After the crash into an iceberg, four of the men escaped aboard the final lifeboat, according to news site Quartz. One made it onto another lifeboat while another, who was reportedly named Fang Lang, was picked up after being spotted floating in the wreckage. Records reveal that even that rescue was tinged with racism.
Officer Harold Lowe, who manned lifeboat 14, was said to have hesitated over saving the Chinese passenger, whom he called a “Jap,” a derogatory term used to describe individuals of Japanese descent.
“What’s the use?” Lowe said, according to lifeboat passenger Charlotte Collyer as reported in Encyclopedia Titanica. “He’s dead, likely, and if he isn’t, there’s others better worth saving than a Jap!”
But other passengers convinced Lowe to act. After he recovered his strength, Fang Lang proved to be a valuable member of the lifeboat and “worked like a hero,” rowing until they were rescued, Collyer later said. Lowe soon walked back his comments.
In part because most of the Chinese men survived the sinking of the Titanic ― even though women and children had been prioritized in the rush to the lifeboats ― their appearance in the U.S. was greatly scrutinized. A story in a 1912 issue of the Brooklyn Eagle offers a snapshot of the anti-Chinese bias aimed at the six men. Referring to them as “creatures” and “coolies,” the newspaper claimed that some of them were “found, wedged beneath the seats” of the lifeboats.
But documentary director Arthur Jones doesn’t believe that is accurate.
“We visited a large number of foreign archives and museums, worked with historians from the United States and China, searched and studied many [pieces of] evidence,” he told Xinhua News Agency. “There is no single [piece of] evidence to prove the Chinese survivors were stowaways [on the lifeboats]. I believe they did not do anything dishonorable.”
Other Western media outlets at the time also claimed that the Chinese passengers disguised themselves as women to escape the doomed ship ― another detail that the team producing “The Six” don’t buy.
“The press at the time labeled the Chinese survivors, referred to in places as ‘celestials,’ as cowards who dressed as women to sneak into lifeboats,” Schwankert told Quartz. “They had no basis for that, and we believe it’s just not true. … It’s time for these men to have their rightful place in history.”
Unlike the other passengers, these six survivors were ordered to leave the U.S. A century ago, American immigration policy was firmly set against the Chinese. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had initially barred all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years; the discriminatory policy was extended in 1892 by the Geary Act and made permanent in 1902 with even further restrictions. (The policy would not be ended until 1943 when China was a World War II ally.)
Little is known about the lives of the six men after their expulsion from the U.S. Their stories were mostly forgotten and if they were brought up in the press, “it was to say they did something dishonorable,” Jones told the South China Morning Post.
With the help of a social media campaign, however, the documentarians set out to track down their descendants. It was a difficult task, given that the survivors’ names have been recorded with varying spellings. But the team did make headway, according to the South China Morning Post. Their research led them from Wisconsin to the port city of Guangzhou.
Soon, the passengers will receive the treatment they deserve.
“We don’t accept the reports and the history as it is presented. The six Chinese men have been put into a position of injustice for more than a hundred years. We can finally tell their story rightly,” Schwankert told Xinhua.
For more on the film, head to the Facebook page for “The Six” here.