Born June 16th, 1950
Died November 6th, 2024
Anna Lo, who has died aged 74, was the first politician born in east Asia to be elected to the Northern Assembly. She was described by the Alliance Party leader Naomi Long as a “trailblazer”. Lo, who was born in Hong Kong and served at Stormont from 2007 until 2016, was also a driving force in the Chinese Welfare Association in Northern Ireland and a member of the North’s Equality Commission.
A feminist and self-described humanist, she campaigned against racial discrimination, while herself suffering from racist threats and intimidation – one of the reasons she cited for not seeking to continue as an Assembly member for the constituency of South Belfast in the 2016 Stormont election.
In an interview with Susan McKay in 2007 she explained how her mother named her Manwah, meaning elegance. However, her teacher in her Hong Kong primary school, whom she remembered as a towering bullying Scot with a colonial attitude, insisted pupils must have English names.
She asked one of her brothers what name she should take. “He was reading Pride and Prejudice at the time and said I should take the name of Mr D’Arcy’s sister, Georgianna,” she said. “He wrote it out for me but half the class couldn’t say it and I couldn’t spell it, so I became Anna.”
Her brothers went to university but her parents decided she was through with education. “My mother said girls shouldn’t be too clever – if you are too clever you won’t get a husband,” she recalled. “That infuriated me. I loved school. I was burning inside. I was determined to get ahead in life just to show my mother.”
Her first job after school was as a clerk, and then a secretary. In Hong Kong in 1972, she met and later married a Belfast journalist, the late David Watson, who was then working on the South China Morning Post. They moved first to London and then in 1974 to Belfast, where her husband worked for the Belfast Telegraph. The couple divorced in 2010.
She first did secretarial work at a newspaper and then at the BBC where, when it was learned she spoke fluent Cantonese, she became a contributor to the World Service. She reported on the Vietnamese boat people who came to Northern Ireland in 1979.
She took a period away from work to have her two sons. Around this time she became aware of the racism some Chinese people, many of them working in restaurants, were suffering in Belfast. She worked for a time as a police interpreter and in 1986 got a job with the newly created Chinese Welfare Association (CWA).
At this time, she finally fulfilled her wish to go to university, attending the University of Ulster and graduating as a social worker in 1993. She worked initially with Barnardo’s and then in 1997 was appointed director of the CWA, where she was instrumental in getting British legislation to outlaw race discrimination extended to Northern Ireland.
Alliance leader Naomi Long said “her service to the Chinese community, to good relations and to the city of Belfast, much of which went unseen by most, was transformational”
She told McKay that a couple of years before her election in 2007 she asked a respected Northern Ireland political figure to say a few words in Chinese at a launch she was attending. “Och, I’ll just say, ‘Give me a number 44′,” he replied.
That was at the softer end of racism. As an elected representative, the hostility became more pronounced. Possibly her worst experience was in 2009 when the PSNI warned her of death threats against her. This was after she campaigned on behalf of more than 100 members of the Roma community being subjected to intimidation in south Belfast.
“I’m not going to be deterred by these people,” she said. “If they think that they can stop me from speaking out against them or speaking for the vulnerable people, new ethnic minority communities or migrant workers, they are mistaken.”
Former Alliance leader David Ford, in paying tribute, recalled how once she fearlessly confronted people who were interfering with her car. “She just went straight down towards them and they ran away. So five-foot-nothing Anna was able to terrify street hoodlums who were probably 30 years younger than her.”
Lo was the centre of controversy in 2014 when she told the Irish News she favoured a united Ireland while adding that it was “very artificial” for Ireland to be divided up and for “the corner of Ireland to be part of the United Kingdom”. This discomfited some senior party figures, who feared it would damage support. Alliance was then facing into the European Parliament election with her as party candidate. Nonetheless, she won 44,432 votes, increasing the Alliance vote by 1.6 per cent, although failing to be elected.
David Ford said she was a “formidable politician”. Current leader Naomi Long said “her service to the Chinese community, to good relations and to the city of Belfast, much of which went unseen by most, was transformational”.
Lo died in Belfast City Hospital following complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her family said she “stood for and fought for equality, for women’s rights, against discrimination including racism, and for a political system to serve the needs of people rather than reinforce historic divisions”.
Anna Lo is survived by her sons, Conall and Owen, two grandchildren and partner Robert.