Uncovered Stories from the Titanic: The Six Documentary

Alec Massey

Features Editor

With the help of a hyper-realistic video game and a reenactment of the loading of lifeboats, researcher Steven Schwankert learns more about the eight Chinese passengers on the Titanic. Sewanee kicks off its pre-AAPI month activities with a showing of The Six documentary followed by a panel. The documentary produced by Luo Tong and Arthur Jones follows Schwankert who does a deep dive into the history of the eight Chinese passengers on the Titanic and the six that survived.

         Schwankert is based in China and wanted to discover why out of the 705 survivors on the Titanic the Chinese survivors’ stories are unknown. The Chinese sailors who boarded the Titanic were recorded on the ship log as Ah Lam, Fang Lam, Lee Bing, Cheong Chip, Cheong Foo, and Ling Hee. Ah Lam and Ling Hee did not survive the sinking, but their presence along with the six survivors’ presence provides a representation of Chinese people in the American mythos. When the Titanic sunk in 1912, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented all Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US, was still thirty-one years away from being repealed. The disappearance of the Chinese passengers from the Titanic story is related to the prejudice against Chinese people that was rampant as a result of the Exclusion Act.

         After docking in New York on the Carpathia with all the other survivors, the Chinese passengers had to immediately board the Annetta and sail to Cuba as they were not allowed to find work in America. The Annetta’s boat records list the names of the Chinese survivors which is how Schwankert and his team confirmed their movement after the Titanic, but they split up afterwards and simultaneously scattered their stories. Part of what makes their identities so elusive is the transcribing of their names into English and the tendency, noted by the documentary, of Chinese immigrants to change their names. Merchants and scholars were unaffected by the Exclusion Act and because of their free movement from China to the US, they would help other Chinese people get into the US by giving them legal papers with different names. The Chinese immigrant would completely adopt this new name and burn all other papers with their birth name. Therefore, the question of who exactly to look for when trying to learn about the survivors was tricky for Schwankert and his team. With the transcribing of their names into English, the spelling that represents the pronunciation could represent any number of Chinese characters. Because of that, there is still a lot of vagueness that the researchers had to navigate in order to unearth stories.

         Due to the vagueness of these people’s stories, and prejudice against Chinese people, many stories were created about the passengers that vilified them. One story in particular that was used to vilify four of the Chinese passengers was disproved  by the researchers. Previously, it was thought that the four Chinese survivors who boarded “Collapsible C,” the collapsible  lifeboat that the owner of the Titanic Ismay got on, bypassed the women and children and stowed away on the lifeboat by laying underneath the seats. To disprove this claim, the team used a hyper-realistic titanic sinking video game to track the movements of the passengers from their rooms to the top of the ship. They saw that the passengers, using their knowledge of ships, found an alternate route to the top of the ship and went over to where Collapsible C was being loaded. The team would not be able to test the possibility of their hiding under the seats without a replica of the lifeboat; therefore, they got help from a local school that built an accurate copy of the lifeboat. By filling the ship completely, they were able to tell that there was no way that a person would miss someone laying under their feet. They surmised, then, that the four Chinese survivors who found safety on the lifeboat were not being sneaky or cowardly but that they saw a chance at safety and boarded just like any other passenger.

         The documentary itself had many other stories of the Chinese passengers of the Titanic, and the panel afterward discussed the documentary’s strengths and weaknesses. The documentary allows for representation, though it is through dramatization. In referencing Chinese audiences’ reaction to the documentary, panelist Dr. Teri Terigele said, “[they] weren’t concerned with the white narrative but eager to know about the content, specifically how Chinese representation was associated with this large historic event of the Titanic. The documentary allowed for the highlighting of stories that were previously hidden by history. It does pose a question, however, of how important who tells the story is.”

Terigele said, to this point, “People are more likely to be persuaded by in-group members… which makes the allyship very important…having that allyship from the majority people speaking for [minority groups] can bring more audiences.” She also mentioned that performative allyship can be dangerous as it is very likely that it will silence or overshadow the voices of the minority group being represented. The documentary calls attention to the eight Chinese passengers and gives them a spot next to the other passengers in the story of the Titanic. Even if the documentary is not perfect, as Terigele said, “Something is better than nothing.”

In addition to the screening of The Six documentary, Sewanee is hosting several other events such as the Pre-AAPI month celebration. On April 9 there will be a meeting in McClurg ABC from 6:00-7:00 p.m.  about Global Sewanee: Early Asia Connections. There is another screening for the documentary Far East Deep South about Chinese people who immigrated to the Mississippi Delta in Naylor Auditorium on April  16 from 7-8:30 p.m. Showings of “Tilda Swinton Betrayed Us,” directed by Olivia Millwood (C ‘24), will be held in Angel Park from April 16-20. A poetry reading of “The Lengest Neoi” by poet-in-residence and panel member for The Six screening, Stephanie Choi,  will be held on April 17 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in Naylor. Finally, on April 23, the Multicultural Center is having a culture night at 6 p.m. Though there does not seem to be much Pacific Islander representation in Sewanee’s pre-AAPI celebrations, hopefully, May will bring in more events that celebrate both Asian American heritage and Pacific Islander heritage.