Tze Ming Mok: Being Asian - the struggle to belong

Tze Ming Mok

The day will come when I won't be a minority in this country. No one will be. This will be a shock to some people, to find that something can rise from the ashes of majorities and minorities. They're called pluralities, it's merely math.

When that day comes, I'll find myself back in standard two. Hay Park Primary in Roskill South was, in 1986, an ethnic microcosm of the projected population of New Zealand come 2051. Well, maybe with more Samoans. That year, Madonna released True Blue, the white population of my class photo slid under 50 per cent, and a multicultural future was born. Two years later, my standard four class was perhaps New Zealand in the twenty-second century: Polynesian, Maori, Asian and White, split roughly four ways. And the Somalis hadn't even arrived yet.

Hay Park Primary sat on the divide between the good side of the rugby field and the state housing area. They called it a white-flight school. There was poverty; it was no dewy-eyed utopia but there was something comforting and very stable about the balance of differences. It was probably the happiest time of my life. This was partly because words didn't mean anything yet. Though we were ahead of our time, we were in the bubble of childhood. Hurts inflicted didn't last, as though we weren't able to remember pain. We didn't understand what we were saying, or who we were, in what system. We didn't even know the world was white. Unbelievable maybe, but true. I thought America was run by the Huxtables [the Cosby Show family].

The teachers approved of my triumvirate of friends because together we were a successful, popular epitome of Mt Roskill's laissez-faire brand of multiculturalism: Samoan afakasi, Chinese, and Pakeha with putative streaks of Maori. "I'm a half-caste," Etevise once pronounced proudly; "I'm a quarter-caste," Kristy chimed in - she half-knew her quarter-whakapapa; "I'm a full-caste," I hazarded. "You can't be a full-caste, 'caste' means you have to be part something," Etevise declared knowledgeably. It was cool to be part something, because it meant you were part of something. White was not yet "something" - none of us had read Being Pakeha at that point.

Anger, fear, the diminution of our place in the world, our affirmation of identities through negation of others ... we awoke to all these things, the infrastructures of a system we had only been dimly aware of in our mouthings of interesting new words like chingchong, currymuncher, boonga, hori and honky. It came upon us all. Gradually. This was how you grew up. Each group drifted away from the others, under the shadow of knowledge. Now we have to figure out how to return to each other without becoming ignorant again.

[In 2004] when the anonymous skinhead punched Chi Phung in the chest and ran, Phung, a tiny, pigtailed Vietnamese student of sociology, lay crumpled and crying on a Christchurch sidewalk for twenty minutes. And as this now ubiquitous anecdote of national embarrassment concludes: nobody came to her aid. Because of this, though I've slipped unnoticed through near-rioting Southeast Asian streets, and passed unscathed though China, Central Asia and the Middle East, there are parts of this country where the promise of my passport's protection isn't enough to put me at ease.

The attack on Phung sparked Christchurch's first serious immigrant-led anti-racist movement, culminating in a 2000-strong street march, which dwarfed a rival turnout of barely two dozen National Front members.

Asian and migrant communities could be forming a nascent political sector if not an actual political force. It's been a long time coming. But rather than self-congratulation, this development should summon an urgent self-examination of our place in this roiling grumble that is passing for a race relations debate.

It is barely necessary to point out the cynicism of colour-blind rhetoric from the right, when they are drawing lines around groups that exist (we do, undeniably, exist), pinning them here, counting them there, stacking up the numbers, and playing them off against each other. We Asians are dubbed by our western WASP host societies as model minorities, the group most likely to be courted by the power elite to be used as a shield against accusations of racism. Not all Asians are married to Brash, but I bet he wishes we were. So hard-working, meritocratic and capitalist - boy, would we keep the house clean. Even better, many Asian groups have a reputation for being uncomplaining and apolitical. And for good reason - the well-travelled Chinese and Indian global diasporas know that to kick up a fuss gets you kicked off the bus.

There are exceptions. We can't help but get a bit touchy after being beaten up.

One of my friends preparing for a work-trip to Christchurch has literally had nightmares about the National Front. But there were hundreds of ordinary people with full heads of hair present that day on the street when Chi Phung was beaten to the ground. They did nothing. They are the real nightmare.

By now Christchurch, the city itself, has taken on the scapegoat personality of the country's worst instincts. And this will allow the rest of New Zealand to just walk blankly on, stepping over the fallen on the sidewalk.

