Saturday, January 17, 2009
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Sandwiches, Taiwanese style
4:00AM Wednesday Dec 31, 2008
By Lincoln Tan
Raymond Njoto says rice rolls are a cross between sushi and a Subway roll. Photo / Martin Sykes
You can do with rice what you do with bread, says Raymond Njoto, who holds the master franchise of Taiwanese rice roll chain QQ Rice for Australia and New Zealand.
"When people think about making a sandwich, they always think of bread, but you can actually make a rice sandwich as well," Mr Njoto says.
He describes the rice rolls as a cross between the Japanese sushi and the Subway sandwich, but says it is a traditional Taiwanese meal.
The rice rolls - which seem to be uniquely Taiwanese - could have been inspired by the sushi during the time when Taiwan was a Japanese colony between 1895 and 1945.
"Just picture Subway, but instead of bread, think of it as having rice as a base," says Mr Njoto.
So instead of different types of bread, you can choose from white, purple, red, brown, wheat-germ or wild rice, and fillings such as smoked salmon, spicy radish, barbecued pork and teriyaki chicken.
These are then rolled into a rice ball and, depending on your choice of grains and filling, it could well be a very healthy meal.
Taiwanese immigrant Jessie Chiang says the rice roll is a popular "picnic food" there, because it can be eaten hassle-free without the need for fork or chopsticks.
"To prepare, all we need is a plastic bag."
Rice is lined at the base of the plastic bag, the filling such as braised minced pork is added, and then it is all squeezed into a compact rice ball.
* Where to try
QQ Rice, 15-31 Wellesley St West. Rice rolls are priced from $5.20.
* Make your own
Ingredients: Steamed or boiled rice, fillings and sauces of your choice.
Method: Spread rice over a plastic wrap, add fillings and cover it with rice. Roll it tightly with the plastic wrap or plastic bag into a ball, and it's ready to be eaten. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10550083
By Lincoln Tan
Raymond Njoto says rice rolls are a cross between sushi and a Subway roll. Photo / Martin Sykes
You can do with rice what you do with bread, says Raymond Njoto, who holds the master franchise of Taiwanese rice roll chain QQ Rice for Australia and New Zealand.
"When people think about making a sandwich, they always think of bread, but you can actually make a rice sandwich as well," Mr Njoto says.
He describes the rice rolls as a cross between the Japanese sushi and the Subway sandwich, but says it is a traditional Taiwanese meal.
The rice rolls - which seem to be uniquely Taiwanese - could have been inspired by the sushi during the time when Taiwan was a Japanese colony between 1895 and 1945.
"Just picture Subway, but instead of bread, think of it as having rice as a base," says Mr Njoto.
So instead of different types of bread, you can choose from white, purple, red, brown, wheat-germ or wild rice, and fillings such as smoked salmon, spicy radish, barbecued pork and teriyaki chicken.
These are then rolled into a rice ball and, depending on your choice of grains and filling, it could well be a very healthy meal.
Taiwanese immigrant Jessie Chiang says the rice roll is a popular "picnic food" there, because it can be eaten hassle-free without the need for fork or chopsticks.
"To prepare, all we need is a plastic bag."
Rice is lined at the base of the plastic bag, the filling such as braised minced pork is added, and then it is all squeezed into a compact rice ball.
* Where to try
QQ Rice, 15-31 Wellesley St West. Rice rolls are priced from $5.20.
* Make your own
Ingredients: Steamed or boiled rice, fillings and sauces of your choice.
Method: Spread rice over a plastic wrap, add fillings and cover it with rice. Roll it tightly with the plastic wrap or plastic bag into a ball, and it's ready to be eaten. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10550083
Monday, December 22, 2008
Weijun Collins.
:00AM Monday Dec 22, 2008
By Alanah May Eriksen
Weijun Collins.
* Our lost children: Child abuse and the charities campaigning to end it
Weijun Collins has experienced abuse first hand - she was a slave for 10 years during China's Cultural Revolution.
So after reading the Herald's Our Lost Children series, the 64-year-old felt compelled to donate $1000 to a charity working to combat child abuse.
Mrs Collins, who studied early childhood education at the Auckland University of Technology in 1997, also wants to donate her time helping new parents in their homes.
Her donation will go to Barnardos, which runs a programme called Footsteps to Feeling Safe teaching children how to escape abusive situations.
Northern region spokeswoman Jenny Corry said of Mrs Collins' donation: "I think that's fantastic. It's so generous.
"We want her to know we will certainly put the money to good use. It will go directly to the children.
"If she's interested in working with us I'm sure we can use her in some capacity."
Mrs Collins was born in China into a prominent and well-educated family. When she was 10, her father, once a high-ranking official, was condemned as an enemy of the Communist Party and banished to a labour camp where he was tortured and starved to death.
Mrs Collins struggled to continue her education but her father's crime eventually rebounded on her and she was sent to the Gobi Desert in north-west China for 10 years farming wheat, maize and opium.
Forced to live in a cave with little food and minimal clothing, she laboured in sub-zero temperatures under heavy guard.
"I was humiliated, outcast," Mrs Collins said.
"No one would talk to me because of my father. I was given the heaviest work to do.
"No one wanted to be my friend. They would hold meetings just to criticise me."
But she managed to find an English textbook which she used to teach herself the language in secret. The only books allowed during that time were books written by Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong.
When she felt she was able to speak English well enough, she biked eight hours into the closest city to look for a job as a teacher, telling soldiers she had back pain and needed to see a doctor.
She was eventually offered a job teaching English as a second language in a small village and, after a battle with her minders, was permitted to work there.
She came to New Zealand in 1986 to study English after a Kiwi tourist, whom she had taken in in China, paid for her tickets.
She returned to China after a year working at a university teaching English before settling back in New Zealand in 1995.
She has since written an autobiography - Desert Rose - and married an English professor working in the engineering school at Auckland University.
She is currently writing a book on parenting skills.
The two daughters she had with her first husband also live in New Zealand and are married.
As a result of Our Lost Children, a research project into minimising brain damage to children on life support has received a $50,000 donation from Mercury Energy.
And an Auckland couple are sponsoring two families associated with Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, which has also had offers of food and clothing.
Presbyterian Support has also received donations.
By Alanah May Eriksen
Weijun Collins.
* Our lost children: Child abuse and the charities campaigning to end it
Weijun Collins has experienced abuse first hand - she was a slave for 10 years during China's Cultural Revolution.
So after reading the Herald's Our Lost Children series, the 64-year-old felt compelled to donate $1000 to a charity working to combat child abuse.
Mrs Collins, who studied early childhood education at the Auckland University of Technology in 1997, also wants to donate her time helping new parents in their homes.
Her donation will go to Barnardos, which runs a programme called Footsteps to Feeling Safe teaching children how to escape abusive situations.
Northern region spokeswoman Jenny Corry said of Mrs Collins' donation: "I think that's fantastic. It's so generous.
"We want her to know we will certainly put the money to good use. It will go directly to the children.
"If she's interested in working with us I'm sure we can use her in some capacity."
Mrs Collins was born in China into a prominent and well-educated family. When she was 10, her father, once a high-ranking official, was condemned as an enemy of the Communist Party and banished to a labour camp where he was tortured and starved to death.
Mrs Collins struggled to continue her education but her father's crime eventually rebounded on her and she was sent to the Gobi Desert in north-west China for 10 years farming wheat, maize and opium.
Forced to live in a cave with little food and minimal clothing, she laboured in sub-zero temperatures under heavy guard.
"I was humiliated, outcast," Mrs Collins said.
"No one would talk to me because of my father. I was given the heaviest work to do.
"No one wanted to be my friend. They would hold meetings just to criticise me."
But she managed to find an English textbook which she used to teach herself the language in secret. The only books allowed during that time were books written by Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong.
When she felt she was able to speak English well enough, she biked eight hours into the closest city to look for a job as a teacher, telling soldiers she had back pain and needed to see a doctor.
She was eventually offered a job teaching English as a second language in a small village and, after a battle with her minders, was permitted to work there.
She came to New Zealand in 1986 to study English after a Kiwi tourist, whom she had taken in in China, paid for her tickets.
She returned to China after a year working at a university teaching English before settling back in New Zealand in 1995.
She has since written an autobiography - Desert Rose - and married an English professor working in the engineering school at Auckland University.
She is currently writing a book on parenting skills.
The two daughters she had with her first husband also live in New Zealand and are married.
As a result of Our Lost Children, a research project into minimising brain damage to children on life support has received a $50,000 donation from Mercury Energy.
And an Auckland couple are sponsoring two families associated with Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, which has also had offers of food and clothing.
Presbyterian Support has also received donations.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
New Zealand Chinese Association (Akld Br.) Inc.
2008 Winter Newsletter
P.O.BOX 4 8 4
Gwa Leng (Gualing) Family Publication
.
Following the successful launch in 2006 of the Tung Jung Association of NZ publication, Zengcheng NZ’s, which profiled
the various Jungseng villages and families that originated from there, a number of Gwa Leng family profiles were not
able to be included due to the limitations on content on the book.
Consequently the Gwa Leng New Zealand Family History Group was established with the following aims:
to produce a contemporary historical record of Chinese New Zealanders tracing their roots back to Gwa Leng
to promote and encourage families to develop their own family histories and family trees as a record for future
generations.
A number of family profiles and family trees have already been submitted and this is a request to target those families
from Gwa Leng that we are not aware of and have not been contacted.
If you have family roots from Gwa Leng, have an interest in your genealogy, have a story to tell and are comfortable to
have it published along with other Gwa Leng families, please urgently contact Mike Wong 06 8775085.
This project is supported by the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage
2008 Winter Newsletter
P.O.BOX 4 8 4
Gwa Leng (Gualing) Family Publication
.
Following the successful launch in 2006 of the Tung Jung Association of NZ publication, Zengcheng NZ’s, which profiled
the various Jungseng villages and families that originated from there, a number of Gwa Leng family profiles were not
able to be included due to the limitations on content on the book.
Consequently the Gwa Leng New Zealand Family History Group was established with the following aims:
to produce a contemporary historical record of Chinese New Zealanders tracing their roots back to Gwa Leng
to promote and encourage families to develop their own family histories and family trees as a record for future
generations.
A number of family profiles and family trees have already been submitted and this is a request to target those families
from Gwa Leng that we are not aware of and have not been contacted.
If you have family roots from Gwa Leng, have an interest in your genealogy, have a story to tell and are comfortable to
have it published along with other Gwa Leng families, please urgently contact Mike Wong 06 8775085.
This project is supported by the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton
The story of how Chinese immigrants found their way to the Mississippi River Delta in the late 1800s and earned their living operating small family grocery stores in neighborhoods where mostly black cotton plantation workers lived. What was their status in the segregated black and white world of that region? How did this small group maintain their culture and ethnic identity? What has happened to these merchants and their families over the years?
