In support of today's One Day Without Us day of action in the UK, I'm posting my poetry on the subject throughout the day.
With Charles Shaar Murray and Buffalo Bill Smith, St Ives festival 2009
Yellowface
I’m Yellowface
Gonna eat your soul
I’m Yellowface
I’m Yellowface
Gonna swallow you whole
I’m Yellowface
Make you scrabble like a mole in a hole
For every little part, any little role
Make you thank me for the things I stole
I’m Yellowface
Endless night no hope in sight
You're crazy for a chink of light
Keep you polite, out of the damn fight
Creature of the night
No sense of right
You know what else?
Youy’re lacking in height
No sight of your own might
Trite, no bite.
I’m Yellowface
Gonna keep you small
I’m Yellowface
I’m Yellowface
Don’t see you at all
I’m Yellowface
I’m the devil with a shovel
I’ll bury you good
Deep in the woods
Right where you stood
‘Cause you so slow and you knew I could
I’m Yellowface
Teeny little folk so cute, can I feed you?
I think I need an electron miscroscope to see you
Maybe a Hubble telescope to even get near you
Wanna hug you, wanna hold you, ain't never gonna fear you
I’m Yellowface
I don’t wanna see you
I’m Yellowface
I just wanna be you
Five minutes that’s all it takes
To empty you out, hey, them’s the breaks
Scoop you out hollow
Like a ricy husk
Chain you up, let you out at dusk
Or maybe a week, that’s enough
'Cause you’re so meek and I’m very tough
I’m Yellowface
Gonna eat your soul,
I’m Yellowface
Gonna swallow you whole
I’m the devil with a shovel
I’ll bury you good
Deep in the woods
Right where you stood
Coz you so slow and you knew I could
I’m Yellowface
Yellowface
I'm Yellowface
by Anna Chen, June 2009
READ MORE about the One Day Without Us day of action here
I Am Rich and You Are Poor: lines on dead Chinese workers and their rich benefactors by Anna Chen
In support of today's One Day Without Us day of action in the UK, I'm posting my poetry on the subject throughout the day.
I Am Rich and You Are Poor Lines on dead Chinese workers and their rich benefactors
I am rich and you are poor
I travel, you seek a foreign shore
You have needs but I have more
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.
The world’s an oyster, a wondrous thing
Find the pearl, make an angel sing
To swinish herds it’s all just bling
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.
I’ve news for you, I’ll beg, implore,
You aren’t walking through that door
You figure what frontiers are for
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.
I am rich and you are skint
You slave for pennies, I made a mint
This world loves those who’re carved from flint
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.
I weep for you, I sympathise
Look, tears are welling in my eyes
You’re coming here to seek the prize
But tales of gold are pretty lies
You want to be where you’re despised?
You’ll be lucky if you’re serving fries.
Yes, me, well I have cash to buy
Whatever I want, I get to fly
Not hide in a truck, rolling in muck
Relying on luck to make a buck
Stuck in a rut with the doors all shut
Banging on gates and the ladder pulled up.
Sucked down in the sands
You ebb with the tides
White under the moon
You shine in the sea
I am rich and you are poor
Bottom of the barrel while I’m top drawer
I will help you stay where you are
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.
I am rich, you’re stony broke
I am special, you’re an anonymous bloke
We’ll only love, respect, honour, support, hold you, care for your loved ones, when you croak
Hey, let’s all give to charidee.
Anna Chen February 2009
READ MORE about the One Day Without Us day of action here
The cast of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Snow In Midsummer in rehearsal holding One Day Without Us placards. From left to right: Katie Leung, Andrew Koji, Lucy Sheen, Wendy Kweh, Andrew Leung, Jonathan Ragget, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Daniel York, director Justin Audibert, Richard Rees, Kevin Shen. At the front in the red jacket is Jaqueline Chan and (kneeling) Sarah Lam.
