Skeletons in the cupboard that didn’t rattle

Aug 4 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Liverpool’s links to Shanghai have been well chronicled with the advent of the Olympics. Emma Pinch meets a woman who discovered her connections to the Chinese city run deep.

IT WAS one of those things you just knew not to ask about. All Yvonne Foley knew was that her birth dad had done a bunk when she was a baby.

It was only at school in Kirkby that she realised her dark, delicate looks were different to those of her white classmates. "Chink," they’d slyly call her. She asked her mum why.

Yvonne learned she was one of an estimated 1,300 children whose hard-working Chinese seamen fathers were cast off by the English government in the lean times following the war.

Since 2004, she has been trying to uncover her own story, and that of the estimated 1,000 "half and half" wartime children like her, whose early years were clouded by silence, poverty and heartbreak.

"The majority of the women in our group went to their deaths believing they had been voluntarily deserted," she says.

"Most of us are in our 60s and we were brought up in an era when you kept quiet.

"We were skeletons in the cupboard but we didn’t rattle."

Yvonne was born in February, 1946, and lived in Caryl Gardens, Toxteth, where people like firemen and carpenters lived. By April that year, her dad had set sail for China. Finally giving up hope he would return, her mother married the man Yvonne regarded and loved as "dad".

"Like all of us, I thought, ‘he left me, so why should I bother with him?’ so I got on with living. I didn’t question it.

"I wasn’t really conscious of being different until I was 11 and we moved to Kirkby where everyone seemed to be white. Then I began to wonder. People said things and called you nasty names. Not like Liverpool 8 at all, which was full of Chinese Eurasians like me, so you didn’t question where you came from."

Her mum told her what she knew.

"Some of the Chinese sailors were tall, dark and handsome; they didn’t drink, they looked after their children, and they didn’t beat up their wives," says Yvonne. "What more do you need to know?

"She was under 21 when they met and when her father found out she was going out with a Chinese man, he ended up telling her to get out, so she did. She thought if she got pregnant the authorities would have to marry her, but she got pregnant and it was still not given.

"From the little I was told by my mother, he was a union leader – they used to have meetings in the house.

"She told me my Chinese father was from Shanghai, the French quarter, and that was why I was given a French name, Yvonne.

"My mother had said he thought ‘if I go back, things might be OK, and I can send for you’ but I’m not sure. You don’t know afterwards whether it’s imagining, wishing, whatever."