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/12302.Chopsticks_in_the_Land_of_Cotton
http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/12302.Chopsticks_in_the_Land_of_Cotton
Monday, November 17, 2008
Wong becomes NZ's first Asian minister
3:47PM Monday Nov 17, 2008
Pansy Wong says her ministerial appointment sends a message to the world New Zealand is a country where anyone can be accepted and succeed. Photo / Paul Estcourt
Pansy Wong says her ministerial appointment sends a message to the world New Zealand is a country where anyone can be accepted and succeed. Photo / Paul Estcourt
Pansy Wong says her appointment as the country's first Asian Cabinet minister shows New Zealand is an open and tolerant country.
The 53-year-old ethnic Chinese MP was appointed Minister for Ethnic Affairs and Minister of Women's Affairs in the new-look Cabinet today.
Mrs Wong said she had always battled to be treated like any other New Zealander and her electorate win in Botany and her appointment as a minister sent a message to the world.
"It shows that New Zealand is a tolerant country where anyone can be accepted and succeed," she told NZPA.
She hoped her achievements would show other minorities they could succeed within mainstream parties and politics and encourage them to get involved.
Mrs Wong credited education, hard work and determination - a system of values instilled by her poor uneducated parents - as the keys to her success.
Born in Shanghai, her family moved to Hong Kong when she was five.
Her father was a seaman who was away for six months of the year and she, her mother, and two brothers lived in a small room in a shared apartment block floor populated by seven families.
"That was about 40 people. We shared one kitchen area and one toilet and one bathroom. So I experienced poverty."
Despite their surroundings, her parents were extremely proud and committed to providing an education and better life for their children.
"She held on to the dream that one day, because the living environment was so depressing, that she wanted to own her own apartment. That dream was fulfilled after six years."
In Hong Kong it was popular to take an English name. Born Yu Fong, which meant "fragrance of flowers", she chose Pansy as her English name.
"I liked it. Pansies are tough but they are also happy and kind of vivacious. It was only afterwards that I found out they don't have any fragrance."
In 1974, when she was 19, her family emigrated to New Zealand after her father, who had docked here on his travels, decided it was good place to raise a family.
Mrs Wong studied at Canterbury University, helping out in her family's St Albans fish and chip shop and Bealey Ave hamburger joint in her spare time.
"Even now I can still flip a mean burger."
It was at university that she met her Malaysian Chinese husband Sammy.
She went on to complete a Masters of Commerce degree with honours, initially working at what is now Ernst and Young as an accountant before joining Christchurch firm Smiths City where she eventually became chief financial controller.
In 1989 she was approached to enter local politics and was elected to Canterbury Regional Council, where she became known as the "$6 million dollar woman" for carving that figure off the budget.
As MMP neared Fendalton MP Philip Burdon approached her to stand for National and she agreed, in 1996 becoming New Zealand's first Asian MP by virtue of National's list.
It was during that election that she first locked horns with New Zealand First leader Winston Peters who was campaigning on an anti-immigration platform and described her as a "token" MP.
After the election she threatened to quit National if the incoming government adopted NZ First's immigration policy.
Mrs Wong said being described as token did not overly worry her because she was used to such treatment.
"Even today some people mock my accent and the way I speak."
She said if anything the barbs helped her motivation.
But she did not like NZ First's denigration of immigrants, knowing first hand how hard it was to resettle in a foreign country.
Mrs Wong said since she was elected to Parliament she has tried to represent Asian communities, but she does not see herself as a spokeswoman for all Asians, as there is a diverse range of interests and views within such a wide group.
"I think it's really important for people to see Asians as individuals rather than just a group."
- NZPA
Pansy Wong says her ministerial appointment sends a message to the world New Zealand is a country where anyone can be accepted and succeed. Photo / Paul Estcourt
Pansy Wong says her ministerial appointment sends a message to the world New Zealand is a country where anyone can be accepted and succeed. Photo / Paul Estcourt
Pansy Wong says her appointment as the country's first Asian Cabinet minister shows New Zealand is an open and tolerant country.
The 53-year-old ethnic Chinese MP was appointed Minister for Ethnic Affairs and Minister of Women's Affairs in the new-look Cabinet today.
Mrs Wong said she had always battled to be treated like any other New Zealander and her electorate win in Botany and her appointment as a minister sent a message to the world.
"It shows that New Zealand is a tolerant country where anyone can be accepted and succeed," she told NZPA.
She hoped her achievements would show other minorities they could succeed within mainstream parties and politics and encourage them to get involved.
Mrs Wong credited education, hard work and determination - a system of values instilled by her poor uneducated parents - as the keys to her success.
Born in Shanghai, her family moved to Hong Kong when she was five.
Her father was a seaman who was away for six months of the year and she, her mother, and two brothers lived in a small room in a shared apartment block floor populated by seven families.
"That was about 40 people. We shared one kitchen area and one toilet and one bathroom. So I experienced poverty."
Despite their surroundings, her parents were extremely proud and committed to providing an education and better life for their children.
"She held on to the dream that one day, because the living environment was so depressing, that she wanted to own her own apartment. That dream was fulfilled after six years."
In Hong Kong it was popular to take an English name. Born Yu Fong, which meant "fragrance of flowers", she chose Pansy as her English name.
"I liked it. Pansies are tough but they are also happy and kind of vivacious. It was only afterwards that I found out they don't have any fragrance."
In 1974, when she was 19, her family emigrated to New Zealand after her father, who had docked here on his travels, decided it was good place to raise a family.
Mrs Wong studied at Canterbury University, helping out in her family's St Albans fish and chip shop and Bealey Ave hamburger joint in her spare time.
"Even now I can still flip a mean burger."
It was at university that she met her Malaysian Chinese husband Sammy.
She went on to complete a Masters of Commerce degree with honours, initially working at what is now Ernst and Young as an accountant before joining Christchurch firm Smiths City where she eventually became chief financial controller.
In 1989 she was approached to enter local politics and was elected to Canterbury Regional Council, where she became known as the "$6 million dollar woman" for carving that figure off the budget.
As MMP neared Fendalton MP Philip Burdon approached her to stand for National and she agreed, in 1996 becoming New Zealand's first Asian MP by virtue of National's list.
It was during that election that she first locked horns with New Zealand First leader Winston Peters who was campaigning on an anti-immigration platform and described her as a "token" MP.
After the election she threatened to quit National if the incoming government adopted NZ First's immigration policy.
Mrs Wong said being described as token did not overly worry her because she was used to such treatment.
"Even today some people mock my accent and the way I speak."
She said if anything the barbs helped her motivation.
But she did not like NZ First's denigration of immigrants, knowing first hand how hard it was to resettle in a foreign country.
Mrs Wong said since she was elected to Parliament she has tried to represent Asian communities, but she does not see herself as a spokeswoman for all Asians, as there is a diverse range of interests and views within such a wide group.
"I think it's really important for people to see Asians as individuals rather than just a group."
- NZPA
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Mid-Autumn Festival - Moon Cake Recipe
Dough:
4 cups Plain flour
3/4 cup Powdered milk
1/2 tablespoon Baking powder
1 cup Sugar
4 Eggs
Filling
4 cups Red, green or lotus seed paste
20 Yolks from salted eggs
1 Egg yolk
3/4 cup Melted butter
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
To make Filling:
1. Put the 20 salted egg yolks on a baking sheet and bake for 10 mins.
2. Divide bean paste into 20 portions and press a salted egg yolk into each of these.
3. Roll these up into a ball with the egg yolk hidden in the centre.
To make Dough:
1. Sift flour, powdered milk and baking powder together.
2. Beat sugar and eggs together until creamy and white, about 10 minutes.
3. Mix in the melted butter.
4. Then lightly fold in the dry ingredients.
5. Divide this mixture into 20 portions.
To make the mooncakes:
1. Increase the oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Roll out dough to 4 inch circles.
3. Place a portion of filling each in the centre and bring up the sides to encase it completely. Pinch cracks to seal and roll between your hands to make a ball.
4. Lightly flour the mould and press the dough ball into it, flattening it with the palm of your hand. Shake to tip out.
5. Place them on a baking sheet, brush tops with egg yolk, and bake for 30 mins.
6. Serve warm or cold.
4 cups Plain flour
3/4 cup Powdered milk
1/2 tablespoon Baking powder
1 cup Sugar
4 Eggs
Filling
4 cups Red, green or lotus seed paste
20 Yolks from salted eggs
1 Egg yolk
3/4 cup Melted butter
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
To make Filling:
1. Put the 20 salted egg yolks on a baking sheet and bake for 10 mins.
2. Divide bean paste into 20 portions and press a salted egg yolk into each of these.
3. Roll these up into a ball with the egg yolk hidden in the centre.
To make Dough:
1. Sift flour, powdered milk and baking powder together.
2. Beat sugar and eggs together until creamy and white, about 10 minutes.
3. Mix in the melted butter.
4. Then lightly fold in the dry ingredients.
5. Divide this mixture into 20 portions.
To make the mooncakes:
1. Increase the oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Roll out dough to 4 inch circles.
3. Place a portion of filling each in the centre and bring up the sides to encase it completely. Pinch cracks to seal and roll between your hands to make a ball.
4. Lightly flour the mould and press the dough ball into it, flattening it with the palm of your hand. Shake to tip out.
5. Place them on a baking sheet, brush tops with egg yolk, and bake for 30 mins.
6. Serve warm or cold.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Fire safety in Chinese
Fire safety in Chinese
By JUDITH LACY - Tribune | Sunday, 24 August 2008
It wasn't quite the lucky 08-08-08, but the launch date of a Chinese language booklet in Palmerston North had enough eights, plus a fire safety-significant one.
The liberally illustrated 10-page booklet covers fire safety tips for around the home and has already been translated into Maori and French.
Launched on 18-08-08, the Chinese booklet is a joint initiative by the Palmerston North Fire Service and the Manawatu branch of the New Zealand Chinese Association.
Last year a group of older Chinese visited the Palmerston North fire station to learn about fire safety and co-ordinator May Needham identified a need for a Chinese language booklet.
Soon after taking up her position, Mrs Needham found older Chinese were not accessing information available to "mainstream" New Zealanders.
Manawatu Chinese Association vice president Tony Thackery told the launch the booklet would be of vital importance to many new Chinese migrants. If it assisted in saving one life or someone from serious injury, the venture had been worthwhile.
Firefighter Mitch Ormsby, who worked with Mrs Needham on the project, hoped the relationship would continue and more fire safety tools could be developed.
The booklet's development was funded by the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust and COGS, with printing costs met by the Fire Service.
Representatives from the Department of Internal Affairs, Age Concern, St John and Settlement Support also attended the launch.
Settlement Support co- ordinator Shelley Davenport said getting official material in languages accessible to migrants was an ongoing challenge.
The fire safety booklet had a strong lifesaving message and was "just brilliant", she said.
By JUDITH LACY - Tribune | Sunday, 24 August 2008
It wasn't quite the lucky 08-08-08, but the launch date of a Chinese language booklet in Palmerston North had enough eights, plus a fire safety-significant one.
The liberally illustrated 10-page booklet covers fire safety tips for around the home and has already been translated into Maori and French.
Launched on 18-08-08, the Chinese booklet is a joint initiative by the Palmerston North Fire Service and the Manawatu branch of the New Zealand Chinese Association.
Last year a group of older Chinese visited the Palmerston North fire station to learn about fire safety and co-ordinator May Needham identified a need for a Chinese language booklet.
