Oral Histories: Jabez

My name is Jabez Lam, I work in Hackney Chinese Community Services as a manager here. I joined HCCS in 2017, but before I joined, I’ve been involved in Chinese community activities since the mid 1970s. In recent years, from 2018, we are in the process of transition, from a Chinese centre to become a centre for East and South East Asians. We see that the interests of East and South East Asians are a lot in common, that a lot of our common experiences in this country are marked by racism, prejudice and racism in this country is very much based on appearance-based prejudice. Unfortunately, it took the form of the pandemic to reaffirm our vision. During the pandemic, the threats on Asian and South East Asian went out the roof and when racists carry out their attacks they don’t ask whether you are Chinese… they just see your appearance and assume you are related to the so-called source of the pandemic and they attack you.

When I first came I came in 1973 and at that time the kind of street racism was very obvious. When I first came I had experiences of just walking on the street and people walking past you, spit on you and call you and call you “f—king chink”. That don’t happen today.

I have the experience of when I first came here in 1973 as a student… I went to interview as a waiter for a part time job on the weekends. The first day I went on duty, the boss said let me introduce you to way things are. I thought “fair enough” he’ll show me where the menu is, the knife and forks, chopsticks and napkins. He showed me to the front of the shop. Behind the curtain there’s a baseball bat behind there. Then he told me behind the till, “underneath there is a bicycle chain”. I thought, I came to work as a waiter, why are you showing me this? That is the kind of atmosphere [there was].

You can’t rely on the police… you have to rely on yourself. So I think that my first impression, and I think it was in reaction to that, that a so-called Chinese identity was formed. We felt then that we had to share the Chinese identity, to support one another. That’s how it was formed.

I’ve been involved in community activities and politics since 1975. Over the years I’ve set up five Chinese community centres. I think I can proudly say that I am the first person [in the community] to challenge police misconduct and call the police racist … and in fact when I first challenged the police, calling them racist because of their behaviour, the police are the people that I challenged calling them racist but the ones who actually undermined me the most were the Chinese community leaders.

I grew up in a very sheltered life! My family in Hong Kong. is quite middle class and they would tell me “don’t get into trouble, don’t mix with the wrong people, go to England to study” blah blah blah… I think my parents didn’t realise that by giving me that freedom… I went wild!

I came here in 1973, in 1974 was the miners strike that brought down the Heath government.

Hong Kong is such a hierarchical society. Workers at the bottom of the ladder. Workers can change the government? Can bring down the government? How did that happen? Then I started to get involved in the student union… a lot of radical things about abortion, the IRA, Bobby Sands and the Hunger Strikes, anti-apartheid and boycott of Barclays.

Against that background in the 70s, while me and a group of friends, talking about Socialism, and then we saw all these young families and children from Hong Kong, brought by their father to come here. The father cannot speak English, been stuck here for, I don’t know, ten, fifteen, twenty years…been stuck in a kitchen with no interaction with British society. They don’t know the British system. When you have a wife and children here, you cannot isolate. Because children go to school. When your family have to go to the GP, wife can’t speak English, children can’t speak English, he can’t speak English. Can’t find a place over their heads.

So against this background, talking about Socialism and changing the world. Then we saw all this injustice. We said, “we’re just talking Socialism! Are we really Socialists? If we are really Socialist we have to change these injustices”.

1976 is the year when Britain passed the Homeless Persons Act whereby the government for the first time assumed responsibility over people who were homeless. Their definition of homelessness: unsuitable living circumstances. I was in the student union taking part in campaigns for homelessness as a law, then I see these people [immigrants from Hong Kong] who are so proud they found a little room. This is fucking homeless! And that’s the injustice.

This is much better now, but that’s an extreme situation and that’s just one example of what triggered us to start the Chinese Workers Group and start to… we feel that we need to change this, how to do it was to start a direct service. So a group of students, about eight or nine of us, literally go to the area near Chinatown to look for a community space, that’s how we start. Wednesday afternoon university is closed for student activity, so Wednesday afternoon we’d be seeing people queuing down the block. And yeah…that’s how we started.