Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Comparison by Topics

As Yelin points out, Phillips’s Final Passage and its main protagonist Leila are placed in a particular historical moment. From the context, it emerges that Leila was born in 1939, the day the Second World War was declared in Europe, and was 19 years old when she left the Caribbean for England in 1958. It was the year Phillips himself was born and subsequently, he and his parents left St. Kitts. Yelin further emphasizes that eruptions of violence against black Caribbean immigrants in the area of Notting Hill in London in 1958 are also present in the novel, when Leila notices the billboards with election campaign slogan “IF YOU WANT A NIGGER NEIGHBOUR VOTE LABOUR” (Phillips, Final Passage 122). On the other hand, Mo’s Sour Sweet does not relate to any particular events in the UK, but refers to the Chinese Civil War, which occurred throughout the 1940s and instigated migration from the mainland China to Hong Kong. In this manner, Lily and Mui, who were left parentless after their father had died in the war, migrated from the southern Chinese province Kwangsi to Hong Kong, where they were received as Chinese refugees, started working at a very young age and migrated to England as adults.

Caribbean and Chinese mindsets are strikingly different from the European one as well as from one another. Just as white Europeans are prejudiced against other races and all Chinese or black people usually look the same to them, the Chinese and West Indians also have stereotyped opinions on white Westerners and cannot tell them apart. Both the novels illustrate the life of immigrants in London, where the Chinese and West Indians encounter white people and try hard to comprehend their hostile attitudes, behaviour and culture.

1.6Cultural Background and Reasons for Migration

Caribbean cultural identity has “the traumatic character of ‘the colonial experience’” (Hall 435). Black people, predominantly from Africa, were dragged into slavery and transported into colonies in the Caribbean, where they were constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of the West and also made to experience themselves as ‘Other’ (436). As cultural identity comes from somewhere, has a certain history and undergoes constant transformation, one cannot deny African presence in the Caribbean. Although it was silenced by the powerful experience of slavery, Africa was present

in the everyday life and customs of the slave quarters, in the languages and patois of plantations, in names and words, [...] in religious practices and beliefs in the spiritual life, the arts, crafts, musics and rhythms of slave and post-emancipation society (436).

After all, Africa has remained the unspoken presence in Caribbean culture. However, it was not until the 1970s that the so-called Afro-Caribbean identity became historically available to the Caribbean people, they discovered themselves to be ‘black’ (436).

Though the Caribbean islands are nominally independent from Britain nowadays, they have no culture or economy of their own and are still dependent on the UK in these terms. The islands are based on agriculture, upon tilling of the soil, and people remained “close to the domestic patterns of slavery in the villages: seasonal labour for the cane and then getting work wherever they can” (Bell 600-601). Unemployment and poverty forced West Indians to migrate to the mother country, where work and opportunity were and where they believed to be accepted and treated fairly. Although leaving the island was for the protagonists of The Final Passage, Michael and Leila, like “leaving the safety of your family to go live with strangers” (Phillip, Final Passage 11), they wanted to start a new life in England, hoped for a better future and felt “sorry for those satisfied enough to stay” (20). They had their minds filled with ideas and half-truths; Michael thought that going to England was a life-changing experience that broadened Caribbean mind: “For a West Indian boy like you just being there is an education. [...] It’s a college for the West Indian” (101). They were amazed by second hand stories and the idea of huge manufactures “with more lathes than there be people on this island” (100). Although there were “many people [...] coming back from England with anything except the clothes they standing up in” (106), they did not acknowledge the discrimination black people like them might have been facing overseas.

Michael’s grandfather envisioned his grandson’s future outside the Caribbean, “West Indian man always have to leave his islands for there don’t be nothing here for him” (42), and indeed, there was not much for Michael, who was unemployed, habitually drunk and lived off his grandparents. He was inconsiderate and his behaviour was abusive: “He think he can just go put whatever woman with child he feel like and then go walk out with a next one like nothing is the matter” (59). The poor boy from Sandy Bay village “had done well for himself” (49) when he married Leila, the mulatto girl from St Patrick’s, whom he has been cheating on with a married woman. Leila’s father, whose identity remained unknown, was probably a white Englishman and in her childhood years, Leila had been mocked by her black schoolmates for having lighter skin, she was called “mulatto girl” and “wished that her mother would tell her it was not true” (65). With moving to England, she yearned to reunite with her mother and save her marriage that was falling apart. “She saw [Michael] still as both a destroyer and a partner, but she knew that he too would come to England because Calvin needed a father [...]. But if the marriage did fail again in England [...], it would not be her fault” (95).

