{"id":15916,"date":"2014-03-23T13:16:46","date_gmt":"2014-03-23T00:16:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nzcfs.adminmouse.co.nz\/?p=15916"},"modified":"2017-02-10T19:11:42","modified_gmt":"2017-02-10T06:11:42","slug":"helen-wong-and-the-history-of-chinese-people-in-new-zealand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nzchinasociety.org.nz\/helen-wong-and-the-history-of-chinese-people-in-new-zealand\/","title":{"rendered":"History of Chinese People in New Zealand – Helen Wong & Bill Willmott"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ken
Ken Chan (hands clasped) arrived in 1939. Behind him, his aunt points at his father whom ken is about to meet for the first time. To the left are his grandmother and mother. \u00a0Image: NZ Herald<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the NZ Herald recently there was a story about a Chinese man who arrived as a refugee from war-torn China in 1939.\u00a0 The story is a heart-warming tale of how refugee, Ken Chan, and some of his family fled Canton [Guangzhou] as the Japanese were taking over that part of China.\u00a0 He was only 7 years old at the time (see the accompanying image, and,\u00a0for why they were so smartly dressed,\u00a0read the NZ Herald article<\/a>!) but he settled well into the Kiwi way and made a life for himself and his family here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Ken was only one of many Chinese people who, since the 1800s, have travelled to New Zealand.\u00a0 They were often harshly treated with the intolerant poll tax<\/a> being levied (1881-1934) and living unforgiving lives – but finally made a go of it. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

The first Chinese man, Appo Hocton<\/a>,\u00a0arrived in New Zealand \u00a0in 1853 \u00a0and was naturalised. \u00a0\u00a0In the 1860s, Chinese immigrants were invited to New Zealand by the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce to replace the western goldminers who had followed the gold-fever to Australia.\u00a0 However, prejudice against the Chinese eventually led to calls for restrictions on immigration. \u00a0Following the example of anti-Chinese poll taxes enacted by California in 1852 and by Australian states in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s,\u00a0John Hall<\/a>‘s government passed the Chinese Immigration Act in 1881. This imposed a \u00a310 tax per Chinese person entering New Zealand, and permitted only one Chinese immigrant for every 10 tons of cargo.\u00a0 Richard Seddon<\/a>‘s government increased the tax to \u00a3100 per head in 1896, and tightened the immigration restriction to only one Chinese immigrant for every 200 tons of cargo.<\/p>\n

The poll tax was waived in 1934 by the Minister of Customs, following Japan’s\u00a0invasion of Manchuria<\/a>, and the Act was finally repealed in 1944.<\/p>\n

Those days are hopefully now over.\u00a0 In 2002, at Chinese New Year celebrations at Parliament in a formal process of reconciliation, Helen Clark offered the Government\u2019s apology for this racist restriction. \u00a0Further, in compensation, the Government also spent NZ$5 million in 2005 to establish a Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust to sponsor various events.\u00a0 Click here<\/a> for more details.<\/b><\/p>\n

As a consequence of those early haphazard entries into New Zealand, many second and third generation Chinese descendants have desired to search for further details of their roots in their ancestral home of China.\u00a0 Helen Wong, a second-generation, NZ-born Chinese has researched and assisted many people to discover their Chinese roots, roots that were hard to access until the 1980s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some early immigrants made that initial decision to come to New Zealand by jumping ship when conditions as a seaman became too hard to bear, with the result that they left no record of where they came from.\u00a0 These people often heard of the goldfields and knew they could make a living there and send money home to the family in China.\u00a0 Later they founded businesses such as fruiterers, market gardeners and restaurants often from the knowledge they had learnt from their families back home in China.\u00a0 These types of work were often their only recourse, as pakeha Kiwis worried that the Chinese may take over and push out those already in settled occupations (such as farming ) and so they created difficulties for the Chinese. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another aspect that weighed heavily on the minds of these early immigrants was their desire, when they died, that their remains should be returned to be buried in their ancestral homeland. \u00a0The driving force behind overseas Chinese burial practice is the belief that after death, the soul of the deceased hovers over the grave.\u00a0 If a Chinese man were to die in a foreign country, his soul would be homeless and therefore unable to rest until his body was shipped back to China and buried in his home village.\u00a0 After the allotted period of reverence, the deceased spirit would then become an ancestor. \u00a0Overseas, this was not possible.<\/p>\n

This gave rise to an industry in shipping bodies back to China and the SS Ventnor <\/b><\/a>was one of several ships engaged for that task. \u00a0In 1902, this one unfortunately sank on the West coast of North Island, at Hokianga, and several stories and plays<\/a> have been written about the tragedy.<\/p>\n

Helen recently gave a talk to Hibiscus Coast branch and told of her accompanying a number of present-day Chinese New Zealanders \u00a0on successful trips back to China to find their roots.\u00a0\u00a0 For that search, Helen Wong lists several clues that descendants may not realise they still possess \u2013 such as:<\/p>\n