The legendary Maya Angelou once proclaimed, “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” This was probably the feeling that propelled the Liang siblings to conceptualise and launch the Desi Chinese Project.
This is particularly true for communities that lie at the margins of society. For such groups, storytelling is essential to keep the memory of the past alive.
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Generations of people of Chinese origin have settled and lived in India for over two centuries, yet this rarely-talked-about community still struggles for a foothold within the intricately woven narrative fabric of the country.
Statistically speaking, the Chinese in India were always quite limited in number. But various resources point towards the fact that even this figure has dwindled significantly in the present day. This, coupled with the increasingly discordant discourse playing out between the two neighbouring countries, made the Liangs realise that the life history of their community needed to be recorded for posterity.
VICE News caught up with Jennifer and Lawrence Liang, who along with a small team have created a thoroughly stimulating living archive of their community.
VICE: Tell us about your own background, and what prompted you to set up the Desi Chinese Project (DCP)?
Jennifer Liang: My two brothers and I were born in Kolkata (state in east India) and moved to Bangalore (southern Indian city) early on. The emotional connect with the city where most of our family lived was always very strong. Though the questions of our Indian-Chinese identity were always there, being physically away from the larger community provided us the space to chart our own life and career path.
Being away also helped me look at things a bit more objectively, especially the crises which the young people from the community regularly faced with regard to their identity, education, life choices etc. Based on these concerns, I chose to do my master’s thesis on the stress that Indian-Chinese youth experience in Kolkata. Later, while doing a short pre-doctoral course, I spent a year and a half researching and recording our oral histories which led to the organisation and establishment of the Indian Chinese Association in Kolkata.
Though I left the city in the year 2000, I have been contributing towards the growth of the community through discussions and sharing of ideas with prominent people from both within as well as non-Chinese researchers, filmmakers and writers.
Lately, the big concern has been the rapid loss of our unique history, with the older generation passing on and the younger generation migrating out. As the community turned increasingly scattered and scarce, we and several others came together as a group to start working on this initiative.
Who all make up the team that is at the backend of DCP, and how exactly did you guys put this all together?
Jennifer Liang: For Lawrence and myself, this is of course a very personal journey. This is our way of leaving behind a legacy and memory of a community that was vibrant, and contributed to the cultural history of India in its own special way.
Vidura Jang Bahadur is a photographer who, after returning from an almost four year stay in China, started meeting and photographing Chinese families in India. He has travelled all over the country, and has possibly met more members of the community than any other person. He was, thus, a natural partner in this project.
Jenny Pinto enters the story from an interest in the intersection between food and culture, and how communities cook up their own histories. She has written a book on the history of her mother and extended family’s food traditions and related histories.
Koel Chatterjee is a graphic designer and illustrator who has a similar interest as Jenny’s in food histories.
What are the challenges you and your team face while attempting to record these stories?
Lawrence Liang: Official histories are often the product of official memories, and when you are working with an extremely tiny community in the context of a large nation state, it becomes difficult to turn to the usual sites of history namely archives and repositories. In fact, archival history in this context acts as a deterrent rather than an enabler of community narratives.
Aga Shahid Ali in a poem speaks of how history comes in the way of memory, and one of the challenges of a project of this kind is to reconstruct the story of a community primarily through its individual and shared memories. This is easier said than done as it requires a methodology that is attentive to oral histories, experiential narratives, all of which become a challenge when it comes to a community that has been a little reticent to speak about itself.
Given the current political climate between India and China, are there any issues the members of the community face that hinder the peace of their daily existence?
Lawrence Liang: In general, India has been an extremely hospitable home for the Indian-Chinese community, for whom in fact there is no other home apart from here. However, the older generation has memories of the 1962 war, during the course of which many families were interned in a camp in Deoli, Rajasthan (state in north India). There is, therefore, understandably some amount of anxiety about how a conflict would impact those of us living in India.
At an everyday level, these tensions translate into commonplace discrimination in the form of name calling or the use of racist slurs. We believe it is very important to distinguish between Chinese as a nationality, and Chinese as an ethnicity. The Indian-Chinese are Indian nationals as much as anyone else, and like every other Indian, concerned about the territorial integrity of the country.
What do you envision for the project going ahead? How do you intend to find a wider audience for the same?
Jennifer Liang: We envisage this project as being one that is driven primarily by content provided by the members of the community itself. What we have compiled is merely the preliminary material and we hope that it will inspire people to contribute their own stories, images and memories to make this a rich and thriving archive of the community.
We also see the project speaking to other similar initiatives – for instance a history of the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean – and in that sense, we hope that people generally interested in diasporic histories will also find this venture interesting and relevant to them.
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