The Big Smoke

Christine Lee

The lawyer
Christine Lee Something of a tour de force, Christine Lee has just stepped off a plane after a 13-hour flight from the Chinese capital – where she was appointed legal advisor to the Beijing city government – but still launches into an energetic defence of the Chinese community here.

‘We have been silent for too long. We will not be silent any more,’ says the 45-year-old lawyer who heads Christine Lee & Co, the largest Chinese law firm in the UK. As well as working on leading cases in the fields of immigration and human rights, she has emerged as a spokesperson for the community, working closely with the Parliamentary All Party group on Chinese affairs, the Chinese Embassy and the government in Beijing; she also founded the North London Chinese Association.
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Lee says she owes her strong-mindedness to a childhood spent in a Belfast boarding school – as the only Chinese girl out of 66 boarders, she was often forced to stand up for herself. Her family, who emigrated to Belfast from Hong Kong when she was 11, followed a well-worn path for new Chinese arrivals by running a takeaway business. Her father was constantly harassed in the early years. ‘He got called “Chinky” and people threw things at him,’ says Lee. Although she hasn’t experienced much direct racism herself, she says the fact that she is a woman and Chinese made her the subject of some curious looks at her first court presentations.

Lee says the issues facing the community have changed dramatically over the last ten years. One of her biggest campaigns has been to push for changes to the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill which would open the door to more Chinese immigrants who are desperately needed to fill gaps in the catering industry – left vacant by second-generation Chinese who are reluctant to follow in the family business.

Her other passion is politics – going against a tide of traditional indifference. ‘Chinese here don’t do politics. Voting is a non-starter. The idea of my parents’ generation was that you came here and made lots of money, and that’s how you gained influence.’ Lee says that lack of consultation on issues that affect the community, such as immigration, is a major problem. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that, as yet, there are no Chinese MPs. Lee says that is all set to change: her latest project is to encourage young Chinese to enter politics. ‘The second generation don’t want to sit back and rely on other people. We need to use our voices, to be seen and heard.’

Lyn Wong

The dishwasher
Lyn Wong Calling herself a ‘newcomer’, Wong arrived in London this April. She is a 48-year-old divorcee and is the only breadwinner in her family, although her daughter, who has just graduated from university, is now seeking work in Tienjin, their home town in northern China. ‘It is becoming tougher and tougher to find a decent job and maintain a good standard of living in Tienjin,’ she says. ‘Prices are going up all the time and even housing has become expensive, but people’s wages stay the same.’ After a failed attempt to run a small garment business, she applied for a work visa for the US but was turned down. Then she decided to come to England to work.

Wong’s first job when she arrived in London was working as a nanny for a wealthy Shanghainese family. Her duties were cleaning, cooking and looking after the two-year-old. ‘Madam treated me like I was of an inferior class. I tried to ignore her and just carried on with my daily routines. But she paid me £130 a week for six days’ work. I asked everyone if this was normal for London. They all said it was below the minimum,’ says Wong. After raising the issue with her employer, her boss reluctantly agreed to pay her £150 a week. Two weeks later she was dismissed, with half a day’s wages owing which she has still been unable to claim back.

Wong asked around for work from a circle of friends and acquaintances that she had formed from northern China. ‘I rely on them for support and resources at a time like this,’ she says. She soon got her second job, via a friend, working as a kitchen porter in a Cantonese restaurant, earning £180 a week. After paying £25 a week in rent, she sends most of the rest of her wages home to her daughter. ‘I worked like a horse,’ she says, ‘But one day when I got sick, the boss put on a long face. He didn’t pay me for the sick day and wasn’t happy that I got sick within two weeks of starting work. He expected me to be working non-stop. I guess I just wasn’t a good horse.’ She was dismissed the following week.

Wong says she didn’t despair but went to an agency which, after charging her £80, found her a kitchen job in a Chinese takeaway. ‘I am looking after everything, as a chef, a fryer and a dishwasher,’ she says. She works 11 hours a day, with Sunday off. For her one-woman show, she is being paid £170 a week.
Interviewee’s name has been changed.

Ching-He Huang

The TV chef
Ching-He Huang ‘My first impression of London was formed on the day my family arrived here in December 1989,’ says China’s answer to Nigella Lawson. ‘We were on the Underground, travelling in from Heathrow, and a British couple started chatting to us. The first thing they said was: “Do you own a restaurant in London?” As we were Chinese, that was the only possible profession they could imagine us doing!’

The Chinese community has come a long way since the days when the word ‘takeaway’ was automatically preceded by ‘Chinese’ (although public perception has been somewhat slower to clock that), so how is it that 29-year-old Huang has chosen a career in an industry that most of her contemporaries have been eager to distance themselves from?

‘My generation is divided between those who don’t want to be associated with that whole catering thing,’ says Huang. ‘They think of themselves as very much British and want to dissociate themselves from the jobs their parents did. But the other half of us are beginning to feel we want to be connected to our background. Younger Chinese, like myself, have started visiting China and learning about our heritage. My cooking reflects the mix of those two aspects.’ Huang was born in Taiwan and brought up in South Africa. Her parents moved to London and set up home in Golders Green when she was 11. She later graduated from Queen Mary and Westfield College with a first-class degree in economics.

