Online exclusive
Why I Made features artists and writers sharing with listener.co.nz the behind-the-scenes stories of their creations. Here, writer Cadence Chung and theatre-maker Jamie Yee talk about Encounter, a walk through history which takes participants back to late-19th and early-20th century Wellington, the experiences of its first Chinese residents and the racism they faced.
Jamie Yee and Cadence Chung, why have you made Encounter?
JY: I’m the co-creator, along with Sharon Wang, who’s in the MFA [Master of Fine Arts] programme, at Victoria University. I’m in the Theatre Honours Programme and we met in class. We pretty quickly noticed that we were the only two Chinese New Zealanders – actually the only two people of colour – so we got talking about what it means to be Chinese in New Zealand. I started talking about some of the history in the Wellington region and historical places of interest and we both agreed it could make a good walking tour.
I walked away and went about my day; then, a couple of days later, I got an email from Sharon saying, “Right, I’ve got Cadence on board to write and you can direct,” so here we are!
It sounds like it was a little bit of a surprise to you.
JY: A little bit – but a good one!
Cadence, how did you meet Sharon?
CC: I put on a show called Hector at Bats, about what a meeting between the 19th century French composer Hector Berlioz and a Chinese Wellingtonian called Hector Wong might be like. It was kind of absurd… Sharon went along because she was trying to see more Asian art and she approached me after the show to see if I’d be interested in working on a project with her.
We went for a coffee; she explained what the project was and I thought it sounded amazing. I’ve written a lot about Chinese experiences including a musical about Chinese gold miners, but never really anything based specifically in Wellington, so it sounded like a really fun way to showcase close histories – the sort of things that happened right down the road.
I’ve also read accounts of my own family histories and always thought, “This would make such a good story” but I never quite found the right way to weave them together. This project was perfect and came at the perfect time.
Jamie, are you from Wellington? Do you have ancestral connections here?
JY: No, I’m from Christchurch. My dad’s family migrated there in the 1920s.
CC: My family arrived in the 1890s. Jamie and I got on well quite quickly. I thought, “Cool, here’s another Asian person who knows that their great-great-grandparents are Chinese.”
JY: Cadence is underselling things because her Wellington roots go deep. One of the stops included in the show is directly related to her family.
Which one?
CC: Well, the Dick Lee & co shop was owned by my great-great grandfather. He was Dick Lee, and he’s a character in the show. The shop sold herbs and things for traditional Chinese medicines, but it also became very important to the Chinese community as a kind of community hub.
It was in Tory Street, and now there are apartments there but the façade at the bottom of them remains.
So, how did you put all these stories together?
CC: A lot of the early work was just me having to, you know, crack down and try to write a script. We all did a lot of research, which provided amazing material for me to look at. In the end, I wrote two scripts – a male and a female version, because the experience of men and women in early New Zealand were very different and I didn’t want to ignore one part of the story.
You’ve done a lot of writing as a poet and composer, how different was Encounter?
CC: It was a huge challenge, if I’m being honest. I’ve done some playwriting and poem writing, but this was just on a whole other level of interactive. It’s not like people are sitting down in the dark watching a show or picking up a book and reading it. They’re having to live it, so it has to be engaging enough that they feel like they’re part of a whole new experience while they’re walking down streets that they know.
After the writing, what was next?
CC: We did test walks, and Jamie and I recorded ourselves speaking the words.
JY: And quickly realised how different an audio format is to a play or anything like that! It feels really long when you’re just standing somewhere with your headphones on with so much going on around you as well. We realised that we had to revise the script and make it more like a video game so the person wearing the headphones is a protagonist and living through it.
We got Kassandra Wang on board to co-direct and do the audio. We saw that, because we’re using an app as well, we had a really cool opportunity to kind of “game-ify” things. That’s not to sound too diminutive, but we added elements to give the audiences imperatives so they’re kind of instructed to look around and engage with the space they’re in.
We evolved the audio, and got two actors, Shervonne Grierson and Dennis Zhang, to do different character voices.
How far is the walk?
JY: We meet at Bats and go from the Wellington waterfront to Haining St, so it’s about 2km and takes about an hour and 10 minutes.
Who do you hope comes along?
JY: Anyone! I think a lot of people don’t realise all of this stuff is around, you know? Sometimes I’ll be out with friends and I’ll just point out a spot and say, “This used to be such-and-such a shop,” and they’re like, Oh my gosh, we never realised.”
CC: That’s definitely a feeling we want to bring out in the audience. Just having them realise how much historical stuff is actually right there and you never notice.
Was there anything that particularly surprised, amused or shocked the two of you that you discovered?
JY: That is a good question. One tiny thing is I always thought that Haining St, which was described as a notorious Chinese street, was named after a Chinese word but it’s very much an English and Scottish word. I was shocked by some of the crime that happened here.
This is the street where Joe Kum Yung was shot?
CC: Yes, he was shot by a white supremacist called Lionel Terry in 1905. Joe Kum Yung’s death is part of this story and I guess I was surprised that when we started doing test walks, we walked right past the plaque that commemorates this. We were like, “Hang on a minute, it should be here…” and then we found it. It’s small and underneath plants. I thought that was interesting – that something commemorating one of New Zealand’s first recorded hate crime was this tiny little circle.
Encounter, December 10 – 14, 4:30pm or 6:30pm.
