Encounters with a significant other

The Dragon and the Taniwha Edited by Manying Ip. Photo / Supplied

The tragedy of public life is to be remembered more for bad gaffes than good deeds. One of the more outrageous sound bites in a career of them was Winston Peters' assertion that he could not possibly be anti-Asian because as a Maori he traced his origins to the Gao Shan Zhu tribe from China.

We are talking here about a prehistoric migration that began 6000 years ago. Go back a few more millennia and on this basis Peters or practically anyone might as well claim Prince Philip as a dear but distant uncle. As tenuous as any contemporary linkage based on prehistory must be, when researcher Jun Lu first arrived in New Zealand in the 1990s he could not help but note that hui also means meeting in putonghua (mandarin). There are other echoes of cultures long parted: a respect for elders, the symbiotic cloak of extended family and an abiding fondness for pork.

Historically links between Maori and Chinese faced attack, motivated by racist fear. As an MP in the 1920s Sir Apirana Ngata sparked a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the employment of Maori, particularly women in Chinese and "Hindu" market gardens. His principal concern was the creation of a "mongrel race". It takes two to mongrel.

Given the laws of attraction and a racist poll tax levied only on Chinese that ensured Chinese women were rare, Ngata's suspicions proved as correct as his fears were unfounded. Chinese and Maori did indeed share beds and homes, but Maori Chinese families continue to grow with no sign yet of the demise of society as we know it, though perhaps not as some might once have wanted it.

While the contributions are not even and some feature indulgent jargon, The Dragon and the Taniwha puts the dragon and the taniwha, their encounters and shared destinies, under intelligent scrutiny for a broad audience for the first time. Contributor Jun Lu's chapter gives flesh to Peters' simplistic statement, summarising the latest anthropological insight. Geographers Richard Bedford and Robert Didham chart the demographics of intermarriage and socio-economics, pinpointing stray and common threads.

The last census found more than 4000 New Zealanders who called themselves Maori Chinese. How those families regard themselves is revealed in Jennifer Hauraki's heartfelt chapter, a refreshing mix of research backed with the raw honesty of her own experience. Margaret Mutu provides an incisive sweep through the Maori media from colonial times to today and concludes that when independent Maori voices have made it to print and broadcast, they have been thoughtful and welcoming to the Chinese, celebrating what lies in common rather than targeting conflict for conflict's sake.

Compare and contrast this with the multitude of mainstream media outlets that have routinely sank to regular helpings of odious caricatures and demonisation of the Chinese from the 19th century to the present day. When Sally Liangni Liu completed a similar exercise on the Chinese language media she found that with limited resources the contemporary Chinese media, predominantly print, liberally lifted and translated Maori issues from mainstream sources, but provided even less context.

The resulting brew may yet fuel future race and class divisions. Editor Manying Ip was determined not to ignore the elephant on the marae, the Treaty of Waitangi and the bicultural nation it supposedly bequeathed. Historian Nigel Murphy gleefully slices and dices race myths that saw Maori viewed as Aryan, even one of Israel's lost tribes, and Pakeha happy to call themselves Maorilanders and ever ready, with their brown brothers, to fight off the "Yellow Peril" in the cause of racial "purity".

Murphy's analysis is taken further by Mark Williams who issues the big challenge, suggesting that biculturalism "extends the colonial relationship into the post-colonial present, allowing no place for those not included within its binarism." How then do recent Chinese migrants view the Treaty? Manying Ip reports good awareness of the Treaty and its implications as a founding document, but wariness that as a significant other, the Chinese feel excluded from the bicultural debate. The most optimistic view comes from one of those surveyed that objected to the wording of a survey question that described the treaty as an agreement between Maori and Pakeha.

As this person said, "...the Treaty is between the Crown and Maori, and the Crown represents all people, including the Chinese". Wise words indeed.

The Dragon and the Taniwha
Edited by Manying Ip (Auckland University Press $49.99)

* Gilbert Wong is an Auckland reviewer and works for the Human Rights Commission.