Not a gold rush, just chilling in Paradise.
My great-grandfather Ah Soon worked on a German cruiser and somehow ended up settling in Samoa around 1899, just before Samoa was declared a German colony. In a paper presented by former Samoa Attorney-General Tuatagaloa Aumua Ming Leung Wai to the China and the Pacific Conference in Apia on 25 February 2015, Tuatagaloa spoke of my great-grandfather:
“Ah Soon knew how to speak German after having served as a steward on a German cruiser called the Cormorant. He later settled in Samoa after 1899 and ran a successful banana plantation, grocer and tailor shops and a taxi business in Apia.”
The first Chinese to settle in Samoa were sailors on European trading ships in the 1870’s. Samoa, like the rest of the Pacific, was opening up to regular contact with the outside world with Christian missions that began operations in the 1830’s and European companies and entrepreneurs starting large-scale plantations and trading stores.
In the absence of a formally recognised central government, these early Chinese were free settlers in Samoa like their European counterparts. All of them were men and they married Samoan women, had large families and ran successful businesses.
A few examples, again from Tuatagaloa Aumua Ming Leung Wai’s paper:
Ah Ching from the Fukien Province in China, left home as a teenager to work as a crew member on a trading ship and after several years, decided to settle in Samoa. He married the daughter of a local chief, had ten children and became a successful landowner and businessman. Some of his descendants are prominent in business and sports in Samoa and New Zealand today.
Leung Wai went to Samoa when he was in his early 20’s and married a Samoan woman. He ran several businesses including taxis, restaurants, and profitable plantations. Among his descendants are lawyers (great-grandson Tuatagaloa Aumua Ming Leung Wai is a former Attorney-General of Samoa), business owners and sports people (grandson Bee Leung Wai was a three-time gold medallist in weightlifting at the Pacific Games).
Indentured labourers.
European trading companies and entrepreneurs started settling in Samoa by the end of the 19th Century. It soon became apparent that Samoans did not like to work 9-hour days in the heat for wages and the labour shortage saw them recruiting in the islands of Melanesia and later on in China.
The largest trading firm in Samoa by the time of the German colonial administration in 1900 was Deutsche Handels und Plantagen Gesellschaft (DH&PG). They found Chinese labourers hard working and easier to control far away from their homelands.
Unlike my great-grandfather and his cohorts, the Chinese who went to Samoa as labourers were not free settlers; they were indentured labourers on contract and were expected to return to China at the completion of their terms. (Not unlike the present Pacific Island seasonal workers in Australia).
Many of the Chinese labourers suffered under the largely unregulated conditions and floggings were common.
Wrote Tuatagaloa Aumua Ming Leung Wai, it could be for any of these reasons:
“hiding, laziness, running away, insulting behaviour, breaking the curfew and even for not bowing low enough in respect of their masters.”
Stories about the ill treatment of Chinese labourers reached China and the Chinese government temporarily halted the labour trade and warned the German administration in Samoa to ensure the protection of the safety and human rights of Chinese labourers.
For the most part of Samoa’s colonial experience, the Chinese were seen as the lowest in the pecking order by the colonial masters. There were proclamations from the German colonial administration (later adopted by the New Zealand colonial administration) prohibiting Chinese from socialising and entering Samoan homes.
Still many Chinese labourers had relationships and children with Samoan women, and one of the darkest chapters in Samoa’s history, was when these labourers were forced to return to China without their wives and children.
Chinese under the independent state of Samoa.
When Samoa became an independent state in 1962, only Samoan matai (chiefs) were eligible to vote and run for parliament. However, a special electorate was established for Individual Voters, or those who did not identify as Samoan with access to a chiefly title.
So many of the descendants of German, American, British, Melanesian and Chinese settlers filled this roll and could run for parliament and had the right to vote without the matai requirement that was in place for Samoans.
The Samoan parliament amended the Electoral Act in the mid-1990’s abolishing the Individual Voters electorate arguing that every citizen of Samoa is Samoan regardless of background and therefore has access to a Samoan family with rights to land and chiefly titles.
Amazingly, there was no dissent from the Europeans, especially from the Chinese-Samoans to the amendment.
As the former Attorney-General’s weighty name suggests, he holds the chiefly titles of Tuatagaloa and Aumua from his Samoan families and still keeps his Chinese last name Leung Wai. (Unlike his, my family adopted my grandfather’s first name Lafoa’i instead of Ah Soon as our last name. But there are many descendants using the Ah Soon or simply Soon as a last name in Samoa today).
By 2015, around 20% of the members of Samoa’s parliament were men and women of Chinese heritage. In the previous HRPP government, the minister of finance was the late Papalii Lee Hangz, a Samoan of Chinese heritage.
White elephants and roads to nowhere.
The Samoan and Chinese governments have had close relations since the mid-1970’s. Over the years, Chinese influence is evident everywhere in the Pacific region especially in Samoa with multi-storied buildings built under Chinese aid or so-called soft loans.
In an interview with a former minister of international development and Pacific Affairs, Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, she condemned the way future generations of Pacific Islanders are left with a legacy of debt as a result of these white elephants and roads to nowhere.
When the Solomon Islands government signed a security agreement with the Chinese government last year, it sent ripples of anxiety across the Pacific and Canberra to panic mode.
Chinese in Samoa today.
There is a chain of supermarkets around the islands of Samoa called Frankies supermarkets. They are owned by a Chinese entrepreneur named Frankie Cai who arrived in Samoa in the early 1990’s to help his uncle’s business. He married a Samoa woman, has a Samoan family and runs the largest supermarket chain in the land.
Another prominent family is the Chan Mows. The old man was a cook who ran a small eatery behind the old market and also cooked for the Catholic priests. His descendants own the iconic old Burns Philip store in Apia plus large land holdings in the hinterlands of the town.
Many Samoans of Chinese heritage have been or are prominent in sports. Fred Ah Khoui was a household name in rugby league in the 1980’s, and every year in the Samoan national rugby squad, there would be someone of Chinese background in it. Others have been famous in the NFL in the US.
Chinese influence in Samoan cuisine.
The first Chinese who settled in Samoa may not have introduced rice to the country, but those who came after certainly made it a staple in the Samoan diet.
It is very rare to have a Samoan feast without the Samoan variations on Chinese dishes like sapasui (chop suey), siaumegi (chow mein), palu fuamoa (egg foo young), keke pua’a (cha siu bao) and Chinese pastries masi saina.
The secret is in the importance of family (aiga).
As a Samoan of Chinese heritage, I look at the way the Samoan family operates and find it very similar to the Cantonese way of honouring elders and supporting the unit.
Those early Chinese settlers would have found in Samoa a way of life that was familiar to them and therefore decided to stay and make a go of it. It wasn’t like eking out a living in the barren and dusty outback of Australia. Samoa’s soil is so fertile it inspired the novelist Somerset Maughan to write that even the fence posts take root and grow.
A final observation from Tuatagaloa Aumua Ming Leung Wai:
“Samoan society is a very inclusive society. Intermarriage with persons from other races is generally accepted. This is why the Chinese who migrated to Samoa were able to assimilate with ease into Samoan society. This assimilation was made easy by the fact that Samoa women are good looking. The children from these Chinese-Samoan unions are also very good looking. The children from these inter-marriages are considered to be Samoan and are accepted by Samoans as their own.”