Soon after taking up her position, Mrs Needham found older Chinese were not accessing information available to "mainstream" New Zealanders.
Manawatu Chinese Association vice president Tony Thackery told the launch the booklet would be of vital importance to many new Chinese migrants. If it assisted in saving one life or someone from serious injury, the venture had been worthwhile.
Firefighter Mitch Ormsby, who worked with Mrs Needham on the project, hoped the relationship would continue and more fire safety tools could be developed.
The booklet's development was funded by the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust and COGS, with printing costs met by the Fire Service.
Representatives from the Department of Internal Affairs, Age Concern, St John and Settlement Support also attended the launch.
Settlement Support co- ordinator Shelley Davenport said getting official material in languages accessible to migrants was an ongoing challenge.
The fire safety booklet had a strong lifesaving message and was "just brilliant", she said.
Poll tax kept out Chinese
Poll tax kept out Chinese
By JUDITH LACY - Tribune | Sunday, 14 September 2008
WIDE AWAKE: Jessica Wong, 11, plays with lion Hoi Gong at its awakening ceremony at Te Manawa on Monday. Inside the lion are Teh Gyu Kim (head) and Qi-Wern Lim (tail). Aluminium-framed, Hoi Gong is a lot lighter than its bamboo and rattan predecessor, which has been retired.
Hoi Gong waits patiently, sparkling in the gloom.
Manawatu is spelt out in yellow letters around its neck.
Palmerston North Deputy Mayor John Hornblow, clad in a burgundy jacket he was presented with during a visit to Palmerston North's friendship city Kunshan, approaches.
Ceremonial brush in hand, he begins dotting a red liquid on the golden lion in a series of specified steps, starting with the eyes, moving to the toes, and ending with the forehead.
So begins the awakening ceremony of the Manawatu Chinese Association's new lion, an event which last happened 18 years ago.
Monday's ceremony in Te Manawa's courtyard marked the opening of two exhibitions at the Palmerston North museum, A Barbarous Measure: The Poll Tax and Chinese New Zealanders, and one celebrating the association's 70th anniversary.
A Barbarous Measure includes photos, newspaper clippings, cartoons and poll tax associated items.
The [PndStlg]10 tax on every Chinese migrant was introduced in 1881 to make it difficult for Chinese to settle in New Zealand.
Anti-Chinese feeling is evident in a poem published in the Press in 1899, which begins:
"Heap up the Chow Man's burden
Don't let his misery cease".
A White NZ League cartoon from 1931 exhorts consumers to buy from their own race and keep New Zealand white, loosening the "Asiatic stronghold" on market gardening.
Exhibition curator Nigel Murphy told the opening crowd the aim of the poll tax was not to harm Chinese, but to exclude them from New Zealand and being New Zealanders. Unlike Britain, class was not important here; instead race was everything.
In 1896, the tax was increased to [PndStlg]100, roughly equivalent to 10 years' earnings.
In 1934 payment of the tax was waived and the legislation behind it repealed in 1944.
About 4500 Chinese paid a total of [PndStlg]308,080 between 1882 and 1934.
Mr Murphy asked, in 2008, who is a New Zealander? Does white still mean New Zealander? What is our national identity? How much of the attitude behind the poll tax still exists?
New Zealand Chinese Association president Steven Young said it was the fifth time the poll tax exhibition had been mounted in New Zealand.
Sixteen years ago the association commissioned Mr Murphy to research the tax. Until then, little was known about it and the legislative framework that gave rise to it, Mr Young said.
The tax virtually stopped the migration of Chinese women, for 40 years shaping the New Zealand Chinese community into one of "married bachelors". This had a huge negative social and cultural impact, he said.
In 2002 Prime Minister Helen Clark apologised to Chinese who'd paid the poll tax and suffered other discrimination, and to their descendants. Palmerston North MP Steve Maharey said the apology wasn't about dragging up painful memories. Instead it was so people could move on.
Mr Hornblow announced Palmerston North was the first New Zealand local authority to join the China and New Zealand Business Council, formed in 2006.
Palmerston North City Council is also working towards creating a bonsai garden at Victoria Esplanade.
* A Barbarous Measure runs until October 12. Free admission.
By JUDITH LACY - Tribune | Sunday, 14 September 2008
WIDE AWAKE: Jessica Wong, 11, plays with lion Hoi Gong at its awakening ceremony at Te Manawa on Monday. Inside the lion are Teh Gyu Kim (head) and Qi-Wern Lim (tail). Aluminium-framed, Hoi Gong is a lot lighter than its bamboo and rattan predecessor, which has been retired.
Hoi Gong waits patiently, sparkling in the gloom.
Manawatu is spelt out in yellow letters around its neck.
Palmerston North Deputy Mayor John Hornblow, clad in a burgundy jacket he was presented with during a visit to Palmerston North's friendship city Kunshan, approaches.
Ceremonial brush in hand, he begins dotting a red liquid on the golden lion in a series of specified steps, starting with the eyes, moving to the toes, and ending with the forehead.
So begins the awakening ceremony of the Manawatu Chinese Association's new lion, an event which last happened 18 years ago.
Monday's ceremony in Te Manawa's courtyard marked the opening of two exhibitions at the Palmerston North museum, A Barbarous Measure: The Poll Tax and Chinese New Zealanders, and one celebrating the association's 70th anniversary.
A Barbarous Measure includes photos, newspaper clippings, cartoons and poll tax associated items.
The [PndStlg]10 tax on every Chinese migrant was introduced in 1881 to make it difficult for Chinese to settle in New Zealand.
Anti-Chinese feeling is evident in a poem published in the Press in 1899, which begins:
"Heap up the Chow Man's burden
Don't let his misery cease".
A White NZ League cartoon from 1931 exhorts consumers to buy from their own race and keep New Zealand white, loosening the "Asiatic stronghold" on market gardening.
Exhibition curator Nigel Murphy told the opening crowd the aim of the poll tax was not to harm Chinese, but to exclude them from New Zealand and being New Zealanders. Unlike Britain, class was not important here; instead race was everything.
In 1896, the tax was increased to [PndStlg]100, roughly equivalent to 10 years' earnings.
In 1934 payment of the tax was waived and the legislation behind it repealed in 1944.
About 4500 Chinese paid a total of [PndStlg]308,080 between 1882 and 1934.
Mr Murphy asked, in 2008, who is a New Zealander? Does white still mean New Zealander? What is our national identity? How much of the attitude behind the poll tax still exists?
New Zealand Chinese Association president Steven Young said it was the fifth time the poll tax exhibition had been mounted in New Zealand.
Sixteen years ago the association commissioned Mr Murphy to research the tax. Until then, little was known about it and the legislative framework that gave rise to it, Mr Young said.
The tax virtually stopped the migration of Chinese women, for 40 years shaping the New Zealand Chinese community into one of "married bachelors". This had a huge negative social and cultural impact, he said.
In 2002 Prime Minister Helen Clark apologised to Chinese who'd paid the poll tax and suffered other discrimination, and to their descendants. Palmerston North MP Steve Maharey said the apology wasn't about dragging up painful memories. Instead it was so people could move on.
Mr Hornblow announced Palmerston North was the first New Zealand local authority to join the China and New Zealand Business Council, formed in 2006.
Palmerston North City Council is also working towards creating a bonsai garden at Victoria Esplanade.
* A Barbarous Measure runs until October 12. Free admission.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Metro's Best Asian Restaurants 2008
In association with Asia Downunder
The September issue of Metro, on sale August 25, contains our inaugural comprehensive guide to Auckland's top 50 Asian restaurants, selected after several months of exhaustive judging.
As part of the process we selected winners across 10 categories, including the popular vote for best food hall.
Congratulations to the winners who are...
SUPREME WINNER; BEST JAPANESE
SOTO
13 St Marys Rd, Ponsonby.
Ph 360-0021.
www.sotorestaurant.mobi
BEST CHINESE
PEARL GARDEN
1 Teed St, Newmarket.
Ph 523-3696.
BEST INDIAN
SATYA
17 Great North Rd, Newton.
Ph 361-3612.
BEST INDOCHINESE
SOPHEARA
136 Chapel Rd, Flat Bush, Manukau.
Ph 272-4749.
BEST KOREAN
MAPO
22a Torrens Ave, East Tamaki.
Ph 265-1700.
BEST MALAYSIAN
MALAYSIAN NONYA
87D Picton St, Howick.
Ph 537-168.
BEST THAI
THAI FRIENDS
311 Parnell Rd, Parnell.
Ph 373-247.
wwwthaifriends.co.nz
BEST ASIAN FUSION
CHOW
1 Pakenham St East, Viaduct.
Ph 365-2585.
www.chow.co.nz
BEST YUM CHAR
SUNSHINE
39 Market Pl, Viaduct.
Ph 302-3322.
BEST FOOD HALL
FOOD ALLEY
22 Albert St, City.
Ph 373-4917.
The September issue of Metro, on sale August 25, contains our inaugural comprehensive guide to Auckland's top 50 Asian restaurants, selected after several months of exhaustive judging.
As part of the process we selected winners across 10 categories, including the popular vote for best food hall.
Congratulations to the winners who are...
SUPREME WINNER; BEST JAPANESE
SOTO
13 St Marys Rd, Ponsonby.
Ph 360-0021.
www.sotorestaurant.mobi
BEST CHINESE
PEARL GARDEN
1 Teed St, Newmarket.
Ph 523-3696.
BEST INDIAN
SATYA
17 Great North Rd, Newton.
Ph 361-3612.
BEST INDOCHINESE
SOPHEARA
136 Chapel Rd, Flat Bush, Manukau.
Ph 272-4749.
BEST KOREAN
MAPO
22a Torrens Ave, East Tamaki.
Ph 265-1700.
BEST MALAYSIAN
MALAYSIAN NONYA
87D Picton St, Howick.
Ph 537-168.
BEST THAI
THAI FRIENDS
311 Parnell Rd, Parnell.
Ph 373-247.
wwwthaifriends.co.nz
BEST ASIAN FUSION
CHOW
1 Pakenham St East, Viaduct.
Ph 365-2585.
www.chow.co.nz
BEST YUM CHAR
SUNSHINE
39 Market Pl, Viaduct.
Ph 302-3322.
BEST FOOD HALL
FOOD ALLEY
22 Albert St, City.
Ph 373-4917.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Ahead of the Bananas NZ Going Global International Conference in August, RENEE LIANG spoke to guest speaker Alison Wong about writing, her Montana shortlisted poetry collection Cup, and growing up Chinese in New Zealand.
THE FIRST thing that strikes me about Alison Wong is her laugh. It’s frequent, loud and suddenly throws its arms about you like some long-lost cousin. She has one of those familiar-looking faces and I catch myself wondering if we are related somehow. It’s unlikely, though it would be good if we were. Then perhaps I could lay claim to some of those writer’s genes which make Wong one of our country’s emerging stars.