Phillips depicts Caribbean women as devoted, usually single mothers, being submissive and subordinated to promiscuous men who often have children out of wedlock. West Indians are generally portrayed as religious people, children reading the Bible to their parents and staying to live with them till adult age. They had been educated by the British who taught them everything about Britain but nothing about the Caribbean: “Know anything about England? [...] I been reading about the place since I five” (140). As a result of the mixture of many colonial influences and English schooling, they are confused about their cultural identity and the history of the island, and “had never really worked out for [themselves] the relationship between the English, the Irish, the French, the Portuguese, the Africans and so on” (171).

The colonial character of confused Caribbean cultural identity is in contrast with the strong sense of Chinese cultural identity. While the Caribbean was the place where many cultures were imported and mixed throughout the time, China was exporting its culture worldwide. As Fung implies, Chinese are found in many different parts of the world since they started migrating from their homeland in the early 1800s to fill cheap labour shortages brought about by the abolition of slave trade. The early migration was also stimulated by the decline of Qing Dynasty in the middle of the 19th century, which let banditry, civil disorder, local feuds and famine break out in China. Fung further reports that the money the migrants sent home became an important component of the Chinese economy. The remittances were crucial for old people because “there was no pension in China until recently”, and so they counted on their sons “who were bound by filial obligation to look after them in their old age” (Bočánková 113). They relied on the set of traditional values, which stemmed from the old Confucian philosophy, such as dependence within a family and being part of something bigger than themselves. This sense of obligation and the feeling of mutual dependence give the Chinese psychological and social security till the present time (112). The values of the old society had also been professed by the leaders of the People’s Republic of China that was established in 1949. Therefore, changes in Chinese society “have been less total and less consistent” (111), and the Chinese bring their identity and values with them wherever they migrate to.

The Communist regime in China induced migration to Hong Kong, where economic situation and “the arrival of new competitors for the limited job opportunities” made the natives look somewhere else for jobs (Akilli, “Chinese”), and Britain with its post-war demand seemed to be the right place to go to. As we can see in Sour Sweet, the initial aim of the Hong Kong Cantonese immigrants was to make enough money in food businesses “to create better living conditions in their native land, and finally return to their country of origin” (“Chinese”). Thus Chen, a former farmer, migrated to the UK and was regularly sending remittance money to his dependent parents:

Old Mr Chen was a carpenter [...]. The carpentry business had taken a down-turn in the early 1960s as rice production had shrivelled under competition in Thailand. [...] Mother and Father Chen were now heavily dependent on their son’s money from overseas (Mo 5).

He met his future wife Lily at the dance that had been thrown “for emigrant bachelors like himself in search of wives to take back to Europe” (4). They had only known each other for three weeks when they got married, and two weeks later the couple left for the UK.

Confucian philosophy, which the Chen family followed, provides ethical guide to the proper behaviour of the Chinese, is a set of obligations that leads to harmony and emphasizes the loyalty of the inferior to the superior (Bočánková 119). Lily was, therefore, dutiful and devoted wife, respected Chen and addressed him as Husband. She was committed to the philosophy of yin and yang that keeps the dualistic, male and female, principles in balance. Lily was thus not inferior or subjugated to him, she let him act as if he was the dominator, but in fact it was her who had the leading role in their marriage: “If Lily led it was by default and, even so, with such delicacy that Chen thought himself the dominator rather than the dominated” (Mo 15). As Bočánková points out, “throughout history the main common goal for the Chinese was harmony in all aspects of their lives” (112), and therefore Lily let the man, supposedly the head of the family, take decisions in their lives, although she was intellectually superior to him. According to Rothfolk, “the family exists as a balance between yin and yang forces, husband and wife, which are dynamic and developmental.” And Lily did see herself and Chen as two opposing principles, “it was his function to oppose, part of the natural order of things” (Mo 45). “The ideal Confucian family was an extended one of three or four generations, in which authority rested with the elderly male members” (Bočánková 120), and this was just the case of the Chen family when Grandpa Chen migrated to Britain to join them.

The rigid character of Chinese marriage differs greatly from the relaxed but passionate nature of the Caribbean one. Bočánková implies that “Chinese culture does not encourage strong expressions of personal feelings” (114), and social behaviour is strictly defined. As opposed to the Caribbean, where promiscuity and infidelity were common, love or sexual attraction played only little role in the Chinese marriage and women were involved in a master-servant like relationship with their men. Mui represents a typical Chinese woman and what she is expected to be like:

Four years Lily’s senior, Mui had been brought up [...] in view that she should become a woman: uncomplaining, compliant, dutiful, considerate, unselfish, within her limits truthful and honourable; and [...] utterly submissive to the slightest wishes of her superiors which included women older than herself and the entire male sex, including any brothers she might acquire in the future (Mo 10-11).

The awareness of values and the sense of obligation to one another, which they had deeply written in themselves, made Lily and Mui strong enough to survive in Britain. In contrast, Leila saw herself as a failure even before the migration and had no strong sense of identity or person to turn to.