Yellow Peril by Tze Ming Mok

Sunday night

David Tung, Chinese-American visitor with art collective The Long March: 'Who's Pansy Wong? She just came to the No Chinatown tent.'

TM: 'And said?'

DT: 'Hi, I'm Pansy Wong.'

TM: 'What did you say?'

DT: 'Hi, I'm David Tung...'

TM: 'She's our only Chinese Member of Parliament.'

DT: 'So she's important?'

TM: 'It's like you just got a visit from Barack Obama.'

DT: 'Really?'

TM: 'Uh... No.'

Friday night

Over the PA at the Karaoke stage:
'We have a lost child here. His name is Ang Lee. A lost child, named Ang Lee. His eyes are brown. His hair is black. He is Chinese. He is eight years old."

From within the Karaoke audience: "He's gay. He was robbed of an Oscar by a smug race relations movie in 2006."

The Central Leader and the Aucklander both carried front page announcements last week: Roskill is the new hot suburb, Roskill is the future, tourists should go to Roskill to see the People of the Future, and to eat the Food of the Future.

I double-taked the Roskill Grammar girl on the top right of the Aucklander front page, and the woman buying veges behind the Community Board member at the Wesley market in the Central Leader. If you're of a certain generation of Chinese female who was a schoolkid for a while before critical mass really hit, you and your mother will always think the Chinese girl with the short hair in the class photo is you. Our time has come! Chinese girls with geeky short haircuts and glasses, we are the people of the future!

And what is our futuristic food? For those in the know down Southwest Central, the grounds of Wesley Intermediate and War Memorial park provided no muesli bars this weekend. Instead, we had the freshest, most chutney-laden kachoris of Avondale, the finest beef rendang of Manurewa (or indeed, Auckland), smooth black Ethiopean coffee from that Ethiopian lady who's always there with her coals, pots, little cups, bored, styley young daughters, and son in the soccer gears working the huge mixing-deck pumping out Amharic pop, the homemade gravlax on a Finnish rye cracker called, I believe, something like 'Finncracker', Kurdish daterolls, the Eritrean Injera stall staring down the Ethiopian Injera stall from opposite ends of the field (don't mention the war!) and the Rojak guy's dry run for the Lantern Festival coming up this weekend.

I'd dare to say the International Cultural Festival was a better experience than the Lantern Festival this year, food-logistics-wise. Not as much shade, but more room, more diversity, less madness, more bins per stall. Mother's loudly patterned shirt still required however.

Yes, the International Cultural Festival had spread out from Potter's Park, and migrated to its natural home, Ros-Killa, MF. McGehan Close was just around the corner, as was the hall where I used to sing in the Mt Roskill Municipal Choir (the hardasses we were, we fundraised for two years to tour Japan doing Sound of Music medleys. The Japanese were a little confused as to why the alto section was made up of yellow and brown kids when they'd ordered blondes.) As well as the 'melting pot', you had your Roskill Churches tent, outnumbered on the field by the Falun Dafa adherents and Yogic Meditators. You had your Waikowhai Scouts.

Yes, so I've moved back in with the folks before leaving the country in ...good god.... about three weeks. It's nice taking time out in good old sleepy Roskill. Er, I mean, vibrant Roskill, Gateway to the World, Portal to the Future. I like going to the Cameron Pools (sorry, 'Roskill Aquasports') where swimmers in the fast lane are slow (so slow they're nearly going backwards... to the Future!), then sitting in the sauna where there will always be two middle-aged South Asian guys with big stomachs and chest-rugs, talking about somebody's (Future!) wife in Hindi possibly, a pair of Mainland girls in (Futuristic!) skirted one-pieces giggling in Mandarin, a doughy ageless Chinese guy sitting on the top shelf like an grotto-Buddha with his legs crossed and eyes closed (bending the space-time continuum!), perhaps a couple of South Asian ladies with long heavy plaits, fully clothed, enjoying the heat and talking about somebody's (Future!) husband in Punjabi maybe, and usually one white guy looking kind of nervous (...about the Crowded Future?) - but hey, we're all sweating, except the fully clothed South Asian ladies. I like strolling back down along the field to my parents' house and seeing the blingin' neighbourhood mums out walking slowly with their baby-strollers and their own mums ambling alongside them in saris and sandals-with-socks. I like going to Yogijis with my mum for muruku and banana chips.

I like being East Asian in the CBD because you can walk down the street and no-one will stare at you, or bother you with inane requests. You can be completely invisible in a way that says 'I am this town.' One does not stare at office blocks, at traffic lights, at stormwater drains, or ask them for money, time, directions.

