In June 2024, my dear friend Dr. Patricia Lee Men Chin’s father passed away. She invited me to a funerary service at the Poo Thee Chee pagoda on the Rue Madame in Port-Louis. After the ceremony was over, I joined her family for a delicious meal in one of the pagoda’s back chambers. As Patricia generously heaped my bowl with dumplings, vegetables, and rice, I expressed my surprise that the food was vegetarian. Patricia chuckled at my expression and said, “Ena boku lor kominote sino morisien ki to pa kone.”

She was right. Having grown up in Mauritius, I was familiar with the laboutik sinwa as a symbol of times gone by, with mine bwi and baget fromaz as unparalleled delights for one’s tastebuds. But as the anthropologist Edward T. Hall underlines, a community’s culture is like an iceberg: The visible and accessible aspects, such as food and festivals, only represent a small part of the community’s cultural richness. The deeper and perhaps most significant components, such as cultural values and historical legacies, remain submerged… until one makes the effort to dive underwater.

This first exchange generated multiple others of its kind, and it was soon decided: we had to create a space beyond our conversations to engage with these varied facets of Sino-Mauritian histories and lived experiences that are often not articulated beyond closed doors, and yet are so intrinsic to the fabric of our nation. Luckily, Patricia and I were not only friends; we were also both Mauritian women academics working in North America, with past conference-organizing experience. This past week, from 3-5 July, we hosted an interdisciplinary conference titled “Stories of Migration: The Chinese Diaspora in the Indian Ocean and Beyond.” Our starting point was the general perception of the Sino-Mauritian community on the island. As readers will know, there is a tendency in Mauritius to reduce Sino-Mauritian history to one of industriousness and hard work, encapsulated within the figure of the boutikie sinwa. This picture is undoubtedly rooted in truth. At the same time, it falls short of a rich and varied history. For example, as various scholars have underscored, Chinese presence in Mauritius can be traced to as far back as the Dutch period, and throughout members of the Chinese diaspora on the island have contributed to the development of the island as enslaved persons, free agricultural workers, indentured labourers, traders and artisans.

Additionally, as Patricia eloquently described during the conference, nostalgic remembrances of the laboutik sinwa and celebrations of the hard work of the boutikie often gloss over the violent realities that these shopkeepers and their families had to deal with. For example, they often had to undertake 364 working days a year (with the sole exception of the Chinese New Year). They had to serve the drunkards who knew they lived in a room behind the shop and would knock on their door at any time of the day or night looking for alcohol (thus dismantling any possibility of real rest from work). Children who had to start working behind the counters as soon as they got home from school (before any notion of “child labor” was present on the local scene). And virulent racism often struck when it was least expected: Sinwa pa dimun sa, kan li mor li vinn diab.

One of the high points of “Stories of Migration” was a roundtable on collective memory, which allowed members of the community to share both their childhood remembrances and their hopes for the future. Ms. Marget Li Yin, for example, recalled the 1968 racial riots that happened when she was four years old: pushing back against a binaristic narrative that often pits the Creole community against the Muslim one, she described the Chinese shopkeepers who lost everything as the “collateral damage” who remain absent from official histories. And Mr. Kee Chong Li Kwong Wing explored the layered histories of solidarity that often existed between the Sino-Mauritian shopkeepers on sugar estates and the Indo-descended workers. Their innovation of micro-credit services, for example, is widely known. But additionally, they often helped in more implicit and powerful ways: Mr. Li brings up the example of a boutikie who, aware of the fact that one of the laborers used to metabolize his frustration from back-breaking work in the fields by beating his wife and children, used to make sure the man drank to the point of stupor (and therefore beyond the capacity to enact any kind of physical assault) before going back home, irrespective of whether the man could pay for the liquor or not. This fact was remembered by the man’s son, who many years later expressed his gratitude for the discreet and yet life-changing act of kindness.

This latter anecdote, in particular, feels representative of the complexity of the dialogue that we need in Mauritius. One that celebrates solidarities without erasing the layered violences of the past. One that seeks to do justice to the specificity of a community’s experience, while still being sensitive to its entanglements with other sections of the Mauritian population.

Those conversations have real stakes, for they may help inform our responses to contemporary challenges. The Sino-Mauritian community has been described in the international media as « Africa’s most integrated Chinese community. » At the same time, it has been described as the « island’s next dodo » — a community that is on the brink of extinction. Indeed, ancestral languages are dying out: as brought up by Mr. Philip Ah-Chuen, the new generation does not speak Hakka anymore, and this language is absent from the educational landscape, where Mandarin has taken over as the « Chinese » language. Mauritians might be familiar with this challenge in other contexts, for the difficulties faced by Hakka have key resonances (though not straightforward equivalences) with Bhojpuri-speaking and - teaching in relation to Hindi. Additionally, roundtable participants underlined that the changing Sino-Mauritian family structure and prevalent diasporic movement abroad means that ageing parents often find themselves on their own, but existing old age homes are not culturally equipped to care for them properly. In a country with an ageing population, such concerns merit greater place in the public conversation, as relevant both within and beyond specific communities.