Meeting her just ahead of a conference for Chinese New Zealanders fondly nicknamed The Banana Conference, the first observation that pops into my unguarded mouth is that she is a New Zealander of Chinese descent. This is not the way she prefers people to approach her writing, she tells me smiling: “you write out of your own experience, but your experience isn’t just from your ethnic background, it is informed by everything in your life.” She goes on to add that most of her poems come with no ethnic flavouring. But in terms of experience, Wong has certainly had a rich life so far.
Growing up in urban, Middle New Zealand Hawke’s Bay, Wong was often isolated from Chinese culture. The Chinese community in Hawke’s Bay was small, unlike the bigger Chinese communities of Auckland and Wellington, and Wong was not aware that she was supposed be different from her Pakeha friends. But however much she downplays the cultural influences on her work, her Chinese upbringing continues to influence what she chooses to write about.
When Wong was a baby, her parents decided to stop speaking in Chinese to their children, to avoid problems with an employee who was paranoid they were talking about her behind her back. As a result Wong can’t speak much Cantonese, something that prevented her from getting to know her grandmother and importantly, many of her own family stories.
As an adult, Wong unravels her Chinese background through her writing. Stories she came across while finding out about her own community have been jumping-off points for some of her fiction. But although she does meticulous research to ensure her work is historically accurate, in the end, what she writes is fiction. “All (my) major characters and their relationships are completely fictional.”
Writing came naturally to Wong. She speaks of a sense of “otherness” common to many artists, but says that she would have become a writer anyway. As a schoolgirl, Wong did not relate to the stories of Sargeson and Mansfield, both of whom referenced spheres of New Zealand experience alien to her, and in the case of Mansfield featured characters that Wong found denigrating to her race. But she identified with the imagination and otherworldliness of Owls do Cry by Janet Frame. With further encouragement and permission from teachers, including one who allowed her to write an assignment on India in the form of poems, her urge to write was unlocked.
Members of her family – her mother, her father, her siblings and her half-Chinese son – wander through Wong’s poems, often becoming conduits to express her musings on love, relationships, memory and loss. Wong has also been working for some years on a historical novel about the Chinese community in New Zealand at the turn of last century. This, she concedes, has spilled over into her other writing – “it’s just coincidental that (I) happen to be Chinese and some of that feeds in as well... I’ve had to do so much research into Chinese things for my novel (that poems) have fallen out of that.”
On sampling her first collection of poetry Cup – a finalist for this year’s Montana Best First Book for Poetry Award – I find that Wong’s verse is spare and elegant, possibly with oriental notes, but balanced by a healthy whiff of Kiwi earthiness. One minute you sigh over the restrained longing of Landscape, the next you are gently slapped in the face with the sly punnery of Kilmog Hill. One gets the impression that Wong is quite happy to step quietly into the background and let the reader absorb the feelings and intent by themselves.
For example, in her poem Tessellation: “the man loves her/deeply//a stone in cool water//milk-drunk/reminiscent...”, Wong demonstrates her understanding of the importance of the white spaces between the words, the things left unsaid and therefore all the more powerful.
There is a subtle sensuality in her writing. Lovers feature in her poetry as often as her parents do – and she is touchingly vulnerable in her expression of her feelings: “as I lie/draped over you with nothing/not a molecule/between us/I feel like a soft wet leaf/a piece of news/paper wet with the love of you – “ (After).
It is probably fair to say that Wong has had her share of bad luck with men. Going over to China in her early twenties driven by “a calling”, she met and married a Chinese man and brought him back to New Zealand with her. However, in the end the marriage didn’t work out.
Wong found that being divorced was freeing: “I’d spent all those years supporting my husband and doing what I needed to do to earn a living and not doing what I really wanted to do. So when I didn’t need to support him any more, I could think about what I wanted to do for me and that’s when I started taking my writing really seriously... I realised – I’m a writer, I don’t need to earn any money, I can be poor, I can just do what I want to do.”
And what she wanted to do was write poetry and fiction, lashings of it, doing the Creative Writing paper at Victoria University at the same time as she enrolled in the Creative Writing course at Whitireia Polytechnic. This change of discipline – Wong’s previous degree had been in Mathematics and she had worked in IT for many years – might have seemed sudden, but Wong was happy.
Typically for a Kiwi, she downplays the subsequent success she had, earning among other honours an appointment as the Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University, the Reader’s Digest-New Zealand Society of Authors Stout Research Centre Fellowship (to write her first novel), and inclusion in Best New Zealand Poems 2006. She says that these honours focussed the spotlight at times, and her ethnicity came up for analysis repeatedly: “I just think you’ve got to carry on doing your own thing regardless of what anyone else thinks or expects – otherwise it can cripple you.”
Wong became involved with fellow Wellingtonian poet Lindsay Forbes, and they had a son they named Jackson. Jackson has been both a source of literary inspiration – the middle section of Wong’s book, subtitled Wishing Spiders, is about him – and of literary disruption. Wong laughs when I ask how her novel is getting on. “I try to write when Jackson is at school or otherwise occupied but it’s not easy! There are limited times you can write and it’s totally, totally different with a novel compared to say, a poem. With a novel, unless you make yourself sit down and write whether you feel like it or not, you’ll never write it.”
Although Wong and Forbes’ relationship did not last, one other result of their union, the Porirua Poetry Café, did. The live poetry performance venue has now hosted many local and international poetic talents. Wong does not see herself as a performance poet – “I can’t put on voices or (put on) a particular persona” – but she does enjoy reading.
And later when I have the opportunity to see her read, I can see this. She lets her words speak for themselves, almost absenting herself from the podium. Her voice is quiet, but with an inner steel which I can’t help feeling has defined Wong’s approach to life so far and comes through in her writing. A quiet, familiar strength. Quiet except for that loud, generous laugh of hers.
See also:
» Cup, By Alison Wong
Alison Wong’s poetry collection, "Cup" (Steele Roberts, 2006), is shortlisted for the 2007 Montana NZ Book Awards NZ Society Authors Best First Book for Poetry. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Best NZ Poems 2006, Dear To Me: 100 New Zealanders Write About Their Favourite Poems, and various other journals and anthologies. She was the 2002 Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University and a founder of Porirua’s Poetry Café. She lives in Titahi Bay, Porirua, where she is completing a novel.
» 14.09.07 / Arts Feature
THE FIRST thing that strikes me about Alison Wong is her laugh. It’s frequent, loud and suddenly throws its arms about you like some long-lost cousin. She has one of those familiar-looking faces and I catch myself wondering if we are related somehow. It’s unlikely, though it would be good if we were. Then perhaps I could lay claim to some of those writer’s genes which make Wong one of our country’s emerging stars.
Meeting her just ahead of a conference for Chinese New Zealanders fondly nicknamed The Banana Conference, the first observation that pops into my unguarded mouth is that she is a New Zealander of Chinese descent. This is not the way she prefers people to approach her writing, she tells me smiling: “you write out of your own experience, but your experience isn’t just from your ethnic background, it is informed by everything in your life.” She goes on to add that most of her poems come with no ethnic flavouring. But in terms of experience, Wong has certainly had a rich life so far.
Growing up in urban, Middle New Zealand Hawke’s Bay, Wong was often isolated from Chinese culture. The Chinese community in Hawke’s Bay was small, unlike the bigger Chinese communities of Auckland and Wellington, and Wong was not aware that she was supposed be different from her Pakeha friends. But however much she downplays the cultural influences on her work, her Chinese upbringing continues to influence what she chooses to write about.
When Wong was a baby, her parents decided to stop speaking in Chinese to their children, to avoid problems with an employee who was paranoid they were talking about her behind her back. As a result Wong can’t speak much Cantonese, something that prevented her from getting to know her grandmother and importantly, many of her own family stories.
As an adult, Wong unravels her Chinese background through her writing. Stories she came across while finding out about her own community have been jumping-off points for some of her fiction. But although she does meticulous research to ensure her work is historically accurate, in the end, what she writes is fiction. “All (my) major characters and their relationships are completely fictional.”
Writing came naturally to Wong. She speaks of a sense of “otherness” common to many artists, but says that she would have become a writer anyway. As a schoolgirl, Wong did not relate to the stories of Sargeson and Mansfield, both of whom referenced spheres of New Zealand experience alien to her, and in the case of Mansfield featured characters that Wong found denigrating to her race. But she identified with the imagination and otherworldliness of Owls do Cry by Janet Frame. With further encouragement and permission from teachers, including one who allowed her to write an assignment on India in the form of poems, her urge to write was unlocked.
Members of her family – her mother, her father, her siblings and her half-Chinese son – wander through Wong’s poems, often becoming conduits to express her musings on love, relationships, memory and loss. Wong has also been working for some years on a historical novel about the Chinese community in New Zealand at the turn of last century. This, she concedes, has spilled over into her other writing – “it’s just coincidental that (I) happen to be Chinese and some of that feeds in as well... I’ve had to do so much research into Chinese things for my novel (that poems) have fallen out of that.”
On sampling her first collection of poetry Cup – a finalist for this year’s Montana Best First Book for Poetry Award – I find that Wong’s verse is spare and elegant, possibly with oriental notes, but balanced by a healthy whiff of Kiwi earthiness. One minute you sigh over the restrained longing of Landscape, the next you are gently slapped in the face with the sly punnery of Kilmog Hill. One gets the impression that Wong is quite happy to step quietly into the background and let the reader absorb the feelings and intent by themselves.
For example, in her poem Tessellation: “the man loves her/deeply//a stone in cool water//milk-drunk/reminiscent...”, Wong demonstrates her understanding of the importance of the white spaces between the words, the things left unsaid and therefore all the more powerful.
There is a subtle sensuality in her writing. Lovers feature in her poetry as often as her parents do – and she is touchingly vulnerable in her expression of her feelings: “as I lie/draped over you with nothing/not a molecule/between us/I feel like a soft wet leaf/a piece of news/paper wet with the love of you – “ (After).
It is probably fair to say that Wong has had her share of bad luck with men. Going over to China in her early twenties driven by “a calling”, she met and married a Chinese man and brought him back to New Zealand with her. However, in the end the marriage didn’t work out.
Wong found that being divorced was freeing: “I’d spent all those years supporting my husband and doing what I needed to do to earn a living and not doing what I really wanted to do. So when I didn’t need to support him any more, I could think about what I wanted to do for me and that’s when I started taking my writing really seriously... I realised – I’m a writer, I don’t need to earn any money, I can be poor, I can just do what I want to do.”
And what she wanted to do was write poetry and fiction, lashings of it, doing the Creative Writing paper at Victoria University at the same time as she enrolled in the Creative Writing course at Whitireia Polytechnic. This change of discipline – Wong’s previous degree had been in Mathematics and she had worked in IT for many years – might have seemed sudden, but Wong was happy.
Typically for a Kiwi, she downplays the subsequent success she had, earning among other honours an appointment as the Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University, the Reader’s Digest-New Zealand Society of Authors Stout Research Centre Fellowship (to write her first novel), and inclusion in Best New Zealand Poems 2006. She says that these honours focussed the spotlight at times, and her ethnicity came up for analysis repeatedly: “I just think you’ve got to carry on doing your own thing regardless of what anyone else thinks or expects – otherwise it can cripple you.”
