In 1912, the White Star Line's Titanic sailed at sea.
In April 1912, three days after the sinking of the Titanic, some 700 survivors were taken to New York by another passenger liner, the Carpathia, which rescued them from the icy North Atlantic.
Some have been reunited with loved ones, some have received medical care, or are finally relieved to be back on solid ground after a disaster that killed 1,500 people. But not everyone stepped off the Carpathia.
The six survivors -- all Chinese sailors -- had to stay on board because they were barred from entering the United States because of an anti-immigration law called the Chinese Exclusion Act. The next day, immigration officials escorted them through Manhattan and put them on a cargo ship bound for Cuba that they had contracted to work with. Then, they seemed to just disappear.
Rescuing passengers on the lifeboats of the Titanic
While the Titanic disaster and the lives of its many survivors have been well documented, the stories of Chinese passengers have long been ignored. Researcher Steven Schwankert said in an interview in Beijing: "I thought, 'It's not possible that these six people just went away, never married, never had children, never told anyone this story. '"
As Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century, surviving the Titanic disaster was just one of many difficulties they faced. At the time they were the specific target of discriminatory policies in countries such as the UK, Canada and the US.
Generations later, the effects of these policies are still being felt, including 's wave of anti-Asian discrimination and xenophobia triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, these problems were tried to solve more than 100 years ago.
Little is known about the stories of sailors even in China, whose lives were largely shaped by historical trends, including why they appeared on the Titanic. Labour strikes in the UK left them unemployed, so their employers reassigned them to the North American route. As planned, the Titanic carried eight sailors from Southampton, England, who would travel in third class to New York, where they would transfer to a new ship.
When the cruise ship hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, the eight men moved quickly. Five people managed to board the lifeboat , but when the ship was engulfed by the sea, the other three fell into the freezing water along with hundreds of others.
Two of the three sailors, Li Lin and Lin Lun, are believed to have died in the water. The third man, Fang Rongshan, held onto a piece of wreckage and was one of the last to be rescued when a lifeboat returned to look for survivors.
At some point in 1920, Fang Rongshan's portrait in Chicago
Fang Rongshan's rescue inspired the end of the movie Titanic, and even appeared in a cut scene . But in the decades after the sinking, the stories of these Chinese survivors remained unknown even to some of their descendants, and the negative portrayal of them by shipowners and the news media may have played a role.
As the ship sank, four of them arrived in a crowded but not full lifeboat, including the owner of the Titanic, J. Bruce Ismay, who later died for not living with the ship been criticized.
After the disaster, Ismay told investigators that the Chinese were stowaways. News reports also accused them of dressing up as women in order to be saved first, but no direct evidence was found that they did, and it was impossible for them to know who else was on board.
A few years after the titanic disaster, there is a good chance that some of those survivors ended up in the UK, where the merchant ship sailors went to war due to the World War I conscription, and there was a huge shortage of sailors.
After WW1 and WWII, the need for such labor disappeared, thousands of Chinese sailors were repatriated by the British government, and some were forced to leave their families in the UK. Know where these people go . According to the producers, this is likely what happened to several Chinese survivors of the Titanic.
"They didn't use the Chinese Exclusion Act, they got rid of thousands of Chinese people directly under the contract law ," Jones said of the British government's actions.
There are also some Chinese survivors who have gone to the US or Canada, although it will be decades before the laws against Chinese labor immigration are repealed.
To bypass the law, thousands of people born in China use fake documents to enter the country. In order to protect this new identity, they often need to keep silent about their past lives, or even let their partners and children know.
"There are still people who keep family history secrets like this," Schwankert said.
Fang Rongshan's son, Tom Fong, said his father died in 1985 at the age of 90 and never talked much about his life, but he knew his father had suffered a shipwreck.
Fang Rongshan's son Tom Fang
In 2003, a cousin told Tom Fang that it was the Titanic. So he and his son searched the Internet and found that his family's surname was on the passenger list, but the spelling was slightly different, which is common in Roman characters transliteration of Chinese names. Then they found another place where it was mentioned that a man grabbed a piece of wreckage until he was finally rescued, which is consistent with Fang Rongshan's story.
However, Titanic enthusiasts and experts didn't believe his claims at first. Tom Fong, 61, owner of the Cozy Inn in Wisconsin, one of the oldest Chinese restaurants in the nation, said self-innocence was only part of the reason he shared the family story.
"And beyond that," he said, "I just want people to know the truth."
