Watch & read

A two-part documentary on the history, origins and identity of the Chinese in the Netherlands – the wider story that our own family’s arrival from San Tin is part of.

A report on the work of Chinese associations in the Netherlands – language lessons, get-togethers, care for the elderly and everything else set up to keep the culture alive. Exactly the kind of work our association grew out of.

A four-part series on Chinese culture and how Chinese Dutch people shaped it for themselves – filmed in the years when many of our own uncles and aunties were at school here.

A look at a hundred years of Chinese migration to Amsterdam, from strike-breakers and shadowy figures to shopkeepers and businesses in plain view – the city where our own family settled too.

Three generations in the street where our clubhouse stands: from the sailors and boarding-house keepers of the 1920s to the restaurants and the children who grew up there. The closest to home of all the books on this page.

Chinatown The Hague from 1920 to 2010. It was here, in 1936, that two relatives from Chau Tau and San Tin opened a grocery and a restaurant on Thomsonplein – the first family business in the Netherlands.

Five hundred years of immigration to the Netherlands. Not a book about us, but the book that shows where the arrival of Chinese sailors and restaurant workers fits into the bigger story.

Chang Ju Cheung sets the Chinese community in Amsterdam alongside the one in Hong Kong and asks, topic by topic – culture, health, racism, emancipation – how the first generation differs from the second and third. Exactly the conversations that rarely happen out loud at our table.

Chang, born in the Netherlands and raised with two cultures, sees Chinese traditions disappearing with his generation. In five parts he goes looking, in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, for what fades and what stays – Hakka culture, Cantonese opera, kung fu, living on the water, Chinese New Year.

Writer Pete Wu travels to Wenzhou with his parents for the first time – the place they left fifty years ago. Officially to look at a flat, but really to ask about the migration story they’ve never talked about. A different region from ours, but with that familiar silence at the table.

A read-aloud book for the very youngest that explains the New Year customs – exactly what you’d want to pass on to your own grandchildren. Illustrated by Sioe Jeng Tsao, an artist of Chinese descent from Rotterdam.