But I also like being East Asian in Roskill because you can walk down the street and no-one will stare at you or bother you with inane requests. Instead they will smile and say hi, because obviously, we all actually live here.

Just a little to the side, in New Lynn on Saturday (hey, we're all part of the 'Rainbow Region'), the desis got together for their preliminary forum in preparation for launching a full scale South Asian New Zealand conference next year, along the lines of us Chinkies' regular Going Bananas efforts. (Ahem, once more, South Asians: now 33.4% of all 'Asian NZers'; Chinese down to 41%.)

Mumbai-ite Media Mogul (ho ho) Sapna Samant reports back:

I came out with a positive buzz. It was valuable to hear critical dialogue on the construction of national identity and how we can/not be part of this rather than let the dominant groups (in the mainstream and within South Asians) define what we should call ourselves or where our loyalty lies. It was the older patriarchs (two of them, one a 'pillar' of the community) who insisted that our duty lies towards NZ. Yes it does, but in this globalised economy where transnationalism is getting to be the norm amongst many Asians how can 'duty to NZ but maintain Indian culture' be a defining parameter?

Another interesting point raised was changing names to get a job. While the academics did not have a moral stand on it (because it is a question of survival so to each his own), there was emphasis on changing the power structure that compels immigrants to change their names. Once again two men (may I say Hindu Indian men, well settled in New Zealand and hence, in my opinion, giving themselves the right to be judgemental)opined that 'we' should not change our names and were condescending towards those who do. So instead of accomodating the survival needs of new migrants or letting them negotiate their own identity (who likes to change their name, unless it is for survival?)the community sets fixed boundaries on who should do what in order to maintain 'Indianness'. I have friends in India who thought long and hard to name their kids because these kids are going to study/live overseas in the future and should have short, sweet Indian names to make it easy for them. Is that 'Indianness' or not? Or is it accomodating the self within global cultures? Our parents perhaps never had an idea where our destinies will take us so they gave us names without thinking about our existence within such spaces.

So, while I was really stimulated by the speakers and the workshops and just meeting/seeing people what troubles me is the theme of accomodating oneself within New Zealand and maintaining 'Indian culture' in rigid, visible, obvious ways (such as your name) rather than questioning and changing the hierarchies (in the mainstream and communities) that propogate such modes of survival and difference.

Another really interesting theme that came out was this thrust by government, political parties and politicians to push 'national identity' towards ethnic minorities. The academics of course questioned that and rightly so. This week the Herald has spent reams and editorials on religious identity in NZ and the underlying theme was the liberal, democratric and Christian beliefs on which NZ society is based, which allows for accomodation of other religions and cultures. I dispute this belief because democracy is not a Christian or Western institution in the first place and neither is the idea of tolerance. Similarly national identity and the place of ethnic minorities within that is for the minorities to decide, not for mainstream Pakeha to push.

See also:
Mt Roskill Will Take Over the World Part II: No.2

Mt Roskill Will Take Over the World Part I: The Brethren Wing

Day three of the lunar new year. Some of our Chuxi guests thought that was the day to eat vegetarian food; others said New Year's Day was the meatless day. My family assumed one simply sprawled immobile eating leftovers all week.

春节快乐
恭喜发财
万事如意
身体健康

Tardy Chinese New Year greetings, I apologise. Blood sugar levels. Too high. To blog.

Last year at an Asia:NZ lunch, I met one of those white-guy journalists who always comes along to meet the natives. He made an immediate impression by telling me that he liked it best when I blogged about food, and that I should concentrate on that (rather than all that politics stuff I guess, which I should probably forget about if I want to build an audience). Because I didn't know quite what to say to that, I think I stopped talking to him and can't remember his name unfortunately.

Fair point though. Sadly, while 'ethnic food'-blogging is the PA-reader's favourite treat, Yellow Peril will soon be turning into that most ignored of forms, the infrequently updated blog from abroad that isn't quite a travel blog but still has no local relevance, let alone handy recipes or even baby-raising tips, as I'll be gone from the end of March for about a year, living in various places (not necessarily 'Asia' either), not having babies, and not cooking with my family.

But kicking it off will be a stint at the Shanghai International Literary Festival in late March, where I'm speaking the same weekend as novelist Amy Tan, cookbook writer Fuschia Dunlop, and the local pop-star-turned-writer known as the Tibetan Madonna. I'm dumbfounded at the opportunity - the writing of one of these people has become incalculably important to my family's torturous diasporic identity, and meeting her will be an honour.

