The Good Immigrant Page 6
‘Chinese’ was what I was though, as informed by my nonplussed parents. Actually, let’s qualify that: half-Chinese. Outside my own family I barely met any other Chinese people. The term ‘East Asian’ doesn’t appear to have been invented at that juncture in history and the collective umbrella term for us arguably-yellow-arguably-dull-brown/olive-people-with-funny-shaped-eyes was ‘oriental’ – a ludicrous colonial expression, which literally means the ‘furthest point east’. The mysterious ‘orient’ began life in the Ottoman Empire, i.e. Turkey. As civilised white men murdered, pillaged and plundered their way further across the globe, ‘orientals’ were found in the ‘Middle’ East and as the intrepid colonials went further still, ‘oriental’ came to sum up everyone and everything east of India. ‘Oriental’ has connotations of bamboo and flutes and red sunsets. It should only really be used to describe carpets, as the word has an inherent exoticism that I’m not sure a boy growing up in Wiltshire can ever fully embody. In the US ‘Asian Americans’ have rejected the term ‘oriental’. Here, the Chinese (at least) have positively embraced it, because we appear to be a pragmatic species and aren’t known as the ‘model minority’ for nothing. So at this confusing point of second generation immigrant experience, I accepted that I was an ‘oriental’ and found a ‘role model’ in another ‘oriental’: Kendo Nagasaki.
There appeared to be very few ‘orientals’ on TV in the seventies and the ones that were haunted me to such an extent I almost found myself wishing they weren’t there. Along with ‘chink’ and ‘China’ I would be taunted with cries of ‘Bruce’ (Lee, naturally, though in the Land Before Home Entertainment one rarely actually saw Bruce), ‘Kung Fu’ (a TV series starring David Carradine as the supposedly mixed- race Eurasian martial arts expert with legendarily rubbish slow-motion fight sequences), ‘Grasshopper’ (there was a blind, bald Chinese guru in said Kung Fu series who would appear in flashback and advise Carradine in a ludicrously exaggerated cod-Chinese accent which many white people at the time loved to imitate), ‘Hawaii Five-O’ (being set in Hawaii and being an American rather than British show, it actually had a reasonably inoffensive Asian side-kick character), ‘Hong Kong Phooey’ (a cartoon series about a Kung Fu kicking dog in a silk dressing gown), ‘Fu Manchu’ (Sax Rohmer’s legendarily racist cartoon Chinese villain further immortalised in a series of films starring Christopher Lee, one of which seemed to be on literally every Sunday afternoon) and ‘Cato’ (a character in the Peter Sellers Inspector Clouseau films who appeared for 10 minutes in every movie and got the living shit literally kicked out of him and who many white men of a certain generation seem to adore beyond all reasonable ken).
Given how few ‘orientals’ there were on TV at the time it was also astounding how many of them were portrayed by white men. I can vividly recall wondering whether Chinese men just didn’t do acting or whether white men just loved dressing up and looking silly. Even my favourite TV programme in the world, Doctor Who, got in on the ‘yellowface’ act.
Yellowface is a form of theatrical makeup used by performers to represent an East Asian person (Wikipedia).
1970s Doctor Who was a very different beast to the one that adorns our screens now. There was no soppy soapy romance, no hopelessly po-faced self-aggrandisement, no superficially flashy CGI and no bombastic manipulative music. It was just cardboard sets, men in rubber suits, rattling good scripts (er … usually) and a maverick outsider travelling in time and space (what could be more attractive to a boy who was bullied at school?).
However, in one crucial area, New Doctor Who trumps Original Doctor Who hands down. The modern version positively teems with diversity of all kinds. ‘Old Who’, I’m afraid to say, was populated almost entirely by white people with some very occasional but fleeting ethnic stereotypes bunged in. For a remit with the whole of time and space as a palette, this is a bit crap frankly.
