ngg_shortcode_0_placeholderFifty Shades\u2026<\/b>\u2026of Yellow<\/b><\/p>\n
I bet that got you going!<\/p>\n
And now it looks like a rating scale for cowardice\u2026<\/p>\n
I was found by the police on the doorstep of either 42 or 63 Berwick Street in Hong Kong on about 23 December 1960.\u00a0 They reckoned I was approximately 2 days old.\u00a0 My birth was registered by the matron of Po Leung Kuk, an orphanage and refuge for mothers.\u00a0 My parents always believed that I was eventually in Fanling Babies\u2019 Home.\u00a0 Sally Rigby\u2019s parents believed, to the contrary, that I was in St Christopher\u2019s.\u00a0 It irritates me profoundly that I don\u2019t know as none of the paperwork I\u2019ve uncovered so far confirms where I was.\u00a0 I arrived at LondonAirport (now Heathrow) with 8 other adoptees on 20th December 1962.\u00a0 My parents had been put in touch with the Rigbys, also from the Wirral (between Chester and Liverpool), and they travelled in my father\u2019s car to collect Sally and me from the airport.\u00a0 The name on my birth certificate is Lam Ling Chi<\/b>.\u00a0 I also had a bracelet with this name on.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know where the name came from.\u00a0 I had thought it was my original name but many adoptees were given their names by the director of the children\u2019s home they were in.<\/p>\n
ngg_shortcode_1_placeholder My dad was 2nd generation Chinese, born in Cardiff in 1922.\u00a0 His parents were so poor, he was adopted by a man called Chin (surname), in exchange for a laundry.\u00a0 During WW2, he met up again with his birth family in Liverpool.\u00a0 He married my mum in 1951 in an era when mixed marriages were extremely rare.\u00a0 They met as lab assistants at Shell\u2019s Stanlow Oil Refinery in Ellesmere Port on the Wirral.\u00a0 They couldn\u2019t have any children so they adopted me.\u00a0 They thought \u201cLing Chi\u201d would be unpronounceable (in Mandarin, it\u2019s Ling Zhi) so I became Claire Ling Chi Chin<\/b>.<\/p>\n
Dad\u2019s blood relatives took an enormous interest in this adoption and were extremely supportive.\u00a0 Like Dad, they were born here and couldn\u2019t speak Chinese at all.\u00a0 His sisters, however, had both married Cantonese speaking Chinese men, and they tried to communicate with me.\u00a0 There were 2 small problems.\u00a0 One was that I was extremely traumatised and would scream my head off in the presence of men.\u00a0 Poor Dad couldn\u2019t go anywhere near me for the first couple of days back in Little Sutton village where I grew up.\u00a0 The second was that I either couldn\u2019t or wouldn\u2019t speak.\u00a0 A somewhat alarming report on my adoption file assesses me as \u201cextremely under developed\u201d.<\/p>\n
My mother died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage when I was 12.\u00a0 I was never close to the few relatives she had, so imagine my surprise, when playing in the village, some English kids approached me claiming to be my cousins.\u00a0 The family was rather tight lipped about the whole affair and I\u2019m not really sure how much her side of the family viewed our rather unusual situation.\u00a0 Mum\u2019s father refused to attend the wedding when she married Dad, so who knows\u2026<\/p>\n
Of the 100 or so of us who were adopted by British families, I was pretty unique in having exposure to Chinese relatives and Chinese culture. \u00a0But just how Chinese were we really?\u00a0 Dad and his family were BBCs, British Born Chinese.\u00a0 The food we ate was what we could cobble together from the village shops and the odd trip to Chinatown in Liverpool for soya sauce.\u00a0 Supermarkets didn\u2019t exist in the 60s as they do now \u2013 at least not on the Wirral.\u00a0 An English school friend invited me to tea and was delighted to serve me Vesta Chicken Chow Mein.\u00a0 I\u2019d never heard of it.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t resemble anything my family had ever encountered.<\/p>\n
Even more excruciating was the occasional visit to Chinese restaurants.\u00a0 My poor father once had to withstand a tirade from a waiter who claimed Dad wasn\u2019t Chinese at all.\u00a0 \u201cYou don\u2019t talk Chinese, you don\u2019t walk Chinese, you don\u2019t even look Chinese.\u201d\u00a0 Imagine what they made of me, with my English mother.\u00a0 What\u2019s worse, I actually look Japanese<\/i>.\u00a0 When I visited Dad\u2019s younger brother, who\u2019d escaped all this abuse and emigrated to Singapore, I met enormous hostility in Malaysia because I was mistaken for being Japanese.\u00a0 The conversation went something like:<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s Chinese, she\u2019s our cousin.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe doesn\u2019t look like you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s adopted.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do you know she\u2019s Chinese, then?\u201d<\/p>\n
So clearly there are shades of yellow and, in the eyes of \u201cproper Chinese,\u201d I\u2019m patently at the pale end of the scale.\u00a0 In fact, they call us bananas<\/b>.\u00a0 In the light of the controversy over Ashley Cole being accused of being a choc ice<\/b>, I\u2019ll leave you to ponder that one.<\/p>\n
I was determined to counter this by dressing Chinese (you can see I\u2019m still trying) and learning Chinese.\u00a0 I went to DurhamUniversity and studied Mandarin.\u00a0 I was supposed to study in China for a year but extensive medical tests led to discovering I was a carrier of Hepatitis B.\u00a0 It took 18 years before something vile came out of the woodwork relating to my dodgy origins, and this was it.\u00a0 It meant I had to go to Taiwan instead (China wouldn\u2019t let me in).<\/p>\n
