1
Not Made in China
Oxford’s many beautiful museums are destinations for visitors and residents alike. As a mother of two young children, I relied on their free activities as a source of entertainment and education for the little ones – a nice break in the day between feedings and naps. We’d usually stick to the child-friendly spaces for fear of damaging displays or being too noisy and disrupting other museum-goers. On one carefree, child-free morning in 2014, when the kids were in nursery, I went to see the Cézanne and the Modern exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, featuring paintings and sculptures by many of the renowned Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters of the late 19th- to mid-20th century who rebelled against the art establishment with their innovative approach to creative expression.
It was liberating to enter the museum without a double pushchair carrying the collective weight of two toddlers, along with all the equipment required for even a short trip. Walking freely with just my purse, I was ready to take in art at my own pace, although I first had to wait patiently in a long queue to purchase a ticket. I stood there, checking my phone and hearing the distant screams of small children, relieved they weren’t my responsibility. A museum worker
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approached each customer in turn with a form on her clipboard, presumably to help speed up the queuing process. She was a tall, older, white-haired lady, calm and gentle in her demeanour. I stood in anticipation, like waiting to be called on by the head teacher. Then her eyes fell on me, and she asked an innocuous question. ‘You don’t need this form for Gift Aid, do you?’
Having recently moved to Oxford from California, I had no idea what she meant. ‘What is that?’ I asked. ‘Gift’ and ‘aid’ both sounded like nice things I’d be happy to have.
She explained that it was a scheme allowing the museum to reclaim the tax on the ticket price from UK taxpayers, essentially increasing the funds received by the museum. More money for them, not for me. Yes, now I understood, slowly exhaling and suppressing my frustration. It was all clear. Simply by looking at me she’d made the quick assumption that I wasn’t a UK taxpayer, my face signalling to her that I was a tourist, a mere visitor here. That I didn’t really belong. All of this casually communicated by a poorly framed question.
Surprised, confused and unsure of how to respond in that split second – given that I was not then in paid employment, instead choosing to be a full-time carer of my children – I hesitated. Even though I didn’t wish to confirm what she was implying, my response was a quiet ‘no’. Alas, no defiance or outrage from me. It hadn’t occurred to me in that moment that since my husband was working and paying taxes, as a household we certainly were UK taxpayers. I turned away, feeling annoyed at her and dissatisfied with myself. Even now, I think of how I should have responded, how I could have pointed out her bias and stereotyping. That particular moment has passed, but the impact of the question has not. I’m regularly mis-
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taken for a tourist or an overseas student, or greeted with ‘Ni hao’ with the expectation that I speak Mandarin rather than English. I can often go about my day without feeling different or thinking about my racial or ethnic background, until an incident such as this, when someone inadvertently reminds me.
These continual assumptions are small annoyances that contribute to a lifetime as an outsider. Despite being born in Canada, having lived and obtained citizenship in the United States, and now permanently residing in the United Kingdom with British citizenship, as a person of Chinese descent I’m viewed as a ‘forever foreigner’.1 Tourist is the default assumption, not resident or citizen, and certainly not taxpayer. China, or another East or Southeast Asian country, is my assumed homeland, erasing the complexity of my journey and my story. Acts of violence or verbal abuse aren’t required to feel othered – often it’s much more subtle than that.
While I couldn’t formulate a quick, pithy comeback to the museum worker that day, this book is my fuller response. It’s my attempt to address what I – and others – have felt to be a longstanding and persistent lack of acknowledgment and understanding of British Chinese people and our histories. Across education, politics and popular culture, British Chinese experiences haven’t had much visibility, remaining largely unseen and rarely discussed. But they merit deeper examination.
