Percy Chen’s China Called Me: My Life inside the Chinese Revolution was published in Boston by Little, Brown in 1979. Used copies are available from US on-line dealers at around £8.– Chen, born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1901, was educated at University College School in London, then at the Middle Temple where he was called to the Bar in 1922. He returned to Trinidad and then in 1926 he went to China and joined his father, Eugene Chen who was soon foreign minister. Percy Chen’s recollections of life in 1910s and 1920s England are informative, for he had a dark complexion through his French West Indies mother (who, with her daughters, lived in London at that time).

The autobiography was also published in Chinese.

THIS WEBSITE CONCENTRATES ON BRITAIN, AND THE BLACK PRESENCE 1830-1930. MANY PUBLICATIONS WITH STRANDS OF BLACK BRITISH HISTORY CAN BE OVERLOOKED AS THEY WERE CLASSIFIED AS ‘AFRICAN’, ‘AFRICAN-AMERICAN’ AND ‘CARIBBEAN’. THE BUILDING YOUR LIBRARY PAGES PICK BOOKS PUBLISHED IN THE 20TH CENTURY WHICH ARE STILL AVAILABLE, AS USED COPIES, THROUGH WEBSITES SUCH AS ABE BOOKS. PRICES INDICATED IN THESE PAGES ARE FROM SUCH SITES, AND EXCLUDE POSTAGE. THE REDUCTION IN SECOND-HAND BOOKSHOPS AND MODERN COMPUTER-AIDED CATALOGUES SUGGEST THAT THOSE SEEKING TO BUILD THEIR OWN LIBRARIES MIGHT BENEFIT FROM BUILDING YOUR LIBRARY PAGES.

Index to Building Your Library

 

#  1         Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen. Tswana 1895

#  2         Nancy Cunard

#  3         Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson

#  4         Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

#  5         Brew family of Ghana and London

#  6         Booker T Washington; Chief Alfred Sam

#  7         Wellesley Cole, Kossoh Town Boy and An Innocent in Britain

#  8         Ira Aldridge

#  9         Paul Robeson, Negro, 1927

# 10       The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol 1

# 11       Jomo Kenyatta

# 12       Langston Hughes The Big Sea (1940) and Rampersad’s biography 1986, 1988

# 13       Percy Chen, China Called Me

# 14       Stimela Jingoes (Lesotho) recalled France in 1917; Herbert Julian Black Eagle memoir of a Trinidad aeroplane fanatic trained in 1910s England

# 15       Thomas L. Johnson, Twenty-eight Years a Slave (Bournemouth 1909)

# 16       Donald Hinds, Journey to an Illusion (1966).