This is the story of a quest I began three decades ago - the search for my Chinese identity. The path I travelled was not linear, and the years brought pain as well as joy. But, while this is a narrative about being Chinese and also a New Zealander, I know that the search for purpose and meaning in life is universal. I hope that others in our culturally diverse society will find their own ways to embark on that same journey.
Helene Wong was born in New Zealand in 1949, to parents whose families had emigrated from China one or two generations earlier. Preferring invisibility, she grew up resisting her Chinese identity. But in 1980 she travelled to her father's home village in southern China and came face to face with her ancestral past.
What followed was a journey to come to terms with 'being Chinese'. Helene Wong writes eloquently about her New Zealand childhood, about student life in the 1960s, and coming of age in Muldoon's New Zealand. What her Chinese ancestry means to her gradually illuminates the book as it sheds new light on her own life. Drawing on her experience of writing for New Zealand films, she takes the narrative forward through the places of her family's history - the ancestral village of Sha Tou in Zengcheng county, the rural town of Utiku where the Wongs ran a thriving business, the Lower Hutt suburbs of her childhood, and Avalon and Naenae.
Print publication: May 2016Ebook publication: May 2016Pages: 240RRP: $39.99ISBN: 9780947492380ISTC: A022016000000050DOI: 10.7810/9780947492380
Helene Wong was born in Taihape, New Zealand, and grew up in Lower Hutt, near Wellington. After graduating in Sociology from Victoria University of Wellington, she worked in the Public Service, becoming in 1978 social policy adviser to Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon, and the first woman to be appointed to his Advisory Group.
Her career then took a different turn as she followed her love of theatre, working as an actor and director before moving into film and television in the mid-1980s. She was appointed as the first script development executive in the NZ Film Commission, then worked as a freelance script consultant on several short and feature-length projects, including Illustrious Energy, Leon Narbey's acclaimed feature film about Chinese goldminers in Otago.
Helene then wrote and directed documentaries for television, notably Footprints of the Dragon, about Chinese in New Zealand, for the series An Immigrant Nation. It was among the ten top-rating documentaries of 1995. The following year, she became a film critic with theNew Zealand Listener, a position she still holds.
Helene has taught classes in scriptwriting, film criticism, cultural identity and the media; judged numerous industry awards; served on the jury of the Asia-Pacific Film Festival in Auckland in 1996; and, from 2000 to 2006 was a member of the board of the NZ Film Commission. Helene Wong is now a full-time writer and occasional actor.
Auckland Writers festival
Inside Outside: Helene Wong
Lower NZI, Aotea Centre, Auckland, NZ
Fri 13 May 2016, 02:30 PM
In 1985 the late historian Michael King published Being Pakeha, a book which fathoms what it is to be a non-Maori New Zealander. Three decades on, the accomplished Chinese-NZ writer, reviewer, actor and director Helene Wong has published her memoir, Being Chinese: A New Zealander's Story, which explores the experience of being of Chinese descent, being both part of this place but also set apart.
Auckland Writers Festival day one: Drunk on information
By David Larsen @leaflemming · On May 14, 2016
Helene Wong's session was next. Before I talk about the excellence of this session, which was, again, sold out, and which moved many of us to tears, and which got a sustained standing ovation, full disclosure - Helene and I worked together for years on the Listener's film column. She could not have been a better colleague. For the last couple of those years, I picked up extra money now and then covering for her while she was off working on a mysterious and seemingly very demanding book. The money was very useful. I wondered occasionally if I would ever see the book. I should have known better; Helene finishes what she starts. Robert Muldoon - for whom she was a social policy advisor in the 1970s - once described her in a letter as "tough", which I would guess was his highest term of praise. Helene mentioned this herself, with entirely pardonable satisfaction, in the process of introducing herself and outlining her life, which is the immediate subject of her memoir, Being Chinese: A New Zealander's Story. The larger subject is identity, in New Zealand and within the category "New Zealander", a category from which Chinese New Zealanders have been periodically being excluded ever since the first Chinese immigrants arrived here in the 1860s.
Helene was giving this year's Michael King Lecture - her title is a conscious echo of King's classic exploration of his own New Zealand identity, Being Pakeha - so this was the only session of the day with no conversational component: one woman delivering a talk. Much, much higher information density this way. Helene took us through the New Zealand Chinese experience from go to woe, woe having arrived almost immediately. (She quoted this splendidly appalling headline from a 19th century paper: Silly salacious slut snared by slinky slit-eyes.) And then out of woe into assimilation and relative acceptance, helped by China's status as a bulwark against the Japanese in WWII, and back into woe again: periodic yellow peril scares and upflares of overt racism, right down to the present. (On Andrew Little's Labour, and their ridiculous campaigns against Chinese property buyers and, god help us all, chefs, Helene said simply this: "Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be?" And I have to tell you, it went through me like a knife. Because no. It isn't who we should want to be. But it seems it's still who we sometimes are. I made several rude remarks about those Labour campaigns on Facebook. That was the sum total of my response. I basically did nothing to let Little know he doesn't speak for me.)
It was a sharp, humane, intelligent lecture. At one point Helene paused to play us Roseanne Liang's short film Take 3, a hilarious excoriation of racist casting attitudes towards Asian women in New Zealand film and TV. I've seen that film several times, two of them at festivals with large audiences. I've never seen an audience respond with quite this degree of chastened realisation.
Helene closed by pondering the reception futures waves of immigrants are likely to receive. Better than in the past? Maybe. Not something to count on. But look, she said, at what we stand to gain from inculcating a more inclusive mutual respect for all of our New Zealand identities.
So I bought that book too, obviously.
http://www.metromag.co.nz/culture/books/auckland-writers-festival/auckland-writers-festival-day-one-drunk-information/
Interview
www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/201799886/helene-wong-being-chineseBook Launch
www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/201799886/helene-wong-being-chineseBook Launch
gallery.mailchimp.com/abb717fd0b5566533999d5d11/images/bad0f3e9-39f0-4de8-9cab-4800ecde881b.jpg
newspaper article
m.nzherald.co.nz/wairarapa-times-age/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503414&objectid=11634573Interview
www.thebigidea.nz/stories/being-herself?platform=hootsuite
m.nzherald.co.nz/wairarapa-times-age/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503414&objectid=11634573Interview
www.thebigidea.nz/stories/being-herself?platform=hootsuite
www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/writer-helene-wong-interview/
www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/extract-helene-wongs-chinese-new-zealanders-story/
www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/extract-helene-wongs-chinese-new-zealanders-story/