Chinese British support UK One Day Without Us National Day of Action in defence of migrant workers, Monday 20 February
Monday is Britain's turn to host a National Day of Action as part of an international protest in defence of migrant workers who have been used and abused for too long. Even now, they are being treated as a political football by this squalid government. We are declaring our support and solidarity with a vital strand of workers who have kept this country going.
If you stripped out our migrant workers, Britain would fall apart. One Day Without Us should give us a taster of what life would be like without immigrants.
There are 15,000 fewer teachers in further education than we had in 2009. Science teachers are in such short supply that they will have to be recruited from abroad. This year we're expected to experience an exodus of EU migrant workers from the UK. And we'll all have to work harder for longer because we won't have the replacement workers to pay for pensions.
As is the rest of the developed world, the UK is suffering a shrinking workforce as baby boomers start to retire. We simply don't have enough workers to replace them.
It is clearly bad for the UK to exclude the people who pick our veg, build our infrastructure, run our buses, cook and serve our food in the lovely Chinese and Indian restaurants and takeaways we use all the time, look after us in the NHS or in care homes, or study and teach in our universities. Did you know that there are tens of thousands of Chinese students paying fees to study in our higher education system right now? In total, more than 150,000 overseas students contribute more than £2.3 billion per year to the exchequer, £8 billion to the British economy.
It's particularly relevant to Chinese in Britain as restaurant workers have been targeted by the Border Patrol in fishing raids.
A banker, a worker and an immigrant walk into a bar. On a table there are ten pies. The banker eats nine of the pies and says to the worker: watch out for him. He's after your pie. That's what the government and the Brexit movement are saying. And the government and Brexit are joined by Lexit — leftists for Brexit who dangerously accommodate 'alternative facts' about migrants taking 'our' jobs.
Remember: it was the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008. And it was China who was able to take up some of the slack and give us time to get the system back on track. Unfortunately, instead of steadying the system in everyone's interest, the West bailed out the bankers with public money and set us on course for disaster yet again. US markets are all a-quiver as hugely over-priced stocks seem to defy the laws of physics — the next crash may be as bad as the 1920s. It's like playing pass-the-parcel with a live grenade and everyone's waiting for the music to stop.
In the meantime, the poorest paid the bill through George Osborne's vicious and thoroughly discredited austerity measures, targeting those least able to afford it. What was the point of a bedroom tax that cost as much to administer as it collected? What did the cruelty of PIP cuts achieve except to cause pain, misery and even death for the disabled? Which migrants stopped much needed housing being built?
The billionaire class would like us all at each others throats — it takes our attention away from "Sir" Philip Green's third mega-yacht or "Sir" Richard Branson's private Caribbean island and his publicly subsidised rail service. The top percentage quadrupled their wealth since 2000, and tripled it since the 2008 crash while general incomes haven't even made it back to pre-2008 levels — we are far from all in it together.
The usual suspects have been rounded up: the disabled, those on benefits, ethnic minorities, pensioners, women, and people who come here to work (remember: immigrants yield a net benefit to the nation's coffers). But none of them chose to stop building homes (and handily keep property prices elevated), or to slow investment in education, or to run the NHS into the ground for privatisers to pillage.
The EU referendum has boiled down to a bogus debate about immigration that is dependent on the lie that migrants take 'our' jobs. Employers, who do the actual employing and the paying, are rendered invisible. No-one criticises – say – Dyson for closing its UK factory and pursuing cheap labour in Malaysia. If any Lexiteer tells you it's the migrants' fault, they are – to put it mildly – misinformed. Or misinforming.
Brexit means getting Trump. We're being delivered out of the EU frying-pan and into the Trump fire by both the government and the Labour opposition. The NHS is on offer for predatory US business — how does this mean 'taking back control'? Labour and the rest of the left should be holding the line, rather than capitulating to the specious immigration debate that's been whipped up by the mainstream media.
