PROJECT EVENTS 2021 April 15, 25. The Chinese Community in Jamaica. “Show Me a Mountain: Jamaican Writers & Visual Artists of Chinese Descent.” Organized by Jacqueline Bishop, an award-winning photographer, painter and writer born and raised in Jamaica, who now lives and works in New York City.

With the coming of Emancipation in 1834 to the island of Jamaica, the formerly enslaved sought to leave the site of the plantation in droves. Faced with a shortage of labor on the plantations, the white elite of the island and the imperial powers of Britain turned to countries such as China to fill these labor shortages in an indentureship scheme that would see mainly Hakka Chinese immigrants arriving in Jamaica starting in 1840, though there is evidence of a Chinese presence on the island from as far back as the 1700s.  This growing community would see Chinese cemeteries being built on the island, Buddhists temples, and today an area of downtown Kingston has been recognized as the first China Town on the island.

“Show Me a Mountain” sheds a spotlight on this dynamic community by having two panel discussions with writers and visual artists who are Chinese of Jamaican descent. This event was sponsored by NYU Liberal Studies.

Featured Writers: Ann-Margaret Lim, Hannah Lowe, Kerry Young. Session will be moderated by Sharon Leach. 

The program will be one hour long. Sharon Leach will do a general welcome before doing an introduction of the writers in alphabetical order Ann-Margaret Lim, Hannah Lowe, Kerry young. Writers will read in alphabetical order before being engaged in a discussion of their work by Sharon Leach. The final 15 minutes of the program will be opened up to the audience for a general discussion.

Ann Margaret Lim — of Afro-Jamaican and Chinese descent, has two published books of poems, The Festival of Wild Orchid and Kingston Buttercup. She was featured in Ebony Magazine after her 2014 debut at the Calabash Lit Fest. She has represented Jamaica in poetry festivals in Latin America, and her work is published in UK, Caribbean and US anthologies.

Hannah Lowe is a British writer, known for her collection of poetry Chick (2013) and family memoir Long Time, No See (2015). She began writing poetry at the age of 29 after her Jamaican-Chinese father died and her English mother had a stroke, later reflecting: “I had been suppressing a lot of grief over a sustained period of time and poetry… opened a door on that pain. I found that I could revisit the past in my poems, and contain it, or alter it even.”

Following a suggestion by John Glenday at a course in 2010, Lowe began to write about her father — who had sailed from Jamaica to Britain on the SS Ormonde in 1947 — and this led to her debut poetry collection Chick, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2013. This work was shortlisted for the Forward and Fenton Adelburgh First Collection Prizes. In September 2014, the Poetry Book Society included Lowe in its list of Next Generation Poets, published each decade. She has published other collections of poems focused on the Chinese-Jamaican story.

Kerry Young —Is a British writer, born in Jamaica. She is the author of three well received and interlinked novels: Pao (2011), Gloria (2013) and Show Me a Mountain (2016).  Born in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Chinese father and a mother of mixed Chinese-African heritage,  Young migrated to England when she was 10 years old.  Her first novel, Pao, is told in the voice of the book’s Chinese-Jamaican main protagonist. Young’s next two novels were also, like Pao, set in mid-20th-century Jamaica “against a backdrop of social change and political upheaval, telling three people’s interlinked stories of struggle and redemption, love and ambition, race, class, gender and colour in a country at a crossroads.”

As stated on the British Council website: “Her fiction has been praised for combining family history, deep research and the expressive power of patois. By doing so, it brings the global realities of Chinese identity to life. And she celebrates the underappreciated impact of Chinese culture on the modern Caribbean, making a powerful case for a new understanding of Jamaican urban life.”

Sharon Leach is a Jamaican writer and essayist, born in Kingston. In addition to being a featured columnist for the Jamaica Observer, she is the coordinator and editor of that publication’s weekly literary arts supplement, “Bookends”. Her fiction has appeared in several journals, including: Jamaica Journal, Caribbean Writing Today and, most recently, AfroBeat Journal.

Sharon Leach was one of the first recipients of a scholarship to the Calabash Writers Workshop and, in 2011, she was awarded the Musgrave bronze medal from the council of the Institute of Jamaica. Her first collection of short stories, What You Can’t Tell Him: Stories, was published in 2006.