who was both familiar and a stranger, constructing his life from my memory and the memory of others, through guesswork, inference, conjecture. Not because he is dead, but because he was always only half real, half imaginary, known to me for a long time but never wholly seen – bound to the silence of his own secrecies.