I read 'Long Time No See' in March 2021. I had ordered it because I had already
read Hannah Lowe's contribution to a collection of people's experiences connected
to the situation when 'The Windrush Generation' were caught up in a government
campaign to reduce migration and I was interested to find out more.

Hannah writes about her father, Ralph. He was also known as Chick, Chin or Chan.
Those nicknames partly reflected his ancestry, with a Chinese Jamaican father and
a black Jamaican mother. We find out about his childhood when he worked in
'Chiney' provision stores, his move to the U.S. to earn money from agricultural
work, his increasing political concerns connected to Jamaican independence
and another move, to the U.K. on the ship 'Ormonde' a forerunner of 'The Empire
Windrush'. In the U.K., after initially working as a railway shunter, he used his earlier
experience and skill with cards to essentially become a professional gambler.

Although there are elements of fiction, Hannah Lowe's account of his life moves
forward in time, juxtaposed with her own growth through childhood and university.
We find out about the tensions in the relationship and the way others, as at school,
are surprised by her father, both older than average and physically different from her.
Like many parent:child relationships, there are challenges, particularly from adolescence
onwards.

However, after studying at university she steadily becomes more interested in his
history and how his lived experience is so different from when, "it was white men
in universities speaking to white men in universities about black men and women -
describing and defining them." (p.240).

As often, there is regret at what hasn't been said when he dies after his health
deteriorates as he is afflicted with stomach cancer. As she writes, "The moment
I realised my father was going to die was the moment I wanted to ask him everything,
to hear his story from his own mouth, to talk in a way we'd never talked. His death
severed my connection to China, to his secret life in London - all the history I'd never
know." (p.290)

However, she does find out about his early life from a notebook he kept
and with her own recollections and skill as a writer who now teaches creative writing,
she vividly describes contrasting locations including suburban England, Jamaica and
the U.S. For example, in the U.S., he experienced a contrast in how he and others
were received in the south compared with the north and worked alongside Japanese-
American internees while in the U.K. he got to know friends from other Caribbean islands
who were "all in the same boat."

She also describes contrasting characters: her parents, her friends at school and university,
her father's friends and family as he grew up and the rather 'dodgy' characters he
associates with during his gambling career.

Find out about the previous book I focussed on.