British Chinese populations are growing. The 2021 Census estimated that there were about 445,646 ethnically Chinese people in England and Wales, up from 393,141 in the 2011 Census, but staying at 0.7 per cent of the total population (an increase from 0.4 per cent in the 2001 Census).2 Nearly a quarter of the figures from 2011 included people born in the UK.3 Data from the Scotland
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Census 2022 results show ‘Chinese, Scottish Chinese or British Chinese’ people at about 47,075 or 0.87 per cent of the population (up from 0.64 per cent in 2011),4 while in Northern Ireland the 2021 Census reported 9,500 ethnically Chinese people, or 0.5 per cent of the population (up from 0.3 per cent in 2011).5
These numbers don’t capture the full picture given the limitations of the Census, and also as some people of Chinese descent may not identify as ‘Chinese’, instead choosing another category like ‘Asian other’, or they may equally be of mixed backgrounds, or remain undocumented and uncounted. The 2021 Census data for England and Wales show that 1.6 per cent of the population (972,783 people) identified as ‘Asian other’, 0.8 per cent (488,228 people) as ‘Mixed White/Asian’ and 0.8 per cent (467,116 people) as ‘Mixed other’.6
The categories themselves are confusing and contested. When I moved to the UK I was shocked to find that I didn’t count as ‘Asian’ in the British conception of the term. That category seemed to belong to those of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage (considered ‘South Asians’ in the US). I remember searching online and being excited to find the BBC Asian Network radio station but was disappointed not to see any East or Southeast Asian representation. The same thing happened when I looked up the British Asian Trust. When completing official forms I belatedly discovered that I was filling out the wrong box, ticking ‘Asian’ until I noticed a separate ‘Chinese’ option. Despite China being one of the most populous countries in Asia, Britain’s colonial history and demographic make-up meant that ‘Chinese’ became excluded from ‘Asian’, placed in its own distinct, racialised category. It appears that the legacy of empire has triumphed over geographic reality. Separating out ‘Chinese’ and relegating all
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other East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) ethnicities to an ‘Asian other’ grouping encourages the harmful lumping together of very different ethnic identities, with the default assumption that we’re all Chinese. Moreover, when it came to my children, there was no ‘White and Chinese’ box, so would they be ‘White and Asian’ or ‘Any other mixed’? Why was ‘White’ always listed first? The creation of these categories has fundamental effects on lived experiences and identity formation. The banality of administrative bureaucracy becomes an exercise in exclusion.
British Chinese people tend to be a ‘minority’ within ‘minorities’ –being one of the smaller racially minoritised groups. Compared with other communities of colour in England and Wales, according to the 2021 Census, the Chinese population was well below most Black and South Asian communities: Indian, 3.1 per cent (of the total population); Pakistani, 2.7 per cent; Black African, 2.5 per cent; Bangladeshi, 1.1 per cent; Black Caribbean, 1 per cent; and only higher than Arab, Black other, Mixed White/Black African, Roma, and Gypsy or Irish Traveller groups.7 In Scotland, those in the Chinese grouping were a smaller proportion of the population than Pakistani, Indian, African and Mixed categories.8 Whereas in Northern Ireland, ‘Mixed Ethnicities’ was the largest ‘Minority Ethnic Group’, followed by Black populations, and then Chinese and Indian groups were comparable.9
Compounding the issue of low numbers is the historical dispersal of British Chinese people across Britain. This is a likely remnant of economic restrictions and discrimination in the 1900s, which limited Chinese business owners to certain industries, such as laundries and, later, restaurants and takeaways, relegating them to an ‘ethnic niche’ with less contact with white workers. To minimise
competition between Chinese owners within these sectors, businesses were spatially distributed. That’s why you can find Chinese takeaways in small towns all over the UK, even where there’s no visible Chinese community. The 2021 Census showed higher per- centages of Chinese people in London (33 per cent of the reported Chinese population), the South East (14 per cent), and the North West (12 per cent); other areas were under 10 per cent, with Wales and the North East the lowest at 3 per cent.10 Data from the 2011 Census reported that of the 348 local authorities in England and Wales, just over a quarter (26 per cent) of the reported Chinese population lived in thirteen of them, and fifty-nine local authorities (or about one in six) had fewer than 200 Chinese residents.11 This geographic spread of already small numbers contributes to the isolation and potential vulnerability of British Chinese people.
