Before my husband Greg Yu started composing the original music score for a documentary on the Titanic last year, I never knew there were Chinese survivors. I had seen plenty of movies, documentaries retracing the tragic destiny of the luxury ship when it sank on 14 April 1912 but don´t remember ever hearing about Chinese among the survivors. And yet, eight Chinese men originally from Guangdong province boarded the Titanic four days earlier, in Southampton, England. Of these eight, six of them survived and made it to New York: Lee Bing, Fang Lang, Chang Chip, Ah Lam, Chung Foo and Ling Hee. 

According to the documentary « The Six: the untold story of RMS Titanic’s Chinese passengers », they were professional mariners whose UK employer, following the coal strike there, had decided to send them across to North America, where they were meant to switch to the Annetta ship docked in New York; a fruits boat sailing between various ports on the American East Coast down to ports in the Caribbean. The Titanic was the only ship sailing the Atlantic those days.

Traveling in third-class, housed in windowless cabins in the bow of the ship, they would have been among the first passengers to feel the vibration of the collision with the iceberg at 11:40pm. After managing to make their way up, five of them coincidentally happened to share the same lifeboat as Joseph Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line, who owned the Titanic. The last of the survivors, Fang Lang, did not make it to the lifeboat but was found floating on a piece of wreckage, and might well have been the last passenger rescued from Titanic. It is said that Officer Harold Lowe, who was commanding the lifeboat, was first reluctant to save Lang, stating he looked dead and if not, “there’s others better worth saving than a Jap!”. The doorframe is exhibited in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. James Cameron, Executive producer on The Six, came across the anecdote of that Chinese survivor during his research and later admitted this became the inspiration for Rose & Jack´s story ending. He even shot the scene of his rescue that was later removed from the final version.

Irony has it that when the Carpathia, one of Titanic’s sister ships that came to rescue, reached New York, the six Chinese compatriots were not permitted to enter the United States because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Passed in 1882, that act prohibited immigration of Chinese laborers to the States. The six men were held overnight in custody, without receiving any medical aid or psychological support and within 24 hours after reaching an immigration station on Ellis Island, their story just vanished from the history books. 

When British film-maker Arthur Jones and Steven Schwankert – lead researcher and historian for The Six – started to track down the descendants of the six survivors, they found out that some were not even aware of the connection to the Titanic, and 90% of the Chinese people they asked did not know about it either. One reason the men might have refrained from sharing their story was the fear of being found out and deported. Maybe they never felt safe enough to tell their story. But a rumor has it that the men had disgraced themselves by sneaking onto a lifeboat after disguising themselves as women, which might also be why many prefer not to remember their survival story in China. Women and children had been prioritized in the rush to the lifeboats, therefore men who survived the sinking of the Titanic were often scrutinized. 

In Sichuan province (one of Imperial Tours’ favorite destinations to see giant pandas and taste delicious spicy food), a full-size replica of the Titanic is under construction and should soon open as a theme park in the near future. The original idea was to introduce a high-tech simulation allowing tourists relive the moment when the ship hit the iceberg but it was eventually dropped after family members of the victims and survivors rallied against the concept.  When Arthur Jones´ team contacted Romandisea, the company building the replica ship, they were initially reluctant to memorialize the six passengers, repeating the allegation about these “dishonorable men”.