Cuban Chinese 1880-

[baksha]

Cuban Chinese -

[amy]

For anyone in the New York City area who's interested, there will be a free lecture on the history of Chinese in Cuba, Feb. 4th at Barnard College, Columbia University, Broadway and 116th Street:

barnard.edu/events/chinese-cuba-bondage-transnational-citizenship

[douglaslam]

I am very much interested. I can't see how I could be in NYC for the free lecture. Any chance of listening to or viewing it on line ?

[amy]

Douglas, try to email them and ask if it will be webcast or recorded. Maybe they can provide some digital access for you. Alternatively, the lecturer Kathleen Lopez has a book titled "Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History". It's pricey (about $30), but looks like it could be a good read - ask if your local library can obtain a copy.

[douglaslam]

Amy, I'll take your suggestion on board. I am interested in Cuba because my auntie( father's younger sister), who passed away only last November in LA, married her husband who was on a trip home from Havana in the late 1940s. Their story is also an absorbing one because Cuba too discriminated against the Chinese. It involved false paper and all that. Another uncle also went to Cuba. If it weren't for Castro, I might have ended up in Havana, a real amigo.

[laohuaqiao]

A Chinese Cuban/American in the news in NYC,

The 84-year-old Manhattan man left bruised, bloodied and humiliated by NYPD cops during a jaywalking ticket blitz plans to hit back with a $5 million lawsuit ...

Kang Chun Wong has lived in the same Upper West Side neighborhood for nearly five decades. He owned the popular La Nueva Victoria restaurant on Broadway while raising three sons, and now spends his retirement doting on his grandchildren and socializing with friends at a senior center in Chinatown.

From his humble beginnings in China, to immigrating to Cuba at age 19 to work on farms, to traveling with only the clothes on his back to New York City in 1966, where he slept on floors and worked in restaurants until he could operate his own eatery, Wong said he had never found himself on the wrong side of the law.

www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-man-ticketed-jaywalking-file-5b-lawsuit-article-1.1592002

Mr. Wong is one of many Chinese Cubans who arrived in NYC in the 1960s and many opened Chinese-Spanish restaurants in upper Manhattan.

[Doug 周]

DL,

Another forum posted some possible contact information for the lecture:

Kathleen López (http://latcar.rutgers.edu/people/core-faculty/50-kathleen-lopez) is scheduled to lecture at Barnard College (http://barnard.edu/calendars/upcoming) on Tuesday, Feb. 4th, at 6 p.m. on “The Chinese in Cuba: From Bondage to Transnational Citizenship.” This assistant professor at Rutgers is the author of Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History.
Cheers, Lily

[amy]

Douglas, I plan to go to the lecture at Barnard. If I find anything interesting I will report back to you. My cousin's father emigrated to Cuba in the 1950's and sadly died there before he could get his family to join him. My cousin went to Havana many years later as an adult to try and find his father's grave, but was never able to locate it. I'm hoping I can glean some information that would be useful for him.
Best,
Amy

[douglaslam]

Good, Amy. Hope you can make it to the lecture and report back. See if you could meet the lecturer afterwards for an informal one-on-one chat. I often pondered what If I had succeeded in going to Cuba before Castro seized power? I might be given a name like Carlos or something, and languishing in Havana, or living somewhere in the U.S. as a Cuban exile. Douglas BTW I could not watch the video in my part of the world.

[helen]

Film Screening of Cuban Chinese & Q&A with director Pok Chi Lau
February 8 @ 2:00 pm - 3:30 p

Come meet and greet renown Chinese American photographer Pok Chi Lau. Pok Chi will show us his latest images of his photographic work done in Myanmar. Maybe he might add a fishing story or two.

He will also screen “Cuban Chinese”, brief visual history of Chinese in Cuba featuring Caridad Amarand who performed Cantonese opera professionally in Chinese communities through Cuba from 1942-1958.

“Caridad has no Chinese blood but has more Cantonese culture in her than my American born son.” – Pok Chi

Free event.
2pm - Images from Myanmar and “Cuban Chinese” screening with the director Pok Chi
3pm - Light refreshments and food served

people.ku.edu/~pclau/artist.htm
pokchilau.4ormat.com/

Pok Chi Lau was born in Hong Kong in 1950. After working for one year in a dead-end job on the graveyard shift in an electronic factory, in 1969, he left for Canada and the United States to pursue a career in photography. In 1975 he earned a BFA in Industrial and Scientific Photography at Brooks Institute of Photography, and in 1977, an MFA, specializing in social documentary photography, at the California Institute of the Arts. For the last three decades, he has been documenting the Chinese Diaspora from China to different parts of the world. His current multi-media project is mixed-raced people, their descendants, and stereo-types.

He is an Emeritus professor in the Design Department of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas. He can be contacted through email: [e-mail]


www.chsa.org/event/film-screening-of-cuban-chinese-qa-with-director-pok-chi-lau/

[helen]

Hi DouglasLam - my boy Simon went to Cuba - had a great time there. But there's something about not going in via USA -

[laohuaqiao]

I did go to Kathleen Lopez's talk. I believe most of the talk was taken from her book, Chinese Cubans, a Transnational History, published 5/2013.

Ms Lopez speaks Mandarin and , presumably as part of the research for the book, she helped one of the Chinese Cubans find her grandfather's ancestral village in Xinhui and her Chinese relatives.

She cited another book as useful source of information on Chinese laborers in Cuba, The Coolie Speaks, Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba, by Lisa Yun.

[helen]

Thanks for you post laohuaqiao - Interesting subject.

[amy]

laohuaqiao,

I was at the talk too. Sorry I don't know what you look like - would have been nice to say 'hello' in person. I spoke to Dr. Lopez a little afterwards and she said the Cuban-Chinese mutual aid organization Chee Kung Tong (致公堂 ?) in Havana has recently hired Mitzi Espinosa Luis (the granddaughter of a Cuban-Chinese merchant that Dr. Lopez helped reconnect to relatives in China) as an outreach liaison and they are eager to establish relationships with other relatives of Cuban-Chinese worldwide. Dr. Lopez says Mitzi is active on email and can help folks looking for any Cuban-Chinese family roots. She didn't have Mitzi's contact info offhand, but here is Dr. Lopez' contact info for anyone interested:

Dr. Kathleen M. Lopez, PhD
Assistant Professor
Departments of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies & History
Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences
54 Joyce Kilmer Ave, A263 Lucy Stone Hall
Piscataway, NJ 08854
848-445-4207
[e-mail]