Somewhere in the mid-1970s, the luridly titled Doctor Who story, ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang’ graced six consecutive Saturday evenings. A handsomely mounted Victorian Sax Rohmer homage that did, however, manage to feature, in the very same story, arguably one of the worst giant rats ever seen on TV, as well as one of the very worst examples of yellowface as a gang of silent, sinister and inscrutable (it’s amazing how easily and often those words flow together) goons (the only appropriate description) appeared, led by an English actor called John Bennett sporting ridiculous false eyelids that looked like you could sit on them, skin made up yellower than a lump of cheese and speaking in a hopelessly mishmashed Chinese/Japanese hybrid accent that would have had Henry Higgins completely stumped. Not nearly so much though as the fact that the BBC still carries a website page somewhere that heaps lavish praise on Mr Bennett’s staggeringly silly turn, opining that, unless they knew, a viewer might be hard-pressed to tell that the English thesp wasn’t in fact Chinese. Not unless they were under the impression that Chinese people had eyelids made from recycled skateboards and talked like Yoda in Star Wars when he’s been on the ketamine, I think.
There appeared to be no ‘oriental’ comedians to take the piss back and, unlike black people, we ‘orientals’ didn’t even have any ‘oriental’ pop stars. There was a Japanese bloke who played bass in the video for Rod Stewart’s ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ which, being Number One for what seemed like forever at the time, did at least mean that this one almost-Chinese cool-looking dude was on Top of the Pops every week.
And that was it.
And then along came Kendo Nagasaki.
Kendo was a proper badass. In wrestling parlance, a ‘heel’ as the sport’s ‘antagonists’ are traditionally known (the term has possible biblical origins apparently). He won all his fights, dispatching his hapless opponents with consummate ease though a combination of breathtakingly agile flourishes, athletic kicks and gloriously Machiavellian skulduggery. Kendo (in my memory play) wore florid silky martial arts gear, all dragons and flames and bamboo-style lettering. He was sleek and quick, cunning and sly, made elaborate entrances to the ring where he acrobatically warmed up, revelling in the booing and baying of the crowd whom he arrogantly baited (and did so again after his inevitable victories) in what seemed, to a racially abused schoolboy, the ultimate act of ethnic defiance.
In short, Kendo Nagasaki was an out-and-out dirty villainous cheat that the crowd, viewers, commentator and other competitors loathed beyond all seeming limit – except that this fiendish ‘oriental’ won bout after bout with his despicable and blatant dirty tactics, appearing to positively revel in the fact that no matter how much everyone involved seemed to will it, he simply would not be beaten.
Now, ‘kendo’ is a form of Japanese martial art descended from ancient swordsmanship and ‘Nagasaki’ is of course the Japanese city famed for ever as the one that was controversially flattened by ‘Fat Man’, the second US atomic bomb at the tail end of World War II. So the name, as well as being completely nonsensical, was arguably offensive. But this was the 1970s, remember, when we watched publicly subsidised paedophiles on TV.
So Kendo Nagasaki was a dubiously named gangsta badman. Kendo also wore, as part of his rather florid orientalist costume, a mask. A mask with (naturally) epicanthic eye slits, that covered his entire face and made him appear even more of a villain. There was a strange wrestling rule about masked wrestlers: they could only have said mask removed when they were defeated in the ring.
But that was never happening to Kendo Nagasaki. He was quicker than everyone else, could do ‘proper’ kung fu (unlike that David Carradine slow-mo bollocks), and was adept at getting in cheeky little punches when the ref wasn’t looking, as well as carrying on fighting when his opponent was on the deck and even laying out the ref when occasion demanded.
And I found myself silently willing on this masked man of the East as the only strong assertive role-model on TV who I could somehow relate to, albeit tenuously, despite the fact that everyone else in the entire country (the ones who watched wrestling anyway) appeared to despise Kendo Nagasaki.
