BOOK REVIEWS
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this field are already much in her debt, and this piece well deserves the wider circulation it will receive from its inclusion here. The contributions of Hayes and Goodstadt contain useful descriptive material; but it is to be regretted that delays in publication have rendered some of the papers much out of date, and caused others to be superseded by their authors' own fuller publications.
University of London, 1969.
H. G. H. NELSON
THE CHINESE IN LONDON, Ng Kwee Choo, Oxford University Press (for the Institute of Race Relations), London, 1968, pp. x, 92, paperback, 15/-d.
As Mr. Ng tells us, there have been Chinese in Britain since at least 1814, and it may, therefore, seem perhaps strange that they have escaped study for so long. But it is largely their "non-organisation" which has made them a most evasive, nebulous and difficult subject, so that there is no ready-made framework within which to seek for and organise data; and Mr. Ng in this pioneering work finds himself forced to leap from topic to topic without any systematic progression of ideas or approach. Furthermore, there are, doubtless, aspects of Chinese society in Britain which could not be published without harm to the research worker, his informants and the Chinese community at large, and the knowledge of this must also be a handicap to an author. The criticism of this book, then, that it lacks depth and organisation, should be tempered with the qualification that the author has attempted an extremely difficult task.
Mr. Ng divides the Chinese in London into three main groups: long-standing sojourners, largely mariners or ex-mariners; recently arrived (i.e. post-war) restaurant workers; and students, businessmen, nurses, etc. This last group attracts little of the author's attention, while the first is never as clearly differentiated from the second as the division into separate groups would lead us to expect. By and large, it is the restaurant workers who form the subject matter of the book.
The first twenty pages provide an interesting historical account of Chinese immigration. There follow chapters on the social backgrounds of the immigrants, on their occupations in Britain, on their employer/employee relationships, on their associations