The Chinese state visit was broadcast over a television set at the Yichang Crowne Plaza hotel café where I was eating breakfast. It was a stunning visual – a swarm of British dignitaries on a red carpet, flanked by men in uniform, welcoming the arrival of President Xi as he touched down at Heathrow Airport in October 2015. By all measures, China was welcomed onto the western stage with outstretched arms and deference, and President Xi radiated in the spotlight.
I set out after breakfast that October morning to retrace my twice orphaned Sino-British grandmother’s footsteps in Yichang in the hope of reclaiming her past, which was lost a century ago. She and her family had fallen into the shadowy cracks and crevices of both countries – unrecorded and invisible – with neither country wanting to account for them. As I walked through remnants of old Yichang, the irony of events struck me. Great Britain was embracing a new era of economic collaboration with China and gaining traction towards becoming the most desired country for Chinese students (Zou 2020), while I was on the shores of the Yangtze River sorting through the collateral damage from the Sino-British relationship a century ago.
Two Sichuan students – Mr. Qian Weishan/ 钱为善 (my great grandfather) and Mr. Hu Jizeng / 胡繼曾 had been identified in 1905 as good candidates for government sponsorship to England (Xi-Liang / 锡良 Manuscript 2017). Both had returned home to Sichuan with engineering degrees, expectations of prosperous careers and… English brides. Qian’s career as Sichuan’s Commissioner of Foreign Affairs during a particularly challenging time for Sino-Western relations caused tumult and instability for his daughters. Neither side of the family was willing to step in. Indeed, now a century later, the number of Sino-western marriages has risen again as the cross-cultural currents have flowed fluidly between the East and the West (Murphy 2013).
In Yichang, I walked by the area of the old Church of Scotland Mission where my Eurasian grandmother had been raised by her adoptive mother Mary Emelia Moore. Moore, a missionary from New Zealand, had been her second adoptive mother. Her first set of adoptive parents, British river explorer Captain Cornell Plant and his wife Alice, had died at sea while trying to bring my grandmother and her younger sister to England for an education. For a time, she and her sister were stranded in Hong Kong – caught between both worlds, wondering which one would claim them. In the end, Butterfield & Swire, along with the Yichang British Consul, returned them to China where they lived a hybrid existence – raised Chinese by a western adoptive mother in a western mission. Moore had described girls of mixed marriage, like them, as a class to be pitied. (Moore 1923)
As I reflect back at the human toll of Qian’s and Hu’s decisions as young students in London, I wonder about the tens of thousands of students studying in the UK today. As tensions rise between the East and the West – with pandemic finger-pointing, a growth in Asian hate crimes, and fears about China’s corporate and political overreach into UK industries, I wonder if we are entering a cooling off period. If so, what will the human fallout from this generation of returned students be? Will their enthusiasm and zeal for cross-culturalism during the UK and China “golden era” launched in October 2015 catch them in the cracks, just like my family a century earlier, when the relationship sours?