I cringe when I hear others refer to ‘the Chinese’, as if we’re one indistinguishable monolithic group subscribing to the same cultural practices. This characterisation encourages a denigrating homogenisation that views Chinese people as all the same. There are fifty-six recognised ethnic groups in China, and hundreds of languages and dialects spoken.12 China has one of the largest diasporas in the world (behind India, Mexico and the Russian Federation), with ten million people migrating around the world in 2020.13 There have been generations of migrants leaving China to settle elsewhere. With people of Chinese descent coming to the UK from all parts of the world, it makes little sense, for instance, to conflate the experiences of Chinese people arriving from mainland China, Africa, Singapore and the US. The incredible diversity within the ‘Chinese’ ethnic category with respect to language and dialect, regional identity, culture, nationality, class and much more, can
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be obscured. As such, I use the word ‘communities’ to emphasise that British Chinese people don’t just form one community, and in fact, significant differences among ‘Chinese’ people have resulted in barriers to social cohesion and solidarity. The term ‘Oriental’ has fallen out of favour in the United States, and in 2016 President Barack Obama eliminated its use in federal laws.14 However, it’s still regularly used in the UK, even among Chinese people and business owners. Indeed, there’s a neighbourhood ‘Oriental Snack Shack’ with East Asian owners that I frequent. The term is problematic because of its association with a long history of imperialism, colonialism and racism. It’s a Eurocentric term, which, at various times in history, has been used to describe the Middle East, Central Asia and East Asia, referring to a mystical place that does not actually exist. There is no ‘Orient’. It’s imprecise and designed to exoticise and ‘otherise’, relying on damaging stereotypes of those deemed ‘Oriental’. I avoid using the ‘Far East’ for similar reasons. ‘Far East’ from where? The term centres the world on Europe, conceptualising Asian countries as distant and fundamentally different. Professor Edward Said’s foundational book Orientalism explains the ways in which depictions of ‘the Orient’ as irrational and backward were juxtaposed to the modernity and superiority of the ‘West’ in order to justify Western domination.15 Likewise, any unnecessary reference to ‘Chinese’ in phrases such as ‘Chinese whispers’ or ‘Chinese wall’ feels culturally insensitive, disparaging the Chinese language as incomprehensible, or needlessly qualifying the concept of confidentiality with an ethnic element.
Struggles for first-generation Chinese immigrants establishing a life here, learning new laws, customs and even a new language, can be different in many ways to the struggles for those born
and raised in the UK, who are integrated into British society but possibly still not feeling like they fully belong. British Chinese people born in the UK (of second or later generations), those of the ‘1.5 generation’ arriving as minors, or others like me who are ethnically Chinese, born in a ‘Western’ country and subsequently emigrating to the UK, all have distinctive life stories to share. Public and political discourse, and even academic study, tend to focus on Chinese immigrants and visitors, largely ignoring or pushing to the periphery the British Chinese born or raised populations. For example, Dr Diana Yeh, Senior Lecturer at City, University of London, found that government policy making and institutional funding decisions in the 1990s prioritised overseas, especially China-born, Chinese people for ‘high art’ opportunities, while British Chinese were limited to a lesser status of ‘community arts’ and educational initiatives where less funding was available, and less prestige conferred. According to Yeh, ‘the rise of China has in fact further contributed to British Chinese invisibility’, resulting in troubling hierarchies of authenticity that privileged international Chinese.16 This question of whether one is ‘Chinese enough’ can be a conflicting personal quandary as well as a disturbing external assessment, especially for some in second or later generations who may feel more culturally ‘British’ than ‘Chinese’ and have little or no connection with China.
One of the key concerns at the heart of this book is to look at who counts as ‘British Chinese’ or, as some prefer, ‘Chinese Brits’. Do you have to be a UK citizen? What if you’re from a Commonwealth country? Is it enough that you’re simply living in Britain, or do you need to have permanent residency? Can you be a recent immigrant? Is there a notable transition from
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‘Chinese in Britain’ to ‘British Chinese’? What about people with mixed heritage? Are we talking about racial identity, ethnicity, nationality – or all of the above?
The short answer to all these questions is, ‘It’s complicated.’ Nationality tends to be documentation-driven, determined by birth certificates and passports. Individual racial and ethnic identity is primarily a matter of self-determination, albeit with an element of external validation. For instance, even if you claim a particular identity, this may not be accepted by others – think Rachel Dolezal, a former chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the US, who notoriously deceived people about her racial background, self-identifying as Black, but born to and later outed by her white parents; or Oli London, a white British influencer who reportedly went through eighteen surgeries, spending over $200,000 to look like a Korean pop star, who self-described as ‘transracial’.17 Instead of circumscribing who can claim ‘British Chinese’ identity, I prefer an inclusive approach to self-identification, which avoids debating degrees of ‘Chineseness’ and doomed judgements of authenticity. But I do acknowledge a questionable grey area where self-identification can veer into deception and cultural appropriation where ancestral ties don’t readily exist.
