There are so many good historical themes that the British newspaper The Guardian published a report in May called The secret deportations: how Britain betrayed the Chinese men who served the country in the war.
There is no way to send an extranet link, it is not sent here, and it is easy to find on the official website of the Guardian.
During World War II, britain to ensure the Atlantic sea transport line, there is a very lack of excellent seafarers, and China's Shanghai and other places are large ports, there are many experienced seafarers, so the British recruited as many as 20,000 seafarers from China to help Britain engage in Atlantic transport missions, the war is extremely cruel, the Allied side has 3500 merchant ships sunk, 72,000 merchant seafarers died, the Guardian report estimates that thousands of Chinese seafarers (thousands) died.
Han Qing, director of the Maritime History and Culture Research Center of Dalian Maritime University, said in an interview with China Daily: "At that time, 15% of the seafarers of the British merchant fleet were Chinese, and I consulted Wikipedia and said that the number of seafarers of British merchant ships died in the war was 36,749, and the proportion of Chinese seafarer deaths was also in the thousands.
The picture below is of the Chinese seafarers in Liverpool in 1942, from the Guardian, the building was the Nook bar that Chinese seafarers loved to go to that year, and the appearance has not changed today.
One of the Chinese crew members, Poon Lim, who served on a British ship that was torpedoed by a U boat in the South Atlantic, drifted on a small raft for 133 days, a miracle known to the British wartime propaganda department, and a special film called "The Chinese in Wartime Britain." (the Chinese of wartime Britain), which promoted the life of Chinese seafarers in Britain.
But the gratitude of the British is only within the screen, and the salaries and treatment of the Chinese crew are lower than those of the British crew.
There were around 2,000 Chinese crew members in Liverpool after the war, and on October 19, 1945, after the victory of the war,
Thirteen British officials gathered in Whitehall, London, for a secret meeting. The meeting was chaired by Courtenay Denis Carew Robinson, a senior official of the Ministry of the Interior, and attended by representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of War and Transport, the Liverpool Police and the Immigration Inspectorate. After the meeting, the Aliens Department of the Ministry of the Interior prepared a new document designated HO/213/926. Its contents may not be discussed in the House of Commons or the House of Lords, discussed with the press, and not recognized to the public. It was titled "Forced Repatriation of Unwelcome Chinese Seafarers."
The British authorities prepared the document because at first officials wanted to expel them in the name of crime, but found that only 18 of the approximately 2,000 Chinese had committed crimes and lacked a valid reason, so they drafted this secret document for expulsion. But the problem is that, in addition to the crew members who had voluntarily wanted to return to China, hundreds of people have married or had children out of wedlock with local British women, and many children have been born.
According to British law, these people who have formed families have the right to stay in the local area, so the British authorities believe that the deportation operation must be carried out in secret, and the search team composed of immigration officials and police officers searches for Chinese men in the streets, docks, and Chinatowns, some Chinese seafarers gather with friends at the docks, some are playing mahjong, and they are arrested and taken away.
As a result, many British women found that their Chinese husbands had suddenly disappeared and never returned home, and many thought that they had been abandoned by their husbands, and they returned to China alone, regardless of their wives and children.
In 2002, a British television station released a BBC documentary called "Shanghai".
Telling the story of a British-Chinese child named Keith Cocklin looking for his Chinese father, he found a 1945 home office report in his research, which was not only full of negative descriptions of the Chinese crew, smoking opium, and said without evidence that more than half of them suffered from st. venereal diseases and tuberculosis, not only that, the report ended by saying that many of the British wives of the Chinese crew were prostitutes and did not want to accompany their husbands to China, as if to justify the expulsion of Chinese seafarers. Ignoring the fact that many British women have no idea where their husbands have gone.
Keith Cocklin is irritated by the prostitute description at the end, as his mother is just an ordinary British woman.
After the documentary was broadcast on television, it was run by a woman named Yvonne Foley. Foley's woman saw that she was 56 years old when she was born in February 1946, and she was also a descendant of the Chinese crew, and before that, she only knew that her father's name was Nan Young, a ship engineer in Shanghai, China, but she did not know that there were so many stories. After watching the documentary, she went to the government to check the reports and saw descriptions of many of the wives of the Chinese crew as prostitutes, and Yvonne was also angry because her mother was born into a wealthy Catholic family. The photo below shows Yvonne, along with Yvonne and her sister.
So Yvonne decided to find the descendants of the Chinese crew, and also set up a website, many people came to her, and recalled vague fragments of her childhood, a man named Leslie Gee told her that his father was called Lee Foh, who was also expelled by the Liverpool authorities, and then his mother married another Chinese, and when he grew up, he tried to find out the whereabouts of his father, and later with the help of the Uscisional Department, found that his father had gone to the United States.
Among Yvonne's interviewees, some of the children spoke of the incredible hardships of childhood. As the main breadwinner of the family is deported, many seafarers' children remember going to bed hungry, huddled in a room or two, and surviving on the kindness of their friends. For those married to Chinese, it is impossible to obtain state assistance, because in doing so they automatically lose their British citizenship and they themselves are officially classified as "foreigners".
Some women have also been rejected by their families for marrying Chinese men. Some people can't cope, sending their children to nursing homes or adoptions, and some have considered suicide.
One interviewee said that for many children, the hallmarks of their early years were poverty, racist abuse and "alcoholic" stepfathers. There was a mixed-race man named Peter Foo, whose father was one of the deported seafarers. When he was 14 years old, Foo's mother and stepfather immigrated to the United States, leaving him in Liverpool with his grandmother, who died shortly after, leaving him in the care of his brother, pictured below.
