Chiang Yee was a Chinese writer, poet and painter who lived in England during the 1930s and 1940s. In his writing and drawings, there are many observations on the attention that his Chinese appearance provoked, all enabling him to tell stories about both Chinese and English cultures. The autobiographical persona of Silent Traveller, created by Chiang Yee in his writing, steered clear of controversial remarks, although he had strong feelings about Chinese politics, racism, and how Chinese people were regarded in Britain and America.
This chapter explores how emotions, whether difficult or joyous, do not fit smoothly into linear narratives, and make personal memory an unreliable witness to history. Historians also may have a personal and emotional interest in the subjects they study. Indeed, I cannot think about Chiang Yee without resonances of my own family history, and experiences of being or embodying something of the Chinese in Britain. In a new analysis of The Silent Traveller in London (1945) and The Silent Traveller in Oxford (1946), the chapter explores what happens if we deepen rather than deny the historian’s role as storyteller, and pay closer attention to the differences and overlaps between Chiang Yee the author and Chiang Yee the Silent Traveller. Embracing the fragmented, the personal, the emotional, and the miss-remembered reveals a series of moments that speak about a Chinese physical presence in Oxford and London. These bring us closer to what it felt like to be a Chinese man in England during the 1940s, between the stories that were silenced and the things that could be said