I’m not surprised that the Ashmolean Museum worker mistook me for a tourist. I regularly see buses of Chinese tourists (and visitors from other countries) coming to Oxford. According to the Office for National Statistics, visits to the UK by residents of China (excluding Hong Kong) have increased substantially. In 2009 there were about 192,000 visits, rising to over a million in 2018.18 During these trips, money flows. Total expenditure from inbound
trips to Britain from China was £1.71 billion in 2019 (up 14 per cent from 2018).19 COVID-19 halted this growth, and although China didn’t remove all travel restrictions until 2023, the British tourism and hospitality industries aim for a return to, and surpassing of, prepandemic numbers. China remains a valuable market for international tourism, with countries actively courting Chinese tourists to come and spend. I remember the first time I heard Mandarin spoken over the public-address system on a train from Oxford to London, letting passengers know that the Bicester Village stop for luxury outlet shopping was approaching – language access in this country seemed to prioritise the retail industry and the UK economy generally over the need to convey vital information to its residents.
Not only are tourists courted, but students too. China sent more international students to the UK than any other overseas country from 2015 to 2022, surpassed by India for the 2022/23 academic year.20 The Higher Education Statistics Agency reported that in the 2019/20 academic year there were approximately 400,000 non-EU students, of which over 104,000 were from China. The COVID-19 pandemic saw a slight reduction in numbers, but there were still about 100,000 Chinese students each year from 2020 to 2023, with the number of students from China increasing 41 per cent from 2017 to 2022.21 Overseas student tuition fees have become a significant part of several UK universities’ budgets. Working in the higher education sector, I’m aware of the anxieties around reduced funding from student tuition overall, and international fees in particular, and its potential impact on the bottom line. Universities, their educational and research missions notwithstanding, can be run like businesses. The strategy of treating Chinese international students
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as ‘cash cows’, and generally neglecting them beyond their tuition contribution, is a morally reprehensible and risky one, with potentially severe economic implications.
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I didn’t come to the UK as a tourist or a student. At the age of thirty-two I came as a ‘dependant’, under my husband’s Tier 2 ‘Skilled Worker’ visa – infantilised by the government. We arrived in the country in 2012 with our eighteen-month-old daughter when I was six months pregnant with our second daughter. It was the same year that the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy was announced by Home Secretary Theresa May. Openly declaring war on immigrants, she stated that ‘the aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants’.22 Armed with our visas, we weren’t ‘illegal’, but that aggression affected immi- grants and non-immigrants alike.
A key component of this new policy was the enforcement of immigration laws not just by immigration officers but by regular people who suddenly became de facto border control agents acting under the threat of fine or jail. Staff in hospitals and GP surgeries, schools,23 universities and banks checked immigration status, and there was worrying data sharing between government agencies.24 Employers checked for the right to work. Landlords renting out accommodation had to assess immigration paperwork. This ‘hostile environment’ (later branded the ‘compliant environment’) bred a culture of suspicion, incentivising discrimination against anyone who looked or sounded ‘foreign’, inhumanely treating those who merely wished to stay in this country and use basic services.
We’d decided to move to the UK because my husband was offered a job as a professor at the University of Oxford. I’d never been to Oxford before, but trusted that it would be an exciting adventure and an opportunity to raise our family together. After living on opposite coasts in the US – I was in California, he was in New York – we needed to bring an end to the nearly 3,000-mile cross-country commute. While we love Oxford, with its international reputation and small-town feel, its exciting cultural activities and the peaceful countryside close by, there has been a huge financial and social cost to coming here. Leaving our extended family, friends and social networks to start over in a new country provoked a sense of loss that never goes away, even with the associated gains.
At the same time, there’s been a tangible hit on our bank accounts. When we arrived in 2012 it cost £991 per person in fees for ‘indefinite leave to remain’ in the UK, and £851 for naturalisation. In 2024 it cost £2,885 for indefinite leave (a near threefold increase), and £1,630 for naturalisation (almost double). That doesn’t cover the visa fees and the immigration health surcharges for the first five years before you’re eligible for permanent residency. With excessive fee increases unrelated to the actual administrative cost of processing applications, the Home Office has been making money off the backs of immigrants, who not only pay taxes but as a condition of their stay have no recourse to public funds to which they’re contribut- ing. Covering these immigration fees has essentially amounted to substantially less pay for us than for a UK worker doing the same work, just because we’re from another country coming to contribute our labour to Britain. The costs themselves can act as barriers to legal immigration and integration. Often the sense I get, particularly from the media, is that we should be ‘grateful immigrants’ along
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with being ‘good’ ones; that we must have come from a worse-off place, desperate to enter the UK to take advantage of its resources; that we should accept the view that immigration is a burden for the country, and that exclusion and removal are preferred over consideration and compassion.