Come on down ...Fuschia Dunlop!

Fuschia Dunlop is a celebrated chef whose specialty is the Sichuan and Southwest Chinese homestyle cuisine that my mother was raised on at her mother's table (rather than what she chowed through at the street hawker stalls of Burma and Singapore). Sichuan style is prided as China's greatest cuisine (depending on who you ask), and is a style of food which is hard to come by in New Zealand or in most of the Chinese diaspora - so we make it ourselves. People used to Chinese food meaning 'Cantonese food' sometimes find it an acquired taste, or never get used to it at all (like my true-blue-cod Canto dad who finds much of it too sour). Fine by me and mum - more left for us. Bring on the black vinegar. If you're curious, the deli stall at the back entrance of Silver Bell, Dom Rd, has a selection of cold-dressed dishes in the Sichuan ballpark, which aren't at all bad, especially when compared with... nothing. It even has one of my favourite Chengdu street-snacks, shaomai, which looks like a big moneybag and is filled with savoury stewed glutinous rice.

As discussed last year, my family's unusual diaspora Chinese travel route means our food style gets quite eclectic come New Year's Eve banquet time. This year, my mother divided the food seemingly by generational migration geography: a full starting course of Sichuan/Yunnan cold dishes & street-style snacks; a second course Malaysian/Penang curries, sambals and pickles, and a Vietnamese stir-fry; and for dessert the Radio New Zealand Ray McVinnie Berry & Rhubarb Brioche.

My ma has been inspired by Fuschia Dunlop's Sichuan Cookery to restart the family 'lushui' pot of simmering spices like cassia, cao guo (Chinese cardomom), star anise and Sichuan pepper, which is used to stew meat, reused, recombined and replenished forever, the original spices tracing like DNA down the generations. You can't take it through customs though, so her mother's never made it over.

I already posted some of our favourite Malaysian/S'porean and Burmese recipes last year, so here's a list of this year's Sichuan starters, all guided by the work of Dunlop's Sichuan Cookery upon my mother's memory:

Yibin 'kindling' noodles (yibin ranmian): dry noodles in a sesame, soy and chilli sauce, tossed with pounded walnuts, peanuts, toasted sesame seeds, pickles, coriander, and peashoots.
tiger-skin green peppers (fupi qingjiao): much like the balsamic dressed sweet grilled capsicum you find in Eastern mediterranean cuisine, but with Chinkiang black vinegar - simple and delicious.
fine green beans in ginger sauce (jiang zhi jiang dou) - mmm, gingery.
radish slivers in spicy dressing (liangban luobusi) - great with the Yibin ranmian.
fresh broad beans in simple stock sauce (yanshui hudou) - sauce is made from the lushui stock, so can't be made on its own ...but once made, you can't stop eating it.
'man-and-wife' beef shinsteak slices (fuqi feipian, traditionally made with lung) - sort of like a pot roast, but about a millions times more glamorous - shins are stewed in the lushui pot, served in thin, marbled slices, dressed with an aromatic sauce made from the lu and scattered with sesame seeds and coriander. Also great with the noodles.
spicy cucumber salad (qiang huanggua) - cucumber fried with chilli, sesame oil, and Sichuan pepper... zing!

Recipe requests welcome. However, my prediction is that most people will be confused by this and will want curry. Well too bad. You've had enough curry; it's not healthy. Sichuan food is not a crowd-pleasing coconut-creamy curry nursemaid. It is an angular, vinegary taskmistress with a dry chilli riding crop, but a heart of golden sesame. It drives out the damp and humidity, which is the perfect Traditional Chinese Medicine prescription for life in Auckland.

Gotta get back to the fridge now.

***update***

From a source at the Auckland Central Library:

Do you know that your post has just gone up and there are already three holds on the Dunlop cookbook? Mine included.

Heh. Xinan represent!

So the Herald has visited McGehan Close three bloody times now, and found what? People with jobs, who feed their children, and a strong community. In looking for 'the underclass', John Key seems to have stumbled across 'the aspirational working class.' Rather than coming off as a cut-rate Tapu Misa with more swearing (my usual register, I'm well aware), I'll just throw straight to her excellent column today, The Case of the Missing Underclass. Here's a chunk, but you may as well go read the whole thing.

The idea of an undesirable, ignorant class of people populating the underbelly of society and threatening its survival has been around since at least the 18th century, when English demographer Thomas Malthus warned against the over-production of the lower classes and encouraged them not to breed...

