Longing and Belonging: the Chinese in Jamaica and the Wider Caribbean

This talk explores the longings and belongings of Chinese Jamaicans, as in, the mixed-race descendants of the Chinese indentured labourers who first arrived on the island in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on conversations, communal events, and my interlocutors’ own literary creations collected during ethnographic fieldwork between February 2023 and 2024, I examine how their in-between identity provides both a sense of comfort and a persistent ambiguity in their ongoing search for belonging.

As generations pass and ethnic-racial mixtures deepen, ‘China’ becomes increasingly symbolic: a resource for crafting a cosmopolitan self-identity rather than a straightforward marker of origin. This shift expands the meanings attached to ‘Chineseness’, even as it risks loosening a grounded sense of ethnic community. To understand this community’s everyday life, I argue, is to attend to these layered negotiations of identity and feelings, and to situate the Chinese Jamaican experience within broader inquiries into wider Caribbean and overseas Chinese worlds and diasporic intimacies.

Yichi Zhang is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, UK. Her research investigates the emotional lives of the Chinese community in Kingston, Jamaica, with a particular focus on the intersections of transnational migration, racial dynamics, and urban space. Yichi has recently published a paper on the Chinese shopkeepers’ boredom in the peer-reviewed Urban Studies Journal, City

MCI’s PGR workshops are lunchtime seminars held in person at the Manchester China Institute. They seek to bring together students, faculty and staff who can best provide feedback as postgraduate researchers develop their ideas. Free lunch will be provided.

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