Arthur Jones is a filmmaker based in China with over two decades of experience in journalism and documentary making. Asma, policy researcher, met with him for an insightful conversation at the multidisciplinary journey behind making The Six (2021). This fascinating investigative documentary sails back in time to the untold story of the six Chinese survivors of the Titanic, shedding light on the harder battles of survival they fought in their lifetimes.
Asma: I saw online you did English literature at University of Cambridge and then went to China— I did Chinese Studies at Oxford and would love to go to China for as long as you did. What made you want to move to China, and why did you stay?
Arthur: I just went for gap year, I had no real sort of ‘China’ interest. I had just finished my degree, and I thought I had to work, but I hadn’t decided whether I was going to go to film school, but I had applied. I had friends who’d gone to film school. I was applying for directing and screenwriting but thought, ‘I don’t really know what I would build a career on.’
I stayed in Cambridge, working in a school. I wanted to write and all that kind of stuff, but I didn’t know what about. Growing up in farming areas in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, like, farming area, and then I went to Cambridge, but I felt I had nothing. I was a comprehensive school kid who went to Cambridge, so I was surrounded by people who had done gap years and knew everything about the world. They’d had a background that took them certain schools, a certain understanding of the world, andI felt a lot like a swan trying to glide smoothly, but very much kicking hard underneath. Looking back though, I think a lot of people felt that.
I’d also never heard of a gap year. Because everybody around me had done one and gone all over the world to do interesting things and I hadn’t, I thought, I’d better go do a gap here and then I’ll have something that’s ‘mine’. I just looked around and thought, where should I go? This country or that country, or should I do this in England? What should I do?
I remember I was just walking down somewhere in Cambridge, and passed by a job centre with a flyer in the window advertising teaching in China. I thought, China, maybe that’s what I should do, because I don’t know anything about it. It was very random. I found a job somewhere in Southwest China in Yunnan, did the year and then went back to England, dropped out of film school and went back to China.
Asma: What did you do in China after you dropped out on film school?
Arthur: I dropped out to go back to China but I said I would do something in either film or journalism. I came back through the school that I’d been teaching at in the first year, but immediately started looking for work related with writing or film. I ended up getting a job running a magazine in Shanghai. I then became a freelance journalist and was already working on films. I got to know some Chinese directors who were like using me to do interviews and film related work, and I was doing film journalism, as the Variety correspondent in China. Gradually, the film took off, and I stopped doing journalism.
Asma: Would you mind giving a brief description of your film, The Six?
Arthur: Through my film partner, Steven Schwankert, I discovered that there were eight Chinese people on Titanic— Steve and I had talked about this while we were making a different film. The Titanic is a constant refrain, ‘It’s bigger than Titanic’ or ‘More people on it than the Titanic’. At the start, I was not really interested in Titanic.
In a nutshell, there were eight Chinese people on Titanic, of which six survived, making their survival rate incredibly high compared to any other national group- especially considering that they were third class passengers where survival rate for one in six. So they shouldn’t have survived at that rate. It was quite common for people in a national or ethnic group to get stuck somewhere on board but they weren’t all in the same lifeboat. They were split across two boats, and one of them appeared to have gone into the water, which was incredibly unusual because almost nobody was rescued from the water.
The more we looked at it, the more we thought, this is weird. Not just the survival rate, but also that nobody had ever claimed them, that they were like a ‘lost’ group The Titanic attracts so many people to the story that there are more people claiming to be descendants of Titanic’s survivors than could possibly exist.
But no one had ever claimed these six men. No one at all. We couldn’t find anyone, no public statement— so we just thought, here’s a great set up for a film. If we can find them, that’s an adventure and a mystery that we can solve.
But as we came to find, their story intersected with a whole era of Chinese migration, and we very quickly discovered that these six men had ended up in Canada, America, the UK, and various other places. Their paths after Titanic had crossed events such as the First World War and other big movements of the early 20th century. I don’t think of it as a history film, but more as an investigative or detective history film.
Asma: I really admire the intricate woven story lines of looking at how these passengers survived the Titanic, and then the anti-Chinese, anti-immigration discrimination that they faced later in life— was your initial focus going to be on how they survived, and naturally this other story line appeared afterward during research?
Arthur: It came a bit later. The project took five years, but the first six months, we were just beginning to film and tentatively think, “Should we know this? It’s gonna be a big commitment.”