Perhaps I am being uncharitable. Maybe Phung was so small that she could not be seen by the naked eye. Perhaps she briefly turned invisible. It is possible. Migrants and their children are magical people. We have the power of flight, the power of shrinking, and of invisibility too. In the past it's been what saved us. We have flown, fitted in to small spaces granted us, and blended into the background. Many Asians, and people from refugee backgrounds, have roots in countries where they have been vulnerable minorities, sometimes with protection, sometimes without. Finding that protection in New Zealand has historically been a matter of assimilating into a culture that is unquestionably white, not into some impossible idea of a colour-blind nation free of ethnicity.

But times have changed, and I'm grateful. I'm not Old Generation Chinese, nor entirely new - I've never begrudged the new migrants their right to be unapologetic in their ethnic identity and their difference. In fact, I've welcomed their presence for allowing me to be unapologetic. They've drawn attention towards us, towards an idea of "us", after so many years of our hiding and forgetting who we are.

[Phung] believed that the root of white aggression against non-white immigrants and foreign students was premised on white Pakeha denial that they themselves are an immigrant people. For Phung, the key to asserting migrant rights to belong in New Zealand is for all newcomers to see their presence as an "entry by Treaty".

Our high-profile migrant politicians exhibit no noticeable drive for political partnerships with Maori. But here on the ground, we can't fool ourselves into thinking that we can dabble in horse-trading when we are the horses.

The principles of the Treaty give us rules of engagement; if we accede to them, we will access our right to be different. Just imagine - you could assert your right to belong here based not on the length of time you've lived here, or the proximity of your homeland to New Zealand, or the turns of your accent, or the amount of money you've paid to the government, or the colour of your skin, but on your commitment to the place's founding principles. I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work.

Maori got enough of a raw deal with the first round of newcomers: given this new era of political trade-offs, understandably they may be suspicious of a group being racked up by the opposing side. And among Asian communities, there is a manifest lack of interest in comparing Maori and Asian colonial experiences. On both sides there is a tendency towards basic class-divided, colourbarred racism, fed by ignorance. But we can't afford another front. We can't fight so many battles. We have to strike a new kind of deal.

If we don't, the low-level, gut-rumble of fear for our people may never stop. It comes and goes, particularly around election time. During the run-up to the 1996 election, I thought it would be a perfectly fine idea to take the suggestion of what appeared to be up to half of the country - to go the hell home. But there wasn't anywhere to go but Mt Roskill. And they were burning crosses on Somali lawns there. One day, as I walked past Hay Park Primary, a throng of high-spirited schoolchildren followed me along the field's perimeter, calling "do you speak English?" over and over. These were just mocking play-words, meaningless to those kids. But not to me, not anymore. Perhaps it was a perfectly reasonable question, but I didn't feel like answering. I went into the school and talked to the teachers, who remembered me, and found myself reduced to tears. They sat in a circle in the same old staffroom, looking smaller than they used to, lips pursed in concern, watching their finest work unravelling. They probably gave a little talk about it in Assembly.

At that time, most of us were being regularly abused at a frequency we'd never before experienced ... the Old Generation [Chinese] began dissociating themselves from the New Wave, and plenty still do. I had previously thought that dissociating was a psychiatric disorder, or something people did during the Cultural Revolution to avoid being sent with their dissident friends to the labour camp. When it affects whole communities, it's an illness symptomatic of a simple deficiency: that of having no allies.

When we look at this place from our outsider perspectives, it seems like such a young country with such small problems. This opening phase of petty deals and self-protection is an adolescent, immature stage. Some of us remember race clashes, state pogroms or even genocides in our lifetimes, in our old countries.

Here, I refuse to believe that rioters will ever come to tear down our shops, burn our sacred places, and drive us into the sea. The other path is wide open, and people too are still open. We don't have to close ourselves off, even if we're used to those kinds of defensive moves. It's safe enough to take a gamble to grow this country up, and grow into it. Whether of the New or Old Generations, we can't afford to be among the passers-by, hidden amid the ranks of white society, hurrying past the darker, poorer minorities punched to the pavement.

We need to realise that if Maori are expendable we are all expendable, and that the only lasting alliances will not be engineered by political parties but by the people; not unions of convenience, but of love.

* The full version of Tze Ming Mok's essay, Race You There, winner of the 2004 Landfall essay prize, will be published in the book Great New Zealand Argument, edited by Russell Brown, in early July.