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How did you get interested in film and video? Growing up in the Caribbean, I did not think of film as something particularly interesting. I grew up in the Sixties, and I was in high school in the Sixties when there was a Black Power uprising in Trinidad. It was a very intense time politically. Because of the questioning of white supremacy and colonial hierarchies , I thought about identity and who I was. At one point, a cousin came from New York and brought my sister a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book. International politics, China, took on a different meaning. China was a place that we associated with the stodginess of my parents. China is evoked in a lot of diasporic homes that way to correct the bad behavior of the children. What is the Chinese community like in Trinidad? It is a small community, about 2 percent of the population. My family was a mixed family, because my mother is third-generation Chinese Trinidadian; her grandparents had come as indentured laborers from China. That older community had been very much assimilated or creolized into French, African, Trinidadian culture. One of the things I wanted to put in My Mother’s Place [1990] was her disorientation. For example, she talks about the Taiwanese, and she does not even see them as Chinese like herself. In my youth, there was a great distinction made amongst the various groups of Chinese in Trinidad—between new immigrants and creolized Chinese. Those communities were quite separate , and there were class divisions as well. There are, for example, the “shop Chinese.” When I was a kid, every little village in Trinidad had a shop that was the “Chinese shop.” There was always a counter in the front, a shelf behind with all the goods, and a side door and (Ithaca, New York, April 25, 2000) Interview with Richard Fung 140 Chapter 5 a separate counter where rum was served; it was a rum shop. After the Black Power uprising in the sixties, I think a lot of the Chinese left and went to places like Canada. The Chinese came as indentured laborers, many of them went into business , and then into the professions. Many of the Chinese are quite well off from going into business. However, others went into the civil service and ended up as bureaucrats. In the video, my mother talks about her father trying to discipline the children to be Chinese, as if they were living in China, but there was that extreme creolization of my mother’s cousins and siblings, who intermarried. In fact, my mother is the only one of her siblings who married another Chinese person. There were different models of how to be Chinese. Some Chinese saw themselves as being kind of Chinese white people in a way, and they identified with the colonial hierarchy and wanted to be part of the country club that my mother says was only for whites. My mother was local Chinese, but I was really brought up as a sort of half-shop Chinese. I would spend weekends packing shelves and learning the cash register. My mother grew up in a large family of many first cousins, and she was the poorest of the lot. She was not educated— she did not finish high school—so I think when she did well through business her ambition was to mix with her cousins. Growing up in Trinidad, when I became more politically aware, I did not think of cinema as a site for finding anything, because the only work that would come down to the Caribbean was the crassest of popular Hollywood cinema and television. I became exposed to different sorts of film when I went to Ireland. How did you end up in Ireland? My family is very Catholic; Catholicism is the dominant religion in Trinidad . Trinidad became a British colony very late, and, by the time it became British, the established culture was French, not Spanish. Spain owned it, but the French Catholics settled it. A lot of freed slaves went there, because there was land available, and, later on, aristocrats, escaping the French Revolution, went to Trinidad. Growing up, I heard my mother talking about villages near to her village in the south, called First Company, Fifth Company, etcetera, and this was land given to African American soldiers who had supported the British. They were Americans who were given free land and actually went to Trinidad. I went...

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