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 had only just started 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.

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.

It’s Chinese New Year: Winki cleans the house and washes her cuddly toy Little Dragon, but Little Dragon flies off to the parade. A read-aloud book for the very youngest, where the New Year customs are simply the backdrop – exactly what you’d want to pass on to our own grandchildren. Illustrated by Sioe Jeng Tsao, an artist of Chinese descent from Rotterdam.