Not the Yellow Peril
In this episode, we explore what’s needed to adapt within an unknown and often hostile world…
Lying abandoned and forgotten amongst the leaf-litter in the mini-forest behind my current house, there’s this abandoned old stone:
I’ve no idea what the script means, or what the stone was for: part of a gravestone, perhaps, or just some kind of marker. But whatever it actually was, it’s a good reminder of the Chinese mining-communities that developed right across the goldfields in this part of Australia, from the late 1850s onwards.
These days the Chinese community plays a big role in the culture of the local region, such as the Golden Dragon Museum here in Bendigo, and Chinese New Year parades and suchlike. Back then, though, Bendigo was perhaps one of the few relatively-safe havens in the entire country: just about everywhere else, the Chinese were hated, with a passion. Part of that hatred was just the usual fear-of-the-Other myths, of course - ‘Yellow Peril’ and all that. But perhaps even more it was because they were so successful at mining - particularly in reworking old mullock-heaps to retrieve large amounts of gold that the white miners had literally thrown away. Not popular, doing that…
So imagine this is you. It’s the early 1860s. You’ve just arrived at Melbourne port, heading for the goldfields. You’re yet another young man from the Guangdong province, and you’re seeking better economic opportunities for yourself and your family (to paraphrase the Wikipedia page on the Golden Dragon Museum). In terms of ‘seeking your fortune’ and all that, you’re really no different from all those others stepping off a boat in those days. But unlike most of those others, you don’t understand the language, the culture, the food, the health-system, the economic-system, the legal-system or just about anything else, you’ve no idea how to get where you need to go, and everyone around you seems to hate you for no apparent reason other than just you being you.
Yes, you’re strong, you’re healthy, hard-working and all the rest - and right now you’re completely out of your depth. It quietly dawns on you that you’re not going to last long on your own like this…
So what do you do? What help do you need?
This is where you need your own community. Fast.
If it doesn’t exist, you’ll need to create it. Fast.
And play your part to help others in that community, too. Also fast. So that they can help you.
Your own community, yes, yet also within the larger community. That part’s important…
As I understand it, these are some of the things that the Chinese miners actually did, as their own community:
— Set up a ‘greeter’ team to meet new arrivals off the boat, provide somewhere safe to stay, deal with the legal-paperwork, do basic cultural-orientation, and get them ready to go on their way.
(That’s how and why all those ‘Chinatowns’ sprang up in all of those port-cities and elsewhere all around the world back then: they were the ‘greeters’ and the safe-space who helped you settle in before you moved on to the goldfields or whatever.)
— Set up a ‘transit-network’ to gather new arrivals into travel-groups, to guide them on the five- to ten-day journey to the respective goldfield-hub, and provide food, shelter and safety along the route.
(Yes, by the 1860s, there were train-services available out to many of the larger hubs such as Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Maryborough and more. But you’re one of the ‘hated’ folk as the Chinese were back then, you don’t get to go the easy way on the train: you walk…)
— Set up ‘work-teams’ to work together, dividing up the work between the main task (mining) and all the support-infrastructure (cooking, cleaning, resources, transit, defence and everything else), to give much higher efficiency and effectiveness than trying to do it all on one’s own.
(Trying to do everything on one’s own - as so many of the white miners tried to do, for lack of trust - does not work as well as team-work does. For example, not only is there a much higher cost in time and more in switching between tasks, it’s difficult to guard your own camp when you’re down at the bottom of a mineshaft…)
There were also a range of other tasks at the community level:
— Provide community-level support-services such as healthcare and shops.
— Provide shared-information services, such as locations of new gold-sites.
— Provide policing and governance within the community itself, such as on disputes, conflicts, drug-misuse and suchlike, both within your own community and to reduce the risk of conflicts with the broader community.
— Provide liaison with the broader community, such as to build stronger trust and to resolve conflicts with the broader community - court-cases and so on - and also to ensure alignment with the broader-community’s laws and regulations
And also, in the longer term, beyond the immediate main task:
— Provide ‘useful services’ to the broader community, particularly things that others don’t want to do.
(Hence the stereotypic ‘Chinese laundry’ and so on…)
— Be seen as actively contributing to broader community, such as support for charity, and engaging in social and cultural events.
(In the present day, another example of the latter would be the way in which the Sikh community here in Australia have built up huge reputation and respect by turning up at emergencies with a truck-load of food, a portable kitchen and a whole lot of smiles and laughter, cook it all up, freely hand out meals to everyone who needs it, tidy everything up behind them, and then drive off again into the distance until the next time they’re needed. A simple, subtle yet visibly-practical way for an ‘alien’/‘Other’ community to build trust…)
So look around, not just in the past, but in the present too. Consider all those circumstances where you too could suddenly find yourself out your depth. Bushfire, perhaps; flood; storm, or storm-surge; tsunami, earthquake or whatever. Food-shortage, financial-failure, pandemic and all manner of other possible perils. None of it your fault, yet you’ll probably be blamed for it anyway. And no doubt all too many others stranded in the same boat, in the same mess, at the same time, just like you. And you all have to deal with it, right now. What do you do? What help do you need?
This is where you’ll need your own community. Fast.
If it doesn’t exist, you’ll need to create it. Fast.
And play your part to help others in that community, too. Also fast. So that they can help you.
Your own community, yes, yet also within the larger community. That part’s important…
So apply those same lessons that the Chinese miners learnt, back in the gold-rush days:
— Who would act as ‘greeters’ to help people survive those first stages?
— Who would create and run the ‘transit-network’, to help you get to where you need to go?
— Who would create and run the ‘work-teams’, to get things done? What would be the tasks? How would you choose which team to join, which tasks to do?
— What kinds of support will you need? - food, clothing, shelter and so much more? Where would that support come from?
— Who would gather, collate, distribute the information you’ll need? Who would do this? How would they do it?
— Who would provide governance, guidance, help resolve all of the conflicts? How would they do this? What support would they need, to do those tasks?
So many different kinds of support that you’ll need: more, and more, and more, and always more…
And then there’s another catch. When you do need that support, you’ll need it all to be in place right now. Yet it takes time to get all this support set up and running. So if it isn’t already in place by the time you that need it, it may well be too late to be of any use.
Which means that you need those services to be set up before you need it all. You’ll need it to be ready and available at every moment that you might need it. Even if you don’t ever actually need it. Sure, it might wasteful to set it all up if you don’t ever need it - yet you’ll often have no way of knowing beforehand if you’ll ever need it or not. That’s the dilemma. How would you tackle that?
That old abandoned stone at the bottom of my garden should help to remind us of all of those challenges above - and why it’s so important to face them now, too. Before the disruption comes….
The Chinese tablet is probably from a gravestone, the characters state the origin (家鄉) of the person buried, down to the village (廣東省花縣馬溪村, Maxi Village, Hua County, Guangdong/Canton Province).