The unknown “Six” of the Titanic still “live” through their stories

One hundred and more (to be precise, 109) years after shipwreck of the Titanic, in April 1912, which claimed the lives of more than 1,500 people, brings to light a hitherto unknown story of six Chinese passengers on the cruise ship.

A shocking story of bravery, rescue and survival against the backdrop of one of the greatest maritime tragedies in history, as reported by extensive article in the New York Times.

The «The Six» tells the stories of these six sailors who survived the shipwreck: the Li Bing, Fang Lang, Chang Chip, Ah Lam, Chung Fu and Ling He.

When several hours after the tragic sinking of the ship, the dawn of 12^ης In April 1912, about 700 survivors were picked up from the icy North Atlantic by another adjacent ship, the Carpathia, among those who climbed it were all six of these Chinese.

The point, however, is that these six sailors never landed in New York, like so many others, under an anti-immigration law then called the “Chinese Exclusion Act.” So, as the documentary reveals, the very next day, on April 16, 1912, they boarded a cargo ship bound for Cuba to live and work. And then they seemingly disappeared. Nobody heard anything about them again.

“It is not possible for six men not to get married, not to start a family and not to tell this story to anyone,” said Steven Swankert, the film’s lead researcher.

The real ολ Golgotha ​​of the six Chinese actually started after their rescue from the wreck and the reasons were that all of them were almost everywhere unwanted because of their origin and nationality.

“Immigration is not something that started with Donald Trump,” Schwankert said, referring to the former US president’s policies and remarks. “These are issues we faced a century ago.”

Schwankert, however, opened lost shipyards, naval encyclopedias, shipping yearbooks, asked people, traveled to China and finally managed to “dust” very well the last moments of the Chinese sailors on the Titanic.

Initially, it was eight people, all from Guangdong Province in southern China, and were working in carnivals in England when their employer put them on the Titanic bound for New York.

When the ship hit the iceberg, the eight men acted quickly: five of them boarded lifeboats, but the other three fell into sub-zero water. Two of the three sailors, Lee Ling and Len Lam, are believed to have drowned. The third, Fang Lang, clung to a piece of debris (like the door Kate Winslet climbed in “Titanic”) and waited until a lifeboat returned to search for survivors, making him one of the last survivors.

In fact, as the film informs us, the Fang Lang’s rescue was the inspiration for the end of James Cameron’s “Titanic” (who, not coincidentally, is also the executive producer of the documentary, so he knew Lang’s story). When the ship sank, the six Chinese arrived in a lifeboat full of Bruce Ismei, the owner of the Titanic.

After the sinking of the Titanic, some of the survivors probably ended up back in Britain, and after World War II, thousands of them were forcibly repatriated by the British government, leaving the families they had raised in Britain. According to the directors of the documentary, this obviously happened to all six Chinese who survived the sinking of the Titanic.

Entering China, and given the rise of the country’s Communist Party, they all entered with forged documents and different names. Their previous life had “died” along with their old name and none of the six sailors’ children ever learned the truth about their fathers.

Fang Lang’s son, Tom Fong, said that his father, who died in 1985 at the age of 90, never spoke of his life, but Fong knew he was in a wreck.

In 2003, one of his cousins ​​told him that he was 100% sure that the ship on which his father was was the Titanic. It was a moment of purity for many descendants of these six sailors, whom history has almost completely forgotten.

“The screening of the documentary is a justification for our family storiesFong concludes meaningfully.