Situation upon Arrival in Britain

1.8Discrimination and Racism

When Leila was trying to find accommodation in London, she was confronted with white hostility towards coloured people and discriminating signs “‘No vacancies’, ‘No children’. [...] ‘No vacancies for coloureds’. ‘No blacks’” (155-56). No whites wanted to rent a room to a coloured couple with a baby. Leila was disenchanted, as she saw that blacks were only offered inferior housing, separated and made to live on the outskirts of the city. She had no other choice but to take a dilapidated terraced property, and they wondered “whether decent people [could] be expected to live in a place like [that]” (162). Leila was sceptical of trusting white people, found them deceitful and tried to avoid contact with them. When she spoke to her mother’s white doctor, she realized that a white man did not know how to behave when dealing with a coloured woman: “He [...] spoke to her with a smile on [his] face as if afraid that to release it might be interpreted as sexual aggression, or colonial bullying, or both. [...] She knew that behind it a man was frightened, not of her but of himself” (152). However, the white racism was not monolithic, Leila became friends with a white neighbour Mary, but this friendship alone could not prevent “Leila’s experience of alienation and displacement” (Yelin).

In contrast to the West Indian family who was discriminated against in terms of housing, the Chen family lived relatively comfortably in a rented flat that “English people had competed for [,which] made Chen feel more rather than less of a foreigner, it made him feel like a gatecrasher who had stayed too long and been identified” (Mo 1). Chen was well aware of the fact that he was perceived as the other, the foreign, he got used to the English who “stared at him because he was Chinese [...]. This staring no longer disconcerted, although he found the accusatory quality of the stares puzzling. There was a reassuring anonymity about his foreign-ness” (9). But in a way, he understood their attitude. As well as they found him different, he considered them as strange-looking, “Chen understood: a lot of Westerners looked the same to him too” (9). When he worked in the Chinese restaurant in Soho, he and his colleagues preferred to see Chinese customers and held discussions about the disturbing “idiosyncracies of their hosts and patrons, the English. Among these eccentricities was the strange and widespread habit of not paying bills” (29). The Chinese waiters tried to comprehend the English and their loud and rowdy, often insulting, behaviour “including fencing with the chopsticks and wearing inverted rice-bowls on the head like brittle skull-caps” (29). Later on, when the Chens were looking for the place where to set up their own business and came across English men, Chen, who already learned the lesson of English hostility towards coloured immigrants, warned Lily and Mui that “the English were peppery, often manufacturing pretexts for anger where none reasonably existed” (83).

Their son Man Kee also experienced what it meant to be coloured, when he was bullied at school, white boys beat the small Chinese and took his bus money. This enraged Lily, who taught him to defend himself. She did not understand Western behaviour and was convinced of the supremacy of the Chinese race (Suprajitno 80). However, she did not only consider them superior to the British, but also to West Indians. She was relieved when she found out that Man Kee “was friendly with Indian boys,” and not with “those monkey-looking black boys. They looked so primitive. Might have got [her son] into trouble” (Mo 247). As Asians had much in common, “they ate the same special lunch and went round in a group,” they held together (247). Lily was clearly prejudiced against black people and did not want to be involved with them in any way. As opposed to West Indians who resigned to their inferior position in the British society, the Chinese thought highly of their own race and kept aloof from both the British and West Indians.