A Forgotten Story of Racial Discrimination from the Titanic tragedy, 6 Chinese people were saved

KOMPAS.com – When the British luxury passenger ships, Titanic sinking into the Atlantic Ocean in April 1912, thousands of people fell into extremely cold waters. Many of them did not survive.

In the darkness the rescue team found a Chinese youth still alive, holding on to a wooden door with shivers.

The man was Fang Lang, one of 6 the Chinese who survived the tragedy of the Titanic. Their story later became one of the inspirations for Hollywood films Titanic in 1997.

However, the threats to their lives don’t stop there BBC on Saturday (17/4/2021).

Within 24 hours of their arrival at an immigrant inspection station on Ellis Island, New York, they were evicted from the country, due to the China Exclusion Act, a controversial law prohibiting immigration of Chinese people to AS.

The six people then disappeared.

A documentary has just premiered in China, The Six, highlighting the identities and lives of the six men, 109 years after the unsuccessful voyage.

Their story reveals irony beyond the tragedy of the Titanic, a tale formed by discrimination racial and anti-immigration policies, which are currently getting particular resonance after the recent anti-Asian harassment in the US.

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Who are the six Chinese who survived?

The people were identified as Lee Bing, Fang Lang, Chang Chip, Ah Lam, Chung Foo, and Ling Hee. They are believed to be sailors heading to the Caribbean for work.

“As a group of people who went together, they weren’t known specifically,” said Arthur Jones, British filmmaker and director The Six, to BBC.

The names of the Chinese who survived were on the passenger list of the ship, and news articles covering the sinking of the Titanic were briefly named.

However, unlike other Titanic survivors who received praise in the media, Chinese men were slandered for anti-Chinese sentiment in the West in the early 20th century, according to historians and researchers.

In a report filed a few days after drowning, for example, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called the Chinese survivors “creatures” who jumped into lifeboats “at the first sign of danger” and hid themselves under seats.

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However, research from the documentary film production team shows that these claims are untrue.

They built a replica of the Titanic lifeboat and found that it was impossible for the Chinese to hide without being seen.

“I think we saw the same thing today. We found immigrants being scapegoated by the press,” said Jones.

Other media coverage at the time accused Chinese men of dressing as women to get priority on boarding lifeboats.

Titanic historian Tim Maltin said there was no evidence that the Chinese survivors were stowaways or disguised themselves as women.

“This is a story made up by the press and the public after the incident,” he told BBC.

The rumors likely stem from the stigma attached to many male survivors of the tragedy Titanic sank, because at that time the general public felt that women and children should be prioritized in rescue.

According to Maltin, the Chinese were trying to help other survivors.

Fang Lang, the man who tied himself to the floating door, then rowed on the lifeboat that saved him and helped transport everyone to safety.

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What happened to them after the tragedy?

Expelled from the US, the 6 men were sent to Cuba.

They soon found their way to England, where there was a shortage of seafarers as many British sailors enlisted in the army during the First World War.

Chang Chip became increasingly unwell after that fateful night, and eventually died of pneumonia in 1914. He is buried in an unmarked grave in a London cemetery.

The rest worked together in Britain until 1920, when the country was suffering from a post-war recession and anti-immigrant feelings ran high.

Some Chinese men marry British women and have children in England. However, anti-immigrant policies forced them to leave the country unannounced, leaving their loved ones behind.

“And it’s not their fault. All these families are really being pushed (apart) by politics, something they really don’t control,” said Jones.

Ah Lam was deported to Hong Kong, while Ling Hee boarded a steamboat bound for Kolkata (Calcutta) in India.

Lee Bing immigrated to Canada, while Fang Lang, after sailing between Britain and Hong Kong for many years, became a US citizen, which once refused.

The relationship between history and today

Tom Fong, Fang Lang’s son, was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin nearly half a century after the Titanic sank.

For decades, he knew nothing about the experiences of his father who survived the tragedy of the Titanic sinking.

“He (Fang Lang) never told a story about that. Not to me, maybe to my mother,” Fong told BBC.

Fang died in 1985 at the age of 90. It was not until 20 years after his father’s death that Fong learned from his family members that his father was a survivor of the devastating ship accident.

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Fong thinks his father may have kept his experiences on the Titanic a secret from him, because of the mix of trauma and stigma.

“There is a lot of information that says they sneaked under the boat, and they dressed like women …” he said.

“Stories like that (racial) were circulating at the time,” he added.

When the research team The Six trace the ancestry of the Chinese survivors, many of whom are still reluctant to share their family stories due to the stigmatizing experiences of family members a century ago.

Growing up in Wisconsin, Fong witnessed many incidents where his father had to fight racism, including punching a man who called them an offensive name.

“He (Fang Lang) is a good man, to the point that he feels discriminated against because of his ethnicity,” he said.

More than a hundred years later, the hostility experienced by the 6 Chinese men who survived, is happening again today with the anti-Asian racism movement sparked by the coronavirus pandemic.

In the US alone, there have been thousands of cases of abuse reported in recent months, from being spat on to being verbally abused to violent assaults.

Mr. Fong chose to share his family’s story, hoping the audience will find out about the true story of the Chinese survivors of the Titanic sinking tragedy and reflect on current events.

“Because if you don’t know the history, it will repeat itself,” said Fong.

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