Titanic prejudice

Their separate ways

The Chinese sailors traveled as a group on a single third-class passenger ticket that cost a little less than 60 pounds ($292) at the time. It was paid for by their future employer, the Donald Steamship Co. The man who hired them was also on board the Titanic.

Though the papers carried by the Chinese seamen identify them as Hong Kong citizens, Schwankert has reason to believe that most of them had roots in Taishan county, Guangdong province. After arriving in Hong Kong, they, or their ancestors, had settled along Des Voeux Road West. "Here they found a series of boarding houses, employment agencies, and remittance offices catering to their needs," he says.

Though they were lumped together as a bunch of undistinguished sailors during the voyage, Schwankert has tried to reconstruct their lives as individuals in his book. He says that group leader, Ah Lam, might have been born in Hong Kong. Lam, who was 38 at the time, had already spent several years as a sailor and yet "was no more than a fireman, condemned to working in the engine room".Available documents suggest that he was contracted to earn 1 pound more per month than the rest of the group on his new job.

Schwankert draws attention to the fact that Lam "looks healthy but older than his age", in the photo on his crew registration document. "The lines on his face could be waves upon the ocean. He is not smiling."

Not much is known about Lam's life in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster, as indeed is the case with another survivor, Cheong Foo.

By comparison, the story of another Hong Kong native, Ling Hee, who was traveling under the alias of Yum Hui, is more fleshed out. His crew registration card says he was born on Jan 22, 1889, and that his position was that of a fireman. The photo on the card shows a young man wearing a suit and tie - a scar streaking across his left cheek. In the early '40s, he resurfaced in the state of California, living in San Francisco's Chinatown for some years before joining the fishing and canning industry in Monterey. He is buried in the Chinese Six Companies Cemetery in Colma.

Lee Bing, from Hengtang village in northeastern Taishan and 32 at the time of the disaster, eventually settled in Galt, Ontario, where he opened restaurants and prospered.

The ashes of the fifth survivor, Chang Chip, are entombed in a London cemetery.

The central character in Schwankert's narrative is Fong Wing-sun, a native of Xiachuan Island in the South China Sea. On board the Titanic, he went by the name of Fang Lang and gave his age as 26, although he was probably 18. Fong saved his life by clutching onto a floating door. By the end of that fateful night, he was half-frozen and calling out for help in Cantonese, per observers' accounts.

James Cameron, who filmed a scene inspired by Fong's fight to save his life in his 1997 blockbuster hit Titanic, but deleted it from the final cut, writes in his introduction to The Six: "That man's grit and determination to survive and my admiration for him inspired the now-famous Jack and Rose ending to Titanic," in which Rose, like the real-life Fong, survives by clinging to a floating door.