The six Chinese survivors of the Titanic
DOCUMENTARY TELLS STORY OF THE FORGOTTEN PASSENGERS
In the early hours of April 15, 1912, a lifeboat navigated the frigid waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, its skeleton crew scanning the dark, debris-littered surface for any sign of life. Hours earlier, the unthinkable had happened: The RMS Titanic, a majestic ocean liner deemed “unsinkable,” had struck an iceberg and slowly disappeared into the sea on its maiden voyage.
Hundreds of passengers fled in lifeboats. Hundreds more perished, going down with the ship or freezing to death in the icy water. The only one of Titanic’s lifeboats to turn back to the wreckage found body after body — until it discovered a young Chinese man, still alive, clinging to a piece of wood.
That man would be one of six Chinese passengers who survived the Titanic, a littleknown fact about the historic disaster that has largely remained untold or distorted, owing to a racially hostile environment toward Chinese people in the West at the turn of the 20th century.
Now, the lives of these men — who they were, how they survived that fateful night and why they were barred from entering the United States — are being examined in a new documentary, The Six, by Arthur Jones and Steven Schwankert.
“These were the only guys amongst those 700 that no one had ever claimed. They just completely disappeared. Why did they get ignored?” asked Jones, a Shanghaibased filmmaker.
On April 10, 1912, the Titanic set off on her maiden voyage to the United States from Southampton, England, with 2,229 passengers and crew members. Around 11:30 p.m. on April 14, the Titanic struck an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland and began to take on water. Within hours, the massive ocean liner had cleaved in two and — with hundreds still trapped on board — was swallowed by the frigid waters of what is now known as Iceberg Alley.
About 1,500 people died in the tragedy. About 700 passengers survived and were plucked from their lifeboats by the RMS Carpathia the next morning.
Over the past century, volumes have been written about hundreds of the Titanic’s victims and survivors. However, for six Chinese passengers who survived the sinking, their ties to the Titanic have all but vanished.
“It really started to bother me. Like, why don’t we know?” Schwankert said.
With little to go on at first but the passenger manifest and list of survivors, the documentary team set up a simple website, whoarethesix.com, to crowdsource tips.
Eight Chinese nationals boarded the ship at Southampton, to be exact. Their names appear in rigid cursive on a single ticket for thirdclass passengers: Ah Lam, Fang Lang, Len Lam, Cheong Foo, Chang Chip, Ling Hee, Lee Bing and Lee Ling.
Through two years of painstaking documentation, the filmmakers determined that the men in the group probably knew one another beforehand, having worked together as professional sailors on various ships in Britain.
Because of an ongoing coal strike there, the men were being transferred by their company to a freighter docked in New York, the Annetta, which was to take them to Cuba.
How the eight men responded as the Titanic began taking on water may never be known. They would have been travelling in steerage, the lowest class of cabins, where the survival rate for non-British men was only about 20 per cent.
What was documented is that one of the Chinese men was later found clinging to a large piece of floating wood by the one main lifeboat that chose to return to the wreckage to search for signs of life. Five others escaped in lifeboats. Notably, four were in “Collapsible C,” a backup escape vessel with canvas siding that was one of the last lifeboats to be lowered from the ship.
They happened to share the same lifeboat as Joseph Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the White Star Line, which owned the Titanic. Ismay, who was later pilloried for saving himself instead of going down with the ship despite being such a highranking official, testified in official inquiries that “four Chinamen were in the boat” in which he had escaped.
Even after the Carpathia arrived in New York, the troubles for the six Chinese men were not over. Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882, the group of survivors was not permitted to enter the United States. They were instead forced to board the Annetta, their intended ship of transfer, and the next day departed the country, bound for fruit ships in the Caribbean.
The attitude toward Chinese and other Asian minorities then was hostile, as evidenced in the tone of the few newspaper articles that mention them at the time. For instance, in an unsourced April 19, 1912, Brooklyn Daily Eagle article headlined Heroism of Anglo-Saxon Sailors Stands Out in Disaster, the Chinese passengers are described as almost inhuman and regarded with the utmost suspicion.
“The one dark spot is the fact that in the bottom of one lifeboat which left the Titanic were found, wedged beneath the seats, the bodies of two dead Chinese coolies and eight living ones,” the article stated. “They were creatures on their way to New York to join a sailing ship for the Orient, and who, at the first sign of danger, had sprung into the lifeboats ... They were trampled upon by the women who were lowered into the boats later, and two of them crushed to death.”
Schwankert said there is no evidence that the men stowed away or took the place of women and children on “Collapsible C,” which was not filled when it was discovered.
Against the odds, the team has been able to track down several descendants of the six men — many of whom had never connected their relatives to the historic disaster.
“The most important thing is that they’re given their rightful place in history,” Schwankert said. He also hopes that the documentary will “prove that they were not cowards, that they didn’t live at the expense of others who didn’t survive.”