After I got my haircut this afternoon, I walked past China Exchange near Leicester Square. It was hosting an exhibition on the Connection between London and Hong Kong. Not a bad way to spend the rest of my Saturday afternoon, I thought. And my friend Timson Lau was helping out there, I was pleasantly surprised to find.
There I learnt the stories of the tens of abandoned children from Hong Kong who were adopted by families across the South East during the '50s and '60s. A recent study found many of them reported to have encountered racism in their lives or felt detached from both white and Chinese communities. But at the end, the report concluded in terms of "psychological adjustment and life satisfaction, there were no statistically significant differences between the ex-orphanage women and the comparison groups".
Which is fair, I thought. We all have an equal chance at misfortunes in life; they just come in different flavours.
And the stories of Britain's own child emigrants came up in my mind. It was in V&A Museum of Childhood that I read about them, more than a year ago. Charities, religious organisations and governments ran migration schemes that sent children from poor neighbourhoods - often born to single mothers - to Australia and Canada. Many were forced to leave school as early as 15 and work on farms as hard labourers. Some were abused. The last child left the shores of Britain as late as 1970.
What an interesting country I'm in. On one hand, thousands of British children were sent to the other side of the world to toil in farms; on the other, at the same time, well-meaning middle-class families in the Home Counties imported orphans from the Far East for adoption.
At the end, it worked out for some and didn't work out for some other, in proportions not statistically unlike people who stayed where they had always been. Statistically.
(LBWE-E01)
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There I learnt the stories of the tens of abandoned children from Hong Kong who were adopted by families across the South East during the '50s and '60s. A recent study found many of them reported to have encountered racism in their lives or felt detached from both white and Chinese communities. But at the end, the report concluded in terms of "psychological adjustment and life satisfaction, there were no statistically significant differences between the ex-orphanage women and the comparison groups".
Which is fair, I thought. We all have an equal chance at misfortunes in life; they just come in different flavours.
And the stories of Britain's own child emigrants came up in my mind. It was in V&A Museum of Childhood that I read about them, more than a year ago. Charities, religious organisations and governments ran migration schemes that sent children from poor neighbourhoods - often born to single mothers - to Australia and Canada. Many were forced to leave school as early as 15 and work on farms as hard labourers. Some were abused. The last child left the shores of Britain as late as 1970.
What an interesting country I'm in. On one hand, thousands of British children were sent to the other side of the world to toil in farms; on the other, at the same time, well-meaning middle-class families in the Home Counties imported orphans from the Far East for adoption.
At the end, it worked out for some and didn't work out for some other, in proportions not statistically unlike people who stayed where they had always been. Statistically.
(LBWE-E01)
===========================
Also on Facebook
Read also:
- Townsend, Mark. "How a generation of orphans fared when they were matched to mixed-race couples". The Guardian. 2 February 2013
- Davey, Melissa. "Abused and publicly flogged: the UK child migrants sent for a better life in Australia". The Guardian. 16 June 2016
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