V. Radhika
A smile creases Peter Yu’s face as he relates the incident. A few years ago, Yu’s nephew, then 8, had been teased by classmates and he responded by swearing at them in Chinese — or so he told his uncle. Since Yu knew the family hardly spoke the language, he questioned the boy further. He breaks into laughter as he recalls the “Chinese” words his nephew used: achchha? (really?) and paagal (crazy).

“Obviously he did not know the difference between Hindi and Chinese and assumed that when his parents were not talking in English they were conversing in Chinese,” says Yu, whose restaurant, Wok with Yu, in Scarborough, serves desi Chinese cuisine.

Born and raised in Karachi, Peter and his wife, Sandra, speak fluent Hindi and Urdu and are fond of South Asian food. Bollywood music plays in the restaurant, Shah Rukh Khan dominates the video screens and when the couple want to have a private conversation, it’s in Hindi.

They are not an anomaly. Lyng Wai Ming, whose Chopsticks restaurant in Mumbai boasts an impressive clientele, opened a branch in Scarborough with the same name. Ming ensures that his customers get to watch Bollywood numbers on television as they wait for the Hindi-speaking staff to serve their Manchurians and Hakka noodles. “We also serve fennel seeds (saunf) to our customers because they are used to it,” he says proudly.

Walk into any of the Chinese restaurants dotting the GTA that serve “Indian Chinese” and not an eyebrow would be raised if you attempted to strike up a conversation in Hindi. You could confidently wager that the owner, cook or waiter were from either India, Pakistan or occasionally Bangladesh, speak the local language and have taste buds that swear allegiance to biryani, chicken tikka masala and seekh kebab.

The references to “back home” that pepper conversations with desi Chinese are not to China but to the Indian subcontinent. Joe Samion, manager of the Scarborough branch of Tucker’s Marketplace, says in Hindi, “Home is India. Our parents or grandparents migrated from China but the only place we knew was India. We were Indian citizens holding Indian passports.” Samion, born and raised in Delhi, spoke only Hindi with his parents and siblings, and then with his wife. “Our parents spoke to us in Hakka and we understood the language, but Hindi was our language.”

And it remained so even after his family moved to Canada in 1976. However, history repeated itself and his children respond to him in English. But Samion’s love affair with Hindi continues. After his wife died of cancer, Samion married a woman of Chinese descent from Calcutta and taught her the language. He’s especially passionate about Hindi film songs. “I sing English and Mandarin songs, too, but Hindi songs are my favourite as they capture all kinds of emotions,” he says, rhyming off various numbers to illustrate his point.

Samion is a star performer at the Yin Hua Association get-togethers. Yin Hua translates as “Indian Chinese,” which, according to its members, defines their identity. Every afternoon a group of men and women get together for a mah-jong session, followed by banter in their native Hakka. Peering at the framed sepia photos on the walls of the association office in Scarborough is a popular pastime with many members. Yellowed with time, the photos offer a peek into a treasured past: the Chinese community school in Calcutta, social functions, sports tournaments. It was this bonding through a shared past that helped them carve a new life in an alien country — just as their ancestors did, when they migrated from China. Written records are few, so their descendants rely on oral histories of how drought, famine and the promise of a better life prompted their journeys. They came from Canton, Guangdong, Shandong, Hubei. Among those who came to pre-Partition India, many settled in Calcutta, with others going to Mumbai, Delhi and as far as Karachi.

The story would have ended there, but for the Indo-Chinese War in 1962, when many Indian Chinese were rounded up and deported. That sent many on another migration and Canada became the new home for some. But their connection with the subcontinent remains strong.

Sandra Yu describes what seems to be a nearly universal feeling among desi Chinese: “We do not share any similarities with those from mainland China. We have so much in common with those from India and Pakistan. It is a shared culture.” And when it comes to cuisine, she declares, “We need our spicy food.” Her husband chimes in: “Biryani is my favourite and I can have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Peter Yu is from Shandong, while Sandra is a Hubei and a member of the Hubei Association here. This club prefers to refer to its members as “overseas Chinese,” says treasurer Jimmy Liu. “Not all of us are from Pakistan and members also have relatives in India and Bangladesh, so we feel ‘overseas’ is more appropriate,” says Liu, a denturist who is a third-generation Hubei born and raised in Karachi.

What these associations share in common is the presence of subcontinental culture in their get-togethers, which include Bollywood music and desi food. “We may have left India, but India lives within us,” Samion says.

And while these first-generation desi Chinese give equal emphasis to their multiple identities, their children choose differently. For 15-year-old Samuel Hua, people such as himself are “Canadians with a multicultural heritage and a love for kebabs and Bollywood.”    

V. Radhika is a freelance journalist based in Toronto. Email desilife@thestar.ca.