We did know that their unique experience was partly because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. There were all these stories of the survivors arriving in New York, being treated with kindness, put up in hotels and houses. They were seen as tragic victims of a terrible mishap. But the Chinese survivors were kept on board under custody, then taken off by immigration police the next day, put on ships and kicked out. We found more and more traces of terrible discrimination in the media, in New York and also the UK.
These stories seemed to contradict to each other— people kept saying they were stowaways, but that they had tickets. How could that be true? These men were from the third class, but they survived. If they survived, it must be because they stole the seats of women and children. As we researched it more, it became clear to me that what we were dealing with was a myth of Titanic— who were ‘heroes’ and who were ‘villains’. The discrimination that they’d faced was so integral to their stories, we couldn’t really tell the story of them surviving the Titanic without telling the story of the discrimination they suffered.
Asma: The research process took quite some years – how did you and the research team manage to keep your hopes up in the face of dead leads and insufficient materials to work with?
Arthur: Well, we had already got enough of the story to run with. And we kept pursuing. With one of the people who had backed out, not shown in the film, but once a year, I text him.
Asma: Do you know the reason why he and the man in the film backed out?
Arthur: Either they’ve heard a claim they think is true, but once we start pursuing it, they realise it doesn’t add up. But the other reason relates to why none of the survivors had told their stories. There’s a fear of humiliation, digging over old ground— and you can imagine that maybe part of that story is a relative doing something they shouldn’t have, that the guy was a bit of a bad person.
In films with British sailors talking about their history in the Second World War, they just don’t want to talk about it. It’s to do with trauma, but also maybe a fear that a part of the story doesn’t sound so good when you tell it, and that might reflect back onto their family. There’s an old kind of superstition that if you talk about bad things that have happened, it somehow passed on the bad luck. I think that idea has stayed in Chinese families longer than it stayed in others.
Asma: My grandparents were alive during the partition of India and Pakistan but when I asked my parents about it they say their parents never talked about it, despite living relatively close to the border. Both my parents are originally from the Indian side but moved across a few generations ago, but again the details are never spoken about. Nobody will explain whatever happened to our families.
Arthur: Do you think they don’t know?
Asma: I think it’s an element of not knowing and an element of refusing to remember. It might be the case those who suffered the worst of it thought, ‘Well, we’ve got bigger things to deal with now, let’s try to rebuild our lives instead of focussing on the past.’ I do wonder if there is some shame or survivor’s guilt…
If you tell the story of you surviving, written into the backstory is other people didn’t.
Asma: And it becomes your identity in a way that you might not want to focus on, like Fang Lang who survived the Titanic.
Arthur: Fang Lang, or Fang Wing Sun. We also heard he called himself ‘Frank’, and met someone who referred to him as ‘Vincent’
Asma: You must have used many unconventional methods to get to the truth of the fates of these six men. I thought using the video game to plot the Chinese men’s escape was ingenious but what would have been the most unconventional method you used?
Arthur: The standout ones for me were the cold water testing where we put Stephen in the cold water to test human endurance. It was a great way to show what it’s like to be in water that is insanely cold, and to show that is someone was in really cold water, how quickly would he have to do something to stay alive before he got pulled out of the water. If he had waited an hour in the water for Lowe’s lifeboat, he would have been dead.. Because almost everyone else by that point was dead in the water.
The way we found Tom Fong by taking traces of an online discussion from 15 years before and trying to work out account names by switching email stuff on the backend is a classic journalism thing too. We were using any possible way to understand more of the story. Usually, the reason why these mysteries have come to a standstill is due to being to specialist.
I’ll give you an example. The film I’m working on now is about Peking man, the homo rectus bones found outside Beijing between the 1920s-1940s by an international team on paleo-anthropologists. In 1941, when the bones were going to be moved to the U.S. for protection during the Japanese occupation, they just disappeared.
The team that came closest to finding something really interesting was a South African team. They got hold of information that a U.S. Marine had left in a diary, saying that he had been involved in digging up some wooden boxes in the grounds of the U.S. barracks in Qinghuadao. In the boxes, they had found really ancient looking bones.
The team took maps of 1940s Qinghuadao, and satellite Google Maps of the same area, found an area the boxes could have been, then just wrote a report. They didn’t do much else, because they’re paleo-anthropologists. They don’t talk their way in, or try to persuade local government to get involved. That’s a limitation of not getting other people involved too.
Asma: The fact that there Chinese passengers on the ship that survived is fairly unknown by most people but James Cameron made that deleted scene of it – do you know how he found this pretty remarkable story and why in the end he decided not to keep it?
Arthur: Well, it wasn’t even hidden— It hadn’t really been noticed.