Wong became involved with fellow Wellingtonian poet Lindsay Forbes, and they had a son they named Jackson. Jackson has been both a source of literary inspiration – the middle section of Wong’s book, subtitled Wishing Spiders, is about him – and of literary disruption. Wong laughs when I ask how her novel is getting on. “I try to write when Jackson is at school or otherwise occupied but it’s not easy! There are limited times you can write and it’s totally, totally different with a novel compared to say, a poem. With a novel, unless you make yourself sit down and write whether you feel like it or not, you’ll never write it.”
Although Wong and Forbes’ relationship did not last, one other result of their union, the Porirua Poetry Café, did. The live poetry performance venue has now hosted many local and international poetic talents. Wong does not see herself as a performance poet – “I can’t put on voices or (put on) a particular persona” – but she does enjoy reading.
And later when I have the opportunity to see her read, I can see this. She lets her words speak for themselves, almost absenting herself from the podium. Her voice is quiet, but with an inner steel which I can’t help feeling has defined Wong’s approach to life so far and comes through in her writing. A quiet, familiar strength. Quiet except for that loud, generous laugh of hers.
See also:
» Cup, By Alison Wong
Alison Wong’s poetry collection, "Cup" (Steele Roberts, 2006), is shortlisted for the 2007 Montana NZ Book Awards NZ Society Authors Best First Book for Poetry. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Best NZ Poems 2006, Dear To Me: 100 New Zealanders Write About Their Favourite Poems, and various other journals and anthologies. She was the 2002 Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University and a founder of Porirua’s Poetry Café. She lives in Titahi Bay, Porirua, where she is completing a novel.
» 14.09.07 / Arts Feature
Friday, August 22, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
http://www.asianz.org.nz/culture/inthelimelight/goldenslumbers
Golden Slumbers - Kah Bee Chow's One Day Sculpture
“Once regarded as the most notorious slum area in New Zealand,” Wellington historian Lynette Shum notes, “Haining Street today is an industrial area that bears little indication of its sensationalist past.”*
As the centre of Wellington’s Chinatown from the late 1800s-1940s, the street also bore witness to one of the most violent episodes in Chinese New Zealand history, when Englishman Lionel Terry shot dead Joe Kum Yung opposite 10 Haining Street in 1905 as a protest against Chinese immigration into the country.
Kah Bee Chow’s One Day Sculpture project, located at that site and entitled Golden Slumbers, is partly conceived as an imagined narrative of Joe Kum Yung’s afterlife. Chow says: “Joe was a miner, destitute, alone at the time of his death with long-abandoned dreams of the elusive ‘Sum Gum Saan’, a new gold mountain, the faded promise of the Otago goldfields.” The artist is creating both a fanciful wish-fulfilment and antidote to Joe’s invisibility as his biography was eclipsed by his murderer Terry’s folk-hero notoriety.
Chow draws a common aspirational connection between herself and Joe Kum Yung. “We are separated by 100 years but Joe and I, as first-generation immigrants to New Zealand, perhaps shared in common the impossible spectacular projected fantasies onto this land that drew us here.”
Chow immigrated to New Zealand at age 12 and her delusions were less gilded but not less imagined, and age-appropriate. “I held onto the prepubescent persistence that New Zealand would equate to my Southern Hemisphere Sweet Valley, as appropriated from sugar-coated American teen fiction.”
This memory of things that never existed in New Zealand links Chow to the strangeness and tragedy of the delusions of grandeur that initially tied her, along with Joe Kum Yung and Lionel Terry, to this place.
Project curator Paula Booker notes, “Kah Bee Chow’s One Day Sculpture imagines and re-creates the gold miner’s Sum Gum Saan but she also spatially and socially engages with the memory and disappearance of the things that actually did exist.”
Wellington’s Chinatown has disappeared, due to a range of circumstances including urban development and changing views towards immigrants that led to greater acceptance of Chinese migration to the suburbs. Golden Slumbers is built upon conversations with the present Haining Street community, the people who have an investment in its history and the Chinese community.
This is not an exercise of inserting history into a site that no longer remembers its past, but an attempt to study the perseverance of spatial and cultural memory in lieu of, or as a compensation for, its physical disappearance.
Sunday 31 August 2008 9am to 9pm
Backyard, 10 Haining Street
Central Wellington
One Day Sculpture
a Massey University College of Creative Arts, School of Fine Arts, Litmus Research Initiative.
www.onedaysculpture.org.nz
Curated by Paula Booker
Commissioned by Enjoy Public Art Gallery
147 Cuba St
Wellington
www.enjoy.org.nz
Kah Bee Chow's One Day Sculpture is made possible with support from the Asia New Zealand Foundation and the Wellington City Council's Public Art Fund.
image: 10 Haining Street, June 2008. Photo by Maia McDonald
*Lynette Shum, “Remembering Haining Street: With Both Eyes Open” in http://www.stevenyoung.
Golden Slumbers - Kah Bee Chow's One Day Sculpture
“Once regarded as the most notorious slum area in New Zealand,” Wellington historian Lynette Shum notes, “Haining Street today is an industrial area that bears little indication of its sensationalist past.”*
As the centre of Wellington’s Chinatown from the late 1800s-1940s, the street also bore witness to one of the most violent episodes in Chinese New Zealand history, when Englishman Lionel Terry shot dead Joe Kum Yung opposite 10 Haining Street in 1905 as a protest against Chinese immigration into the country.
Kah Bee Chow’s One Day Sculpture project, located at that site and entitled Golden Slumbers, is partly conceived as an imagined narrative of Joe Kum Yung’s afterlife. Chow says: “Joe was a miner, destitute, alone at the time of his death with long-abandoned dreams of the elusive ‘Sum Gum Saan’, a new gold mountain, the faded promise of the Otago goldfields.” The artist is creating both a fanciful wish-fulfilment and antidote to Joe’s invisibility as his biography was eclipsed by his murderer Terry’s folk-hero notoriety.
Chow draws a common aspirational connection between herself and Joe Kum Yung. “We are separated by 100 years but Joe and I, as first-generation immigrants to New Zealand, perhaps shared in common the impossible spectacular projected fantasies onto this land that drew us here.”
Chow immigrated to New Zealand at age 12 and her delusions were less gilded but not less imagined, and age-appropriate. “I held onto the prepubescent persistence that New Zealand would equate to my Southern Hemisphere Sweet Valley, as appropriated from sugar-coated American teen fiction.”
This memory of things that never existed in New Zealand links Chow to the strangeness and tragedy of the delusions of grandeur that initially tied her, along with Joe Kum Yung and Lionel Terry, to this place.
Project curator Paula Booker notes, “Kah Bee Chow’s One Day Sculpture imagines and re-creates the gold miner’s Sum Gum Saan but she also spatially and socially engages with the memory and disappearance of the things that actually did exist.”
Wellington’s Chinatown has disappeared, due to a range of circumstances including urban development and changing views towards immigrants that led to greater acceptance of Chinese migration to the suburbs. Golden Slumbers is built upon conversations with the present Haining Street community, the people who have an investment in its history and the Chinese community.
This is not an exercise of inserting history into a site that no longer remembers its past, but an attempt to study the perseverance of spatial and cultural memory in lieu of, or as a compensation for, its physical disappearance.
Sunday 31 August 2008 9am to 9pm
Backyard, 10 Haining Street
Central Wellington
One Day Sculpture
a Massey University College of Creative Arts, School of Fine Arts, Litmus Research Initiative.
www.onedaysculpture.org.nz
Curated by Paula Booker
Commissioned by Enjoy Public Art Gallery
147 Cuba St
Wellington
www.enjoy.org.nz
Kah Bee Chow's One Day Sculpture is made possible with support from the Asia New Zealand Foundation and the Wellington City Council's Public Art Fund.
image: 10 Haining Street, June 2008. Photo by Maia McDonald
*Lynette Shum, “Remembering Haining Street: With Both Eyes Open” in http://www.stevenyoung.
Harm Soi Gok
Harm Soi Gok (Chinese fried pork and vegetable dumplings)
1. Boil 2 potatoes, reserve water from cooking the potatoes. Mash potatoes while still hot.
2. Mix 3 Cups of flour with boiling water in a large bowl.
3. Mix in 1 pkt. of glutinous rice flour (454gms.)
4. Knead into a firm dough - add a little hot water if too dry, add more flour if too wet. Dough should not be sticky.
5. Pull off small pieces of dough and roll into balls.
6. Press each ball into flat circles.
Filling
1. Chop barbeque pork, or use cooked minced pork.
2. Pan fry other ingredients of your choice e.g. Chinese chives, spring onions, preserved turnips, dried shrimps, etc.
3. Add a little salt and sugar and thicken with cornflour.
4. Cool filling so that it will be easier to work with before wrapping in pastry.
5. Spoon a small amount of filling onto the prepared pastry circles.
6. Fold and seal the edges with water, then twist to form frilly edge.
7. Dip both sides of dumplings into sesame seeds.
8. Deep fry in oil over medium heat.
Dumplings can be frozen. Re- fry while still frozen. They are crunchier on re-frying.
Kumaras may be used as a substitute for potatoes.
and another from Margaret Wong
1. Boil 2 potatoes, reserve water from cooking the potatoes. Mash potatoes while still hot.
2. Mix 3 Cups of flour with boiling water in a large bowl.
3. Mix in 1 pkt. of glutinous rice flour (454gms.)
4. Knead into a firm dough - add a little hot water if too dry, add more flour if too wet. Dough should not be sticky.
5. Pull off small pieces of dough and roll into balls.
6. Press each ball into flat circles.
Filling
1. Chop barbeque pork, or use cooked minced pork.
2. Pan fry other ingredients of your choice e.g. Chinese chives, spring onions, preserved turnips, dried shrimps, etc.
3. Add a little salt and sugar and thicken with cornflour.
4. Cool filling so that it will be easier to work with before wrapping in pastry.
5. Spoon a small amount of filling onto the prepared pastry circles.
6. Fold and seal the edges with water, then twist to form frilly edge.
7. Dip both sides of dumplings into sesame seeds.
8. Deep fry in oil over medium heat.
Dumplings can be frozen. Re- fry while still frozen. They are crunchier on re-frying.
Kumaras may be used as a substitute for potatoes.
and another from Margaret Wong
Chinese Sponge Cakes
Chinese Sponge Cakes
¾ C Sugar
¾ C High Grade Flour
3 Eggs
1. Beat eggs and sugar until thick and pale.
2. Carefully fold in sifted flour.
3. Grease (brush with oil, using pastry brush) individual Chinese sponge cake tins or muffin tins.
4. Spoon mixture into tins until ¾ full only.
5. Bake at 150C for 15-20mins.
This recipe makes only 12 cakes, so you may wish to double or triple the recipe.
No baking powder required.
courtesey Margaret Wong
¾ C Sugar
¾ C High Grade Flour
3 Eggs
1. Beat eggs and sugar until thick and pale.
2. Carefully fold in sifted flour.
3. Grease (brush with oil, using pastry brush) individual Chinese sponge cake tins or muffin tins.
4. Spoon mixture into tins until ¾ full only.
5. Bake at 150C for 15-20mins.
This recipe makes only 12 cakes, so you may wish to double or triple the recipe.
