Colonial Umpires and Laundrymen
So how come the Chinese in Guiana(in the days of cork hats, Phensic and quiet Sunday afternoons) didn't develop an aggrieved sense of being marginalized despite being at one stage poor and oppressed? How do we explain the absence of a heritage group with academic spokespersons and cymbals of oppression and martyrs exhumed for cultural rehabilitation? One simple answer might be that they were too busy taking care of business, the laundry & grocery business; or too preoccupied with educating their children; or maybe they were just too few in number to matter.
And when the political climate turned inhospitable and the daily demands placed on life seemed no longer endurable, many simply packed their entrepreneurial skills, memories and family photos in boxes and fled to North America. Not entirely in the spirit of 'We done wid allyuh'. Men and women still without a country.
For our ethnic argumentalists this might be too facile an explanation, but Trev Sue-A-Quan's Cane Ripples: The Chinese in Guyana (2003) confirms and explodes some of the myths we still hold about the Chinese. They were perceived, for instance, as blessed with a sense of fair play and race-blind impartiality which made them eminently suitable as cricket umpires. They ran the laundry business for the privileged class who needed neatly pressed shirts, trousers and suits. Sue-A-Quan's book suggests, however, that the lives of the Chinese were in many ways more humanly complex and less self-absorbed than we might think.
