When I was an infant in Kowloon, a neighbourhood girl, Kit, used to come over to play. I suddenly thought about those days in the 1970s earlier today. When we left Hong Kong, we had not expected that our earlier residency application would be granted while we were on holiday in New Zealand. Some of you may remember how much airfares were in the 1970s. My parents took the turn of events as serendipitous, and did not return as planned, adjusting to life in a new country. I never did see Kit again.
Kit, if you’re out there, I want to apologize for pulling your hair.
When I say ‘holiday’ it was more a medical emergency.
Two aunts and an uncle on my father’s side had emigrated to New Zealand and certainly the spectre of 1997 was hanging over us. Whānau had lost family after the communist revolution, so while our immediate family all got out, my father and his family regularly got word of tortures and deaths.
The family had arrived under differing circumstances, starting with an aunt who married a New Zealand Chinese man and came out here in the 1950s. Her siblings emigrated due to unique situations. They are not my stories to tell on a public blog.
My father had a business in partnership with a USAF doctor, Lawson E. McClung, when the US fought in Vietnam. If I recall correctly, Dr McClung’s stepfather owned a hospital in Tennessee, and my parents were in a position to get (or had) a US green card because of my mother’s nursing training. But, ever prudent, my mother, seeing that she had in-laws in Aotearoa, decided to head to the New Zealand High Commission to see if she and Dad could apply for residence as skilled migrants. If not for this decision, I could well have grown up with a US southern accent.
One day, with me in tow, we took the bus through the newfangled underwater tunnel to Hong Kong Island and visited Connaught Centre (now Jardine House), then the tallest building in the colony. I still remember seeing the round windows from within. She got what forms were necessary from the High Commission, and my parents completed them.
My paternal grandparents decided they would visit the kids in 1976. While here, my grandfather found himself in extreme pain, and could not move. He was rushed to hospital and was given the news that he had an advanced stage of liver cancer and he had two weeks to live.
We got word of this and, knowing the limits of western medicine—my mother had trained as a nurse under the England and Wales system—we packed our herbs and medicines (declared, natch) and came out.
Granddad drank the tonics every day as a liquid substitute. Thirsty for a cup of tea? Have a tonic. Want a glass of water? Have a tonic. The theory was that the tonic would flush out the cancer. Thank God we did it. The treatment worked, and he passed away in 1996 of a stroke.
This sudden change of plan meant job-hunting and flat-finding. Mum naturally went to Wellington Hospital where the England and Wales qualification was treasured. Dad had a harder time, working some pretty tough manual labour in switchgear at Turnbull & Jones (so tough that he said he could not make a fist with his hand; it did eventually heal) before eventually becoming a servicing technician—what he had trained in.
We rented a unit in a large house that had been converted into flats, with a Romanian-born Greek plumber and his wife as landlords. They typically rented to Greeks though I believe our first immediate neighbour was from elsewhere in Europe (my impression was the lady was Swiss German). When that family moved—the lady might have been the last one to leave—we went from the one-bedroom flat to their two-bedroom one. Lovely high ceilings, but no insulation, which was very tough for a four-year-old to bear when winter came. My memory of weather in those early years was that te Whanganui-a-Tara was always grey, and having been born in a place with a tropical temperature, I don’t really recall a truly warm (based on my comfort levels), sunny day till 1979.
What is crazy is that despite this massive change in plans, my parents never sought to tell me that we were staying. (When I asked them later in life, Mum said that they didn’t think it would be of much concern to a four-year-old.) For a considerably long time, I thought we were going home. Even starting school at St Mark’s on September 5, 1977 wasn’t enough to signal to me that we were staying. I have little doubt that that shaped the way I viewed my host country, holding on to what memories I had from my first four years should they need to be summoned for my life to continue upon our return. Thank God that included my taonga reo, though Mum—herself quadralingual (Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian, English)—always made it clear that it would be Cantonese in the home and English at school. We were not going to follow the custom of New Zealand Chinese families in encouraging English to be spoken 24–7 to “assimiliate”. As my father wisely put it, you can speak English all you like, but the white man is always going to see you as the other.
He should know. He had a greater English vocabulary than any of his New Zealand-born colleagues, something evidenced in period correspondence when he had to type an awful lot of letters to various government departments. It is no coincidence that I know words like proffer or the Latin ult., inst. and prox. in correspondence. But to his employers, he’d always be the technician—the Barney Collier—and not the Jim Phelps or Rollin Hand, despite an economics qualification that allowed him to be far more prescient about the subject than any talking head on the news.
One of these days I might tell more of this story. But I’ve already ghosted on one autobiography, and won an award for it, and right now I don’t have it in the tank to do my own.
And Kit from Victory Avenue, drop me a line if you read this. Would love to hear how the last 49 years turned out.
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