On Monday, the Ensuring We Remember campaign, set up in memory of the more than 140,000 in the Chinese Labour Corps who served in the Allied forces in Europe in World War I doing the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs, will be tweeting support using the hashtag #1DayWithoutUs.
Anyone in London who would like to take part should get to Parliament Square at 12:30pm and join the FLAG MOB with your national flags in time for the 1pm linking of arms in symbolic solidarity with migrants.
Please join us across the country on Monday 20th February and stand by your fellow working-class human being. You have more in common with them than Farage, Boris Johnson or any of the purported (c)leftists who are failing to stand firm on basic principles and folding like origami. Which, like shampoo, pyjamas, paper, mathematics and science, has its origins in that there "Abroad".
A banker, a worker and an immigrant walk into a bar … TED Talk by Anna Chen
#1daywithoutus #1DWU
Snow in Midsummerat the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford on Avon
Migration Collective
Migration stories at
Upstairs at the Ritzy
Brixton Oval, SW2 1JG London, United Kingdom
https://www.facebook.com/events/643903709104562/
https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/migration-stories
British residents have been sent texts by the UK Border Agency telling them to "go home". Two of them, Bobby Chan, a legal advisor for the Chinese community, and Suresh Grover of The Monitoring Group who was prominent in seeking justice in the Stephen Lawrence murder case, have received the threatening messages and we wonder how many more innocent UK citizens are being frightened out of their wits by Theresa May's boot-boys.
In response, London's Chinatown will be shut down tomorrow as a day of action against heavy-handed racist tactics. The protest gathers at 2pm in Gerrard Street and you'd better get your dim-sum in quick because by 3pm, it's down tools and onto the street.
The last time the UK Chinese went on strike was in 2001 when they were scapegoated for the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak to divert anger from the Blair government which had failed to deal with the crisis. As a result of the protest, minister Nick Brown had to issue a public apology. [Correction: we did it again in 2007. Yay!]
Let's hope the Chinese who George Osborne and Boris Johnson have been wooing don't notice that this is how Chinese people are viewed in Old Blighty.
I'll have an item on my Resonance FM programme, Madam Miaow's Culture Lounge, which starts at 5.30pm (Tuesday) and hope to talk to one of the organisers for a run-down of the issues.
SAY NO TO UKBA FISHING RAIDS
2.30pm Gerrard Street, Soho Chinatown
The day of action will include:
STRIKE and CLOSURE OF RESTAURANTS, and BUSINESS OUTLETS and RALLY
(Invited guests and speakers: Members of Parliament, Human Rights Lawyers, Community and Business groups)
Why has this unprecedented day of action been organized? Over the last month, London’s Chinatown, an international hub of Chinese restaurants and businesses, has witnessed systematic immigration raids.
Over 13 businesses have reported heavy-handed raids of their premises. All the existing evidence suggests that the raids were not intelligence led. Some of the raids did not even lead to a single arrest of any individual. Business owners also believe that the raids did not comply with lawful procedures and have only added fuel to negative stereotyping and ‘racial profiling’ of the Chinese community.
Businesses owners can face up to £10,000 fine per person for employing someone who may not have the permission to work. The harsh and disproportionate fines can lead to legitimate businesses closing down, especially when employers do not understand complicated immigration rules.
Current Government policy has not addressed labour shortages within the catering businesses, enterprises that are key to providing much-needed jobs. The effect of this failure has led to a cycle of discriminatory raids and financial penalties against Chinese businesses coupled with the criminalization of Chinese workers.
The raids on Chinatown has the same effect as the recent Home Office ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’ van campaign when public concern was raised about its damaging impact on Britain’s cosmopolitan cities. The LCCA and Min Quan have written to the UKBA to raise these concerns and suggested a meeting to resolve the problem.
So George Osborne finally concedes defeat over the extra visa required for visitors to Britain on top of the EU visa covering 26 countries.No longer will rich Chinese have to jump through immigration hoops, but poorer Chinese migrant workers will in a two-tier travel trap that signals another nail hammered into prospects of a fair and equitable world.
