However, Fay Wong disapproves of her husband as he continues to see Gloria on the sly. In time, Pao marries the 'socially acceptable' daughter of a Chinese merchant. What Pao needs is a nice Chinese girl, Zhang insists, not a black whore.

The teenage Pao aspires to be like Zhang, but incurs his displeasure one day by consorting in public with a black prostitute called Gloria Campbell. A razor-sharp tradesman, he owns all the 'Chiney shops' and Catholic charities in the vicinity of Chinatown's Barry Street. Like many Jamaican Chinese, Zhang is a Buddhist convert to Catholicism. Terrified, Pao finds sanctuary with a Kingston elder and strongman named Zhang. Emperor Hirohito's troops have bestially slaughtered some 150,000 Chinese in Nanking.

Pao, the novel's eponymous hero, arrives in Jamaica in 1938 a year after the Japanese invasion of China. Ian Fleming, in his Jamaican extravaganza Dr No, wrote disapprovingly of the island's yellow-black 'Chigroes'. Racial tensions developed between them and their black neighbours mixed marriages were generally frowned on. Having escaped this indignity, they set up business in the Jamaican capital of Kingston selling lychee ice cream, oysters and booby (sea bird) eggs. The Chinese first arrived in Jamaica in the 1840s, we learn, as indentured labourers. Pao, her zingy first novel, lovingly recreates the Jamaican-Chinese world of her childhood, with its betting parlours, laundries, fortune-telling shops, supermarkets and (business being a hard game in Jamaica) gang warfare. Young, the daughter of a Chinese father and a mother of mixed Chinese-African heritage, came to Britain in 1965 at the age of 10. Jamaica remains a nation both parochial and international in its collision of African, Asian and European cultures. British calls for racial purity often puzzled these newcomers from the anglophone West Indies, as racial mixing was not new to them. In some ways, this multi-shaded community of nations was a more 'modern' society than postwar Britain, where Jamaicans migrated in numbers during the 1950s and 60s.

Lebanese, British, Asian, Jewish and aboriginal Taíno Indian have all intermarried to form an indecipherable blend of Caribbean peoples. J amaica, where Kerry Young was born in 1955, is an island of bewildering mixed bloods and ethnicities.

Pao by Kerry Young