In 1989, American sociologist Charles Murray, who co-wrote The Bell Curve, warned of an emerging British underclass, identified, he said, by illegitimacy, violence and persistent unemployment. Murray argued the underclass was defined not so much by the degree of poverty as the kind of poverty. In other words, you had to be a particular kind of poor person to qualify.

[...]

Christopher Jencks, professor of social policy at Harvard's School of Government, wrote that the term had focused "attention on the basement of the American social system (those 'under' the rest of us), without specifying what the inhabitants in this dark region have in common". Clearly it meant "something more than just persistent poverty".

"The term underclass, with its echoes of the underworld, conjures up sin, or at least unorthodox behaviour. Low income may be a necessary condition for membership in such a class, but it is not sufficient." In which case, it's probably not very helpful.

We might as well talk about that other phenomenon - the "overclass" or elite, who practise a more socially acceptable form of exclusion from behind their security-locked gates. Could any kid from the poor end of town hope to peek through their windows without getting arrested these days?

Donating my two cents as a Roskill native, even though it bloodied the wrong target, Key's stab was tellingly positioned. With McGehan close nestled in the armpit of Mt Albert, while technically being in the Mt Roskill electorate, it's a double-whammy assault on the pride of the reddest of Labour territories outside of Mangere. For Helen and Phil, this is personal. It takes me back to what I wrote about the premier of No.2: reflecting on Clark's slightly naff but genuine Team New Zealand boosterism about Labour's down at heel multicultural heartlands, and our repositioning at the centre of national identity:

We never thought it would happen, but it does appear that we do now in fact matter - that those demographics left to ferment and foment down in the average lower-middling state-housey suburbs, have actually turned out to be the centre of something. The centre of...

...the Labour Party constituency during a period of unstable minority-government.

For three elections, first the Alliance, then the Greens (and the Maori Party), have failed to pull Labour left. Now, bizarrely, it's up to National to give them that directional shove.

There's currently no real policy behind any of National's gambit towards the poor and the brown, and the cracks are showing already. Key has looked more than a touch patronising in his attempt to force-feed Wesley Primary. I have no faith that the party will come up with the real goods.

But if it took a clumsy weilding of a dubious term like 'underclass' to bring class back into the political consciousness, and if this next election is going to be fought openly over the interests of low-income Maori and migrant minority communities, that's definitely no bad thing.

In other news, I've put my website back up, at a different domain name, after putting off archiving my Sunday Star-Times columns for ages. Here's the index page of my columns, for those of you wondering why I was such a slack blogger last year...

As I wrote to my mate Teanau when I realised, without surprise, that he was behind Te Tino Toa's flag-on-the-bridge/hill effort - it's interesting that the tino is now "the Maori flag" in the media rather than "the Maori sovereignty flag." It seems to mark a reframing: from an aspirational flag symbolising sovereignty from the perspective of some 'radicals', to a statement that 'this is the flag of Maori, and we, the almighty makers of words, acknowledge it.'

I don't know exactly what the occasional dropping of the 'sovereignty' means - can it ever be good to drop 'sovereignty'? - but it does show that the flag has consolidated in the mainstream public consciousness in the last ten years or so, in the way that only a genuine civil society-driven initiative can.

Te Tino Toa is running a competition for the most creative display of the Tino Rangatiratanga flag on Waitangi Day. Please email your pictures to maoriflagATgmail.com.

Meanwhile, as pointed out in the discussion thread to Kane's post, Tariana Turia has been exhibiting a bipolar approach to whether she likes migrants or not. Her recent ill-considered blurt upon not gaining any more Maori seats on the new roll numbers doesn't compare well at all to her comprehensive article in the Aotearoa Ethnic Network journal, and I hope that she reverts to that encouraging and intelligent position, not the strange insulting one.

From 'our' side, it's not that helpful when Lincoln Tan comes out more goofily pro-assimilationist on the flag-flying issue than Brian Rudman. Wrote Lincoln today:

...because Waitangi Day is already marred by so much controversy, and a flag can be a powerful and evocative symbol of allegiance, I do not think it is the right day for it to be flown. The message Waitangi Day should send is that we are all New Zealanders, regardless of colour or creed, and it is here that we belong under the same flag. ...Comparisons between Transit's rejection of Ata Tino Toa's request and allowing the Team New Zealand flag to be flown during the America's Cup are bordering on ridiculous ...for a country which faces its only international battles in the sporting arena, it made sense to fly the Team New Zealand flag on the bridge during the Cup.

