Beginning in the late 1890s and intensifying during Haiti’s 1915–1934 American occupation, a small but economically significant wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in Port-au-Prince with surnames like Wu, Wah, Wawa, Fung, Fong-Ging, and Fungcap.
Unlike the massive indentured labor migrations to Jamaica, Trinidad, and Cuba, these merchants established retail and commercial enterprises along Grand Rue, Haiti’s commercial center, and achieved respected social standing within a single generation.
Their descendants—many now living outside Haiti—preserve fragmentary oral histories of family laundries, bakeries, restaurants, and marriages that reveal how immigrant communities navigated integration in a Caribbean nation simultaneously struggling with foreign economic exploitation and political instability. This post reconstructs that largely undocumented history using family interviews, historical records, and published biographical data.
Why This Story Matters: What Makes This Account Different
- Overlooked diaspora: Chinese immigration to the Caribbean is typically associated with Jamaica, Trinidad, and Cuba, where tens of thousands arrived as indentured laborers. Haiti, by contrast, absorbed a few hundred self-funded merchants whose descendants maintained fewer formal archives.
- Comparative integration outcome: Haiti’s Chinese immigrants faced less systemic exclusion than contemporaries in North America and Australia, suggesting local receptiveness shaped by different economic conditions and racial hierarchies.
- Political vulnerability: Unlike longer-established Chinese diaspora elsewhere, Haiti’s community was dispersed by dictatorship rather than sustained exclusion, illustrating how political violence can fragment immigrant enterprises regardless of economic achievement.
- Source base: This account relies heavily on oral histories from surviving family members—primary sources in their own right—cross-checked against verified historical dates and published artist biographies.
The First Wave: Departure From China and Arrival in Haiti (Late 1890s–Early 1900s)
Chinese immigration to Haiti occurred in two distinct phases. The first, small trickle began in the late 1890s as China’s imperial dynasty weakened and economic opportunity contracted in the homeland.
These earliest arrivals left few documentary traces, but historical records and family genealogies indicate surnames including Wu, Wah, Wawa, Fung, Fong-Ging, and Fungcap among those who settled in Port-au-Prince during this period.
The more substantial wave arrived during Haiti’s American occupation, particularly between 1915 and 1934. Unlike coordinated, state-sponsored migrations to other Caribbean islands, Haiti attracted migrants through informal family networks and individual enterprise.
One documented arrival was Soud Fungcap, who, according to family accounts, found himself unexpectedly in Haiti after boarding a ship initially bound for Brazil while fleeing the Chinese revolution. Rather than continue onward, Fungcap established himself in Port-au-Prince, beginning a family enterprise that would span generations.
Grand Rue and Commercial Life: The “Chinese Colony” (1920s–1940s)
Early Chinese immigrants clustered in Port-au-Prince’s Grand Rue district—the city’s principal commercial thoroughfare and economic heart. This wide avenue, running from the port inland, hosted merchant stalls, storefronts, and residential quarters stacked vertically to minimize costs.
Newly arrived immigrants, often lacking capital, employed a pragmatic strategy: operate small stores on the street level while living in quarters above, maintaining constant business presence while reducing overhead.
The Fungcap family exemplified this model’s success. Soud’s initial operations included laundry services; his son Essud, who arrived from China in 1928, expanded into bakery production and eventually co-founded Nu-Canton, a Chinese restaurant in the 1940s at the corner of Rue des Miracles and Grand Rue.
This establishment became a gathering place not only for Port-au-Prince’s small Chinese community but also for Haitian merchants and professionals drawn to quality goods and cuisine unavailable in typical local establishments.
Community size grew steadily. By the 1930s, Chinese records documented approximately 200 nationals in Haiti; by the 1940s, that number reached around 400—a small but visible population in a capital city of several hundred thousand.
Integration, Resistance, and Political Climate: Early Barriers and Acceptance
Chinese integration into Haitian society was gradual and contested. In the early twentieth century, anti-foreign sentiment simmered among Haitian business interests and political elites who feared foreign economic domination. Historical records from early twentieth-century Haitian newspapers reflect concern about foreign merchants monopolizing retail commerce—a concern that included Chinese merchants.
Yet Haiti’s resistance remained less systemic than anti-Chinese campaigns in North America and other settler colonies. This was partly because Chinese merchants occupied a commercial niche (retail, restaurants, laundries) rather than competing directly with powerful Haitian landowning or industrial elites. Additionally, the scale was small: a few hundred merchants represented neither labor-market displacement nor visible wealth concentration.
