Second generation Australian, Zheng Jiale,
in 1999. Huang Jianda, Zheng Jiale zhuan [The Biography
of Zheng Jiale] (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi chubanshe, 1999).
In August 1901, Zheng Ri left his home town of Longdu, in
Xiangshan County (now Zhongshan City) in Guangdong Province
to try his luck in Australia. Many others had done the same
before him. Around this time, however, the new Commonwealth
Government had passed an Immigration Restriction Act that
was intended to prevent twenty-one year old Zheng Ri - and
indeed all other Chinese immigrants - from entering Australia.
To qualify for admission, Zheng Ri bought an Australian re-entry permit,
technically a Certificate of Exemption from the Dictation Test, from
a fellow villager in China. He borrowed money to cover the cost of his
voyage by contracting with a firm in Hong Kong.
He disembarked in Brisbane after a slow voyage out, and immediately
made his way to Towoomba where he carried an introduction to a local
market-gardener. His employer put him to work planting, watering, weeding,
harvesting and selling vegetables. Australia (or "Gold Mountain" as
he called it) did not quite live up to Zheng Ri's expectations. "This
backbreaking toil was no different from the work we had done as peasants
back home," he later recalled. "For all this I earned just one pound
a week."
After spending five weeks in the vegetable gardens of Towoomba, Zheng
set off in search of other employment. His next job offered little
relief. Zheng found work clearing land for sheep and cattle properties
in outback Queensland. In the company of a team of Chinese labourers
he ring-barked giant gums, felled smaller trees, and rooted out scrub,
to clear a vast acreage of land over a period of eight months. Once
the property was cleared, in July 1902, he found himself unemployed
along with thirty or so fellow Chinese loggers.
Over the next three years he traveled around northern and
central Queensland working as a farm hand, cabinet maker,
general labourer and vegetable gardener, before settling down
to work in a Brisbane factory. By 1909, after saving enough
money to cover his debts and his fare, Zheng Ri returned home
briefly to find himself a wife.
After marrying a local girl in his home village, Zheng returned
to Australia. There he remained on and off for another thirty-five
years, travelling up and down the east coast, and finding
work on isolated farms, in outback towns, and in the larger
cities of Brisbane and Sydney. Although his financial situation
showed little improvement - at one point he suffered a serious
industrial accident that put him out of commission for some
time - he managed to make several visits home over the period.
Then, in 1935, he went back to his village with the intention
of staying for good.
Zheng Ri (right front) and his son Jiale (second
from left at back) on the eve of returning to Australia in
1935. Huang Jianda, Zheng Jiale zhuan [The Biography
of Zheng Jiale] (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi chubanshe, 1999).
Before long back home, however, he discovered that things were little
better in Longdu village. At this time the village was largely populated
by women and girls who were dependent on the financial remittances sent
back by their sons, husbands, and fathers who were working abroad. So
the following year he returned to Sydney once again, this time accompanied
by his second son, Jiale. Father and son lived in a small room in a
Sydney boarding house before Zheng Ri returned to his village for the
last time at the close of the war with Japan in 1946.
The second generation of Zhengs settled down in Australia. Jiale had
initially joined his father by entering the country as a student, one
of the few legitimate ways for Chinese to enter Australia at the time.
In this he was assisted by sponsorship from an established Sydney Chinese
businessman. Unfortunately, his guarantor withdrew sponsorship midway
through the boy's term of study. Jiale then faced deportation. Fortunately,
father and son found another local guarantor in time to prevent Jiale's
forced return to China.
The lad grew to maturity in Australia, where he became a prominent
member of Sydney's Chinese community, especially through his
work with labour unions and with the Chinese Youth League
(the Qiaoqingshe), in Sydney's Dixon Street. In 1999,
Jiale became the subject of the first biography of an Australian
Chinese ever to be published in China - a book by Huang Jianda
entitled Zheng Jiale zhuan [A Biography of Zheng Jiale],
which was published by the Huashan Wenyi Publishing House
in Shijiazhuang, in Hebei Province.
Jiale Zheng welcoming the Chinese ping pong
team on behalf of the Chinese Youth League in the early 1970s.
Huang Jianda, Zheng Jiale zhuan [The Biography of Zheng
Jiale] (Shijiazhuang: Huashan wenyi chubanshe, 1999).
Jiale married in the 1960s and in 1968 bore a child of his own. The
young boy was called Tieqiao ("iron bridge"), partly as a mark of respect
for the famous landmark of his adopted city, Sydney, but also as an
expression of hope that the third generation of Zheng's would manage
to bridge the gulf that separated Australia from their home village
in Guangdong, to which his grandfather had returned after the war. In
later years, when grandfather Zheng Ri reflected back on his time as
a labourer in Australia, he could recall little but hardship - recall
times, for example, when he would fall into bed at the end of the day
"without even washing my feet." Thinking of his final return to his
home village in 1946, he found comfort in the knowledge that he was,
as the old saying went, " a falling leaf returning to its roots" (luoye
guigen).
Not so his grandson, Tieqiao (Iron-Bridge). Having been born, raised and
educated in Australia, Tieqiao could hardly return to his roots in Longdu.
Instead, he turned to Guangdong to find his roots. When he went
back to his father's and grandfather's village, in 1986, what Tieqiao
discovered was not just a village but a homeland. In that year Tieqiao
visited his ancestral village for the first time in the company of a group
of Chinese Australian students. The experience was overwhelming. "I feel
very moved," he told relatives in Longdu. "Very much as though I have become Chinese." Still he returned to Australia - as a Chinese
Australian.
SOURCES:
Zhongshan ren zai aozhou[Zhongshan people in Australia], Zhongshan
wenzhi [Records of Zhongshan] No. 24 (Guangzhou: Zhengxie
guangdongsheng zhongshanshi weiyuanhui wenshi weihuanhui,
1992), pp.75-7 and 175-6.
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Last Updated:
27 February, 2009