And people stereotype the Chinese as logical Vulcan geek robots. Following this - sheesh - America's Cup Team Flag comparison, for a day commemorating a Treaty signed between 'the Crown' and Maori, why doesn't he think it seems to make perfect sense to fly 'the Maori flag' also? I'll be sure to ask him. He goes on, acknowledging that the New Zealand flag can carry a racist load:

In 2004, I organised an anti-racism rally in Christchurch. The National Front organised a counter rally, and I remember one of its members waving the New Zealand flag and yelling, "This flag is ours, do you see anything that says Asian on it?"

So, what am I to do? Campaign for this country to recognise a New Zealand-Asian flag? Such a move would indeed reflect that New Zealand is a country divided.

I can see why a Singaporean, and indeed most Asian New Zealanders, would come to such conclusions. But Tan's attitude promotes an uncomplicated form of nationalism that is weak to resist embedded assimiliationist tendencies, and bluntly excludes the interests of indigenous people.

This isn't to say his ideas about flags, nationalism, and singing patriot songs together on boosterish national days wouldn't be more than enough for him on Waitangi Day, or for all the other non-indigenous ethnic minority populations in New Zealand (aside from the ones who find patriot songs a bit naff, and the ones who are interested in the historical foundations and pitfalls of 'nationalism'). But it's a mistake to compare the route of 'Asian' aspirations for national belonging with Maori - we simply don't have the same will or justification for a sovereignty movement. Our 'Asian' parents, ancestors, or our own Asian selves, chose to come here and live under the rule of the Crown, like all other migrants; Maori authorities never agreed to cede tino rangatiratanga. We can argue all we want about what tino rangatiratanga is supposed to mean, who represents who now, what the Treaty's relevance is, and who is Maori anyway (please, let's not), but in a very basic sense of claims to group status within the nation, there's a clear difference between Maori and everyone else here.

I don't doubt that Lincoln is well aware of that. But with regard to his comments on how that should relate to groups' rights to represent themselves with a flag (national sport teams yes, indigenous people no?), on a day that relates rather specifically to those indigenous people... well, if there's an clearer public example of an 'Asian representative' seeming not to understand Maori aspirations and serving as fodder for distrust between the two groups, maybe he wrote that as well.

Kane is right to emphasise the importance of alliance building between Maori and other ethnic minorities. It's an opinion we don't hear enough in any mainstream forum, so I'll quote his comment in the thread to his guest post again here, from a Maori perspective:

I see a need for unity among other oppressed social/ethnic groups in Aotearoa in oder to increase the effective pressure Maori can bring to bear on the Crown. (These would be mutually beneficial relationships of course but what non-Maori get out of them is for another forum). Currently iwi/hapu negotiate from a relatively powerless position and they get 2% of what they're due because of it. The ability to present a more united front among Maori, Chinese, working class, Thai, Indian, women, Samoans, Somali... would put enormous pressure on any elected govt. to provide better services and resources to all.

Another reason for unity of the oppressed is that a big section of the Maori population does not gain from reparation given to iwi and hapu because they live in isolation from their whakapapa. So for these Maori and the groups that represent them alliances with other marginal groups is imperative. It could be a powerful means to Maori empowering themselves more on their own terms, as opposed to the colonial government setting the agenda.

As for Brian Rudman's despair at our crappy national flag? Daniel Malone designed a New Zealand flag some time ago that incorporated the tino rangatiratanga design into the existing form, but as a part of his anti-hegemonic art practice, has always prevented it from being publicly used in any hokey official campaign as an alternative national flag. Bloody artists. It's always been so much better to look at than the weird, corporate sporting-body alternatives mooted, all of which seem to carefully avoid the colour scheme of Te Tino. Malone's flag changes very little of the design of the New Zealand flag, simply replacing blue with black, and having the tino rangatiranga koru infiltrate and curlicue throughouth the variegated black, red and white stripes of the new Union Jack. Very clever. From the Sue Crockford gallery:

This flag speaks of the contested history of a nation but also carries its own story. It was constructed in response to the removal of Dianne Prince’s Please Walk On Me Flag which was exhibited in Korurangi at the Auckland Art Gallery in 1996, a time of hot debates over what constituted contemporary Maori art. A member of the public complained about Prince’s flag and the police removed it from the exhibition, deeming the work was in breach of the 1983 Flag Act. The flag Malone shows here has been swapped with members of Damn Native / Heart Music crew, and was hung behind them during performances, as well as appearing in other contexts outside of institutional settings. Because the flag has been dispersed through culture in something of a viral way, its meaning is adaptable and its ownership has been collectively adopted, not enforced.

To the bridge!