Profile:Anna Lo, the new Alliance Party MLA who is originally from Hong Kong, sees her recent election victory in the North as a victory for feminism. Susan McKayreports
When Anna Lo was a little girl in Hong Kong in the 1950s she knew white foreigners as "kwailo" - ghost men. Now, if the ghost men of the DUP and Sinn Féin can get their act together, she will, within weeks, be joining them at the Stormont Assembly.
She's bursting with pride, and she sees it as, among other things, a feminist victory. Her older brothers had gone to university but when Anna finished school, her parents insisted she'd had enough education. "My mother said girls shouldn't be too clever - if you are too clever you won't get a husband," she recalls. "That infuriated me. I loved school. I was burning inside. I was determined to get ahead in life just to show my mother."
Her father died young. Her mother lived long enough to see her go to university as an adult. As messages of congratulation poured in last week, Lo was particularly moved when her sister sent her an e-mail from home. "Our parents would be so proud of you," it said.
Her parents were Chinese but native to Hong Kong. Her mother's father was born in San Francisco, the child of a philandering father who had four wives, none of whom was the baby's mother. This was not talked about in the family, Lo says, with a twinkle in her eye. Her grandfather inherited and squandered a large fortune. Her mother was a qualified teacher, but didn't teach. "My grandfather would have been seen to lose face if his daughter went out to work," says Lo. "And then when she married, it would have reflected badly on her husband."
Her mother was frustrated. She also felt she had married beneath her. Lo's father was a civil servant who got TB when he was young and was dogged by poor health all his life. They had five children, one of whom died in infancy. "My mother was unhappy but she was a fantastic mother," says Lo.
MANWAH WAS THE name her mother chose for her when she was born in 1951. It means elegance. It was at school that she became Anna. The headmaster was a towering figure, a shouting, bullying Scot. Lo is tiny and slight. "I still remember his bushy eyebrows," she says. "Those were the days of the British colonial system." He insisted the students were to have English names.
Lo consulted her older brother. "He was reading Pride and Prejudice at the time and said I should take the name of Mr D'Arcy's sister, Georgianna," she says. "He wrote it out for me but half the class couldn't say it and I couldn't spell it, so I became Anna."
After school, her first job was as a clerk. She hated it. Then she became a secretary, which wasn't much better. "I wanted to spread my wings," she says. She moved to London, taking on a course to get a visa. She got married to a young Northern Irish journalist, and came to live in Belfast with him in 1974, when the Troubles were at their worst.
She got secretarial work at a newspaper and later at the BBC. When they found out she spoke fluent Cantonese, they made her a contributor to the World Service. She reported on the Peace People and on the Vietnamese boat people who came to the North in 1979. She began to be aware of how isolated Chinese people were, many of them running restaurants in areas where there were few other Chinese, and inclined to keep their heads down in the face of racist hostility and the overwhelming violence of the times.
"I set up English classes and brought them to places like the Giant's Causeway and Castlewellan. They didn't know Northern Ireland," she says. She took some time out to have her two sons, then she worked as a police interpreter. In 1986, she got a job with the new Chinese Welfare Association (CWA).
Then, feeling that she needed a qualification, she became a full-time student at the University of Ulster, graduating as a social worker in 1993. A stint with Barnardo's followed, before she was appointed director of the CWA in 1997.
Quintin Oliver, the former director of the NI Council for Voluntary Action, says Lo turned the CWA into a "highly effective non-governmental organisation". She was instrumental in getting British legislation to outlaw race discrimination extended to the North. "She just beavers away. She is very good at coalition building, which is important when you are working from a small base."
Oliver was a leading member of the campaign for a Yes vote in the 1998 referendum on the Belfast Agreement, and Lo was one of those chosen to launch the campaign. He points out that in the first assembly there were 18 members outside of the four big parties, whereas now Lo is joining a group of just 10 out of 108. "Their muscle is tiny, but they will have a voice," he says.
Lo was on the Equality Commission and became friends with the former chief commissioner, Joan Harbinson. "She'll be superb in Stormont," Harbinson says. "She is deeply committed, she fights her corner tenaciously and she is always where she is meant to be."
She is divorced and now lives happily with her partner, businessman Gavin Millar, and his 13-year-old son, in the north Belfast suburb of Newtownabbey. Her own boys are 24 and 21, a pharmacist and an architect. Both live in England. Engaging and warm, she loves social occasions and is known as a great hostess.
THE ALLIANCE PARTY, dogged with a reputation for ineffectual do-goodery, is thrilled with its new star. "She is a tremendous worker and she leads by example. She believes very strongly in the Alliance principle of uniting the community," says its South Belfast chairman, Gordon Kennedy, who has become, Lo says, a "father figure" to her. She says she is neither orange nor green: "My home is left-of-centre social politics."
Now director of Wa Hep, the Chinese Community Association in Craigavon, Paul Yam worked under Lo at the CWA. "Her election is excellent," he says. "This isn't just about Anna, it is about the CWA and good teamwork, years of cross community, cross-cultural work bearing fruit. It shows society here isn't just Protestant and Catholic - and she is a woman, too." Lo is a Taoist. Some of her votes came from those who voted in the Women's Coalition in 1998.
Yam feels it is particularly heartening that Lo was elected in South Belfast, where work is soon to begin on the much needed Chinese Community Centre on a prime site provided by Belfast City Council. The centre will house youth groups, the after-school club and elderly groups as well as providing a venue for events such as celebrations of the Chinese New Year.
PLANS WERE AT an advanced stage for a centre in the Donegall Pass area of South Belfast last year when a leaflet was circulated claiming the area was turning into "Chinatown" and that this was undermining the community's "Britishness". "We were warned that the centre wouldn't last a day," says Martin Napier, Lo's "right-hand man" at the CWA. "Anna was upset, but she is stoical. She brushes herself off and moves on."
A couple of years ago, Lo was preparing for an event which was to be launched by an impeccably respectable Northern Ireland political figure. She asked him to make sure he said a few words in Chinese. "Och I'll just say give me a number 44," he replied.
Napier was amused when the administration at Stormont got in touch wanting to sort out translation services. "They provide translators for Irish and Ulster Scots already," he says. "We said it was okay, it was unlikely Anna would feel she needs to address the assembly in Chinese."
After 33 years in Northern Ireland, it shows a good bit in Lo's accent. Her attitudes are refreshingly different, though. "Come up and see me at Stormont," she says. "We'll have a laugh.
TheLoFile
"Who is she?Chief executive of Chinese Welfare Association in Northern Ireland and new Alliance Party MLA for South Belfast
Why is she in the news?She is the first Asian woman to be elected to any European government
Most appealing characteristic:Her open mind
Least appealing characteristic:Takes on too much, thus overburdening her colleagues
Most likely to say:Not a problem
Least likely to say:No