I wrote about the way the stupid British visas exclude the world's biggest shoppers in a recent South China Morning Post column:
A few years ago, I was invited by a friend to join him and a few chums for tea at an elegant hotel in poshest Knightsbridge. Over a pot of Earl Grey, he outlined his cunning plan: to take a stack of Louis Vuitton bags back to Hong Kong where women were offering their firstborns in exchange for the poo-coloured accessories with the vulgar logo. Rarity value would, he assured us, make him a fortune.
He pointed out the LV shop across the street, pressed £2K wads in our mitts. and sent us off in pairs to go fetch. The excitement of handing over a huge amount of cash for such fripperies made me forget to ask for a cut (he judged me well) but I enjoyed picking out the ugliest duffel bag I've ever seen, plus a keycase with the change.
When he asked us to repeat the same in the Bond Street LV store, we were abruptly ejected. Apparently, the manager knew we'd already brought one each in Sloane Street. What planet was I on where shops turned away business? However, such is the topsy-turvey world of the rich, and the mystery of The Brand, that mere tax-paying mortals will never fully understand it.
Today, London may be rammed with Chinese tourists buying their own expensive tat, but Britain attracts fewer mainland Chinese than other European countries. They want to spend their cash in France, Italy and Germany.
The reason is the cost and inconvenience of UK visas required on top of the one allowing access to the 26 other EU countries.
We may consider 20% VAT on goods to be punishingly high, but it's low compared to Chinese tariffs on luxury goods. And tourists also enjoy greater protection against counterfeit rip-offs, our police state being the most draconian when it comes to shopping. Those street vendors in Barcelona selling knock-off Louis Vuitton bags would have their collars felt if they tried that in London's West End.
An estimated £1.2 bn is lost every year in sales because only one in ten Chinese visitors to Europe apply for UK visas. We sniff at that sum and then moan about the deficit.
Chinese are now the biggest shopaholics in the world, and yet we've put up a Closed for Business sign just as we find ourselves immersed in the most horrendous recession ever. Is Brand Great Britain now being managed by Louis Vuitton?
Funny how hitting Tories in their pockets helps them overcome their squeamishness over funny foreigners.
I'm neither in the habit or position, nor have I the disposition, to employ anyone. However, when eleven years ago a fellow leftie found herself even more skint than me, one way to help her out was to offer £20 per week for a four-hour cleaning session at my scruffy flat each week. This represented a large chunk of my dosh but, as she was a single mother facing possible eviction, I thought an emergency redistribution of resources was called for. This was better than a loan or gift as it maintained her sense of pride.
She'd come up with the cleaning idea herself and initially offered to do it for less — I think it was a tenner in those pre-minimum wage days — but that would have changed the relationship to one of exploitation, which was out of the question. As it was, suddenly finding myself in the role of "employer" sat uncomfortably with me, but she insisted she needed the dosh. And so we settled into a tidy home for me and a bit of help for her. In mitigation of the situation, much of these sessions over the next few months was spent talking politics over tea and lunch. And although I couldn't really afford it, I was paying a fiver an hour when the low pay minimum was something like £3.80.
So it's with a wry smile that I learn that Labour peer Baroness Scotland's cleaner, Loloahi Tapui, now imprisoned for overstaying her student visa by four years, was paid a miserly £6 per hour. That's just insulting. I cannot imagine having Pat's income (her real name is the far less lofty Patricia Mawhinney) and paying someone so little.
Although Tapui was yesterday gaoled for a severe eight months, she did at least make £75K off the media through Max Clifford, so perhaps that makes up for being lowballed for her labour by a rich woman.
I was pleased to see that the Baroness who, as Attorney General, was the architect of some draconian anti-immigrant laws, fell foul of her own legislation. Pat was fined £5,000 for neglecting to take copies of Tapui's papers, but I think she should have been fined that sum again for being so bloody mean.
