On Cricket, Music and the Chinese of Jamaica

My paternal grandfather’s first wife, Chong Len Feng, was born in Jamaica, to a Chinese father and an Afro-Jamaican mother. Soon after her birth, she was sent back to China to be raised Chinese, before an arranged marriage to my grandfather brought her to Borneo Island in the 1920s. As far as I know, I’m the first member of my family to return to Jamaica since Len Feng left. 

Although the primary reason I came was for a relaxing, warm winter escape, Jamaica and the Caribbean has long been a place of fascination to me. There are the common cultural touchstones: ‘Cool Runnings’, an obsession with Bob Marley in high school, and discovering a love of Jamaican beef patties at DC’s various Jamaican restaurants (like Aussie meat pies, only flakier!). 

But even earlier than these interactions, my relationship with the region was formed through my dad’s love of the West Indies’ cricket team. Growing up a cricket obsessed boy in the 90s, I recall one Monday morning, when one of my classmates gushed about his trip that weekend to the Perth cricket stadium to watch a match between Australia and the West Indies (often shortened to the ‘Windies’). Apparently, the crowd had come up with some racist chants, calling the Windies players ‘coons’ or the ‘N word’--you know, classic, ignorant Australian racism, the kind that usually targeted Aborigines, but could easily be broadened to include other dark-skinned people. No stranger to Aussie racism myself, I developed a certain empathy and sense of solidarity with Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, two great West Indian fast bowlers, as they scared the crap out of my beloved Aussie batting lineup with their barrage of bouncers (in which the ball is bounced toward a players’ head).

While watching the matches, dad would regale me with stories about the great West Indian team of the 70s and 80s, captained by Clive Lloyd and a fast bowling lineup of Joel Garner, Michael Holding and Malcolm Marshall. Even as a young boy, he imbued me with a sense of post-colonial retribution: of powerful Black athletes beating the descendants of their former British slave masters. Later on, I discovered a great documentary called ‘Fire in Babylon’ about this very dynamic, and was moved to tears by Michael Holding speaking out during recent global Black Lives Matter conversations about the racism he has encountered. While my grandfather’s own experience as a coolie for the British cannot be compared to the chattel slavery which brought West Africans to the Caribbean and North America, I felt a certain bond, growing up the one Chinese kid in a racist town in rural Western Australia. One of the first generations to come of age in a post-colonial but still White-dominated world in which being Black and Brown was associated with negative images, I could hear in every flash of Brian Lara’s elegant blade a whispered “fuck you” at the White power structure.

Alas, as with the broader tale of post-colonial development, the journey to racial equity and liberation is not a straight one. In more recent years, the West Indies team has been a shadow of its former self, maddeningly inconsistent and lacking resilience. I commiserated with a few older Jamaican men regarding this sorry state of affairs during my visit. After touring the Greenwood Great House (formerly owned  by a family that owned over 84,000 acres of land and 2,000 enslaved people), I was pleased to discover that Bob, the man who sold me my ticket–a Black Jamaican–is in fact its owner. I mentioned to him that I was reading “Beyond the Boundary”, a classic cricket memoir by the great Trinidadian writer CLR James. It turns out that Bob had met CLR years ago, when the great man had given a speech in London to a group of West Indians. Bob lived in London for many years, but returned to Jamaica after getting fed up with the racism he encountered living as a Black man there. However, when I asked him if it was satisfying to own a house that once belonged to one of the richest slave-owners in Jamaica, Bob was remarkably level-headed regarding post-colonial race relations.

“I don’t hold a grudge toward the White man,” he said. “We (Black Jamaicans) have our own political problems to sort out.” (Or something like that, I can’t quite remember the details.) He went on to describe the ongoing struggles of Jamaica, among them government corruption, gang violence, and a populace that he thought were more interested in rum bars than a serious reckoning with the country’s history and the project of societal uplift. He also praised the Chinese ability to build a north-south highway across the island, which the French had apparently tried and failed to do, claiming it was impossible.  