Having lived in three white-majority ‘Western’ countries –Canada, the US and the UK – and subsequently learned three versions of English, I’m no stranger to xenophobia and antiAsian racism. My earliest experience of racism was when I was in a nursery in Canada, likely four or five years old. We all used to sit in a circle and say a daily prayer together, which was acceptable in the 1980s, but instead of praying with my palms pressed against each other, fingers to the sky, I copied a Chinese film that I’d seen my parents watching, an old kung fu movie with flying martial artists. I made a circle with my thumb and middle finger, placing the back of each hand on each knee, like you might do while practising yoga. This led to me being singled out and admonished for my actions. Not having the words to explain myself, I was punished with a timeout and left in a separate room in the dark by myself, an early lesson in the need for conformity.
This hyperawareness of my difference is central to my life story as a daughter of immigrants and as an immigrant myself. My parents separately moved from Hong Kong to Canada as teenagers, in search of new possibilities. Competition to attend one of the few universities in Hong Kong was fierce, so, if families could manage it, they sent children abroad to study. With financial support from extended family members, my father jumped at the chance to leave the suffocating confines of his family and their claustrophobic flat, where he shared a small bedroom with his siblings and grandmother.
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He applied to spend his final year of high school in Saskatchewan, Canada, and was accepted – his dense urban lifestyle replaced by sprawling Canadian prairies – before going to university in Calgary and later dropping out. In my mother’s case, moving abroad meant life in a strict Catholic convent for a year because she was underage and needed a formal guardian, so she had to live with nuns before finding freedom in Calgary. After forging independent paths in Canada, my parents eventually met through shared connections, fell in love and created a family together, bringing my younger sister and me into the world. We moved around fairly often in the 1980s, but my memories centre around Toronto and Mississauga, Ontario, where my parents bought their first home together.
Integrating into Canadian culture had positive aspects, but it also meant that parts of me were suppressed, changed or abandoned. My biggest loss was my family’s language, Cantonese. People might expect my Chinese face to be able to utter Chinese words, but they will be disappointed. I used to be proud of being able to speak English with no trace of a Chinese accent, and it still privileges me in many spaces, but mostly I grieve my former childhood bilingual abilities, feeling guilty for abandoning this significant part of my heritage through avoidance and neglect. My half-hearted attempts to regain knowledge of Cantonese through sporadic study have understandably failed. As much as I was surrounded by Chinese people and culture during my childhood in Canada, the language slowly left me. Formal schooling and friendships prioritised English, as did my parents – teaching me while also trying to minimise their accents. Along the way I learned that acquiring English fluency was the prize and Cantonese was the sacrifice.
I didn’t question my ‘Chineseness’ growing up, even though
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I’d only been to Hong Kong once as a baby and never to mainland China. I wasn’t born in China, even if people often assumed I was. While my links weren’t with Asia, I was immersed in my Chinese Canadian family and community. Socialising meant seeing our family members and playing with our cousins, getting together with my parents’ Chinese friends, and attending a Chinese church, despite my reluctance. We occasionally had meals with others in Chinese restaurants, where we’d never order drinks other than tea or water, or desserts that weren’t included with the meal. These outings usually ended with friendly arguments over which family would pay the bill – the winner being the loudest, most insistent one to convince the waiter to hand it over. Outside of school, we were in a protective Chinese enclave of our own making.
The 1991 Canadian census, which includes data from the year before I immigrated to the United States, shows nearly 587,000 Chinese of ‘single ethnic origin’ out of about 27 million people, the largest ethnic group that was not white – just below Italians at approximately 750,000.25 While Chinese people represented only 2 per cent of the overall population, the proportion of Chinese people in Toronto and Vancouver was much larger. These numbers have continued to grow significantly since I moved away. According to the 2021 Census, 1.7 million people reported being Chinese, which is about 5 per cent of the total population and the second-largest ‘visible minority’ group after South Asian populations (representing about 7 per cent).26 Chinese people in Toronto comprise about 11 per cent of the population, and in Vancouver they’re about 26 per cent.