Some Chinese immigrants adapted through explicit cultural concessions. According to family records, when Hoo Ku Haa Kuai—later known as Hoo Ku Wawa—underwent official naturalization under President Sténio Vincent in the 1930s, Vincent, who championed Haitian nationalism, reportedly added “Wawa” to make his name “sound more French,” as recounted by Wawa’s daughter Simone.
He also converted from Buddhism to Catholicism, a pragmatic move to ease integration into a predominantly Catholic, French-speaking society.
Others maintained cultural pride while embracing Haitian identity. The Chinese community observed October 10 as Independence Day, a tradition that persisted even after immigrants began official naturalization.
When Haiti established diplomatic relations with China in the mid-1960s—and later maintained connections through a Chinese (and subsequently Taiwanese) embassy in Port-au-Prince—these celebrations became quasi-official community events, affirming members’ sense of belonging to two homelands.
The Wawa and Wah Families: Entrepreneurship, Civic Standing, and Artistic Achievement
Hoo Ku Haa Kuai’s migration story typifies the Chinese-Haitian immigrant experience. Around 1912, Hoo Ku left continental China aboard a ship with twenty-five cousins, seeking adventure and economic opportunity. Over several years, this cohort traveled through Hong Kong, San Francisco, New York, and Cuba. As the older cousins, concerned about aging away from their homeland, began returning to China to die there, the younger set—thirteen cousins in their late teens and early twenties—accepted an invitation from a relative already established in Haiti who owned a laundry business.
Hoo Ku arrived in Haiti in the late 1910s. Unlike many Chinese immigrants who sought “mail-order” brides from China to preserve cultural tradition, Hoo Ku married into Haitian society. His first marriage was to Olga Sabbat, a socialite from the coastal city of Jacmel; they had seven children.
After Olga’s death, he married Estha Cadet, herself Haitian, and had four more children. Additionally, he fathered two sons—Alex and Jacques—with another woman. In total, Hoo Ku had fourteen children, all Chinese-Haitian.
Throughout his life, Hoo Ku maintained visible symbols of his heritage: photographs of China and a large Chinese flag displayed prominently in his laundry during periods of street turmoil or political unrest.
His integration into Port-au-Prince society proved so complete that his funeral on October 26, 1966, drew mourners who lined the route from the cathedral to the cemetery—a testament to genuine community affection rather than transactional obligation.
The Wah family, another prominent Chinese-Haitian lineage, produced notable visual artists who contributed to Haiti’s mid-twentieth-century artistic renaissance. Bernard Wah, born August 8, 1939, in Port-au-Prince, began drawing in childhood and formally studied ceramics and sculpture at the Ceramics Center. By seventeen, he was already teaching decoration and sculpture to others.
His surrealist paintings achieved international recognition, including exhibition in the 1971 group show “Harlem Artists 71” at a major New York venue. He died in New York in August 1981 at age forty-one. His relatives Marcel Wah and Patrick Wah also pursued visual arts, leaving works in private collections and Haitian cultural institutions.
Second-Generation Language Loss and Cultural Assimilation (Mid-Twentieth Century)
By mid-century, successful Chinese-Haitian families achieved sufficient economic standing to enroll their children in better schools and move beyond purely commercial occupations. The second generation—born in Haiti, educated in Creole and French—experienced gradual linguistic and cultural distance from their ancestors’ homeland.
Few learned Chinese; most acquired only scattered vocabulary or greetings. Sergo Wawa, son of Hoo Ku Wawa, recalled his father’s practical reasoning: “In Haiti, how would Chinese help you? You’re not living in China.” A Chinese employee attempted to teach the younger generation a few words, but the effort yielded minimal retention. Simone Wawa remembered only one word in her father’s native Cantonese: “thank you.”
This linguistic shift reflected a broader pattern among second and third-generation immigrant communities throughout the Caribbean: rapid assimilation into creolized, French- or English-speaking cultures that offered greater social mobility than maintaining inherited languages. Yet even without fluency, many descendants cherished their heritage as a genealogical thread.
Jacques Wawa reflected: “Being born and growing up a Haitian of Chinese descent only brings back positive memories for me. My friends were either from school, our neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, from the provinces, from the Boy Scouts…they knew me as Jacques…we are still excited whenever we see each other in New York, at a party or any other social event.” Similarly, Guy Fong-Ging stated simply: “I never felt any difference at all.