Kendo was defeated (by Mick McManus or some other bland wrestling good guy). And it was no simple KO. A wrestling ‘great’ like Kendo Nagasaki required the whole ‘two pinfalls’ – a pinfall being a move where a wrestler holds his opponent so both shoulders are on the canvas for three or five seconds (I forget which) – to finally end what was a simply glorious unbeaten reign. But this day Kendo was outsmarted, out-thought and outfought, though not out-cheated, Kendo managing to the last to go down with some defiant underhandedness.
But go down he did as he was pinned to the canvas one last time, the ref counted off and the crowd howled in jubilant primal triumph.
And then came the moment when the victor got to unmask the notorious Kendo Nagasaki as the audience bayed with glee …
Kendo knelt …
A hand tugged at his mask. I steeled myself, comforted by the fact that soon we would see Kendo’s proud Asiatic features gloriously unbowed.
The hand tugged further, pulling Kendo’s mask up and up and …
Off it came …
To reveal …
A white man.
!!!!????!!!!????!!!!
Another bloody white man.
White with blue eyes and blonde hair.
A cherubic-looking blond white man.
And a half-Chinese boy turned off his TV in stunned silence.
NOTE: A mere glance at the likes of Wikipedia and YouTube appears to reveal that I’ve probably got Kendo mixed up with another masked East Asian-themed wrestler imaginatively called ‘Kung Fu’ who wore rather more florid outfits than Kendo’s which appear disappointingly prosaic when viewed now. There’s also a clip of Kendo being unmasked by Big Daddy mid-bout and him being a balding white man with brown, not blond, hair.
It’s all very confusing, but like The Glass Menagerie this is a ‘memory’ play.
An ethnic ‘memory’ play.
With no fiddle in the wings.
Window of Opportunity
Himesh Patel
When I was four years old, I tried to jump out of my bedroom window.
No, I wasn’t ending it all before academia drowned my youthful optimism in a sea of social awkwardness and HB pencils. I was trying to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
I was obsessed with the cartoon, watching the same video over and over again at Jackie the babysitter’s house. Seeing how much I loved the show, she let me keep the tape and Mum used it to keep me immobile as she worked around the house.
One afternoon, she was working in the kitchen and called for me. I didn’t respond. She went to the living room to investigate, where the video was still playing but I was nowhere to be found. She called for me again. Nothing. She headed upstairs to find me, crouching on my windowsill, ready to jump.
I know how this may seem, but even at the age of four, I had enough of a grasp on physics to know that jumping down to the ground from that height wouldn’t end well. I’d thought it through. You see, underneath my bedroom window was the porch roof, which was flat and [hopefully] sturdy enough to hold my weight.
The script was written.
We were running up. The director was ready to call ‘action’.
And … a hand grabbed my collar from behind and yanked me back inside.
The video soon disappeared and my bedroom window was locked.
In December 2012, I was invited by the Runnymede Trust to take part in a panel discussion on race in UK film and broadcast media, at London’s South Bank University. I was five years into my time at EastEnders and the organisers believed that young budding actors would be interested to hear my opinion on the matter. As the evening progressed, I began to feel more and more out of my depth. The other members of the panel (including one Riz Ahmed) were articulate and informed. I found myself without a point to make. I felt like I was out of the loop. In the years since that evening, the subject has become unavoidable, and rightly so. Lenny Henry’s BAFTA Television Lecture in 2014 and Danny Lee Wynter’s Act For Change Project are spearheading a movement that’s aiming to redress the balance. I began to wonder how I had managed not to notice such a huge schism in my industry even though it directly affected me.
I think it has something to do with where I grew up. Rural Cambridgeshire, for all its tranquillity, isn’t the most multicultural of places. The story of how I ended up there begins long before I was born.
In the 1960s, a lot of Indians who had settled in Kenya began moving to the UK, some taking advantage of British passports, others fleeing from increasingly severe immigration laws. My grandfather (or Dada, as I call him) lived in Nairobi, working for a company called Lamson Paragon. He was on the factory floor, making business stationery. By 1968, his two eldest sons and his eldest daughter had married and moved to the UK, leaving him in Kenya with my grandmother, their youngest daughter, and my dad. He asked Lamson Paragon for a transfer to Britain and the powers-that-be said yes.
