I’m GT. I was born in Malaysia and my parents were from China but they settled in Malaysia so all of us were born in Malaysia so we call ourselves Malaysian-Chinese.

I came to the UK to train as a nurse in 1976. In those days, there was a shortage of nurses in the UK. The UK Government decided to recruit nurses from overseas, in particular from the Commonwealth countries. So in the 1960s and 70s a lot of nurses came from Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Many arrived in London, in particular east London, then a slum area in town, where nurses were hard to come by. St Andrew’s hospital in Bromley-by-Bow, part of the Newham Hospital Group got quite a few nurses from the recruitment efforts. One of the Welsh tutor from the school of nursing, and his wife, a Hong Kong nurse or sister, were sent to Southeast Asia to recruit nurses there. So quite a lot of nurses from Southeast Asia came to St Andrew’s. That’s why if you go in to St Andrews then, you’d feel like walking in a Malaysian town.

I had been interested in nursing for quite a while. My neighbour in Malaysia was in nursing then. She responded to the advert and went to Kent. I applied and waited for about a year before coming over in 1976. Here I did general nursing, then psychiatry nursing, then went back to SRN training. Later I went to university and did a degree in applied economics in the polytechnic which I think is now called University of East London. After graduation I got a job in Chinatown to work as manager of the Chinatown Chinese Community Centre.

I saw a lot of Chinese people having difficulties trying to access mainstream services, health services or just anything under the sun really. They often had to bring letters from the hospital, the housing office, benefit office or utility bills and so on to us and for help with translation and advice. My main concern being a nurse that time was that I found a lot of them were not able to access health services. There seemed to be quite a bit of wrong diagnosis, wrong kinds of treatment and so on. There was a case where an elderly Chinese man, whom I still remember, looking so ancient, having problems with high blood pressure and diabetes, that every time after seeing his doctor, would get new medication for treatment. But he didn’t know that he had to chuck the old drugs and start the new ones. Once, he took twenty-thirty bottles of the drugs and that almost killed him. There was also another case where a Chinese woman who had a total hysterectomy. For four-five years she didn’t understand she was still trying to conceive but without success. She couldn’t understand why she couldn’t conceive – and nobody told her that her womb had actually been taken away.