When I moved to the United States in 1992 at the age of eleven years old I still felt surrounded by Chinese people, though this time I became acquainted with different Chinese cultures after
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we settled in Cupertino, California, home of Apple Inc. in Silicon Valley. My dad wanted to be closer to his parents, who had moved from Hong Kong to live with my dad’s older brother, the eldest son. Among my Chinese American friends in California there were cultural differences in language, food and customs. I learned that my version of ‘Chinese’ was not universal. Many of my close friends were Taiwanese, speaking Mandarin or Taiwanese at home, which I couldn’t understand. Apart from San Francisco, it felt like Cantonese was in decline, with Mandarin slowly dominating as it was the official language in China and there was increased immigration from mainland China and Taiwan to California. In 2020 Stanford University intended to lay off its long-time Cantonese teacher, citing budget issues. A ‘Save Cantonese’ petition was cir- culated, which over 5,000 people signed, resulting in university officials restoring two of the three Cantonese classes.27 In Oxford I’ve yet to find Cantonese language classes, only private tutors, despite Britain’s history with Hong Kong. Mandarin options are readily available, reinforcing its hegemonic power and risking the local extinction of my family’s language.
My Taiwanese friends introduced me to boba drinks in the 1990s. I remember thinking how strange it was to eat chewy tapioca balls while drinking tea with a comically oversized straw. Cupertino was home to one of the first boba tea shops in the US, Fantasia Coffee & Tea. It became a hub in which young Asian American teens like me would socialise, situated in a larger Asian plaza with a 99 Ranch supermarket, shops and restaurants. Boba – ‘bubble tea’ or ‘pearl tea’, as it’s been called – has become a cultural phenomenon and a symbol of Asian American identity. It also made its way to the UK in the early 2000s. When I first arrived in Oxford in 2012
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I was relieved to find one boba shop in the city, Formosan Tea Bar, which had opened that same year, down a small alley off the High Street, next to a nail salon run by East and Southeast Asian workers. Over a decade later there were at least ten boba cafés in and around central Oxford.
In the US my Chinese identity was subsumed within a broader ‘Asian American’ label. The term ‘Asian American’ itself has activist origins, coined in 1968 by Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka, graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley.28 It moved away from sub-ethnic group identifiers to signify solidarity in the form of a more unifying, politically powerful term, encompassing East, Southeast and South Asian identities. In this way it shared similarities with the term ‘people of color’, popularised in the US in the 1970s as a political tool to bring together racially marginalised groups with a purposefully affirmative framing, moving away from more negative descriptors like ‘minorities’, ‘non-whites’ and the term ‘colored people’, which is considered derogatory in the US.
I became fascinated with issues of social and racial justice, leaving my Microbiology undergraduate degree for an Ethnic Studies one at the University of California, San Diego. Learning about racial discrimination and injustices – and the connected liberation movements – with an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach, was transformative. It gave me the vocabulary to articulate my experiences and a critical lens through which to view the world. I then decided to go to law school to use the law as a mechanism for change. I worked in non-profit legal services organisations in the San Francisco Bay Area dedicated to serving Asian and Pacific Islander communities. According to the 2020 US Census, the ‘Asian’ population (with those indicating only one race) in San Francisco
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County was nearly 300,000 people, about 34 per cent.29 That is a critical mass. Estimates from 2021 show the Chinese population in the city to be the ‘single largest ethnic minority group’ – over a fifth of the population – with other Asian groups represented including Filipino, Vietnamese, Japanese, Asian Indian, Korean, Thai, Burmese and Cambodian.30 Across the country, those of Chinese descent (except Taiwanese) were the largest Asian-origin group, consisting of 5.2 million people in 2021.31 I found a sense of belonging among other secondgeneration Asian Americans, finding our way in a society that didn’t always ‘see’ us. My studies were US-centric, and I knew virtually nothing about the experi- ences of Asian communities in the UK. Inspired by my educational background in Asian American and Ethnic Studies, I embarked on a personal mission to better understand my surroundings in the UK, and the racial and ethnic dynamics that influence our daily lives. Having now lived in the UK for over a decade, what I’ve felt most acutely is the lack of a critical mass of Chinese and East and Southeast Asian people around me –particularly those from second and later generations – that I was used to in Canada and the US; the feeling of safety in numbers, the sense of political power and influence that can come with visible leadership, and the ample opportunity for connection with others of similar heritage. I still miss the vibrant Asian American communities that I was a part of, longing for a similar sense of pan-Asian identity and progres- sive politics. When I left San Francisco for Oxford, Ed Lee was the mayor of the city, the first Asian American mayor of Chinese heritage, serving from 2011 to 2017. There were prominent, vis- ible Asian American leaders across many sectors in the city and throughout the country. Arriving in the UK, I felt a tangible absence
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of equivalent East and Southeast Asian leadership. I didn’t see East and Southeast Asian faces on television and in the news, nor did I see many around me, certainly not at the levels I was used to in North America.