No baking powder required.
courtesey Margaret Wong
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Kissing a goodbye to luck, say NZ's guidelines
:00AM Saturday August 09, 2008
By Lincoln Tan
Do not embrace or kiss Chinese people and do not share a pear with others, because it is considered bad luck.
These and other pointers are intended to give New Zealand Olympic athletes the social edge while they are competing in Beijing.
A handbook prepared in New Zealand by the University of Auckland's Confucius Institute advises against "exposing inappropriate body parts of the body" and to "be very cautious in political discussions".
It has also suggested not to give clocks as gifts to the Chinese because it sounds like the "end of life" in Mandarin.
"[The book] is to give the Kiwis an advantage to better understand and appreciate the Chinese culture at the Games," said Nora Yao, director of the Confucius Institute.
"As we understand, the New Zealanders are the only team in the world to have the guidebook."
It also gives an introduction to China and a guide on how to pronounce common Chinese words, greetings and introductory phrases such as "hello", "thank you" and "I am a New Zealander".
The guidelines, which Ms Yao said had been posted on the New Zealand Olympic website, follow China's attempts to tell its own citizens about appropriate behaviour.
DOs AND DON'Ts
* Do give a brief handshake and smile when you first meet someone. Do not embrace or kiss Chinese people, and there is no need to bow.
* Do behave and wear appropriate clothes in public, but do not show strong emotions or feelings or expose inappropriate parts of your body.
* When someone pours you tea, say thanks by tapping the table about three times with your second and/or middle finger, but not too loud as it might mean you are angry with the waiter.
* Do remember to bring some tissue or toilet paper when you go out, because there won't be any in most public toilets.
* Do build good networks and relationships or "guanxi" with the Chinese, but do not intentionally criticise others because once "guanxi" is broken, it takes a long time to mend.
By Lincoln Tan
Do not embrace or kiss Chinese people and do not share a pear with others, because it is considered bad luck.
These and other pointers are intended to give New Zealand Olympic athletes the social edge while they are competing in Beijing.
A handbook prepared in New Zealand by the University of Auckland's Confucius Institute advises against "exposing inappropriate body parts of the body" and to "be very cautious in political discussions".
It has also suggested not to give clocks as gifts to the Chinese because it sounds like the "end of life" in Mandarin.
"[The book] is to give the Kiwis an advantage to better understand and appreciate the Chinese culture at the Games," said Nora Yao, director of the Confucius Institute.
"As we understand, the New Zealanders are the only team in the world to have the guidebook."
It also gives an introduction to China and a guide on how to pronounce common Chinese words, greetings and introductory phrases such as "hello", "thank you" and "I am a New Zealander".
The guidelines, which Ms Yao said had been posted on the New Zealand Olympic website, follow China's attempts to tell its own citizens about appropriate behaviour.
DOs AND DON'Ts
* Do give a brief handshake and smile when you first meet someone. Do not embrace or kiss Chinese people, and there is no need to bow.
* Do behave and wear appropriate clothes in public, but do not show strong emotions or feelings or expose inappropriate parts of your body.
* When someone pours you tea, say thanks by tapping the table about three times with your second and/or middle finger, but not too loud as it might mean you are angry with the waiter.
* Do remember to bring some tissue or toilet paper when you go out, because there won't be any in most public toilets.
* Do build good networks and relationships or "guanxi" with the Chinese, but do not intentionally criticise others because once "guanxi" is broken, it takes a long time to mend.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Pop art blends cultures
JIM CHIPP - The Wellingtonian | Wednesday, 30 July 2008
HOME MADE: The book of Wellington fanzine artist Kerry Ann Lee's exhibition is literally all her own work. The artwork, designs and writing are all her own, and she will personally print and bind every single copy before signing it for buyers. As a third-generation Chinese Wellingtonian she did much of her growing up in her parents' cafes and restaurants.
Milk shakes with fried rice are an unusual combo but to a young Kerry Ann Lee it constituted balance. The Chinese Kiwi artist grew up the child of Wellington cafŽ owners and restaurateurs.
"To me it was a balance of western food; milk shakes with fried rice." Her parents operated the Gold Coin Cafe, the Favourite Milk Bar and the Cantonese Cafe.
Lee is an underground artist, arts lecturer and freelance designer best-known for her underground punk fanzine work.
As part of her work towards a Master of Design degree at Massey University, Lee has tried to make sense of what it is to be a third-generation Chinese Wellingtonian in her Home Made exhibition at Toi Poneke Gallery. She has also presented the works in a limited edition, self-published book that is likely to be a popular artwork in itself.
It forms the exhibition centre-piece.
"Everyone's understanding of the cultural history is different" she says. "This is my kind of interpretation."
Growing up as an English-speaking Chinese New Zealander, Lee says she is perceived differently by different people, some consider her to be Kiwi and others, Chinese. Sometimes people will slow their speech to her and ask where she is from. For the record, she's from Newtown; three generations removed from her Cantonese forebears.
"I grew up with Wellington being very diverse and multi-cultural, and I really appreciate that."
Her work is a playful mix of collages, paper-cuttings, and dioramas constituted from found materials. Kiwiana is depicted in traditional Chinese forms. A close look at a Chinese dish reveals a 1960s state house that could be from Naenae or Strathmore.
"A lot of the things I do are between cultures," she says.
"Art descriptions, design descriptions, the local history, my own personal private moments growing up - all those elements have that kind of push-pull tension."
She was pleased to able to incorporate some oral history from her own family and friends.
There is no tension between her underground art and Chinese tradition; they make a comfortable fit, she says.
"It is, by the nature of the work, very much a self-published effort, very much underground," she says.
"The big thing about Chinese culture is giving gifts, including people and sharing food. The whole thing about underground culture is sharing thoughts on paper. In a way it goes with the personal being political."
The gorgeous book is divided into sections: Chinese proverbs traditions and mythology, first arrivals - the Chinese gold miners and their immigration and finally personal stories of Chinese migrants in Aotearoa.
"People will engage with the work in the exhibition through [the] aesthetic first. It's an elegant piece of work."
Looking back at her Chinese heritage has been a growth exercise for her, she says.
"It's very much something that I want to keep up with, and keep with me. I'm in a constant state of discovery."
Her unique perspective on her discoveries are on show from Thursday (July 24) evening in Home Made: Picturing Chinese Settlement in New Zealand until August 22 at Toi Poneke Gallery, 61-63 Abel Smith Street. A limited number of copies of her book will be available
JIM CHIPP - The Wellingtonian | Wednesday, 30 July 2008
HOME MADE: The book of Wellington fanzine artist Kerry Ann Lee's exhibition is literally all her own work. The artwork, designs and writing are all her own, and she will personally print and bind every single copy before signing it for buyers. As a third-generation Chinese Wellingtonian she did much of her growing up in her parents' cafes and restaurants.
Milk shakes with fried rice are an unusual combo but to a young Kerry Ann Lee it constituted balance. The Chinese Kiwi artist grew up the child of Wellington cafŽ owners and restaurateurs.
"To me it was a balance of western food; milk shakes with fried rice." Her parents operated the Gold Coin Cafe, the Favourite Milk Bar and the Cantonese Cafe.
Lee is an underground artist, arts lecturer and freelance designer best-known for her underground punk fanzine work.
As part of her work towards a Master of Design degree at Massey University, Lee has tried to make sense of what it is to be a third-generation Chinese Wellingtonian in her Home Made exhibition at Toi Poneke Gallery. She has also presented the works in a limited edition, self-published book that is likely to be a popular artwork in itself.
It forms the exhibition centre-piece.
"Everyone's understanding of the cultural history is different" she says. "This is my kind of interpretation."
Growing up as an English-speaking Chinese New Zealander, Lee says she is perceived differently by different people, some consider her to be Kiwi and others, Chinese. Sometimes people will slow their speech to her and ask where she is from. For the record, she's from Newtown; three generations removed from her Cantonese forebears.
"I grew up with Wellington being very diverse and multi-cultural, and I really appreciate that."
Her work is a playful mix of collages, paper-cuttings, and dioramas constituted from found materials. Kiwiana is depicted in traditional Chinese forms. A close look at a Chinese dish reveals a 1960s state house that could be from Naenae or Strathmore.
"A lot of the things I do are between cultures," she says.
"Art descriptions, design descriptions, the local history, my own personal private moments growing up - all those elements have that kind of push-pull tension."
She was pleased to able to incorporate some oral history from her own family and friends.
There is no tension between her underground art and Chinese tradition; they make a comfortable fit, she says.
"It is, by the nature of the work, very much a self-published effort, very much underground," she says.
"The big thing about Chinese culture is giving gifts, including people and sharing food. The whole thing about underground culture is sharing thoughts on paper. In a way it goes with the personal being political."
The gorgeous book is divided into sections: Chinese proverbs traditions and mythology, first arrivals - the Chinese gold miners and their immigration and finally personal stories of Chinese migrants in Aotearoa.
"People will engage with the work in the exhibition through [the] aesthetic first. It's an elegant piece of work."
Looking back at her Chinese heritage has been a growth exercise for her, she says.
"It's very much something that I want to keep up with, and keep with me. I'm in a constant state of discovery."
Her unique perspective on her discoveries are on show from Thursday (July 24) evening in Home Made: Picturing Chinese Settlement in New Zealand until August 22 at Toi Poneke Gallery, 61-63 Abel Smith Street. A limited number of copies of her book will be available
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Tung Jung China Trip 2009
Expressions of interest are being taken for a proposed tour of China in late March/April 2009.The proposed dates, though subject to change depending on flights available, are leaving on 28 March 2009 from Auckland and arrive back in Auckland 20 April 2009.
This tour is different to the normal tourist trips and includes approximately a week in Guangzhou and Xintang to enable members to visit their ancestral villages and taking the opportunity to do their family history. The tour of China will include a cruise on the Yangtze River, visiting cities like Chongqing, Shanghai, Beijing (see the Olympic venues), Nanjing, Qingdao, Weifang, Qufu (visit Confucius Temple),Taishan Mountains and the Three Gorges Dam.
The Tour package price based on the above itinerary is $6900.00 per person twin shared
plus applicable departure & security taxesof approximately $523.00 if ticketed today.
The cost includes airfares from Auckland to Auckland and all China domestic flights, transportation, 4 star accommodation, western breakfast, lunches and dinners and entrance fees to sightseeing as per itinerary.
Everything is taken care of for you except your own personal expenses.
This price is based on a minimum of 20 persons travelling together in a group.
Due to the floating NZ dollar, prices are subject to change up until full payment has been received.
Confirmation by mid October is required for bookings to be made.
For further information, contact Tung Jung website
This tour is different to the normal tourist trips and includes approximately a week in Guangzhou and Xintang to enable members to visit their ancestral villages and taking the opportunity to do their family history. The tour of China will include a cruise on the Yangtze River, visiting cities like Chongqing, Shanghai, Beijing (see the Olympic venues), Nanjing, Qingdao, Weifang, Qufu (visit Confucius Temple),Taishan Mountains and the Three Gorges Dam.
The Tour package price based on the above itinerary is $6900.00 per person twin shared
plus applicable departure & security taxesof approximately $523.00 if ticketed today.
