When I was an adolescent and later a rebellious teenager growing up in the Chinatown of Calcutta, I was very aware of the 1962 “Sino-Indian Incident.” It hung over the Chinese community like a dark shadow. I knew that because of this shadow my mother decided to send me to study English instead of Chinese. I knew that because of this shadow my friends and relatives left the once-cosy Calcutta Chinatown for foreign countries, and I knew that one day, when I graduated from school, I would also leave India.

I settled in Toronto, Canada, where over two thousand Chinese-Indians had immigrated. Like the majority of the immigrants, settling into a job became my priority. I studied and worked and the shadow of the Incident faded somewhat. But it lurked in my peripheral vision, never fading and never solidifying, like an itch that I could not reach to scratch.

The opportunity to scratch the itch that was the 1962 Sino-Indian Incident appeared: I needed a topic for my MA thesis. I decided to write about it. A friend invited me to the annual meeting of the Association of India Deoli Chinese Internees (AIDCI) in Toronto. Four Chinese-Indians who were interned at Deoli during the Incident organized the meeting, which was attended by former Deoli detainees now living in Canada and the United States. I attended the meeting and recruited four detainees for my thesis, which I titled Deoli Camp: An Oral History of Chinese Indians from 1962 to 1966. I have used the research and excerpts from my thesis and my book The Palm Leaf Fan as the basis of this paper.

Ming, one of the participants, was picked up and interned in Deoli Detention Camp in December 1962. Her parents owned a restaurant in Digboi and had boarded her with a Chinese family in Shillong, where she went to a girl's day school. Ming met up with her parents when she arrived in Deoli.