The Last Dragon Dance: Chinatown Stories

On a hot summer day in 1942, sitting outside her shoe shop in Bentinck Street, a mother fixes her six-year-old daughter’s marriage to her neighbour’s son. A widow converts a part of her house to a temple so that she can support her family with the donations.

During a border skirmish in the north-east, Chinese mothers prepare packages for life in concentration camps giving special instructions to the children, lest they get separated. A gentle bookseller and his daughter disappear in the middle of the night when they are deported to China for his political sympathies.

And in the delightful story ‘Uncle Worry’, Uncle Chien worries when his daughter Pi Moi forgets to call him: he worries that she and her husband, Mohamed, have had a falling out. He worries when Pi Moi does call, for she must be fighting with Mohamed, otherwise why would she call?

From crumbling shops in Chinatown to decaying tanneries in Tangra, Kwai-Yun Li’s The Last Dragon Dance: Chinatown Stories, exposes us to the life of the little-known Chinese community in Calcutta. While the arrival of the Chinese in India abounds in legends, the mass exodus of this dwindling community is not as romantic: political and economic upheavals have forced them to abandon their home.

Even though theirs is so much a story of assimilation and syncretism—growing up in 1950s’ Calcutta one never paid much attention to which customs were Indian or Chinese—the Chinese have often felt the brunt of their foreignness. The rift between Mao and Chiang Kai Shek led to the deportment and imprisonment of hundreds of Maoist sympathizers.

This collection gives voice to such concerns without being overtly sentimental or sensational; Li never fails to see the humour in the idiosyncrasies of her community. These inspired-from-life stories wonderfully capture the mood of the time with unassuming grace.