CHineseINK

I have been asked to support a funding application based on my recent involvement with Enjoy Art Gallery in making a documentary about the Chinese in Molesworth Street (currently in post-production.)

Kah Bee Chow is an installation artist most recently involved in the No Chinatown arts project in Auckland. She is to be one of the artists invited to participate in the Enjoy One Day Sculpture event in Wellington as part of a national project in April 2008. She is of Malaysian Chinese descent and I have also been asked to help her make connection with the local Chinese community in some interaction which may condition her artistic response to Wellington which in turn may feed into her work during the One Day Sculpture project. She will produce a piece of work in 24 hours in front of an audience.

Such connection and interaction will mean that the Chinese community will have the opportunity to have an insider/participant role in this arts project rather than a mere onlooker role.

The Government has released a White Paper on immigration, and Winston Peters has again side-swiped Asian migrants to curry favour with certain sectors of the electorate. I was interviewed for a story to be published in The Press. The main points I made were:

• Assimilation (or integration) of migrants into New Zealand was mainly a matter of time; migrant communities which had been here for over a 100 years were going to be interact more easily with the mainstream than migrants of 10-20 years’ standing, but their children would be well integrated.
• The problems of visible minorities (like Chinese, Indians) would always be more apparent than migrants with European features (like Russians.)
• New Zealand was losing skilled people to Australia and elsewhere and these needed to be replaced with other skilled people - such as international student graduates - if the country is to remain a technologically advanced society. There is international competition for skilled people but New Zealand’s policies towards international student graduates were not competitive. Consequently New Zealand lost such people and with them their international connections.

I attended the Wellington Chinese Association’s screening of two films about the Chinese in Canada, in particular about their fight for redress for the Head Tax.

The first Moving the Mountain was by William Ging Wee Dere and tells of his search for the story of his father’s and grandfather’s journey to Canada.

The second was In the Shadow of the Gold Mountain directed by Karen Cho which tells the stories of some of the surviving Head Tax payers.

Although there are obvious parallels to the situation in New Zealand and its Poll Tax, the stories of extreme privation, and the exploitation of the Chinese to build the Canadian Pacific railway line partly explain the Chinese Canadians’ insistence on individual compensation (in contrast to Chinese New Zealanders’ community settlement by way of a Trust fund.)

It was also interesting to see and hear the widespread use of the Seyip/Toishan dialect in Canada, reflecting the predominance of early migrants from that area of China.

It may be possible for those with a special interest in these films to access them.

Nigel Murphy has been a librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Libary for some 20 years and in that time has undertaken research into the Chinese in New Zealand starting with the Chun family in Wellington and culminating in publications such as The Poll-Tax in New Zealand, Laws and Regulations relating to the Chinese in New Zealand and Aliens at my Table. His research was fundamental to the Government’s Poll Tax reconciliation process with the Chinese in New Zealand. He also curated the poll tax exhibition A Barbarous Measure, which after its debut in Wellington has been toured to Auckland then gifted to the New Zealand Chinese Association. It has since been exhibited at Tairawhiti Museum in Gisborne.

He has now left the Library and today took up his new post as a researcher at the Waitangi Tribunal where he was formally welcomed with a powhiri during which he was “handed over” by his former workmates from the ATL, his family and Chinese friends to his new colleagues. David Fung spoke of Nigel’s deep personal interest in the history of the Chinese in New Zealand and his research into the Poll Tax. I said that the Waitangi Tribunal was now part of the fabric of New Zealand society and that its work was respected even if its recommendations were not always accepted and its moderating influence not recognised. I commended Nigel to his new colleagues for his years of experience in exposing injustice by research and scholarship and also noted that many Chinese, particularly of the younger generation, were learning more about the Treaty and how the Tribunal processes offered an alternative model where non-assimilable differences existed (as between Maori and pakeha) which might be extended to other cultures within New Zealand society.