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Reference
Steven Schwankert (2025). The Six: The Untold Story of the Titanics Chinese Survivors. Pegasus Books. 240 pp. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Six/Steven-Schwankert/9781639368679
Youtube channel link
https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher
Connect on linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayukhpsm/
Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and welcome to this Weekend Book Review! 📚✨
Today I’m opening a book that feels like a flare rising from the cold Atlantic. It is “The Six: The Untold Story of the Titanic’s Chinese Survivors” by Steven Schwankert, published by Pegasus Books on 8 April 2025. On the surface it is history. Inside, it is detective work, migration story, and a quiet protest against forgetting. 🌊🚢
We all “know” the Titanic story, right? Iceberg. Lifeboats. Orchestra. Maybe even Jack and Rose clinging to a floating door. 🎬 But hidden behind that familiar script were six Chinese men who survived the sinking, reached New York, and then were pushed out of the frame almost immediately. They were not just nearly lost at sea. They were almost lost in history.
Steven Schwankert walks straight into that silence. He begins with a fragment eight Chinese nationals on board, six survivors and follows it across oceans and archives. We meet Ah Lam, Chang Chip, Cheong Foo, Fang Lang (or Fong Wing Sun), Lee Bing, and Ling Hee professional seafarers whose courage carried them through icy water only to crash into something colder: racism, exclusion, and the force of the Chinese Exclusion Act. ❄️
What makes this book sing is the way Schwankert works. He hunts for the missing pieces. He interviews descendants, digs into genealogical records, traces journeys from Taishan to the decks of the RMS Titanic, then onward to North America. Bit by bit, he turns faceless “Chinese passengers” into people with families, ambitions, and scars. The Titanic story stops being a Western-only legend and becomes something global and deeply human. 🌍
And Schwankert is exactly the kind of person you want telling this story. He is an award winning writer, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and East and South Asia Chapter Chair of The Explorers Club. He founded SinoScuba and led the first scientific expedition to dive Mongolia’s Lake Khovsgol, where his team found two early twentieth century wooden shipwrecks resting in the dark. 🤿🧭
His previous work, including “Poseidon: China’s Secret Salvage of Britain’s Lost Submarine” and his Beijing & Shanghai guidebook, shows a pattern he is drawn to what has been submerged, literally and historically. His writing across The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The South China Morning Post, and more sharpens his eye for overlooked details and political context. That same energy charges every chapter of “The Six.”
In this episode, I want to explore how this book rearranges the Titanic myth. We will look at how Schwankert reconstructs lives from fragments, how he handles race and migration without turning these men into mere symbols, and how he shifts our gaze from Hollywood romance to the real Chinese experience at the turn of the century. 🔎
So as we dive in, I want to leave you with this question:
👉 If one hidden chapter like this can reshape the story of the Titanic, how many other “finished” histories are still missing voices that could change everything we think we know? 🤔
Huge thanks to Steven Schwankert and to Pegasus Books for bringing this story to us. 🙏
If you enjoy conversations that revise the past and resubmit it with more truth and more voices, please subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify, and to our YouTube channel “Weekend Researcher”. We are also on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast. 🎧📲
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