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Someplace new
© Tze Ming Mok 2005 | Speech notes from Gung Hei Fat Choy: Chinese New Zealanders talk about their experiences in China, Chinese New Year 2005, Year of the Rooster, at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

 

 

春节快乐        chunjie kuaile

恭喜发财        gongxi facai

万事如意        wanshi ruyi

身体健康        shenti jiankang

 

Which is exactly what Rosemary said, but in Mandarin.

 

There are two valuable things I've learnt from my various travels and time in China, with regard to the place of Chinese in NZ. The first is this:
 

China is not the China that diaspora Chinese are keeping on their mantelpieces, hanging on their walls, preserving in boxes.  I don't know that China, never been there.  

 

My mother's family left in '48, fleeing socialist realism like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first time I lived in China by myself, in '97 in Beijing, it was more like this: 

 

I've been to China four times so far, travelled widely within it to places that your average Cantonese diaspora New Zealand Chinese might not think to go - because I'm not strictly Cantonese diaspora.  My mother's side is from the Southwest, Yunnan province, which is pretty obscure in diaspora terms - it's a face of China that faces in a different direction from those southeast coastal provinces that you're probably familiar with, that you're families are probably from - Western China is incredibly diverse, ethnically - it's a different feel - in the northwest it's central asian, post-Soviet, Muslim, as you go further south it gets Tibetan, Yi, the Southeast-Asian minorities, the Burmese and Thai.  Yunnan's population is over 50% ethnic minority people, it borders Burma, which is where my mother was born, just after the fleeing. I have a lot of photos of West and Southwest minority China - the Silk Road trail - and its uncomfortable clashes between traditional life and new Han modernism - but decided not to bring them today. I think in New Zealand, China, even Han China, is already so exoticised, even for Chinese people, I didn't want to exoticise it even more by showing you my holiday snaps. Instead I have some photos of what I called my 'hometown' in China, when I lived there for a little less than a year, from 2002-2003 - Chengdu, Sichuan province, city of ten million people, a Han urban centre, famous for its hot cuisine, tea gardens, pandas, mahjiang, and loud angry women.  None of which you'll see in these photos. These are some pretty typical scenes from a big city in China which is not Shanghai.  Not everything is new yet, but it's on the way. 

 

 

In a sense, there’s a value in the obscure time-capsules of Old Chinese diaspora communities – repositories of 19th century village Guangdong.  And for the higher-end of traditional high-end Chinese culture, that time-capsule is a whole country.  It’s called Taiwan.  But China has moved on, it's making its own historical accommodations.  Has the diaspora?  My family's been here for what I think of as ages - since the 70s - but compared to the old generations, we're already so different in terms of our idea of what being Chinese means.  Our ways of being Chinese may actually seem less Chinese to some really Old Generation NZ Chinese, even though we, as newer migrants, have retained some crucial cultural components a little better.  I was saying to my mother the other day, “Mum, I’ve been living in Wellington, and there are all these Old Generation Chinese people, and they go out and they’re all wearing those jade necklaces, you know with the gold chains, and I’m like, where’s my jade pendant?  I don’t know if they think I’m really Chinese.”  And she huffs and goes to the drawer and finds some piece of tourist crap we got in China one time and gives it to me, and says: “here’s your jade necklace.  Now you’re a real Chinese!  Now tell me, can these Old Generation Chinese with their Chinese necklaces even speak Chinese?” 

 

Meanwhile, the ways that Chinese people from China are Chinese in China and in New Zealand, I think could be completely unrecognisable to the old generations as Chinese behaviour. 


Now, the Chinese have numerous words for “Chinese”:
中国人 - Zhongguoren

华人/华裔 - Huaren/Huayi

汉人 - Hanren

Who are we?  华侨 - Huaqiao. 


The Chinese actually have, inherent in the language, an understanding of the difference between nationality, ethnicity, and national-historical culture.  Amazing!  Imagine if New Zealanders had the same faculty.  All this nonsense about not being 'Pakeha', but just being 'just a New Zealander'... might just shrivel up and go away.

I'm not saying that Zhongguo and Zhongguoren have, on the whole, this tremendous political consciousness.  Let me just say that in China, most people think they have great race relations, and that plenty of people in China think it is the most successful multicultural nation in the world.  That’s because it also has one of the biggest government propaganda machines in the world, and most Han Chinese never meet a ‘real’ ethnic minority, at which point they might realise that the Tibetans and Uighurs and Hui don’t like the Han as much as the People’s Daily seems to make out.

 

If you are huaqiao, your values and behaviour and clothes are different from that of a mainlander, and you go to Mainland China, at some point you’ll be called xiangjiao – banana.  Even though I squatted on the pavement smoking cigarettes and yelling in Sichuanhua at cab drivers and drinking tea out of a jar – it’s never enough.  But you know, even my Singaporean relatives think I’m a banana – and I’ve lived in China for longer than they have (because they fled when they were babies), I can make dumplings, I can speak Chinese about as well as their children.  What does ‘white on the inside’ actually mean?  In the case of Singaporeans, they tend to mean that I have more of a political opinion than I should.  Even though I’m often exercising my political opinion in defence of Chinese people. 

 

As for Mainland Chinese in China, in one special way they are more white on the inside than any of the diaspora.  This leads me to the second major lesson of value I've learnt in my time in China, for us as NZ Chinese, is that there is great value in having grown up as an ethnic minority.  Xiaoshu minzu means ethnic minority. If you say to an average person in China, ‘zai xinxilan, women shi xiaoxhu minzu’, in NZ, we are an ethnic minority, an typical reaction might be laughter – because it’s not possible.  Ethnic minority means those other people.  You know, those kind of poor, underdeveloped, backward, savage, possibly dangerous but very picturesque and entertaining people. Hey, it’s an attitude white people might have in a white country.  Thank god we’re not like that.   That’s one kind of white thinking that never needs to be part of our experience.

 

And I'm not saying that huaqiao either have, on the whole, a tremendous political consciousness.  But we are, because of our marginality, in a privileged thinking-position.  It’s a pity we don’t use it more.  We’re already outside the square.  I get the feeling that for some people, China represents an experience that not only reconnects people with their history, but with a sense of ethnic pride they might have been missing in New Zealand – but I think there’s a danger in uncritically adopting, or carrying through the Mainland Chinese ideology of Han Chinese cultural, historical and geopolitical supremacy, or indivisible unity, we all know that’s ridiculous.  There’s no point in fighting white parochialism with yellow parochialism.  That kind of thinking doesn’t get you anyplace new.   And we are living someplace new.  And in a time that is new.  Preserving a NZ Chinese history is all very well (I’m biased because NZ Chinese history has nothing to do with my family whatsoever), but the NZ Chinese present needs a more nuanced engagement with civil society.  I don’t think we can justify our position here in this country without basing it on engaging with and accommodating difference, between our own Chinese communities, and with others.