Reflections from a Recovering Banana

I have two names: 陳雪瑩 and Stephanie Chan. Parts of my identity would be diminished if one were to exist without the other, in the same way my Chinese and New Zealand identity cannot exist apart from each other. 

BANANAS ARE ALWAYS YELLOW

Growing up my family would always refer to my siblings and I as bananas—yellow on the outside, white on the inside. This is a typical pejorative used to describe Asians in diaspora. I spent most of my life despising my Chinese, ashamed of my yellow, my family, and my culture. I wore the label banana like a badge of honour, hoping that this meant I wasn’t like ‘those other Asians,’ the ones who speak with an accent, the ones who can’t drive, the ones who are stealing all the homes. But, the thing about bananas is, they will always be yellow. As hard as I tried to be white, I still felt other from the dominant Pãkehã culture of Aotearoa. There are many stories of casual racism that have nursed the shame I still feel for being a Chinese-New Zealander today. The inconsistent and exotic interest of people in my Cantonese has fostered in me a deep internalised shame for my language; I worry that I will never overcome my shame enough to pass on the tongue that connects me to my tūpuna. I also can’t pretend that I was surprised when my then senior pastor’s wife jokingly told me not to eat their dog, then claimed it was okay since we were friends. After a while, these encounters become exhausting.

My experiences of racism, like many other Asian-New Zealanders, is tied to the lurking belief that being Asian and being a ‘New Zealander’ is incongruent. Emma Ng, author of Old Asian, New Asian, describes this experience as “an insidious, fleeting kind of racism that catches you when you least expect it during otherwise everyday encounters.” I am often ambushed by the words ‘ni hao' from well-meaning strangers at work and when this happens the Chinese and New Zealand parts of my identity suddenly feel alienated and irreconcilable. Absurdly, in the same sentiment, people often lump me in with ‘white girls’ in what can only be interpreted as an over-attempt to appear non-racist by ‘not seeing colour.’ Why does my skin lose its colour just because I don’t present with a foreign accent? Again, this reveals the deeply embedded and sinister social imaginary that the archetypal New Zealander cannot be Asian-looking. Experiences like these, and many more like it, communicate that to be Asian in Aotearoa is to have your difference made apparent, to never really belong ‘like the others.’ These stories have shaped my difficulty to understand my identity as a Chinese-New Zealander because I have always been told to pick one. I do not feel at home in the world until I can genuinely reconcile my identity as both Chinese and New Zealand.

THE DRAGON AND THE TANIWHA

The national and cultural identity of many Chinese-New Zealanders is derived from the total exclusion, and severe discrimination, of Chinese from the social, cultural, and legal nation-making of Aotearoa, both historically and ongoing. For example, The Chinese Immigrants Act 1881 introduced an entry poll tax of £10 for each Chinese immigrant and a limit of one Chinese passenger per ten tons of cargo on immigrant ships. In 1896 the poll tax was raised to £100 and the passenger restriction increased to 200 tons. The public perception of Chinese was becoming one of a monolithic threat to national identity. An 1895 address given by then Labour Minister to a meeting of the Anti-Chinese League compared Chinese labourers to trained baboons. In the Haining Street Murder of 1905, Joe Kum Yung was shot by Lionel Terry in an attempt to draw attention to his anti-Asiatic views. This warped imaginary of ‘White New Zealand’ is clearly expressed in the irony that the killer himself was a recent immigrant from England. These examples of discrimination have long constructed the social, cultural, and legal structures of identity for Chinese New Zealanders as one of non-belonging and otherness. As Pãkehã have sought to secure power, Chinese have sought to secure tolerance, and an ‘unspoken contract’ came to characterise the relationship between the two groups. Chinese would be docile and placatory, achieving a small slice of the New Zealand dream as a reward for playing along and assimilating. This served to maintain the status quo of Pãkehã as superordinate. The Chinese have often been praised for their high achievements and low profile, but few have bothered to examine the psychological cost of such self-limitation. So, when Asian people have been living in Aotearoa since the gold rushes of the 1860s, what will it take for us to be fully accepted as New Zealanders? “Perhaps at some point,” Ng asks, “we will no longer be asked to justify our presence or prove our worth.”

