NOT CHINESE NEW YEAR

STAB Lab, 2016
(In development)

In 2016, with funding from BATS Theatre’s STAB Lab programme, Jane and Samuel Phillips researched the oral histories of Haining Street, one of Wellington’s most notorious streets. Jane is using these findings to develop NOT CHINESE NEW YEAR, a piece about early and contemporary New Zealand Chinese identity. 

STAB Lab 2016 workshop collaborators: Jane Yonge, Samuel Phillips, Patrick Carroll, Poppy Serano, Thomas Lambert, Alice Canton, Chris Tse, Pippa Drakeford-Croad, Grace Morgan-Riddell.

Jane writes about
not chinese new year
January 2019

I guess it makes sense to start at the beginning of the story of this project. After working on something for some time it’s possible to forget why you started the thing in the first place. NOT CHINESE NEW YEAR is a work I’ve been researching since 2015. I haven’t decided what form it will take or when and where it will happen. It might be theatrical, it might not? It might live or it might die – who knows? It’s been sitting with me for a long time and it won’t go away.

I don’t remember why I started working on the project. I remember how but I don’t remember why. It must have been racism, that and opium dens. My friend Sam and I were talking about building a room that was abject, but also lush, manky but also a boudoir. Sam suggested we make an opium den, like the ones that used to be on Haining Street. I asked, what’s Haining Street?

Haining Street is a street in Wellington which was the only officially unofficial Chinatown of New Zealand. Back in the late nineteenth century, after the gold rush (which occurred mainly in Otago, which is in the South Island of New Zealand), migrant Chinese men found themselves with nowhere to go. They had left their wives, their children, and their parents back on mainland China. They had submitted their bodies to the harsh conditions of gold mining, and to the even harsher conditions of violent racism. Some struck gold, many died.

They made their way north to Wellington. Most moved into mean little dwellings on Haining Street or the streets adjacent and parallel to Haining Street. I think the rent was cheap or perhaps it was the only housing on offer. Tiny cottages, made of heavy, rotting wood beams. The shacks were stacked next to each other, railroad style. Dirt floors, and a kitchen made of haphazardly patched together corrugated iron sheets out the back. Crouched over, Chinese migrants would cook noodles, dim sum, and congee over small fires. One house was apparently a de facto restaurant for the entire neighborhood, and on Sundays the locals would go and share a whole roasted pig.

According to oral history interviews of the early residents and their descendants, conducted by Lynette Shum, Haining Street was home. To the rest of Wellington, however, the street was notorious, full of opium dens, and drugged up crazy Chinese who, if they caught you, would put you in a pot and eat you. They would slaughter you like a pig and roast you over hot coals. Or they would put fire crackers up your butt and light you up in the middle of the street. If you were a Pakeha (white) woman the men would fall in love with you immediately, they would steal and enslave you. Wellington wanted to SCRUB OUT that UGLY BLOT that was Haining Street. Cartoons from the time showed the Chinese climbing into New Zealand, their sharp teeth and long claws extended.

In one of the oral history recordings, one woman recalls her mother warning her not to walk home from school down Haining Street. As a young girl she’d diligently walk the long way home to Mount Victoria, past Haining Street and across the war memorial. But each time she passed Haining Street she would look down it. It’s a short street but it seems long because it is incredibly narrow and has an undulation in the middle of it, as if the earth is a tongue about to swallow itself.

I can see an image of a small Pakeha girl standing at the street’s threshold, peering at the long lines of angled cottages and threadbare washing lines. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and the rest of the city is bright and populated, but Haining Street is dark, derelict, and void of human motion. Yet there is a felt presence, hidden behind pieces of old canvas.

One day the girl’s curiosity got the better of her and she walked down Haining Street. Well, actually, scared out of her mind she ran down it. Paused about half way down. A door to one of the cottages was open and she could see a curl of opium smoke languidly drifting out of the doorway and out onto the street. The opium smoker was concealed in the windowless cottage. A misshapen form neither sitting nor standing, only revealed through the stagnant smoke. The girl moved closer. The form shifted slightly. Remembering old tales, and not wanting to be put in a pot and eaten with chopsticks, the girl turned and fled down the rest of the street.

There was opium. It came from the British. Thick, black, blobby, and sticky like tar. There wasn’t much of it. It was mostly used by old Chinese men who had nothing to live for anymore. But the police raided anyway. One former resident recalls the sound of police whistles – the cops rounding up and arresting opium smokers. Old, infirm Chinese men were herded together and marched off to jail, upon where they would be released the next day.

