CHineseINK

Joan Rosier-Jones

Stead & Daughters Ltd

2009

 

Joan Rosier-Jones resuscitates an otherwise soon-to-be-lost story of the murder of  lone Chinese market gardener Chow Yat in Wanganui in 1922, dissects the rather botched Police investigation and gathers evidence pointing to another suspect now dead. Of Chow Yat himself, we learn little, possibly because there was little to know other than that he was from Panyu County, in Guangdong Province in China, a kindly bachelor of 62, who was attacked in his whare (Maori style hut) one evening, shot four times in the face and robbed. We do learn about the life of Kwong Chong For, the local Chinese patriarch and Chow Yat’s employer and benefactor. After some superficial investigation, suspicion falls on another foreigner,  Toldy a Hungarian, who is arrested and charged, but the case is thrown out because of lack of evidence. Rosier-Jones finds some circumstantial evidence pointing to a shell-shocked First World War veteran who may have suspected Chow Yat of interfering with his three daughters.

 

Rosier-Jones has tried to fill out a sketchy portrait of Chow Yat by reference to background material about the Chinese of that era drawing from standard sources: turmoil in China, a second wave of Chinese migrants/sojourners following the first wave of gold-seekers eventually drifting into provincial centres seeking employment, and attaining a stable and bearable but restricted life on the periphery of European society. In this period more enterprising Chinese such as Kwong Chong For enlarge their families and prosper –with Rosier-Jones reporting that many of the next generation following the classic Overseas Chinese trajectory of entering the professions.

 

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