I’ve always known that I was Haitian.” These accounts suggest that Haitian society, despite economic anxieties about foreign business competition, proved more receptive to individual Chinese immigrants than societies like the United States, Canada, or Australia, where systemic exclusion laws prevailed.
Cultural Memory and the Lost Archive: The Fragility of Immigrant Records
Despite their integration and economic success, Chinese-Haitian families preserved few tangible links to their ancestral homeland. Sergo Wawa recounts the loss of a small wooden chest that his father kept—a repository for letters from relatives in Canton and photographs documenting family connections across the Pacific.
During renovations to the family home on Rue Pavée, the chest was moved to the courtyard and subsequently disappeared, severing the family’s most direct archive.
One emblematic story illustrates the finality of migration. In the 1970s, a Chinese restaurateur named Devis who had lived in Haiti for more than forty years—long enough to establish a successful restaurant and marry a Haitian woman—decided in his old age to return to China to die in his homeland. After three months abroad, he returned to Haiti, dejected.
No one in China recognized him; his identity was irrevocably Haitian. He spent the remainder of his life in Haiti and died there, unable to complete the return journey that aging often prompts.
The Duvalier Dictatorship and Forced Diaspora (1957–1986)
By the late 1950s, Chinese-Haitians had achieved sufficient economic power that François Duvalier, who assumed the presidency in October 1957, recognized their business value. Rather than continue earlier patterns of suspicion, Duvalier—seeking financial support and eager to cultivate a coalition of business interests—welcomed Chinese merchants and their descendants into elite social circles. “He introduced them to Haitian elite society,” recalled Essud Fungcap. “By this time, the Chinese families had gotten so much financial clout in the business sector in Haiti that it was impossible to ignore or spurn them.
They had to embrace them.”
This embrace proved temporary.
The rise of Duvalier’s brutal dictatorship, characterized by executions, disappearances, and systematic repression that intensified throughout the 1960s, prompted Haiti’s educated and merchant classes—including many Chinese-Haitians—to emigrate. “We had to leave the country,” Fungcap explained simply. “There were a lot of killings.” The exodus reflected the broader “brain drain” that depleted Haiti of its intellectual and commercial elites during Duvalier’s rule from 1957 to 1971.
Many Chinese-Haitian families relocated to Canada, the United States, or elsewhere in the Caribbean. Their businesses in Port-au-Prince were abandoned or transferred to relatives remaining in Haiti. The community that had taken decades to build—from isolated merchants in Grand Rue to respected business families with deep social roots—dispersed within a generation. Some descendants returned when Duvalier’s son Jean-Claude, who assumed power in 1971, reopened Haiti to limited foreign business in the 1970s and 1980s, but the foundational community had fractured irreparably.
Later Waves and Contemporary Decline (1970s–Present)
Chinese immigration to Haiti did not cease entirely after the early twentieth-century wave. A second, smaller wave arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, predominantly from Taiwan rather than mainland China. These later arrivals sought not refuge from political upheaval but rather business partnerships and investment opportunities in Haiti’s struggling economy. They arrived as merchants and entrepreneurs in a different era, without the deep family ties or long-term settlement intentions of their predecessors.
By the twenty-first century, the distinct Chinese-Haitian community of the early-to-mid twentieth century had largely dissolved. Contemporary estimates suggest approximately 500 Haitians carry direct Chinese ancestry, though many live outside Haiti or maintain minimal connection to Chinese heritage.
The descendants who remain are acculturated Haitians whose Chinese identity is genealogical rather than practiced—a thread in the tapestry of personal history rather than an active cultural commitment.
Historical Significance: What the Chinese-Haitian Story Reveals About Caribbean Immigration
The Chinese-Haitian experience illuminates several overlooked aspects of Caribbean history. First, it demonstrates that Chinese diaspora extended beyond the major receiving societies (Jamaica, Trinidad, Cuba) and reached even the poorest, most politically unstable Caribbean nations. Second, it shows how immigrant merchants—even operating at small scale—could achieve economic significance in undercapitalized colonial and post-colonial societies. Third, it reveals how integration varied dramatically depending on local conditions: Haiti’s relative openness to Chinese entrepreneurs contrasted sharply with systemic exclusion in North America during the same period.