So in 1970, my dad, aged 16, found himself in the sleepy Cambridgeshire town of St Neots, home to the factory Dada had been transferred to. It transpires that my family were the unwitting pioneers of multiculturalism in St Neots – as far as Dad can recall, they were the only South Asian family in their immediate area, perhaps even the whole town. I assumed that Dad and his family must have felt ostracised. I was wrong: Dad can’t recall ever feeling that way. Whereas the segregated immigrant communities in the big cities were bearing the brunt of xenophobia, no one in St Neots seemed to have any problem with my family joining their community. This positive experience my dad had as a young adult, accepted into British society with open arms, would echo down the years and shape my own experience decades later.
During the harsh British winters, my grandparents escaped back to India. It was during one of these trips, in 1976, that my dada noticed a young girl sat on his bus. He saw her talking to a friend, laughing and smiling. He kept seeing her almost every day and wondered who she was, which family she came from. He made some enquiries and eventually found out. Fortunately, they had some family in common, so Dada sent a marriage proposal to this mutual relative, who passed it on to the girl. Or as I like to call her … Mum.
It took a while for my parents to meet though.
At the time she received the proposal, my mum was studying in India and Dad was studying in the UK. For this reason, the first time around they both said no. Then, in November 1978, my mum’s family moved to the UK and my dada, so sure this girl was the perfect partner for his son, reopened the lines of communication.
As luck would have it, there was a mutual family wedding taking place and the families conspired to have my parents meet during the nuptials. The first day, the plan failed miserably. No one told Mum or Dad that they had to look out for each other and Dad, being the appointed wedding photographer, was far too preoccupied with lining up the perfect shots for the happiest day of the couple’s life. So on the second day, the families attempted it again, this time informing the concerned parties to keep an eye out for each other. Alas, neither of them actually bothered to do so and attempt number two also failed.
Frustrated, Dada decided to take everyone and go over to Mum’s house in London.
They arrived, introductions were made … and then the woman who would be my mum and the man who would be my dad were shoved into a room to talk. They ended up talking for 45 minutes, a pretty long time by most standards.
By January 1979, they were engaged. I asked them both what made them say yes to each other.
‘I don’t know,’ Dad said.
‘No, seriously,’ I replied.
‘Whatever expectations I had were fulfilled. I found someone I could get on with. Something clicked.’
‘Mum?’
‘I met with quite a few guys before your dad,’ she explained. ‘In hindsight, I’ve always had a strong personality and I never did what was expected of me. But your dad was different in so many ways.’
It’s true, Mum di
d go against the grain of what was expected of a girl of her generation. Her father afforded her a good education, a rarity for girls in India at the time and this, coupled with her sheer determination, has had a profound effect on the course of my life.
Dad agreed to get married on the condition that it wouldn’t be until he finished his studies, of which he still had a year remaining. Still, they were married in the eyes of the law on April 19th, 1979, and the Hindu ceremony took place a year later, on April 27th, 1980, after which Mum moved into the family home in St Neots. Dad’s studies led to a job as a dental technician and Mum eventually found work at an insurance brokers. Their life together had begun.
The next decade brought a lot of changes. In 1983, my sister was born. Then, in 1985, Dad’s brother-in-law told him about a shop that had come up for sale in a village called Sawtry, 16 miles up the A1. Being a shop owner himself, he advised that buying the shop would be the best thing my parents could do. After much deliberation, they decided to go for it.
I wondered whether they did it to take control of their lives, become masters of their own fate. Mum, however, says they simply took an opportunity that was afforded to them and did the best they could. Although they had my sister to look after at this point, they weren’t thinking of an ideal future in which they’d be rich business owners with children who wanted for nothing. They were simply putting one foot in front of the other, learning as they went. All that was certain was that the more hard work they put in, the better the reward would be.