 |
|
Walking in migrants’ shoes by buying them? ©
Tze Ming Mok 2006 | First published in the Sunday
Star-Times, 14 May 2006, under a slightly different headline You know about satellite kids: a family migrates here, the parents don’t find New Zealand all it’s cracked up to be and go back to their real life in another country, but leave the children behind to finish their education and figure out their lives. Christine ‘the Mofe Lady’ on the other hand, is a satellite parent. She’s run Hong Kong clothing shop Mofe Fashion in the Mid City Arcade for the last eight years, but now she’s going home. I went to the Closing Down Sale to mourn Mofe’s passing, and see why Christine’s so sick of this place. Turns out she’s not sick of it at all. “I like it here! I like the people, I like the environment.” She’s no isolated migrant; most of her friends are locals – honkys, not Hongkies. But she has been away from her family for too long. Christine migrated here with her husband and two children in the late 90s. Her kids would have been around 16 and 18 at the time, and true to Hongkie form, studied accounting and IT. About a year ago her children moved back to Hong Kong, bringing their dad to ‘take care of them’ and leaving mum to mind the Auckland end of the business. Why didn’t they stay here? Was New Zealand too provincial, too boring? No – they loved New Zealand too, but the economy was slow compared with Hong Kong, says Christine, there wasn’t enough opportunity. When pressed for more, she says her children couldn’t find jobs. Pardon me? In 2004-5 the economy was humming, unemployment was nosediving, and the IT and accountancy industries entered a sustained period of skills shortage. Why, we might wonder, would two Auckland University graduates, geeky in all the right ways, have been unable to find jobs? Maybe she meant they could find work, but saw more opportunity and better pay in Hong Kong. Or maybe they put on their CVs that they were born in Hong Kong and could speak several languages – and that screwed them. As research keeps showing, having a Chinese name alone will boot you to the bottom of the recruitment pile.* Being born in a foreign country only makes things worse. Christine’s kids are building up their work experience in Hong Kong but are still New Zealand permanent residents. Her accountant daughter plans to return. Hopefully her time in Hong Kong won’t count against her when she does – skilled migrants know the vicious circle of ‘no New Zealand work experience’ all too well. To add injury to insult, if this reverse migration has been a result of institutionalised discrimination, it has had wide-reaching knock-on impact on the East Asians throughout Auckland Central. Racism may well have taken our Mofe away. Not our Mofe! For the crucial late 90s period of the East Asian central city revolution, Mofe Fashion was part of the vanguard – the Trotsky to the nightclub Margarita’s Lenin. Where else were you going to get (in their relevant eras) your detachable sleeves, your Sporty Spice vest-jackets, your pink and purple vinyl platform/stiletto/ugg/cowboy boots, your neo-punk tops that said “In case of rapture, you can shirt this have”, your little orange tweed minis, your fake fur shrugs, or in the strange winter season of 2000 the head-to-toe tan suede beaded fringed Pocahontas experience? For the transient world of international student and 1.5er culture and fashion, Mofe was a constant presence; a rock in the swirling river. Christine knows she’s contributed to the cultural reinvention of Auckland City as a harbinger of change. “The [non-Asian] customers kept telling me, oh your shop is so different!” She agrees however, that over time there has been an increased blending of Kiwi style and East Asian style – in concert with the blending of subcultures, at least at the melting edges. Increasing Auckland’s international hybridity through phsyical disguise and reinvention has helped this city on its way towards becoming an actual cosmopolis. Food is the overused marker for cultural exchange, but the multicultural impact of fashion seems a little more meaningful – given that non-Asian people aren’t just paying to be served by us, but to look like us. Ultimately though, by buying the shoes
we buy, are they really walking in our shoes? They might not get screened out
at job application stage because their pumps are too cute. *see ‘A Rose by Any Other Name: The
effect of ethnicity and name on access to employment’ by Marie Gee Wilson,
Priyanka Gahlout, Lucia Liu and Suchitra Mouly, Auckland University Business
School, 2005. http://www.uabr.auckland.ac.nz |
|