Sam and I ran a workshop at 10 Haining Street, a building that has recently been demolished. It was the last historical site on the street. In the 1950s and 60s most Chinese families moved out of the area, over the hill to the neighboring suburb of Hataitai, or up to the Kapiti Coast to start market gardens. After that the cottages were bulldozed. Haining Street today is a series of tall, commercial buildings and apartments.

Number 10 Haining Street had recently been used by musicians for band practice. It was windowless apart from a small sash window in the kitchen. It smelt like the sweat of music, stale beer, and history. The doorway was about five foot high and about three feet wide. A hundred years ago or more, opium users would swing past number 10 on the way home, knock quietly on the door and ask for BLACK RICE. 

The opium dens weren’t the decadent, Wilde-dian, Sherlock Holmes-sian exotic places of elegant debauchery that Sam I had imagined. We saw lush, brocaded drapes and carpets in red. Elegant Victorian gasoline lamps. Men wearing silk suits or traditional Chinese attire. Platters of various Chinese sweets and exotic animals like monkeys and snakes. But old photos show small and dirty rooms, feeble looking men lying prostrate with their heads on wooden pillows. The detritus of opium paraphernalia scattered across the floor. A cracked bowl in the corner of a room with bits of food still stuck to its edges. In one image, a lone watermelon.

I think it was the migratory experience of alienation and isolation that drew me to researching Haining Street. One migrant recalls leaving Canton and arriving via ship to Wellington. He describes how Canton was a bright, modern city with electric lights, telephones, cars, and throngs of people. Wellington, however, was trapped in the past – it was dark and dank and smelled like coal.

What does it mean to start a new life somewhere only to realize that what you envisioned was not what it was supposed to be? Letters from home were never delivered and most of these migrants never saw their families again. A steep poll tax as well as other various sanctions forbade the men from bringing their wives and children to New Zealand. The lived, died, and were buried in a country on the bottom of the world.  

I’ve never made a show about what it means to be a Chinese New Zealander. I’m concerned about the representation of Chinese-New Zealandness. Haining Street is not my story, yet I have permission to tell it because of my ethnicity. Apart from being Chinese, how is this my story? Whose story is it? What do I do with it?

New Zealand has a history of racism, and possibly the most racist act was the murder of Joe Kum Yung in the late 1890s. Joe Kum Yung was an old man, and he was walking down Haining Street minding his own business. He was shot in the back by Lionel Terry, a Paheka man determined to ethnically cleanse New Zealand. Lionel was mad. He wrote manifestos about racial purity and enlightenment. He organized community meetings up and down the country, campaigning against the wave of the orient. Then one day he really flipped the switch, loaded his gun and shot the first Chinese man that he saw. Joe Kum Yung didn’t even see it coming.

There is a small plaque on Haining Street which serves as a memorial for Joe Kum Yung. I missed it several times while hunting for it – it’s small, round, and engraved. It’s not on a wall but cemented into the sidewalk, “exactly” where Joe Kum Yung died. I mistook it for a manhole cover. It’s almost invisible. Back in the nineteenth century the punishment for murder was a public hanging. Lionel went to prison, but not for long. He pleaded insanity and was sent to the coast to live out his days at a mental asylum.

Logically, reasonably, rationally, I know there is nothing romantic about nineteenth and early twentieth century Haining Street. But the mystery and exoticism persists. The smell of fires burning, gasoline, clean laundry, soap, horses, the salty simmer of stock, the crisping of meat. Soft daylight runs down in the middle of the street. Children playing with hoops, balls, and sticks as their mothers watch while leaning on fences gossiping and holding younger children on their hips.

Wait. Maybe no children. No mothers. A dark street. A gothic thoroughfare. Shacks at rough angles, only one story high but leaning in. Nine inch iron rusty nails stick out. The sound of shuffling – no, running – shoes on dirt road. A clang of a pot on metal. The click of Mahjong tiles. Murmurs of deals being made. The rip of a match to light an opium bowl. Ghostly figures moving through shadows. Longing, loss, a hooded figure who might just be death. One firework gone sideways and chopsticks against a wooden bowl. Rags in the wind. Cantonese words in the wind. A southerly shoots through the middle of the street against sagging beams with cracks, decay and mold, and hits the man lying on the floor waiting for the man next to him to pass the pipe.

Fredric Jameson said, “History is what hurts.” It hurts for a variety of reasons, but the one I’m considering is about how history is told, who tells it, and how it is received. If history is what hurts then how does the history of Haining Street hurt?