And talking about the people who make our laws, Pat has starred in the Parliamentary expenses scandal, wrongly claiming some £170,000 since 2004. Only ministers with a primary residence outside the capital are entitled to this. Pat has a £2 million house in Chiswick which — last time I checked — was in London.
As the song goes, it's the rich what gets the pleasure, it's the poor what gets the blame. And the gaol term. But at least sometimes they have the savvy to get Max Clifford on board.
EDIT: An hour later, I've been thinking about how the injustice in this case operates on so many levels. I think it blows out of the water the notion that just sticking a woman of colour, whatever her character, into a position of power, somehow rectifies any social imbalance. This was an instance of one non-white woman exploiting another. If I am being ripped off, it makes no odds whether the Fat Cat in question is black, brown, white, yellow or purple. (Like the Chinese communists who said — albeit in an altogether different context — it didn't matter what colour a cat is, as long as it catches mice.) Although some might argue that it adds insult to injury. I suspect this was a cynical box-ticking exercise by Labour, making a mockery of attempts to create a more equitable system. There are high-calibre women of colour out there who are neither Blairite drones, Tory entrepreneurs nor simple careerists: women who know how to make a moral decision. Those who send their children to private schools while preaching left, or who remain cheerleaders for the Iraq war, do NOT count.
I'm neither in the habit or position, nor have I the disposition, to employ anyone. However, when eleven years ago a fellow leftie found herself even more skint than me, one way to help her out was to offer £20 per week for a four-hour cleaning session at my scruffy flat each week. This represented a large chunk of my dosh but, as she was a single mother facing possible eviction, I thought an emergency redistribution of resources was called for. This was better than a loan or gift as it maintained her sense of pride.
She'd come up with the cleaning idea herself and initially offered to do it for less — I think it was a tenner in those pre-minimum wage days — but that would have changed the relationship to one of exploitation, which was out of the question. As it was, suddenly finding myself in the role of "employer" sat uncomfortably with me, but she insisted she needed the dosh. And so we settled into a tidy home for me and a bit of help for her. In mitigation of the situation, much of these sessions over the next few months was spent talking politics over tea and lunch. And although I couldn't really afford it, I was paying a fiver an hour when the low pay minimum was something like £3.80.
So it's with a wry smile that I learn that Labour peer Baroness Scotland's cleaner, Loloahi Tapui, now imprisoned for overstaying her student visa by four years, was paid a miserly £6 per hour. That's just insulting. I cannot imagine having Pat's income (her real name is the far less lofty Patricia Mawhinney) and paying someone so little.
Although Tapui was yesterday gaoled for a severe eight months, she did at least make £75K off the media through Max Clifford, so perhaps that makes up for being lowballed for her labour by a rich woman.
I was pleased to see that the Baroness who, as Attorney General, was the architect of some draconian anti-immigrant laws, fell foul of her own legislation. Pat was fined £5,000 for neglecting to take copies of Tapui's papers, but I think she should have been fined that sum again for being so bloody mean.
And talking about the people who make our laws, Pat has starred in the Parliamentary expenses scandal, wrongly claiming some £170,000 since 2004. Only ministers with a primary residence outside the capital are entitled to this. Pat has a £2 million house in Chiswick which — last time I checked — was in London.
As the song goes, it's the rich what gets the pleasure, it's the poor what gets the blame. And the gaol term. But at least sometimes they have the savvy to get Max Clifford on board.
EDIT: An hour later, I've been thinking about how the injustice in this case operates on so many levels. I think it blows out of the water the notion that just sticking a woman of colour, whatever her character, into a position of power, somehow rectifies any social imbalance. This was an instance of one non-white woman exploiting another. If I am being ripped off, it makes no odds whether the Fat Cat in question is black, brown, white, yellow or purple. (Like the Chinese communists who said — albeit in an altogether different context — it didn't matter what colour a cat is, as long as it catches mice.) Although some might argue that it adds insult to injury. I suspect this was a cynical box-ticking exercise by Labour, making a mockery of attempts to create a more equitable system. There are high-calibre women of colour out there who are neither Blairite drones, Tory entrepreneurs nor simple careerists: women who know how to make a moral decision. Those who send their children to private schools while preaching left, or who remain cheerleaders for the Iraq war, do NOT count.