The cost includes airfares from Auckland to Auckland and all China domestic flights, transportation, 4 star accommodation, western breakfast, lunches and dinners and entrance fees to sightseeing as per itinerary.
Everything is taken care of for you except your own personal expenses.
This price is based on a minimum of 20 persons travelling together in a group.
Due to the floating NZ dollar, prices are subject to change up until full payment has been received.
Confirmation by mid October is required for bookings to be made.
For further information, contact Tung Jung website
Henry Chan's life story
I have found Henry Chan's life story - part of a book - the link is below. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=ti8359SiPXwC&pg=PA111&lpg=PA111&dq=henry+chan+australia&source=web&ots=jBL7ni7nu_&sig=MpvWbXw9tYjyd8K2F6qMKd4bvdQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=re sult
Also a newspaper article published recently
http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/hi....l?page=fullpage
http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=ti8359SiPXwC&pg=PA111&lpg=PA111&dq=henry+chan+australia&source=web&ots=jBL7ni7nu_&sig=MpvWbXw9tYjyd8K2F6qMKd4bvdQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=re sult
Also a newspaper article published recently
http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/hi....l?page=fullpage
Maps of Zengcheng City
maps - some of the bigger areas are named
-- Zengcheng City
http://wikimapia.org/#lat=23.3000092&lon=113.820076&z=13&l=0&m=a&v=2
have found Xingtang, and the railway line
http://wikimapia.org/#lat=23.1214166&lon=113.5905647&z=13&l=0&m=a&v=2
-- Zengcheng City
http://wikimapia.org/#lat=23.3000092&lon=113.820076&z=13&l=0&m=a&v=2
have found Xingtang, and the railway line
http://wikimapia.org/#lat=23.1214166&lon=113.5905647&z=13&l=0&m=a&v=2
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Chinese community pitches in with $40,000
Chinese community pitches in with $40,000 for victims of quake
5:00AM Wednesday July 30, 2008
By Lincoln Tan
A $40,000 cheque towards relief efforts for victims of China's devastating May earthquake from Auckland's local-born Chinese community has come as a welcome surprise to the Red Cross after donations to the cause had reduced to a trickle.
"China's earthquake seems a long time ago with the Olympics hogging the headlines," said Kelly Mitchell, spokeswoman for the New Zealand Red Cross.
"But the need is still great, and the recovery for victims will take longer than most people's memories. It will take years for most to rebuild their lives."
New Zealanders donated $270,000 in the first three weeks after the earthquake, but Ms Mitchell said the donations had since stopped.
The earthquake in China's Sichuan province killed nearly 70,000 people and many thousands are still missing, presumed dead.
More than 30 million people lost most of their assets and millions of farm animals died after the quake, and survivors have also lost their means to make a living.
A United Nations report last month estimated the damage at US$6 billion ($8 billion) to the region's agriculture sector alone.
Kai Luey, national president of the New Zealand Chinese Association, said the $40,000 was raised from groups "representing the long-term Chinese residents in Auckland" at a dinner last month.
Mr Luey said: "We, the older Chinese community still care about the devastating effect that the disaster caused our compatriots in Sichuan, and we hope the donation would be a meaningful contribution to the relief funds."
The cheque will be presented to Kaye Jensen, Auckland's Red Cross manager, tomorrow.
Ms Mitchell said the donation from Auckland's Chinese community was timely.
5:00AM Wednesday July 30, 2008
By Lincoln Tan
A $40,000 cheque towards relief efforts for victims of China's devastating May earthquake from Auckland's local-born Chinese community has come as a welcome surprise to the Red Cross after donations to the cause had reduced to a trickle.
"China's earthquake seems a long time ago with the Olympics hogging the headlines," said Kelly Mitchell, spokeswoman for the New Zealand Red Cross.
"But the need is still great, and the recovery for victims will take longer than most people's memories. It will take years for most to rebuild their lives."
New Zealanders donated $270,000 in the first three weeks after the earthquake, but Ms Mitchell said the donations had since stopped.
The earthquake in China's Sichuan province killed nearly 70,000 people and many thousands are still missing, presumed dead.
More than 30 million people lost most of their assets and millions of farm animals died after the quake, and survivors have also lost their means to make a living.
A United Nations report last month estimated the damage at US$6 billion ($8 billion) to the region's agriculture sector alone.
Kai Luey, national president of the New Zealand Chinese Association, said the $40,000 was raised from groups "representing the long-term Chinese residents in Auckland" at a dinner last month.
Mr Luey said: "We, the older Chinese community still care about the devastating effect that the disaster caused our compatriots in Sichuan, and we hope the donation would be a meaningful contribution to the relief funds."
The cheque will be presented to Kaye Jensen, Auckland's Red Cross manager, tomorrow.
Ms Mitchell said the donation from Auckland's Chinese community was timely.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Southern Fried Rice - Takes Over China
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1560449379292849948&pr=goog-sl
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Olympic effort for big move ... and don't forget the rice
In just a few days a 12-metre container, full of gear, will be loaded aboard a boat to China.
Inside it will be stowed all the equipment required to help the New Zealand team realise its Olympic dreams.
Everything from printers and plasma TVs, to medicines and muesli bars are included in the inventory, which leaves Auckland on May 25.
More equipment - including uniforms - will be flown to China on June 30.
"A lot of this gear we have carted around for the past few games," says chef de mission Dave Currie, and most of it will be used to make Olympic Village life as comfortable as possible.
Games organisers have provided the New Zealanders with "a blank canvas, pretty much", on which to build a village, so a Maori gateway, and 800kg granite base with accompanying sculpture, should help brighten the place up a bit.
"NZ banners and signs" will add an Antipodean touch to village environs, as should the five outdoor umbrellas.
The Olympic list is nothing if not comprehensive, to the point of being mundane.
12 office chairs are making the trip to China, with 12 whiteboards and an extension ladder.
Sharp-eyed readers might spot an anomaly in the list: 32 drying racks, but only two irons.
That, says Currie, is because the space-age outfits to be worn by our athletes don't require anything as quaint as ironing.
"The kind of gear we have got, you wash it, you shake it, and it's damn near dry."
Six fans and two boxes of air cleaners will help the athletes breath easy.
Dispatching 300 cans of rice to China might sound as sensible as sending coal to Newcastle, but Currie says creamed rice provides a quick blast of carbohydrates to exhausted athletes at the end of their events.
Team management has "no concerns about food or dining" while in China.
The team has banked on the equipment taking a month to clear customs, and Currie is confident everything will be in place by the time the 300-strong squad arrives in China.
An advance guard is scheduled to leave New Zealand for China on July 19, with the first athletes set to touch down on July 27.
Competition begins on August 9.
Inside it will be stowed all the equipment required to help the New Zealand team realise its Olympic dreams.
Everything from printers and plasma TVs, to medicines and muesli bars are included in the inventory, which leaves Auckland on May 25.
More equipment - including uniforms - will be flown to China on June 30.
"A lot of this gear we have carted around for the past few games," says chef de mission Dave Currie, and most of it will be used to make Olympic Village life as comfortable as possible.
Games organisers have provided the New Zealanders with "a blank canvas, pretty much", on which to build a village, so a Maori gateway, and 800kg granite base with accompanying sculpture, should help brighten the place up a bit.
"NZ banners and signs" will add an Antipodean touch to village environs, as should the five outdoor umbrellas.
The Olympic list is nothing if not comprehensive, to the point of being mundane.
12 office chairs are making the trip to China, with 12 whiteboards and an extension ladder.
Sharp-eyed readers might spot an anomaly in the list: 32 drying racks, but only two irons.
That, says Currie, is because the space-age outfits to be worn by our athletes don't require anything as quaint as ironing.
"The kind of gear we have got, you wash it, you shake it, and it's damn near dry."
Six fans and two boxes of air cleaners will help the athletes breath easy.
Dispatching 300 cans of rice to China might sound as sensible as sending coal to Newcastle, but Currie says creamed rice provides a quick blast of carbohydrates to exhausted athletes at the end of their events.
Team management has "no concerns about food or dining" while in China.
The team has banked on the equipment taking a month to clear customs, and Currie is confident everything will be in place by the time the 300-strong squad arrives in China.
An advance guard is scheduled to leave New Zealand for China on July 19, with the first athletes set to touch down on July 27.
Competition begins on August 9.
Rice Rolls
2 bags Rice flour
1/2 bag cornflour
2.5 litres water
filling can be BBQ pork, vegetarian, beef, prawns, dried shrimps.
Mix ingrediaents to make a very thin mix. Oil a container - like a flan dish, ladle a spoon of mix into container.
Steam. When cooked, put a line of the filling on the cooked roll - roll into shape.
1/2 bag cornflour
2.5 litres water
filling can be BBQ pork, vegetarian, beef, prawns, dried shrimps.
Mix ingrediaents to make a very thin mix. Oil a container - like a flan dish, ladle a spoon of mix into container.
Steam. When cooked, put a line of the filling on the cooked roll - roll into shape.
Chinese Settlement in Whittlesea
Chinese Settlement in Whittlesea
http://whittleseachineseassociation.blog....lesea-book.html
"Chinese Settlement in Whittlesea" Book Download
We are pleased to announce the launch of the digitized version
It is offered free to download exclusively on this website.
All you need to do is to extract files from WinZip and Adobe Acrobat Reader to read it.
"Chinese Settlement in Whittlesea: Our Chinese Community, Our Stories" (17.6MB)
http://whittleseachineseassociation.blog....lesea-book.html
"Chinese Settlement in Whittlesea" Book Download
We are pleased to announce the launch of the digitized version
It is offered free to download exclusively on this website.
All you need to do is to extract files from WinZip and Adobe Acrobat Reader to read it.
"Chinese Settlement in Whittlesea: Our Chinese Community, Our Stories" (17.6MB)
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Dragon's creator wants focus on NZ team
5:00AM Wednesday April 30, 2008
By Lincoln Tan
Architect Ron Sang, putting the final touches to his dragon sculpture yesterday, hoped Kiwis could forget about the controversies over the Beijing Olympics and concentrate on supporting the New Zealand team.
The sculpture, an abstract dragon with a greenstone ball, will be unveiled tonight and presented as a good luck gift to the New Zealand Olympians after the launch ceremony of their uniform.
"We don't want to get into the politics of the Olympics, but just get behind our team," said Mr Sang, a member of the New Zealand Chinese Association.
The $50,000 sculpture was designed by New Zealand Chinese artist Guy Ngan, who will be at the function tonight at Villa Maria Estate, where the team's chef de mission, Dave Currie, will be presented with the art piece by association vice-president Steven Young.
Money for the sculpture was raised mainly from the local-born Chinese community.
The dragon will be with the Kiwi Olympians until the end of the Games, when it will be presented to the hosts as New Zealand's gift to them.
"The dragon is a perfect symbol for China, but we didn't want to give them a sculpture of a real dragon because they have plenty of those," Mr Sang said.
"That is why we decided to have an modern abstract dragon, one that's uniquely New Zealand - and having the greenstone is our way of including the Maori people in our gift."
