Discrimination against the Chinese community in the North is making a difficult situation even harder, writes Bryan Coll
IN CRAIGAVON, Harry Choung is trying to fix his laptop, but all he can think about is Moscow. The 17-year-old has a small bet riding on Manchester United in the Champion's League Final in Russia. If Alex Ferguson's team wins with an extra-time goal, Choung will start the weekend with a sizeable windfall. Concentrating on the game isn't easy.
A few feet away, Carol Lam is doing her best to distract the match viewers with updates on her own wagers. The 18-year-old is playing poker on her Bebo profile and is fast running out of chips.
"It's in the blood," laughs Leona Tran, the youth officer at Craigavon's Wah-Hep Chinese community centre, surveying the light gambling going on around her. Poking fun at stereotype is a recurring theme of the group banter at Wah-Hep, most of whose teenage members were born in Northern Ireland.
The majority of the youth club members are the second generation of an 800-strong Chinese community living in the Craigavon area. Yet despite their broad accents and taste for Northern humour, many of Wah-Hep's young members still feel like outsiders in their own community - a fact underlined by the centre's strangely isolated location.
Normally, having an office in a shopping centre would suggest a confident, public presence in the community. But this being Craigavon, Northern Ireland's failed experiment in town planning, Legahory Shopping Centre, the group's base, is anything but a busy thoroughfare.
A so-called single-use retail space, designed to serve one of the residential zones of Ireland's largest new town, Legahory shares many features of the Craigavon landscape. Expansive green spaces and generous cycle paths fail to mask the overall sense of emptiness that pervades the town.
"There's not even a cinema here." complains Carol Lam, who recently returned from Belfast to live in Craigavon. "And there's only one nightclub which is horrendous."
Besides its much-maligned proliferation of roundabouts, there is one thing, however, that Craigavon has in abundance - racially motivated crime. According to the latest figures from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), Craigavon has the highest reported level of racially motivated incidents in any rural area in the North.
In 2008, when the number of racist crimes dropped in the majority of policing districts, the level of racially-motivated incidents reported to the police in Craigavon climbed to its highest level in four years. For the young people of Wah-Hep, this comes as no surprise. "Every day you get the odd little snipe," says Leona Tran, recounting how she was sworn at by an elderly man as she jogged with a Chinese friend. "He just turned and shouted 'Learn to speak English.'" says Yam.
"I replied, 'We know how to speak English'. These comments come out of thin air."
"People are amazed that I can even speak English," says Carol Lam, whose Chinese-born parents first came to Craigavon from Vietnam in the 1980s.
Carol believes that racism is especially prevalent among young people in the North: "I was in a park with a friend and a girl shouted 'go back to your country'. But we were born here so we have every right to be here."
Over half the young people attending Wah-Hep's mid-week session have been forced to move home or drop out of school due to racial intimidation.
Fifteen-year-old Azhar Ahsan, currently on work experience at the Wah-Hep offices, moved to Craigavon with his family following regular attacks on their home in neighbouring Portadown. According to Azhar, his family's plight was met with initial apathy on the part of the police.
"People threw rocks at our house and wrote 'Pakis out' on our wall," he says. "After our windows got smashed we told the police. Then it happened a second time and we told the police again. Nothing happened. When it happened a third time they finally did something about it."
The experience has left him disillusioned with the PSNI, who recently launched an advertising campaign to recruit more ethnic minorities.
"It put me off the police a bit," says Azhar. "I don't have confidence in them."
For Wah-Hep's director, Paul Yam, racism is not the only obstacle impeding Northern Ireland's second - and third-generation Chinese community. Educational underachievement is a growing problem and, according to Yam, one that is going largely unnoticed in schools.
He makes a distinction between the North's more established Cantonese-speaking community, which first arrived in the Belfast area from Hong Kong in the 1960s, and the Vietnamese-Chinese community, which settled around Ballymena and Craigavon in the 1980s.
"A lot of the Hong Kong Chinese have done quite well," says Yam. "But there is a big number of the Vietnamese-Chinese community that are under-achieving. Their educational performance is quite poor."
Among the four older members of the youth club, all of whom were born in the North, half left school without any GCSE qualifications. For young people already at the receiving end of social discrimination, educational failure makes finding employment all the more difficult. "In this education system, if you do well, you'll go far," says Leona Tran. "But if you don't get good grades, there's not much of a safety net."
Leona (25) is, according to Paul Yam, one of the "exceptions" among her peers. Currently working as the group's youth co-ordinator, she is about to leave Wah-Hep, and Craigavon, for London, where she will begin a PGCE teacher-training course.
The move is due partly to her bachelor's degree in Business and Computing, which does not gain her entry to the equivalent course at Queen's in Belfast, and partly for cultural reasons. "I was in London for my degree and I want to go back," she says. "No one cares how strange you look. Here, they judge you by how you look."
The latest figures from the Department of Education show that the number of pupils in schools in Northern Ireland who do not speak English as their first language has more than trebled in the past six years. Yet the number of staff qualified to teach English as an additional language in schools is lagging.
"The only way to overcome failure is intensive learning of English," says Paul Yam, who places the responsibility for educational support on parents as well as on schools; a role, he says, that some families are unable to fulfil. "Most of the parents are in the catering trade and they go to work when the kids get back from school," says Yam. "The majority were educated in Chinese, so they can't really help them with their homework either."
For the young members of Wah-Hep, their patchy language skills are a favourite topic for nagging parents. Yet in such cases, it's slip-ups in Cantonese or Mandarin rather than English that test their parents' patience.
"We're not very good with our Chinese," confesses Linda Lam (12), who is currently taking weekend classes in the language. "If we want to talk with our mum, we'll drag our brother into the room. He's our interpreter."
Living in households where different generations use different languages means identity can be a tricky issue. "I speak Chinglish at home, a mix of Chinese and English," says Leona Tran. "Mum tells us off. She's always saying 'this is my house and I want Chinese, not English.' But I feel Northern Irish above all."
Compared to the rest of the Wah-Hep group, who are glued to the penalty shoot-out in Moscow, Yunlong Zhu (20) seems distracted. As his fellow club members rue their lost bets, Yunlong is coming up with a way to raise more money - this time for victims of the Sichuan Province earthquake.
Yunlong first came to Northern Ireland three years ago, after his father, a martial arts instructor, left China in 1999 to settle in Derry. Today, father and son operate a province-wide martial arts school, specialising in Chinese kung-fu.
Yunlong also competes in national tournaments and recently came second in the British Open championships. He's hoping to put on a martial arts show in Craigavon to raise money for the earthquake and is preparing to ask the local council to lend him a venue for the night.
"At the tournament in London, there were white, black, Chinese and Indian guys doing the sports," he says. "They are all learning our arts and culture.Things like that are much more developed there."
Yunlong holds regular martial arts classes for neighbouring youth clubs and believes the sport is a useful way to reduce the hostility towards the local Chinese community.
"For a while I wanted to join the PSNI to help change people's attitudes. But I noticed that a lot of the youth here aren't scared of a policeman," he laughs. "One thing we have to do is communicate better. Maybe you have to be their friend to change them."
bcoll@irish-times.ie