To the background score of a dental drill’s drone, Dr. Albert Shieh narrates his life story. As he talks of the Parry’s of his childhood, with its slow trams and lumbering handcarts, much of present-day Parry’s streams in and out of his compact clinic on Evening Bazaar Road. From flower sellers to banana vendors, they all drift by and Albert flits from fluent Tamil to English in his conversations with them. In between, there’s the occasional phone call in his native Mandarin dialect with his wife. A wrinkled old man wanders in, spits out his dentures with a few missing molars, and hands it to Albert. As he expertly shaves off the excesses with his bare hands and moulds it into shape in minutes, a sepia photograph of his dentist father, Dr. Say Maw Seng, who migrated from China and worked in this very room from 1944, watches over him.
Just down the road with eight such Chinese dental clinics, Albert’s brother Dr. Sen feeds a pack of 12 stray dogs rice and chicken just outside his clinic. A graduate of Madras Medical College, and once head of a multi-speciality hospital, Sen now shuttles between the two clinics he’s opened on this stretch for his son Christopher, and daughter Jennifer, both dentists. “My father came from a community of traditional Chinese dentists from the Hubei province of China. I grew up watching him work from the time I was five. When you’re around a craft for that long, it’s only natural that you take it up too!” says Sen. All five of Seng’s sons went on to become dentists and today run practices scattered across Canada, the U.S., Nellore, and Coimbatore. While they are trained in modern dentistry, Albert says their hands still remember their father’s inherited skills. In a little drawer by his doctor’s stool, Albert still treasures the lead and iron tools that his father fashioned and filed by hand.
Their memories of their father’s foray into India, though, are shrouded in grey. The story goes that just before World War II broke out, legions of Chinese civilians, especially from the suburbs, stole out of the nation to escape recruitment into the army. “In fact, my father’s parents deliberately sent him and his wife to Burma,” says Sen. From Burma, a small community of Hubei Chinese are said to have reached Madras by boat; an alternate narrative says they walked their way here. They settled mostly in Park Town and set up practice in Parry’s, and their children born here went on to live markedly Chennaiite lives. While they spoke Mandarin at home, Seng’s children learnt Tamil at school, grew up watching Rajnikanth films and celebrated Deepavali as much as they did Chinese New Year. “I only remember a school that taught us to write Mandarin, somewhere on Armenian Street, which closed down in a year or so,” says Albert.
In the early days, the community married among themselves and religiously followed traditional customs. “I moved with a bunch of Anglo-Indian friends, and my mother used to threaten to throw me out if I married outside our community,” laughs Albert. He went on to wed Yu Kwan, the daughter of his mother’s friend and a girl he’d watched grow up in his neighbourhood. Yu recalls her classic Chinese wedding in Chennai. It was a two-day affair, with a lunch hosted by the girl’s side and dinner by the boy’s side the day before. On the morning of the wedding, the groom would have to go to the bride’s home to take her to the wedding and the girl’s folks would bar his way, until he finally gave in and handed over a “red packet” full of gifts for the family. “The most fun would be at the tea ceremony. To every person that you served tea to, they’d have to give you a ‘red packet’ in return,” says Yu. Besides the Chinese wedding, Yu and Albert also had a Christian wedding at a church, for although they were brought up Buddhist, most of the community converted to Roman Catholicism, and have now branched into various streams of Christianity since. While Sen and family are Protestant, Albert and Yu are Seventh Day Adventists. Albert’s Chinese name, which he hardly uses today, was Hung Sen.
Times have changed since the days of the first-generation migrants. One of Sen’s daughters-in-law hails from Kerala, and Albert’s son Joshua fell in love with and married Meera, a Tamil-Brahmin girl he met at Meenakshi Ammal Dental College. “It’s our children’s happiness, not our customs that count,” says Sen. What’s changed the most though, are the community’s Chinese New Year celebrations, says Dr. David Ma, son of Dr. Y.C. Ma, who founded Venfa Dental Clinic. “For the festivities, we’d cook everything that moved,” he laughs. Yu remembers preparing a spread of at least 10 compulsory dishes, alongside an assortment of soups and starters, all prepared in typical Hubei style. “Every year, my sister-in-law would bring us all the dry ingredients from Singapore, such as white and black fungus, dry lily flowers, soya bean curd, green bean vermicelli, because we couldn’t find them here. Even the way we prepared meats differed; the fish, for instance, would be served whole with eyes, fins and tail intact. Of course, it’s nothing like what you’d get in any Chinese restaurant,” says Yu.
With their numbers dwindling, thanks to migration mostly to Canada and the U.S., Chinese New Year today is mostly just house visits among the community. What hasn’t changed though, is their commitment to dentistry. With a steady stream of patients all day, Sen says that though they don’t work the hours their father did, there’s “enough for us to get by”. Sen’s nephew’s daughter too is now a dentist, taking the skill to the fourth generation. What do they love most about their job? “Making dentures. With the shortcuts my father taught us, we can get dentures done in a day. It gives me so much happiness to see patients, especially old ones, so pleased so quickly,” says Albert.
In their years in Chennai, Sen has returned to China once, at the turn of the millennium, for his father wanted to see his homeland once more. “It was a great experience to see my roots, but I would never consider moving back,” says Sen. “I could choose to migrate to Canada or Australia where my children are, but here my heart will always be.”