In fact, visiting Jamaica in 2022, I was amazed at the accomplishments of that great West Indian cricket team of the 70s and 80s in the first place. For such a famously recognizable country–the global superstardom of Bob Marley, Usain Bolt’s indelible victory pose--Jamaica is surprisingly small and under-developed. Compared to the resources of the English or Australian cricket team, their excellence was a David versus Goliath-like achievement. A few days after my chat with Bob, I discovered more reasons for the team’s recent struggles. According to a retired PE teacher who was, by his own account, the best batsman in his high school team, cricket is no longer the most popular sport in Jamaica, having been replaced by soccer.

But if cricket as a global Jamaican export is in current decline, there is another one that remains as vital as ever: its music. And while in Jamaica, I learned that Chinese there played a seminal role in the country’s music industry, primarily as producers, such as Leslie Kong, who produced Bob Marley’s first single. As a boy who dreamed of being–or at least seeing–Australia’s first Chinese cricket player wear the famous baggy green cap (I’m still dreaming of the day), I was overjoyed to see Chinese succeed in the creative industries, beyond grocery stores and other more practical professions. We diasporic Chinese are known globally for many things–industriousness, poor quality plastic goods, chow mein, math…some of these stereotypes are more helpful than others. But being cool or sexy, like a musician or professional athlete? That has typically been the domain of White or Black folks, but not us. Which is why I love the singer Tessanne Chin so much. 

When I moved to America in 11th grade, I felt immediately that I had to choose between either acting White or Black (Abercrombie versus Ecko), and that the default was White. Asian kids don’t get called out for being good at violin or English essay competitions–in fact, it’s encouraged and rewarded. However, you were called a “kigga” or a “chigga" if you acted Black. It’s why the rapper MC Jin was so easy to make fun of, and why Eddie Huang can feel so cringey, even if quietly revolutionary. While looking for jobs as an English teacher in China, I encountered job listings that stated “No Blacks allowed”, and a culture that carried all of the same negative stereotypes about Black people as I had grown up with in the west. In more recent years, I have seen White commentators kvetch about China ‘colonizing’ Africa. In all of these cases, Yellow and Black races appeared in competition, like our enslaved or indentured ancestors, fighting our own battles for recognition as equals while spinning around a still-White axis.  

It was within this harsh context that I first encountered recordings of Tessanne’s performances on ‘The Voice’, which she won in 2013. When I initially saw her perform and speak, I was struck not only by the mastery, soul and power of her singing, but by her Jamaican-ness, her Blackness, or, as she puts it: her ‘Caribbean swag.’ Although I’ve seen many talented Asian singers, Tessanne was the first one with swag. (While Sean Paul is also of Chinese-Jamaican heritage, Tessanne is an unmistakably Chinese-looking Jamaican singer.) Her father is of Chinese heritage, her mother of African and English heritage, in itself a refreshing genesis (versus the far more common White/Black male-Asian female couple). I love the way the entire nation and Caribbean diaspora rallied around her during her stint on an American singing competition.        

When asked in a 2013 interview with hip-hop legend Sway about dark-skinned Jamaicans bleaching their skin, Tessanne said: “It’s so important for all of us to look at each other and say: ‘Whatever God give you is good enough.’ Work with it. Look at the content of someone’s character.” 

In 2022 America, her statement feels retrograde, a throwback to a post-racial MLK/Obama vision when the tenor of race discussions leans Malcolm. Yet what I find most meaningful is the way Tessanne disrupts dominant narratives in which Black and Yellow are in tension, struggling against one another or striving separately to advance in a White-led world. During my trip, I found that Jamaica’s dominant narrative is one of black liberation–of slave rebellions, Garvey’s black nationalism, Rastafari, and African cultural fusion. But I also glimpsed a quieter, subtler, but perhaps equally radical vision. That of a majority Black nation that is as multicultural as its national motto–”Out of many, one people”--would suggest. A Black melting pot with Chinese, Indian, Lebanese, and White seasoning, one that will continue to play an outsized role in decolonizing and re-envisioning what our 21st century will celebrate.