Curiosities of ''Haijiaotangshan''

Walking through the streets of the katendrecht peninsula, I can't help but think that with the beginning of the epidemic, I flited between the head and tail of the Yangtze River to the banks of the Maas river at the moment. The movement of the body often suggests the beginning of memory writing, which is a dynamic process as well as a situational one. And it all starts with the ground beneath our feet… The first Chinese migrant labourers landed in the wharf of Katendrecht in 1900 and entered Europe. This earliest place of anchoring and disembarkation was regarded as a second home by European Chinese ancestors, who called it "Haijiaotangshan"(Cape Tangshan) or "Haijiaochungkuo"(Cape China). From the early Chinese sailors serving in Dutch shipping companies, to the "economically useless people" expelled during the Great Depression in Europe in the early twentieth century and the impoverished "De Pinda Chinees" stranded in the Netherlands, to the "Project-tied migrant workers" under the "One Belt, One Road" strategy today. "The history of Chinese immigration has always shaped the land, but its tangled and obscure historical reality has long been overshadowed by the light and orderly neighbourhood planning of the present. Accompanied with that was a changing history of technology and the regional reality. After the period of blood, sweat and conflict of the "Chinese Sailors And Soldiers Home" also the earliest Chinatown in Europe, we see the Fenix freight warehouse which once the largest one in the world on one side of the neighbourhood. It is connected to euromax, also the world's largest automated unmanned container terminal on the outskirts of the city (and the end port of China's Belt and Road strategy), with a complete automated system built by Chinese manufacturers, and the European regional headquarters of COSCO also there. As we have seen during the pandemic, on one side there is a relentless global flow of capital, technology and viruses, while on the other side there is a suspension of individual destinies and "pasts" in a fluid situation. The former is constantly exacerbated and rendered in reality, while the latter can only fade into memory, but memory does not mean the end, but the creation of a new order, where the scattered fragments of information will reassemble and build connections, gradually arriving at the mirage of reality. As anthropologist Elizabeth Tolkien argues, "the past" is not only a resource to deploy or support a case or to assert a social claim, it also enters memory in different ways and helps to structure it, thus be approached "as literature" that itself is "part of social action”.