To fill this void I began searching for voices, histories and role models in the UK, hoping to better understand my own experiences through others’ stories, and ultimately to feel less alone. I may not yet feel fully British, but my family and I have made Britain our home. This book is for my daughters, so they can see themselves reflected in this country, to help them understand British Chinese histories that aren’t taught in national curricula or readily available in mainstream media, and to hear from others living lives similar to theirs.
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Working as an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion practitioner at the University of Oxford, trying to proactively address inequalities and improve experiences for staff and students, I consistently found that East and Southeast Asian voices were inadequately represented in conversations about racism. The assumption was that they were doing just fine.
COVID-19 upended this, making the inclusion of East and Southeast Asian perspectives in our anti-racism discourse all the more urgent. The upsurge in anti-Asian racism triggered by COVID-19 has been global. At the start of the pandemic, with the earliest-known cases reported in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, a ‘wet market’ that sold fresh produce, seafood, meat, live animals and wildlife became the centre of attention and blame. While sci-
entists were trying to understand the source of the outbreak, racist posts circulated on social media, including a video of a Chinese woman eating bat soup (though the video was made in 2016 on the Micronesian island of Palau rather than in China), vilifying Chinese people and their eating habits. In the build-up of anxiety, uncertainty, illness and death as the pandemic progressed, Chinese people – as well as those who appeared to be Chinese – became the scapegoats. COVID-19 was racialised as the ‘Chinese virus’, ‘China plague’ and ‘Kung flu’ by Donald Trump, the US president, making people like me targets for violence.
The scale of global Sinophobia – anti-Chinese sentiment – and broader anti-Asian racism is made crystal clear in a Wikipedia page titled ‘Xenophobia and racism related to the COVID-19 pandemic’ that compiled hundreds of recorded examples of discrimination in countries on all continents bar Antarctica.32 Closer to home, UK data from the very early days of the pandemic suggested a 300 per cent rise in hate crimes towards East and Southeast Asian people in the UK in the first quarter of 2020, compared with previous years.33 Data from Freedom of Information Act requests to UK police forces showed a 27 per cent increase in reported hate crime incidents from 2019 to 2020, with nearly 6,000 reported hate crimes directed at East and Southeast Asian people between 2018 to 2021.34 A study surveying over 600 East and Southeast Asian people in 2023 found that 48 per cent had been subjected to hate crime during the previous twelve months.35 From businesses vandalised, to physical attacks, verbal abuse and exclusion, there have been wide-ranging impacts.36
News and social media outlets shared numerous examples of attacks and discrimination against anyone who looked Chinese.
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One of the most visible incidents that drew national and international attention was the beating of Jonathan Mok, a twenty-threeyear-old Singaporean law student at University College London. Walking along Oxford Street in London, he passed a group of youths who made a coronavirus-related remark to him. As Mok turned to confront them, he was punched and kicked. He posted photos of his bruised and bloodied face on social media, raising awareness of such attacks in the UK. There were many other incidents, including a nineteen-year-old female Chinese student from Sheffield who was attacked in the city centre; Peng Wang, a thirty-eight-year-old lecturer in Southampton who was assaulted by four men while he was jogging; Yuanzhao Zhang, a twenty-fiveyear-old research engineer in Cambridge beaten by ten teenagers while grocery shopping; and An Nguyen, a Vietnamese curator who was dropped from an art event out of concern that audience members wouldn’t enter the exhibition space if she was there. The BBC created a video of young British Chinese children sharing their experiences of having racist and offensive comments directed at them, causing fear and distress.37 Across different ages, genders, ethnicities and social identities, people were harmed as they were going about their day.
