From sojourners to citizens: The poetics of space and ontology in diasporic Chinese literature from Aotearoa/New Zealand

ABSTRACT

This essay analyses the work of two contemporary Chinese New Zealand poets, Renee Liang and Alison Wong, who explore the historical and contemporary experiences of the Chinese diasporic community in New Zealand. Written in the aftermath of the New Zealand government’s 2002 apology for the discriminatory poll tax levied on Chinese gold miners in the 19th century, Wong’s poetry meditates upon the attenuated lives of Cantonese immigrants subjected to racial abuse and geographical segregation by the dominant Pākehā (European New Zealand) community. Liang, on the other hand, explores changing attitudes towards New Zealand’s long-established Chinese diasporic community in the wake of the 1987 Immigration Control Act, which allowed thousands of new Asian immigrants to enter and work in New Zealand. Both poets use architectural and phenomenological imagery to explore the ways in which Chinese migrants have transformed from a putatively temporary labour force (sojourners) into an established diasporic community (citizens).

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese diaspora
• Alison Wong
• Renee Liang
• gold mining
• phenomenology
• architecture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Mainland China has never been colonized by an outside power, but following the first Opium War (1839–42), Britain compelled China to sign the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, thereby opening the ports of Canton and Shanghai to western trade, and allowing Britain to colonize Hong Kong.

2. See Fresno-Calleja (2017), Kennedy (2013), Rhoden (2012) and Yu-Ting (2019) for analyses of Wong’s 2009 novel As the Earth Turns Silver.

3. As Ravi Palat points out, “isolated individuals” from India and China arrived in Aotearoa/New Zealand from the early 19th century, but the beginning of “large-scale” immigration from Asia dates back to the arrival of the Chinese miners (1996, 37; see also Johnson and Moloughney 2006, 3).

4. In addition to the poll tax, other discriminatory legislation directed only at Chinese migrants included an English-language reading test introduced in 1907; the denial of citizenship in 1908 (with the right to vote withheld until 1952); and exclusion from social welfare benefits (Ip 2003).

5. As noted above, Wong has also published a novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (Wong 2009), also focused on the Chinese diasporic community in New Zealand. This narrative explores the lives of two Chinese immigrants (brothers) who establish a greengrocery in Wellington in the early 1900s, thereby extending Wong’s exploration of Chinese cultural history into the urbanized communities established by the early 20th century.

6. See All’s Well That Ends Well, where Lord Lafew claims “I have seen a medicine / That’s able to breathe life into a stone” ([1623] 2018, 2.i, lines 71–72).

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Notes on contributors

Michelle Keown

Michelle Keown is professor of Pacific and postcolonial literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on Indigenous Pacific and postcolonial literature and is the author of Postcolonial Pacific Writing (2005) and Pacific Islands Writing (2007) and the co-editor of Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas (2010) and Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific (2018). She has recently led a UK-funded research project on arts education and the nuclear legacy in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, outputs from which include a volume of Marshallese children’s poetry (The Marshallese Arts Project, 2018); a graphic adaptation of an anti-nuclear poem by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (History Project: A Marshall Islands Story, 2018) and a graphic novel (Jerakiaarlap: A Marshall Islands Epic, 2019).