Finally, the story of the Fungcaps, Wahs, Wawas, and other families demonstrates the fragility of immigrant communities in nations experiencing political violence and state terror. Economic success and social integration could not guarantee security when authoritarian rulers decided that property and lives were expendable.
The dispersal of Haiti’s Chinese community during the Duvalier years echoes the experiences of other diaspora communities forced to abandon generations of accumulated social and economic capital when political circumstances became untenable.
Frequently Asked Questions About Chinese-Haitian History
Why did so few Chinese migrate to Haiti compared to Jamaica, Trinidad, or Cuba?
Haiti attracted far fewer Chinese migrants than neighboring islands because Haitian entrepreneurs had difficulty facilitating “chain migration”—the informal recruitment of relatives and village-mates that sustained larger waves elsewhere. Jamaica, Trinidad, and Cuba had established Chinese communities and merchant networks that could sponsor new arrivals, provide loans, and offer employment.
Haiti’s smaller, more dispersed Chinese population could not generate the same pull.
How many Chinese people lived in Haiti at the peak of the community?
Historical records and Chinese diplomatic documents estimate approximately 400 Chinese nationals in Haiti by the 1940s, with the population having grown from roughly 200 in the 1930s. This was a small but visible presence in Port-au-Prince’s commercial districts.
Did Chinese immigrants face discrimination in Haiti?
Chinese immigrants encountered some resistance from Haitian business interests concerned about foreign commercial competition, particularly in early twentieth-century newspapers. However, organized anti-Chinese campaigns comparable to those in North America, Australia, or southern Africa did not materialize.
Several factors contributed: the small population size, the niche occupations Chinese merchants filled (retail, laundries, restaurants) that did not directly threaten Haitian elites, and the receptiveness of Haitian society to individual immigrants willing to intermarry and participate in civic life.
How did the second generation maintain (or lose) their Chinese identity?
The second generation, born in Haiti and educated in Creole and French, experienced rapid linguistic assimilation. Few learned Chinese; most retained only scattered words or greetings. This pattern reflected the broader Caribbean reality: social mobility often depended on fluency in colonial languages. However, many descendants maintained genealogical pride and positive memories of their heritage, even if they did not practice Chinese customs or language.
What happened to Chinese-Haitians during the Duvalier dictatorship?
François Duvalier initially welcomed Chinese merchants into elite social circles for their financial clout. However, as his dictatorship became increasingly violent in the 1960s—characterized by executions and disappearances—many Chinese-Haitians emigrated to Canada, the United States, and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Their businesses were abandoned or transferred to remaining family members. The community that had taken decades to build dispersed rapidly.
Are there Chinese-Haitians today?
Yes, though the original community has largely dispersed. Approximately 500 Haitians carry direct Chinese ancestry, though many live outside Haiti or have minimal connection to Chinese heritage. Their identity is primarily genealogical rather than practiced, reflecting the broader integration and diaspora of mid-twentieth-century immigrant communities.
Editorial Note
This article is based primarily on recorded oral histories and interviews with descendants of Chinese-Haitian families, particularly members of the Fungcap, Wawa, and Wah lineages. Biographical information about visual artists (Bernard Wah, Marcel Wah, and Patrick Wah) was verified through Haitian Art Society registries, international art collection databases, and museum catalogs.
Historical dates for the US occupation of Haiti, presidencies of Louis Borno, Sténio Vincent, François Duvalier, and Jean-Claude Duvalier were confirmed through Wikipedia, peer-reviewed historical sources, and official government records.
Population estimates for the Chinese community (200 by 1930s, 400 by 1940s, ~500 descendants today) were drawn from digital archives, social media historical compilations, and Chinese diplomatic records cited in academic sources.
Specific details about individual deaths, family structures, business locations, and personal anecdotes were provided by family interviewees and could not be independently verified through public archives, though they align with documented patterns of Chinese merchant settlement and diaspora in the Caribbean.
Information about the naturalization of Hoo Ku Wawa’s name under President Sténio Vincent derives from family recollection (Simone Wawa’s account of her father’s narrative) and is presented as oral history rather than verified fact. The account of Devis, the restaurateur who attempted return to China, was also recounted through family interviews.
We welcome corrections, additional family accounts, or references to primary documentary sources that might enrich or revise this narrative.
Last Updated on January 15, 2026 by kreyolicious
