335
Other Ranks Coloured
AT'S (Auxiliary Territorial Service - women)
But of course race was not just something for westerners. It was not so dissimilar for some Chinese. I have a friend who said to her daughter, ‘All right, you can go to Britain to study. But you must promise you will never marry a westerner.' Such views are still not so uncommon. There is an obituary in the HKBRAS Journal, Vol. 27, 1987, page 5, for RAS member KMA Barnett OBE. The writer suggested that Barnett's 'occasional sourness could be traced to a resentment that his (most happy) marriage to a Chinese had blocked his promotion.' The writer also said that Barnett was inclined to believe that AIDS was a divine (or nature's) deserved punishment for societies which tolerated, even glamorised, “deviants.”
In the case of my own Anglo-Chinese wedding, although I did receive a certain amount of ostracism from a few colleagues in the early days, most accepted my marriage without too much difficulty. Certainly I received no objections from my employer, the Hong Kong Government. In my case I was married in the morning and, in the afternoon, my Chinese wife and I were invited to the Governor's garden party on the lawn at Government House. This was held annually, on the Queen's Birthday, 21 April, which was then a public holiday. We held a Chinese dinner that evening, in the old Sun Ya Restaurant on Nathan Road. The cost was $130 per Chinese table each seating 12 persons.
Many people, certainly pre-World War Two, took the view that stratification was correct and necessary as lifestyles of the Chinese and westerners differed so considerably. The Chinese, at least outwardly, were not too disturbed by racial discrimination. They took it all quite stoically. After all, they knew who was really superior. Was not their country the Middle Kingdom, with a complex culture and a continuous civilisation going back 5,000 years? They did not want to live on the Peak anyway, it was far too humid up there. Yes, like the British, at heart the Chinese knew who the superior beings really were. Today, while there is still some class distinction and snobbery in the Territory, both among Europeans and Chinese, the old days of racial discrimination have fortunately largely gone. Mixed marriages make the world go round.