The UK media helped set the stage for racial tensions against Chinese communities by using photographs of East and Southeast Asian-looking people in a third of images reporting on COVID-19, completely out of proportion to their representation among the country’s population.38 I saw countless images of Asian people in Chinatown amid the ubiquitous red lanterns in articles about COVID-19. Imagine if there were pictures of English bunting every time there was a pandemic story in the news. The British public was
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given Chinese faces to condemn, rather than their own government, for the poor response to the pandemic.
Scapegoating Chinese people and the Chinese government seemed strategic. The narrative of blaming China conveniently redirected rage away from countries – like the US and the UK –that failed miserably at every level in their response to the virus. An interdisciplinary group of UK-based academics conducted a survey of 2,100 British adults in April 2020, a month into the first lockdown, asking respondents who they thought was at fault for the spread of COVID-19 in the UK. The top response was ‘people not following the social distancing measures’ (75 per cent); a close second was the Chinese government (64 per cent). The other high-rated responses were ‘each and every one of us’ (61 per cent) and ‘globalisation’ (55 per cent). The UK government received a much lower proportion of the blame at 35 per cent.39 Meanwhile, government failures were killing people, with Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic NHS staff disproportionately suffering and dying from COVID-19, particularly Filipino health and care workers.40
I was one of the lucky ones not to have been on the receiving end of physical or verbal abuse during the pandemic. In the early days, people physically distanced from me on the street, and I worried that wearing a mask would make me a target, so I sheltered at home, safe from the virus and from racism. In a work meeting with my white colleagues who had recently travelled to China to visit our research centre in Suzhou, I remember thinking that they wouldn’t be subject to the abuse that would more likely be directed at me, even though I hadn’t been to China in decades. Not only was I worried for my children and our safety, but also for my family abroad, particularly my parents in California when violent attacks
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against elderly East and Southeast Asian people in the US seemed to occur with shocking regularity. The Atlanta spa mass shootings in Georgia that killed eight people (six of them Asian women) and the Indianapolis shooting at a FedEx courier facility claiming eight employees (including four members of the Sikh community) in 2021, along with the 2022 murders of Asian American women Michelle Go (forty years old), pushed onto the path of an oncoming New York subway, and Christina Yuna Lee (thirty-five years old), stabbed while entering her apartment in New York’s Chinatown, created a culture of fear among our communities that spread internationally. In the UK, the cases of missing older East and Southeast Asian women Mee Kuen Chong, a Malaysian sixty-seven-year-old woman from London whose decapitated body was found in June 2021, and Louise Kam, a seventy-one-year-old Chinese woman from Hertfordshire whose body was found in a wheelie bin in August 2021, exacerbated these feelings of vulnerability. Any of them could have been my mother, my sister, my relatives, my friends – or me.
This racism, fuelled by anger, hatred, ignorance and desperation, and ignited by divisive public figures, is not new. Although around 15 per cent of Chinese people in England reported experiencing ethnic and racial harassment from 2009 to 2010 – more than any other ethnic group during the same period41 – the deep historical and structural roots of this racism just haven’t been unearthed as part of our public discourse. This book attempts to recognise this long history and its enduring effects today, and includes the contributions of British Chinese people and the rich history of resistance that is often ignored. I’m taking the fear and helplessness I experienced during the pandemic to educate and connect with others. We need knowledge, empathy and action to collectively
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address anti-Asian racism, and indeed all forms of oppression. As we’ve seen from the riots in cities across the UK in 2024 and the associated racist violence against Muslims, migrants and people of colour following a knife attack that killed children in Southport in north-west England, far-right groups – incited by misinformation about the attacker that was spread online – terrorised communities. I was heartened to see the scale of counter-protests, with thousands of people from diverse backgrounds uniting together to stand against racism, xenophobia and violence. We urgently need to have national conversations about racism in our society and the value of immigration, along with concrete, sustained actions to deal with the root causes of hate and inequality.
East and Southeast Asian people must be included in these efforts. By bringing the perspectives of British Chinese people to the fore in this book, with many voices alongside mine, we can envision a future together in which our communities are fully seen, represented and valued within an inclusive British society. British Chinese people are not simply stereotypes, sidekicks or tourists – they are settlers and citizens, taking centre stage with illuminating and intersectional stories to tell, reclaiming and reframing our own representation away from a national narrative fixated on foreignness. In partnership with other East and Southeast Asian communities and racially marginalised groups, we can take steps towards a future of solidarity and care, reimagining what it means to be ‘British’, in all its complexity. The first step is understanding the past.