Asma: Who saw the connection between Fang Land’s story of being saved while on piece of wood and the Titanic scene?
Arthur: When Cameron was doing research on the film, his team had looked at a lot individual stories of the people onboard. One of the stories they came across was reported in the press of a survivor called Charlotte Collier, who had been on one of the lifeboats. She had said that Harold Lowe had gone back in a lifeboat, lifeboat 14, and rescued more people, and she claimed she was on that lifeboat. She said they’d picked up a ‘Chinese or Japanese man’ from the water and they’d pulled him on. In her story, she said, ‘why would he pick up some racialised slur from the water,’ but when he got in the boat, he was rowing too and trying to help them, so they were all like, ‘wow, no, he’s really a cool guy!’
What Cameron did not know was that he was a man called Fang Lang. There are doubts over Charlotte’s story but the story matches up pretty well. When we met with Tom, Fang Lang’s son, we matched the two together.
When we started out so many people told us it was a dead end, they hadn’t been claimed by anyone, and that they were not good guys. So that became another part of the story— did they do bad things? The more we looked, we found out that anyone who’d done something ‘bad’, was a ‘foreigner’ and was not white, was not British. It was either a slightly tan-skinned European or some other nation that wasn’t Anglo Saxon. But when we looked at the evidence of these cases, it almost never held up. They were mainly claims with no evidence. There was also one case, fairly well documented, of a man wrapping a blanket round his head like a shaw. He said that he tried to get a lifeboat and he was worried he wouldn’t get on. He just kind of snuck on and tried to keep out the way.
Asma: Also it’s not crazy to want to survive, regardless of gender.
Arthur: That is the fundamental thing— whether you dress ‘differently’, try to hide or sneak on, how can you claim that anyone stole a seat when every lifeboat left with empty seats? Every lifeboat on Titanic left with empty seats. So what does it mean to steal a seat? All the evidence points to the fact that they were trying to get women and children, either only or women and children first. And so if somebody sneaks onto that side, were you meant to just die instead? To just uphold some like Edwardian notion of what it means to be a man? That doesn’t make you a hero, it makes you a victim of the social mores at that time.
When we look to the evidence, it shows that every woman and child who got to the boat decks got into a lifeboat. The reason why many women and children still died is mainly because they were third class women and children, and they didn’t come out from below. The third class passengers were told to hold back, unlike in Cameron’s film. They still didn’t believe the boat was going to go down and there were so many third class passengers, so they were being held in the smoking areas for the moment when they would be let up. This was more a social class or etiquette thing, and in fact second class men actually died at a higher rate than a third class man. They were also standing back for a long time, until near the end when it suddenly became clear as ship started really moving; then there was a panic to the decks, by which point there were only two lifeboat left.
The main reason people died had nothing to do with people forcing themselves on lifeboats. It was to do with the fact that there was a belief that it wouldn’t go down and people were being told to wait. But it does seem like the Chinese men did get up to the decks pretty early, so they just had a longer time to find a lifeboat that had spaces. They all had sailing backgrounds, they were deadheads, kind of like in aviation, being taken to work in shipping in the America. Deadheads on board Titanic had a much higher survival rate on regular person, probably just because they knew what was going on.
People would say to us early on, ‘what would you do if you found out that they did get in a fight and steal seats?’ And I was like, “We’d put it in the film.” Why would one of them doing a panicked, bad thing at the end of his life mean that all of them are bad people? It just means they’re human.
Asma: It’s like a “good minority” trope where if one out of a group does something bad, it reflects on the whole.
Arthur: Well, Fang Lang had been undocumented for 30 years. In China, people would sometimes say to us, “he did break the rules for 30 years…” But there’s a movement in the U.S now, amongst Chinese Americans to embrace that history and saying, “screw that, that was a really unfair law. The people who broke that law were heroes.” From the natively Chinese population in China there is the feeling of, “well it is another country and they do have their own rules, you’ve got to respect their rules,” because they’re asking people to do the same to them.
So, I also wanted the film to highlight to the Chinese audience that it’s not really a law worth following, if the law itself is desperately unfair. It’s okay to be a maverick against a system that’s really unfair. It’s not a radical idea in the UK, but would be in China, that you can be critical about your own country.
One of the jobs of the documentarian is to point out problems in countries. In any country. All countries have issues and we can talk about them and unpacking those issues is an important role of media.
The Six was distributed by UK-China Film Collab across UK cinemas in 2021 and is now available for streaming worldwide via Magellan channel.