"So you can imagine what a glorious life I have," he said with a dark laugh, "and in a way, I'm not shocked, really, because I've had to endure racism all my life," he said. "I've never talked about compensation, I'm not interested in money. I just want a damn apology. ”
In 1958, Hollywood made a movie called "Leofoo Inn", produced by 20th Century Fox, the Chinese scenes in it were actually filmed in North Wales, Peter Foo and some other Mixed-race Children from Liverpool played Chinese children in the film, the film starred in Hollywood superstar Ingrid Bergman, she also played "Casablanca", "Murder on the Orient Express" and other well-known movies.
The most legendary story here is told by Perry Lee, and the picture below is a photo of Perry Lee.
His father was born in Ningbo in 1903, formerly known as Chann Tan Yone, during the war worked as an operator in the Blue Funnel engine room, during the war, two of the ships he worked on were hit by German torpedoes, he was captured by the Germans, sent to German prisoner of war camps for a period of time, and later returned to England after the war, in 1946 he was forcibly repatriated to China, leaving behind his British wife Frances, a two-year-old daughter.
After returning home, Chann Tan Yone decided to find a way to reunite with his wife and daughter, he returned to Liverpool in 1949 in the ship used to deport the Chinese crew, reunited with his wife and daughter, to avoid being deported again, he changed his name to Tse Pao Lee, and in 1952 Perry Lee was born.
"All the successes of my life are due to the fact that my father managed to come back," says Perry Lee, proudly a big man in Liverpool who has achieved quite a bit.
Yvonne has written a book about her years of searching called Sea Dragons: Liverpool and Her Chinese Seamen, which is also currently published in Chinese editions in China.
In these stories, the British ship poon Lim worked on was hit by a German U boat, survived after 133 days of drifting in the Atlantic, and the experience of Chann Tan Yone are all good subjects, especially Chann Tan Yone, who does not know how to translate his surname, just call xiao Tan.
Adapted into this plot:
Xiao Tan was a crew member working in Shanghai, because Shanghai was occupied by Japan, he did not want to work in a Japanese shipping company, transporting arms and supplies for Japan, so he saw an advertisement for the British to recruit seafarers in the concession, was selected to go to England, received training to deliver supplies in the Atlantic, and met a local girl Frances in Liverpool, the two fell in love and married.
The mission carried out by Xiao Tan was very dangerous, and during the war, there were up to a quarter of the British merchant ship crew casualties, which made his wife very worried about Xiao Tan's safety, and every time she went to sea to participate in the operation, Xiao Tan promised her that no matter what happened, I would definitely come back.
The picture switches to the Atlantic Ocean, Xiao Tan on the merchant ship, although serious work, but still discriminated against by the British crew, one of them called Matthews is more provocative, the fleet found the German U boat, the alarm sounded loudly, the merchant ship continued to evade, but still hit by the U boat and sank, while the escort ship was also sunk.
Xiao Tan worked on the bottom deck of the merchant ship, with tenacious faith and familiarity with the merchant ship environment, experienced a series of escapes, and finally escaped before the merchant ship sank, encountered Matthews trapped by the hatch in the middle, begging Xiao Tan to open the door, Xiao Tan originally wanted to save his life, but finally he could not bear to see death, found a crowbar to open the hatch to save Matthews.
But after the two swam out of the merchant ship, the lifeboat was already full of people, the British sailors on the ship were only allowed to go up to one more person, Matthews actually punched Xiao Tan, and then climbed into the lifeboat himself, but because the lifeboat had weapons on it, it was considered a threat by the Germans, and the lifeboat was shelled, and all the people on the boat were killed.
News of the total sinking of the fleet reached Liverpool, and many of the Liverpool seafarers' families were devastated, but Frances still believed that her husband was still alive and that Tam was not dead. Xiao Tan did not die, he found the floating object and clung to it and drifted in the sea, and finally was captured by the Germans, sent to the German prisoner of war camp, suffered all kinds of torture, and finally persisted until the end of the war, returned to the Liverpool home, met his wife, and his lovely daughter who was more than a year old, and hugged his wife tightly at the moment of meeting, Xiao Tan said, I promised you, no matter what happened, I will come back, Frances nodded.
In 1946, the British government began a secret deportation operation, and when Xiao Tan was chatting with friends at the docks, he was suddenly caught by the police and thrown into the cabin, and no one was allowed to contact, and was deported back to China. Frances's husband suddenly disappeared, people around her told her that he must miss his hometown, so he left you and the child to return to China, Frances's mother also advised her to remarry, England was also a traditional conservative society at that time, carrying the reputation of being abandoned by her husband, it is not easy to live alone with her daughter, Frances told her mother, he told me, as long as he lives, he will come back to me, I believe his promise.
After Xiao Tan was expelled back to China, he was forcibly requisitioned by the Kuomintang, transported soldiers and supplies at sea, experienced the anti-fascist war, witnessed the corruption and hyperinflation of the Kuomintang, did not want to fight a civil war for the Kuomintang, always tried to find a way to return to his wife and daughter, and finally found a way to get a pass in Shanghai, used a forged identity, deceived the British ticket inspectors at the dock, got on the ship in a thrilling way, and returned to Liverpool in 1949, when Xiao Tan's daughter was five years old. Frances, who lives alone with her five-year-old daughter, has had a tough time.
On this day Frances was cutting potatoes at home, which was the most common food she and her daughter ate.
The daughter asked, Mom, where did Dad go, and whether he would never come back.
Frances replied, no, he'll be back, Dad just went far away, and it will take a little time to get back.
The daughter asked again, but how long does it take for Dad to come back, Frances said he would be back soon, the daughter said Mom, you lied, you used to tell me that. At this moment, Xiao Tan suddenly appeared at the door of the house, and seeing her husband suddenly appear, Frances couldn't help but burst into tears, saying that her daughter's mother did not lie to you this time.