How a Chinese-Jamaican’s family history quest led her to Hong Kong

I DON’T SPEAK PUTONGHUA or Cantonese and know little about China’s past – or present. Yet I – a British-born, American-raised, twentysomething of Chinese and Afro-Jamaican ancestry – travelled to China recently to better understand my compli­cated family history.

Along with me on the trip were my sister, Tao Leigh Goffe, a university lecturer in the United States who is an expert on the Afro-Asian experience in the Americas, and my mother, Judith Hugh-Goffe, a paediatrician who was worried that because we were not “full Chinese” we would not be accepted.

This is how it has always been for people like us – “half Chinese” or black Chinese – in Jamaica, where my mother grew up. Those who are “full Chinese” are proud that they have no black in them and proud that they have a command of Cantonese and Hakka – and proud, too, that they are able to recount their family history, perhaps going back 1,000 years.

According to my mother, her maternal grandfather, Chong Quee, who migrated from Baoan, in Shenzhen, to Jamaica in the early 1900s, often used the derogatory term hak gwai (“black ghost”) to describe black people on the Caribbean island and even to, sometimes, scold his mixed-race daughters, Almira (Judith’s mother) and Curveza.