Beyond Hypervisibility and Fear: British Chinese Communities’ Leisure and Health-Related Experiences in the Time of Coronavirus

Abstract

This paper examines British Chinese communities’ lived experiences of leisure in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The data that inform this paper are based on my ongoing ethnographic research with British Chinese students in two supplementary schools in the United Kingdom (UK) about their leisure and health-related experiences (supported by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship 2019–2020). The current findings are discussed in relation to my field notes, interviews with the students and their significant others from the schools, and social media sites that report on Chineseness and COVID-19. Results include the participants’ change of lifestyles; fear and the pandemic; experiences of racism in relation to their leisure; and leisure and solidarity among Chinese communities. As a Hong Kong Chinese Australian researcher situated in the UK, I have an “insider and outsider” positionality which has an impact on data collection with the participants amidst the pandemic.

Keywords:

• British Chinese students
• COVID-19
• health-related experiences
• leisure
• racism

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Emeritus Professor Anne Flintoff, Dr Beccy Watson and the editors and reviewers for their comments which helped to improve an earlier version of this short paper.

Notes

1 The students vary in their home locations within the Yorkshire and Lancashire regions; birthplace (England, Mainland China, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR)); language use patterns at home (from English only to a mixture of English, Malaysian, Mandarin, Cantonese); parents’ birthplace (Malaysia, HKSAR, Mainland China), and day school attendance. Ethical clearance for the research was gained through the university and from the gatekeepers, students and adults.

2 The interviews before the lockdown were completed face-to-face at the field sites. During the lockdown, interviews are conducted online or over the telephone by snowball sampling method, and an online ethnographic platform was used to collect a third phase of visual, audio and text data with three students.

3 A style of traditional Cantonese cuisine involving Chinese tea and dim sum, a small bite-sized portion of food.

4 A live series which Joe Wicks, a fitness coach runs online fitness routines.

5 TikTok is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service founded in China in 2012.

6 When compared to other ethnic groups in the UK, the Chinese have been perceived as the “minority among minorities”, “quiet” or “reserved” (Pang, 2020).

7 The denial of the violence of the colonial past provides the fertile ground for racism that penetrates everyday cultural practices. “A mass lamentation of the loss of colonial power, played out through alternating bouts of racist hostility and collective guilt” (in Kinnvall, 2016, p. 158)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions.