[Gráinne]

It's hard to find, but I finally caught the documentary The Six. There were eight Chinese passengers on the Titanic; six survived the sinking (hence the title). When the rescue ship landed at New York, these passengers (all men) disappeared. Researchers and historians in several countries tried to track them down.

To paraphrase it, because of exclusionary immigration policies, the six Chinese were not allowed to remain in the U.S, nor return to England. All six were put on a cargo ship bound for Cuba. One died there in 1914. Two others eventually returned to the chaos of China and disappeared. One other had too common a name to definitely trace.

That left two, one of whom did manage to get into Canada where he ran a restaurant for many years.

The most interesting was the last; a man in Wisconsin found that his father had in fact been on the Titanic from another relative. He had no idea, there was no speaking of it. All that time he thought his father was in China (the man himself was born when his father was already in his 70's.) With the researchers, he traced his father's early life in China and found distant relatives. The unassuming Wisconsin man was very moved from what his father had gone through.

The documentary was beautifully done and was an indictment on the long history of exclusionary policies that persisted into the 1940's.