Before qualifying as a lawyer David Tang worked in Chinese takeaways and cleaned lavatories in hotels. Now the man who grew up in a village in Hong Kong owns his own helicopter and flies across the Channel for lunch in fashionable French resorts.
Li Quan, once a member of Mao’s Young Pioneers, is a business school graduate who went on to work for Gucci. Today she devotes herself to the cause of endangered Chinese tigers. Tang and Quan are more successful than most, but the Chinese as a whole — Britain’s third largest ethnic minority after black Britons and people from the Indian subcontinent and the fastest growing — are among the highest earning groups in Britain.
Some 50,000 work in law, medicine and other professions. That is almost one in five — more than twice as many as in the black Caribbean population and nearly twice as many as among black African, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and white British workers. Statistics also suggest that children from Chinese families are the most likely to do well at school.
There have been large numbers of Chinese in Britain since the 1800s but the community as a whole is little understood, certainly by comparison with more recent arrivals from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent.
That is changing because the generation that came here from Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s is starting to retire and their children do not necessarily want to work in a Chinese takeaway. Growing numbers of BBCs, or British-Born Chinese, see themselves as both Chinese and British and want their community to be part of the British mainstream. They talk about setting up an English language newspaper, similar to The Voice, which serves the black community, or the Asian Times.
One, who calls herself Natalie, says: “A term often used to describe a person of similar background to myself is ‘banana’: yellow on the outside and white on the inside. Yellow because I’m Chinese and white because my values, beliefs and outlook are those of the West.”
That’s not to say that they have abandoned their Chinese heritage. Far from it. After Tang’s daughter qualified as a solicitor, he returned to the village where he grew up to offer thanks to his ancestors — he waved sticks of incense, as protocol demands, then lobbed a bunch of firecrackers.
And Quan, for all her western success, declares herself “grateful” to Mao Tse-tung, the murderous dictator. She is a fan of Chinese laws restricting families to one child each (“the world doesn’t have enough resources to support this swarm of human beings”). And she likes to test her American husband’s palate with insects and ox penis.
The rise of a new economic superpower is forcing attention on Chinese people overseas, whether they like it or not. “We used to be seen as newcomers, only here temporarily,” says Lord Chan, the first Chinese man elevated to the House of Lords for his work in medicine. “Chinese have lived and died in the UK for a long time and will continue to do so. But it’s only now that China’s new prominence has finally focused attention on us.”
Many documentary makers have tried to make films about Britain’s Chinese community but failed because they could not get access. As a group the Chinese have tended to shy away from public life — be it politics, the arts or the media. But a new series on BBC2 this week, coinciding with the start of the largest celebration of Chinese culture ever seen in the UK, will provide unprecedented insights into the lives of the Chinese in Britain.
According to the 2001 census, some 250,000 people of Chinese origin live in Britain. That is 100,000 more than 10 years ago. Estimates suggest that as many as 80,000 more work here illegally. The pace of new arrivals largely explains why more than 60% of this highly educated community cannot speak fluent English.
Two economic migrants, “Arthur” and “Tommy”, appear in Roger Graef’s film. They share accommodation with 10 other men: the floor in their apartment is entirely covered in mattresses. To save money they eat nothing but porridge in the morning and noodles in the evening. Selling DVDs on the street, they are robbed three or four times a week. They cannot go to the police. “What we worry about most is getting caught,” says Arthur, adding that he would jump off the plane if sent back to China because he still owes a fortune to criminal gangs.
He worries that the bad experiences he has had in the UK might change him for the worse. “Are British people good?” he ponders. “I have met so many who are mean. But no matter how they treat me I will do my best to be good. I have suffered so much over here.”
Unable to afford a computer, he forages for scrap and builds his own. But with no internet connection he is unable to communicate with his family unless he spends hard-earned cash in an internet cafe. Arthur has tried to hide the hardship he has endured. But when his picture appears on the television screen his daughter says quietly: “Dad looks much older.”
Like Arthur, “Jenny” has not seen her children for two years. She borrows a camera from the TV crew to make a film to send home. This begins cheerfully with shots of her buying an ice-cream, sitting in a park, travelling on the Tube. But then she addresses her children directly: “I will go on working for you,” she says to camera. “I miss you every night . . . I still need a couple of years, that is why I can’t see you.” And suddenly she is crying uncontrollably.
It would be hard, after seeing this, to subscribe to the stereotype of the Chinese as coldly impassive.
Another man, Gui, came to the UK nine years ago. After establishing himself here, he sent for his brother. The brother paid a fortune to criminal gangs to smuggle him over, only to be found dead in the back of a truck, along with 57 others, after suffocating while trying to enter Dover illegally in 2000. Gui read about the tragedy some time later in a Chinese newspaper and had the miserable task of identifying his brother’s body.
Gui’s wife Wang, still in China at the time, adopted their motherless nephew. But when she came to join Gui in Britain the Home Office refused entry to the boy. The film documents the couple’s legal appeals — which they do not understand without help because despite being here for nine years Gui speaks little English.
After the suffocations at Dover — and the death of 23 cockle pickers, mostly Chinese, at Morecambe Bay in 2004 — many Britons felt sympathy towards the economic migrants. But that feeling quickly evaporated because those involved seemed so inscrutable. The individuals in Graef’s film, by contrast, are startlingly familiar and comprehensible.
Graef cautions that the migrants should be regarded with sympathy but not as victims: “That would be wrong. They made a choice to come here. They are driven.”
If the past is any guide, we can be confident that helicopter owning Tangs and tiger saving Quans will present themselves from among the ranks of the most recent immigrants.
Chinatown starts on Tuesday at 7pm on BBC2