There were no direct flights in 1980, so I went via Hong Kong, on my own with food poisoning (don\u2019t ask) and only half my luggage (Cathay Pacific sent the other half to Los Angeles).\u00a0 Oh, and I\u2019d learned Mandarin, not Cantonese (which is what they speak in Hong Kong).\u00a0 So I ended up in even more complicated explanations for my inability to communicate in my own tongue.<\/p>\n
Which brings me to how I\u2019m perceived by the English.\u00a0 One of my bolt holes in Hong Kong was an English school friend\u2019s mother.\u00a0 I arranged to meet her on VictoriaPeak where she lived.\u00a0 She was shocked when she saw me.\u00a0 Hence another somewhat surreal but oft encountered conversation:<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re Chinese!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes.\u00a0 Didn\u2019t Anne tell you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you sounded just like a girl from Liverpool over the phone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI am a girl from Liverpool.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s what I am.\u00a0 A Scouser.\u00a0 What I discovered in Taiwan was that I wasn\u2019t nearly as Chinese as I thought I was.\u00a0 I\u2019d learned to talk Chinese, even dress Chinese, but, in the end, I couldn\u2019t act Chinese.\u00a0 It was a huge disappointment to the family of course.\u00a0 Being the first of my generation to learn Chinese and go back out to the Far East, they expected me to meet and marry someone Chinese.<\/p>\n
I came back to Durham speaking far better Chinese and promptly had a nervous breakdown.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t actually know that I was having one.\u00a0 Everyone put it down to the Hep B at first but after being tested for everything under the sun including glandular fever, we were all very non-plussed.\u00a0 Eventually the university psychologist got wind of this from my prof who was worried I was falling asleep in his lectures.\u00a0 Hence another one of these weird conversations:<\/p>\n
\u201cIs she Chinese?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cChinese don\u2019t recognise Depression.\u00a0 They just get ill instead.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was all a mystery to Dad and me given neither of us had indulged in anything so exotic as Depression with a capital \u201cD.\u201d\u00a0 We both resolutely smiled through our trauma \u2013 poor Dad lost his eldest brother, his mother and his wife within a short space of time and claimed he couldn\u2019t remember the 70s at all.\u00a0 So when I asked him if this assertion still applied to Chinese brought up here, he said the most extraordinary thing:<\/p>\n
\u201cYou were always more Chinese than I was.\u201d<\/p>\n
My 50 shades just got yellower\u2026until I started dating,\u00a0 I\u2019d had mild interest from a Chinese lad in Taiwan, who being very Chinese or very shy, took so long to declare his intentions that I was due to go home before he\u2019d said anything.\u00a0 I went out with a batty American from LA who kept telling me to \u201cmellow out\u201d whenever I got ratty and complained that I was too English and two timed me with a local Chinese girl.\u00a0 Back in Durham, there was a chap from Malaysia called David who was interested but went about it as slowly as the Chinese lad in Taiwan.\u00a0 And then I met David Martin.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t give a sausage about how Chinese I was, the Hep B or the nervous breakdown.\u00a0 Not being Chinese, he didn\u2019t hang around either.\u00a0 I remembered how my landlady in Taiwan had been treated by her husband and mother-in-law.\u00a0 I realised that I couldn\u2019t bow and scrape to a Chinese man \u2013 which is why I\u2019m not married to one.\u00a0 I finally recognised how English I was.<\/p>\n
In the year 2000, I discovered that I wasn\u2019t alone.\u00a0 Despite their best efforts, my parents and the Rigbys didn\u2019t get Sally and me together that often.\u00a0 Jasmine and her mum organised the first re-union but I had to miss it due to a family wedding.\u00a0 But Sally and I got together that year for the first time since we were 7 and Jasmine and I met in London.\u00a0 I also Googled the Fanling website and found a whole bunch of American adoptees from Hong Kong.\u00a0 Kim R, who runs the site, put me in touch with Debbie C who has been very active in organising UK reunions.\u00a0 I met Sue J at the Birmingham one, ironically, since we both live near each other, then we met up again in London.\u00a0 Julia Feast launched the adoption study which brought even more of us together.\u00a0 Imagine the joy of meeting some of the other babies in the Heathrow picture.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s extraordinary to meet others who have been through the same experience.\u00a0 We have an uncanny bond.\u00a0 It\u2019s a novelty to share anecdotes and we can giggle at those weird conversations I\u2019ve quoted because we\u2019ve all had them.\u00a0 I\u2019ve met about 50 of us now \u2013 and we\u2019re like a family.\u00a0 Some of us have tried to be Chinese and some of us haven\u2019t.\u00a0 Some of us flew into a tailspin trying to complete the recent census forms \u2013 anything that puts us into boxes is a nightmare because we just don\u2019t fit anywhere.\u00a0 Then Lucy Sheen came to the rescue.\u00a0 Her advice:\u00a0 Tick \u201cOther\u201d, insert \u201cBritish Chinese\u201d.<\/p>\n
So here I am, Claire Ling Chi Martin<\/b>, British Chinese and 50 shades of yellow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fifty Shades\u2026\u2026of Yellow I bet that got you going! And now it looks like a rating scale for cowardice\u2026 I was found by the police on the doorstep of either 42 or 63 Berwick Street in Hong Kong on about … Continue reading