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and home
Alice Ping-hsiu Lin Updated August 09, 2018
Thus began a research project that took me across various cities in Pakistan,
where a declining minority of ethnic Chinese families shared with me their
lives and experiences that were intimately linked to the development of
modern Pakistan.
It is not popularly known that some of the earliest Chinese in South Asia
emigrated to Kolkata (then Calcutta) during the British era; in fact, as early as
the 18th century.
In the wake of the partitioning of India in 1947, the India-China War in 1962
and later the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, ethnic Chinese families
found themselves dispersed in different parts of South Asia, gaining
recognition and contributing to the economies of each of their localities
through restaurants, dentist clinics and beauty parlours.
Much like the majority of Chinese migrant communities in India and Pakistan,
they are Hakka – also known as Kejia in Mandarin Chinese – a distinct ethnic
and linguistic group dispersed throughout southeastern China, and through
their diasporas to Southeast Asia, South Asia and other parts of the world.
For many other Chinese born in India-Pakistan, 'home' has several meanings
within this family. Jason’s grandfather, for example, lived in Kolkata in the
1940s, moving to Lahore at the time of Partition.
After opening his first shoe store in Rawalpindi, the indomitable Indian-
Chinese entrepreneur proceeded to opening another shop in Murree in 1949.
More shops soon branched out through the growing family.
His grandson, whom I’ll call Jason, is part of a generation of young Pakistani-
Chinese with a heterogeneous sense of belonging and distant ties to the
Indian-Chinese in Kolkata.
When I ask about 'home', individuals within the same family refer to different
cities, but always within South Asia.
It was a time when persecutions of ethnic Chinese by the Indian state were
authorised and many were deported or sent to internment camps.
“Despite how others outside might view Pakistan as a result of instability and
bombings, we are very happily settled here. This is our home”, he tells me.
Many were witness to the armed conflict in the former Pakistani province.
Stories of brutal repression are recounted solemnly to me by those seemingly
at the fringes of South Asian history.
The major events that led to the contemporary formation of Pakistan as lived
by Pakistani-Chinese involve leaving their home and losing their businesses,
properties and communities, to begin their lives anew in West Pakistan.
A Pakistani-Chinese born in Abbottabad, however, has a more optimistic take
on the conflict. “It took us [Pakistan] to lose East Pakistan for me to find my
wife”, he says to me.
As a result of the mass migration of Chinese from East Pakistan, he met his
wife, also a Pakistani-Hakka, of 45 years, in Rawalpindi.
For a long period of time, a mixture of Urdu, English and Hakka was spoken in
their Pakistani-Chinese household.
Preserving the Hakka language is not only useful for daily interactions
between majority of the local Chinese, it also reflects their intimacy and
identity with a particular place: Meixian, the ancestral village of their parents
or grandparents in Guangdong province in China.
Also read: 'Roughly equal parts of my life have been spent in East and West.
Do midpoints make one more reflective?'
The influx of Chinese migrants after CPEC, however, has meant that the local
Chinese have had to address what many see as a handicap — the inability to
speak Mandarin Chinese.
This phenomenon, taking place among the Chinese diaspora in other parts of
the world as well, is also related to the rise of China as a leading economic
power.
When I ask whether the Pakistani-Chinese feel Chinese, the answer is often
conflicting. On one hand, some say that they called themselves Chinese as that
was what Pakistanis explicitly refer to them as. On the other, a more Pakistani
identity is embraced amid the younger generations.