Huang’s brand of cooking, expounded in her book, ‘Modern China’, and her 2005 series for UKTV, ‘Ching’s Kitchen’, combines traditional recipes with modern cooking techniques. The emphasis is on healthy and nutritious dishes – an ethos emphasised by her company, Fuge Ltd, which she set up in 1999 to produce noodle and salad dishes, and health drink du jour TZU.

Huang has noticed a shift within London’s Chinese community over the last few decades. Originally dominated by Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong Chinese who arrived here in the 1960s, the community is being transformed by the wave of Chinese immigrants from Vietnam, Malaysia and Taiwan, who arrived here in the ’70s and ’80s, and most recently by the arrival of large numbers of mainland Chinese. ‘When I was growing up, if we were in a restaurant in Chinatown and spoke Mandarin [the official language of mainland China and Taiwan but not used by those from Hong Kong], we would get poor service. But now if I speak Mandarin in a restaurant, the waiters reply in Mandarin.’

And there is another phenomenon: many young Chinese are migrating again – from London to China. ‘My brother has moved back to Shanghai as he has fallen in love with the place,’ says Huang. She adds that it’s a move she is contemplating for herself: ‘The irony is that for many of us, we can have a better quality of life in China than in London these days.’

The illegal worker
Wei Chen ‘My parents were poor farmers. I had to start earning my living after I completed high school,’ says 36-year-old Wei Chen who grew up in Fuqing, in the Fujian province of China, and worked as a seafood trader there until the industry began to decline in the late ’90s. Married with one son, Chen felt he had to do something to change his fortunes. In 2004 he paid 250,000 RMB (£16,600), which he borrowed from 20 relatives and friends, who in turn borrowed from moneylenders. He paid this fee to a member of a local Snakehead gang for his journey to the West. He travelled with two others from China to Belgrade. ‘From there, we continued by foot, climbing mountains, led by a local Snakehead, for two weeks, all the way to Germany,’ he said. ‘It was cold and we had no proper food with us. We rested in the daytime and walked at night. I heard about people who froze to death on the way. At times, I wondered if I would survive all this.’

When Chen and his team reached Germany, they were sent by a local Snakehead in a van to France. They sat between boxes of goods at the back of the van, with little food or water. In France, they boarded another van and, hidden under the seats, made their way to Dover. The journey from China to Britain took three months. ‘I’m lucky. It’s usually much longer.’

Chen got his first job leafleting for a Chinese takeaway in a London suburb, working seven days a week for £120. The company provided two meals a day but not accommodation. Chen paid £20 a week to share a room with three other Fujianese in a crowded flat.

The job lasted six months before Chen got an offer of work as a bricklayer in south London, thanks to the recommendation of a hometown contact. He earns £60 a day for nine hours’ work, without a day off. Theoretically, he can earn up to £1,600 in a month. But that is not the reality. ‘Although my immediate boss is Chinese, the one who controls the pay is the British middle man above him. When the British can’t pay up, our wages get delayed by the Chinese boss, sometimes for a month, sometimes longer,’ says Chen. This month is his third month of not being paid. ‘Our Chinese boss just keeps telling us that it isn’t his fault. He has no way to push the company to pay. He has to wait patiently, and so do we.’
Interviewee’s name has been changed.

William Ong

The publisher
William Ong has come a long way since his first job in London as a cleaner, back in 1990. Then, he had just arrived from his home country, Singapore, with his British wife. After working in cleaning and pub jobs, then in marketing, he set up Chinatown (www.chinatownthemagazine.com), the only magazine in the country to report exclusively on Chinese affairs. He is also the founder of The Pearl Awards, an annual ceremony held to celebrate UK Chinese achievements across the world in business, entertainment and culture.

Ong, 52, says he’s seen big changes in the community since he first arrived. ‘We call the young British-born Chinese, emerging now, the “third generation”. They are much more creative than their parents or grandparents. They are daring to do new things. We’re also feeling the impact of highly qualified Chinese arriving in London from mainland China,’ says Ong. ‘Even the restaurants are different. These days they are modern, slick and stylish, such as Hakkasan and Ping Pong. There are no more lanterns and dragons.’

Ong says this generation has far less of an identity crisis than the older generation. ‘We used to say the British Chinese were “bananas” – yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Now they practise Chinese customs at home, but they’ve been through the British education system and they seem to be able to merge the two worlds.’

On illegal immigrants, Ong is ambivalent. ‘You can’t stop people if they are trying to better their lives; it’s for the government to sort out.’

Chinatown now has offices in Manchester as well as London, and Ong divides his time between the two cities. Despite the growing presence of Chinese across all areas of British life, Ong says there is still much misrepresentation of Chinese in the media. ‘We are going to see a lot of China-bashing over the next year. There are many who are cynical about China’s progress. There is also a tendency to misrepresent China by focusing on child labourers or human rights. In the case of child labourers, these are people who wouldn’t have jobs at all if China didn’t engage in this type of production. These factories bring schools and hospitals to regions and make them self-sustaining. You can’t change China overnight.’

The Pearl Awards 2007 (www.thepearlawards.org.uk), November 1, Royal Festival Hall.