There are very few ways to articulate the experience of being a Chinese-New Zealander within the racial identity politics of Aotearoa. The relationship of non-Mãori and non-Pãkehã to te Tiriti o Waitangi is rarely discussed. There is an uncertainty of how to negotiate multiculturalism—which already exists—on the foundations of Aotearoa’s established biculturalism. Biculturalism and multiculturalism are often posited as incongruent concepts, but they are not necessarily opposites. Reframing biculturalism as a relationship between tangata whenua and tangata tiriti, rather than Mãori and Pãkehã, is a starting point for understanding the ethical obligation of making homes in a land that has been the reward of colonisation and the breach of te Tiriti. Alistair Reese proposes an interpretation of te Tiriti that recognises Mãori as the ‘hostpeople,’ welcoming tangata tiriti, like myself, into Aotearoa as ‘co-inhabitants’ with an interdependent status of identity and belonging, while recognising oneself as markedly different to tangata whenua. This model of biculturalism can accommodate diversity, as well as address the painful history of Chinese in Aotearoa, without eroding Mãori interest.

ON THE WAY

The question must be asked: how can I, as a first-generation Chinese-New Zealander, belong here and become ‘from here’ without reenacting the violence that is historically rooted in the gesture of trying to belong. A faithful way forward, as someone who follows Christ, might be found in Miroslav Volf’s theology of embrace which finds its basis in Paul’s command to the Romans: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you” (Rom 15:7). Guided by this, reconciliation with the other is achieved only when one is ready to welcome the other into themselves, renegotiating one’s own identity in light of the other’s difference. It is simple to demand acceptance from Pãkehã, but it is another thing entirely to ask the same of tangata whenua, precisely because the desire to belong can easily teeter and sneak into a neocolonial agenda of ‘laying claim’ to a place and we, the new generation of Chinese-New Zealanders, are not exempt from these attitudes. Mãori have good reason to be suspicious of people arriving on their whenua. The way forward for Chinese-New Zealanders is one of careful self-examination and embrace, not an assertion of dominance by claiming indigeneity.

This picture of embrace might be captured in the story of the SS Ventnor. In the late 1800s, the bones of 499 Chinese gold-miners, who had not earned enough money to return to China, were exhumed to be returned home to the care of their families and ancestral villages. Tragically, the ship sank off the Hokianga Heads not long into the journey and eventually the human cargo was washed ashore. The community was devastated, believing that the men’s spirits would not find rest; sitting in a watery grave far from 家 (Chinese word meaning family, home, or household) no one could tend to their needs in the afterlife. For many years it was rumoured that these Chinese bones were found by and cared for by the local Te Roroa and Te Rarawa iwi, who carefully buried them on their own whenua or in nearby cemeteries. In the late 2000s, it was discovered that the local iwi still had vivid memories of the recovery and burial, and a connection between them and Otago Chinese was made. Since then, Chinese descendants have made emotional visits to these iwi to express gratitude for caring for their tūpuna. This relationship has brought to light shared tikanga relating to death and tūpuna, and a deep connection formed over respect for common values. This pertinent story of embrace, that is theologically and biblically urgent, has captured a part of me that has always been silently crying out. It propels a vision of reconciliation for Mãori-Chinese that walks into the future looking back to the past.

The implications of my role as tangata tiriti, in the particularity of my Chinese and acknowledging the complex history of Chinese New Zealanders, is an ongoing hikoi of discovery and listening. Amidst this journey, the gospel of Jesus Christ reinterprets my dislocated identity and history into one of embrace. I find my tūrangawaewae in relationship with Mãori and in the embrace of our particularity, where one’s struggle does not diminish from the other’s, but instead tills the soil for deeply caring and intimate relationships between the two. Since being in more relationships with Mãori over the last few years, and indeed a diverse mix of cultures, and learning about te Tiriti, I have never felt more Chinese. Yet at the same time, it must be recognised that the contemporary reality of Mãori and new Chinese migrants is often marked with prejudice and racist assumptions. Much of the Tiriti journey will be for new Chinese to understand their relationship to Mãori as tangata tiriti. The bright hope for this reconciliatory vision of Jesus Christ is not without precedent —“Chinese bones rest as grateful guests of the iwi; their connection literally embedded in the whenua of Hokianga.”

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Stephanie Chan 陈雪莹 is a theology student in Tāmaki Makaurau.