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Chinese sailors who helped Allies win WWII then were deported from UK the subject of Rosa Fong’s new film. ‘It was incredible and tragic,’ director says
- Macau-born Rosa Fong’s latest film tells the story of Chinese sailors who served in the UK’s merchant navy in the second world war, and were then deported
- Fong has never been afraid to confront contentious issues in her work, which includes Deconstructing Zoe, a portrait of a Chinese transgender actor
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Liverpool, England: home of Europe’s oldest Chinese community and the biggest Chinatown gate outside the Middle Kingdom. And a city that should arguably be the site of a monument to the Chinese sailors who helped the Allies defeat the Nazis. Either that, or a memorial to British government hypocrisy.
Those sailors belong to a sliver of history that resonates with filmmaker and academic Rosa Fong, senior lecturer in film at John Moores University, Liverpool.
Director, screenwriter and British Film Institute award winner Fong is working on Sigh of the Sea, a feature film that will tell the story of the 20,000 Chinese seamen who worked out of the port during World War II, many of whom died in U-boat attacks.
But its focus will be the 2,300 or so who were secretly kicked out of Britain, from late 1945, after they had done dangerous duty with the merchant navy.
The story has been reported sporadically by the South China Morning Post and The Guardian, although it seems often to sink quickly from view. Hence the surprise felt even by Fong, who was born in Macau, when she moved to Britain as a child and grew up on Merseyside.
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