The government lurches from one tabloid-pleasing stunt to another, devil taking the hindmost. They've decided it is a good and productive idea to make employers responsible for law-enforcement by naming and shaming businesses who hire illegal immigrants. You'd think that with billions lost to illegal wars and tax evasion, whoops, I mean avoidance, that a Labour government would have better things to do than scapegoat the low-paid grafters who make them their dinners.
With society breaking down as the nation is plundered by big business who suck up public funds and then evade and avoid tax in some sort of cycle of hell, perhaps a different set of priorities might be more effective. But, no, Labour likes to kiss up and kick down. I'm not saying Labour is small, petty, cowardly and unprincipled, but I'd like to see them pour the same energy and outrage into nailing the super-rich non-doms and PFI bandits who are really milking this country. Let's see the government take on the corporations, the war profiteers (especially those employing former Brutish ministers and prime-ministers), the tax exiles and the non-dom Tetrapack billionaires with the same verve and vigour.
Chicken Yoghurt likens the latest immigrant-bashing "do not fuck with us" tactics to "sending Luca Brasi’s body armour back accompanied by the fish".
"Naming and shaming” in this case strikes me, too, as an attempt to get the vigilante vote. So you’re running a takeaway out in the sticks, getting enough grief already, and then your tormentors find they have some sort of endorsement off the government and an excuse to ratchet up the violence?
A return to the stocks and public punishment … or worse.
The government lurches from one tabloid-pleasing stunt to another, devil taking the hindmost. They've decided it is a good and productive idea to make employers responsible for law-enforcement by naming and shaming businesses who hire illegal immigrants. You'd think that with billions lost to illegal wars and tax evasion, whoops, I mean avoidance, that a Labour government would have better things to do than scapegoat the low-paid grafters who make them their dinners.
With society breaking down as the nation is plundered by big business who suck up public funds and then evade and avoid tax in some sort of cycle of hell, perhaps a different set of priorities might be more effective. But, no, Labour likes to kiss up and kick down. I'm not saying Labour is small, petty, cowardly and unprincipled, but I'd like to see them pour the same energy and outrage into nailing the super-rich non-doms and PFI bandits who are really milking this country. Let's see the government take on the corporations, the war profiteers (especially those employing former Brutish ministers and prime-ministers), the tax exiles and the non-dom Tetrapack billionaires with the same verve and vigour.
Chicken Yoghurt likens the latest immigrant-bashing "do not fuck with us" tactics to "sending Luca Brasi’s body armour back accompanied by the fish".
"Naming and shaming” in this case strikes me, too, as an attempt to get the vigilante vote. So you’re running a takeaway out in the sticks, getting enough grief already, and then your tormentors find they have some sort of endorsement off the government and an excuse to ratchet up the violence?
A return to the stocks and public punishment … or worse.
In this Guardian G2 video (Friday 13th June 2008), a Glasgow community organises to protect friends and neighbours from forced deportation. Moving and uplifting. A rare example of a media report that doesn't present the working class and immigrants as beasts but shows humanity at its best. Report by Rachel Stevenson and Harriet Grant — well done!
In this Guardian G2 video (Friday 13th June 2008), a Glasgow community organises to protect friends and neighbours from forced deportation. Moving and uplifting. A rare example of a media report that doesn't present the working class and immigrants as beasts but shows humanity at its best. Report by Rachel Stevenson and Harriet Grant — well done!
Baroness Scotland
Jean Donnachie, Kingsway flats, Glasgow Scotstoun