The Chinese community in the North has suffered racism for years, but some are trying to change attitudes, writes Susan McKay
During preparations for a recent event organised by the Chinese Welfare Association, chief executive Anna Lo met with the senior public figure, an impeccably respectable Northern Irish man, who was to launch it.
"I said to him, 'make sure you can say a few words in Chinese'," she recalls. "He said, 'Och, I'll just say give me a number 44.' I was gobsmacked."
So Lo wasn't surprised that a report into the mental health needs of the Chinese community in Belfast, published this week, found that nearly 60 per cent of those interviewed had experienced major difficulties with racism.
"I was actually surprised the figure wasn't higher," she says. Police statistics show Northern Ireland has the highest rate of racist attacks in the UK.
"A recent survey found racist prejudice in the North was twice as intense as sectarian prejudice - more than half of those questioned said they wouldn't accept a Chinese person marrying into their family."
Loyalists with links to extreme right-wing British nationalist groups in the UK have circulated leaflets about the "yellow invasion", and, in December 2003, a young woman in her ninth month of pregnancy and her husband were physically attacked and driven out of their rented home in the Village area of Belfast.
On four occasions, the Chinese community has had to abandon plans for a community centre. A leaflet was circulated in the Donegall Pass area, where a site had been identified, claiming that it would "undermine the community's Britishness". Anna Lo's response at the time was: "When are we going to be accepted? We have a third generation now, being born and brought up here. We have stuck with the wider community throughout the Troubles and now, when peace comes, we are being kicked around. We are being told we are not allowed to build here or there, because this is their place and we are not allowed to go in."
However, Northern Irish people have been happy to let the Chinese in to serve them their Friday night takeaways. A majority of the 8,000 or so Chinese community are in the catering trade, working long hours, six days a week in many cases. The abuse Chinese people have to put up with isn't confined to loyalist areas.
"I recently met a woman who used to have a restaurant in the Short Strand in East Belfast," says Lo. "She was caught up in the Troubles with the local community, but she eventually decided she couldn't take any more harassment from local children and teenagers, and she left.
"Her car was vandalised all the time, her windows were smashed, and several times she was trapped and had to spend the night inside the premises because they'd kicked in the shutters so she couldn't open the front door and the back door could only be locked from inside."
It is a familiar story. "There are people who think it is funny to scare the Chinese. A lot of drunks come into takeaways. Some refuse to pay and give the workers dog's abuse, or demand their money back and claim they'll send local heavies round to give them a kicking."
Lo believes protection payments are still being made to paramilitaries. Chinese people, and their restaurants, are known as "Chinkers" and Lo deplores the fact that this term is so ubiquitous that Chinese children themselves use it.
SHE'S ALSO INCREASINGLY concerned about the exploitation of Chinese people by unscrupulous elements within the Chinese community. The majority of Chinese people have little or no English when they come here. "Some of them are illegals or asylum seekers. There are so-called "consultants" who offer 'package deals'," she said.
"They've brought people over on the basis that if they have a baby they'll get an Irish passport, and they charge them a lot of money for something they'd be entitled to anyway. They charge people to fill out forms which we'll help them with for free at the association. You get restaurant owners paying people very badly and housing them in bad accommodation."
Lo, many of whose friends are Irish, feels she isn't fully accepted herself as a member of the local Chinese community, though she is well respected as a professional worker.
"I'm from Hong Kong and I'm from a very different background to many of the rural Chinese workers who come here because of the threat of poverty at home."
HER GRANDFATHER WAS born in San Francisco, the child of a philandering father who had four wives, none of whom was the baby's mother. "Nobody said anything," says Lo.
She was born and grew up in Hong Kong and went to a government school. "The principal was a Scot. We used to call foreigners "kwailo" - ghost men - and he was the epitome of that. My mother named me Manwah. It means elegance. He wanted us all to have English names. I asked my older brother. He was reading Pride and Prejudice and said I should take the name of Mr D'Arcy's sister, Georgianna. He wrote it out for me. But half the class couldn't say it and I couldn't spell it, so I became Anna."
She came to London in the 1970s and married a journalist from Belfast. They moved back to his city in the middle of the Troubles, and had two sons.
"I loved it and hated it - I was terrified a lot of the time," she says. She was kicked in the street, and she and her sons routinely experienced racism - as a small boy one of them was knocked down and kicked in the school playground. His nose was broken and he had a black eye.
"We called it his panda eye," says Lo. "His teacher refused to accept it was a racist incident."
She trained as a social worker, and began to do voluntary work for the Chinese community. "I saw how isolated they were." In 1978 she set up the first Chinese English classes. She worked as a translator for the police and became the new Chinese Welfare Association's interpreter.
The association is now prominent in the struggle for racial equality in the North. It runs highly professional and effective campaigns for legal change, has a strategic plan, and runs a huge range of courses and activities, including after-school clubs and programmes for the elderly.
The Chinese New Year is by now a well-established Belfast event. Last weekend there were colourful Dragon boat races on the Lagan. There were Irish teams as well as Chinese ones.
Anna Lo is determined that cultural exchanges are going to amount to a lot more than, "I'll have a number 44".