Sheet-metal engineer Wayne Blythen, who worked on the sculpture, said it took six weeks and more than 200 man hours to put it together. It is on a 1000kg black-granite base, imported from China, engraved with the words "in recognition of the enduring friendship between China and New Zealand" in English and Chinese.
The sculpture will be exhibited at the Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin airports until it goes to Beijing in July.
By Lincoln Tan
Architect Ron Sang, putting the final touches to his dragon sculpture yesterday, hoped Kiwis could forget about the controversies over the Beijing Olympics and concentrate on supporting the New Zealand team.
The sculpture, an abstract dragon with a greenstone ball, will be unveiled tonight and presented as a good luck gift to the New Zealand Olympians after the launch ceremony of their uniform.
"We don't want to get into the politics of the Olympics, but just get behind our team," said Mr Sang, a member of the New Zealand Chinese Association.
The $50,000 sculpture was designed by New Zealand Chinese artist Guy Ngan, who will be at the function tonight at Villa Maria Estate, where the team's chef de mission, Dave Currie, will be presented with the art piece by association vice-president Steven Young.
Money for the sculpture was raised mainly from the local-born Chinese community.
The dragon will be with the Kiwi Olympians until the end of the Games, when it will be presented to the hosts as New Zealand's gift to them.
"The dragon is a perfect symbol for China, but we didn't want to give them a sculpture of a real dragon because they have plenty of those," Mr Sang said.
"That is why we decided to have an modern abstract dragon, one that's uniquely New Zealand - and having the greenstone is our way of including the Maori people in our gift."
Sheet-metal engineer Wayne Blythen, who worked on the sculpture, said it took six weeks and more than 200 man hours to put it together. It is on a 1000kg black-granite base, imported from China, engraved with the words "in recognition of the enduring friendship between China and New Zealand" in English and Chinese.
The sculpture will be exhibited at the Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin airports until it goes to Beijing in July.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Fight that helped end hostilities at home
Fight that helped end hostilities at home
5:00AM Thursday April 24, 2008
By Lincoln Tan
World War II veteran Daniel Chan Lee says he will spend Anzac Day remembering those like his brother Willie who fought and died for New Zealand. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey
Attending the Anzac Day service used to be an annual routine for World War II veteran Daniel Chan Lee.
But the 93-year-old former transport soldier at 7 Royal Military Transport Unit says he is now too old for parades and will instead spend tomorrow remembering those who died fighting for New Zealand, including his brother.
Willie, his elder brother, who served as a fighter pilot in the Air Force, died when his plane crashed in Cheshire, England, in 1942.
Mr Lee, one of six boys, also had a younger brother, Harry, who served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force.
Mr Lee said New Zealand in those days had laws that discriminated against the Chinese, who were singled out as "undesirable aliens".
It had regulations such as the poll-tax, tonnage ratio, literacy test and thumb printing to limit the number of Chinese coming to New Zealand.
However, Mr Lee said many of the local-born Chinese still considered it to be an honour to be able to serve the country as soldiers, and he said the Army was a "like a different world".
"There was no racism there because we were all united with a common desire of wanting to serve our country, our home."
Mr Lee said his brother Willie is proof of how "colour blind New Zealand gets" when it comes to the Anzacs and other soldiers who died at war. Willie's name is listed on the Roll of Honour in Auckland War Memorial Museum's Hall of Memories.
"It didn't matter that he was Chinese; Willie was treated just as every other fallen soldier in the war."
Mr Lee said it had been his dream to fight overseas, but the Army said he looked too much like a Japanese.
Dr Manying Ip, an associate professor of Asian studies at the University of Auckland, wrote in her book Dinkum Aliens: Chinese New Zealanders in World War II: "In spite of their marginalised status, the hostile social climate, and their very small number (2,943 in the 1936 census), patriotic Chinese New Zealanders, mostly local-born, served in the Air Force, Army and Home Guard.
"World War II marked the crucial turning point for the Chinese community in New Zealand," Professor Ip wrote.
"The status of Chinese rose markedly, and Chinese market-gardeners [who grew produce for the troops] were classified as essential industry workers, their patriotic fundraising efforts within New Zealand and the valiant war resistance back in China were praised and acknowledged."
Mr Lee said he would not attend a service this year.
"By serving in the Army, the Chinese proved that we are just as loyal to New Zealand as anyone else, and I guess in that alone, the victory is ours."
Chinese had barred from naturalisation since 1908, but after World War II, New Zealand laws were changed to allow them to apply for citizenship.
On the web: The Auckland War Memorial Museum has a Book of Remembrance on its website for people to post messages on to remember those who served and died in war.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=123&objectid=10505916
5:00AM Thursday April 24, 2008
By Lincoln Tan
World War II veteran Daniel Chan Lee says he will spend Anzac Day remembering those like his brother Willie who fought and died for New Zealand. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey
Attending the Anzac Day service used to be an annual routine for World War II veteran Daniel Chan Lee.
But the 93-year-old former transport soldier at 7 Royal Military Transport Unit says he is now too old for parades and will instead spend tomorrow remembering those who died fighting for New Zealand, including his brother.
Willie, his elder brother, who served as a fighter pilot in the Air Force, died when his plane crashed in Cheshire, England, in 1942.
Mr Lee, one of six boys, also had a younger brother, Harry, who served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force.
Mr Lee said New Zealand in those days had laws that discriminated against the Chinese, who were singled out as "undesirable aliens".
It had regulations such as the poll-tax, tonnage ratio, literacy test and thumb printing to limit the number of Chinese coming to New Zealand.
However, Mr Lee said many of the local-born Chinese still considered it to be an honour to be able to serve the country as soldiers, and he said the Army was a "like a different world".
"There was no racism there because we were all united with a common desire of wanting to serve our country, our home."
Mr Lee said his brother Willie is proof of how "colour blind New Zealand gets" when it comes to the Anzacs and other soldiers who died at war. Willie's name is listed on the Roll of Honour in Auckland War Memorial Museum's Hall of Memories.
"It didn't matter that he was Chinese; Willie was treated just as every other fallen soldier in the war."
Mr Lee said it had been his dream to fight overseas, but the Army said he looked too much like a Japanese.
Dr Manying Ip, an associate professor of Asian studies at the University of Auckland, wrote in her book Dinkum Aliens: Chinese New Zealanders in World War II: "In spite of their marginalised status, the hostile social climate, and their very small number (2,943 in the 1936 census), patriotic Chinese New Zealanders, mostly local-born, served in the Air Force, Army and Home Guard.
"World War II marked the crucial turning point for the Chinese community in New Zealand," Professor Ip wrote.
"The status of Chinese rose markedly, and Chinese market-gardeners [who grew produce for the troops] were classified as essential industry workers, their patriotic fundraising efforts within New Zealand and the valiant war resistance back in China were praised and acknowledged."
Mr Lee said he would not attend a service this year.
"By serving in the Army, the Chinese proved that we are just as loyal to New Zealand as anyone else, and I guess in that alone, the victory is ours."
Chinese had barred from naturalisation since 1908, but after World War II, New Zealand laws were changed to allow them to apply for citizenship.
On the web: The Auckland War Memorial Museum has a Book of Remembrance on its website for people to post messages on to remember those who served and died in war.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=123&objectid=10505916
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Wanted - lots more Kiwi spuds to feed China
Stephen Wong says the problem will be satisfying a big market. Thrilled by the potential the free trade agreement with China brings, potato chip-maker Steven Wong is spending $2.8 million on new machinery to double his factory's production. But the chief executive of Fresher Foods is now faced with a new problem - New Zealand does not have enough potatoes to meet China's demands. "The free trade agreement opens up an almost unlimited potential," he said. "But many New Zealand companies will not be able to meet the demand of a market with 1.4 billion people." Mr Wong, 60, who was in Beijing as part of the delegation accompanying Prime Minister Helen Clark, said the new machinery at his East Tamaki chip factory to be installed this month would double weekly production to 800 tonnes. But his company would still struggle to meet Chinese orders, which are expected to skyrocket when tariffs are removed. "The lowest price I can offer for the chips at the moment is still about 5c above what the Americans and Europeans charge, but all that will change when the tariffs are eliminated," Mr Wong said. "Who knows what the demand will be like then." He said the factory already faced a shortfall of about 4000 tonnes this year. "China wants 25 tonnes of potato chips from us every week, but we can only supply them with that quantity in a month." Horticulture New Zealand's potato product group manager, Ron Gall, said the cold spring and extremely dry summer had resulted in an annual potato yield that was 15 per cent lower than the 500,000 tonnes New Zealand usually produces. Potatoes fetched about $220 a tonne and New Zealand could easily produce more if demand rose. But whether more farmers would grow the crop would depend on the price China was prepared to pay. "New Zealand has the potential to increase production of potatoes but competition for land use here is fierce," he said. "So, if the price is right, more will grow potatoes, but don't expect them to switch crops if they are going to be paid rock-bottom prices." NZ Herald 17/4/08 Lincoln Tan
Sunday, April 06, 2008
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Book examines historic Maori-Chinese bonds
Book examines historic Maori-Chinese bonds
5:00AM Tuesday March 25, 2008
By Lincoln Tan
Manying Ip says Maori-Chinese relationships are one of the least- documented pieces of New Zealand history. Photo / Martin Sykes
The Chinese men wanted the Maori women for sex, and the women went to them for the money - but it was more than a commercial arrangement, because they did have a relationship - just not the conventional husband-and-wife type.
This little-known facet of New Zealand's history is revealed in a new book by University of Auckland academic Manying Ip.
The men, who were mostly market gardeners, had wives and children in China, she says, but they never saw their families, and had children with the Maori women who worked in their gardens.
And some Maori families encouraged their daughters to be with the Chinese because they were seen as "financially secure".
Maori-Chinese relationships were complicated, and are one of the least understood and documented pieces of New Zealand history, says Dr Ip.
Her book, Being Maori-Chinese, aims to give an insight into the complexities of this cross-cultural alliance.
"Maori-Chinese are hardly featured in mainstream New Zealand history, and strangely, it is a topic that has also been largely ignored by both Maori and Chinese historians here," said Dr Ip, an associate professor of Chinese at the Auckland University, explaining why she decided to investigate the topic for her book.
But the complexities, and sensitivities surrounding it could be reasons local historians have shied away from it.
One Maori elder at the Otaki campus of Te Wananga-o-Raukawa concluded that Professor Ip would get nowhere with her research, because Maori-Chinese would be very sensitive and would not share any in-depth information.
"Are you sure you want to pursue this study on Maori-Chinese relations? I don't think people will tell you much," he said in a letter to Professor Ip.
"Actually, between the Chinese and the Maori, often there weren't marriages as such. There were relationships, yes. After all, the Chinese men lived here without their women for years and years.
"But often the Maori girls wouldn't expect marriage ... I mean, those were very hard times. The girls did as they were told. More often than not, there's no marriage, not even long-term relationships"
But having Maori-Chinese friends, whom she met through her work as a community advocate, writer and someone devoted to fostering better race relations, gained Professor Ip the much-needed acceptance among the group to enable her to conduct the in-depth research that would form the basis of her book.
Today, the younger Maori-Chinese may be confident with their multiple roots and the cultural advantages they possess, but it was a very different story in the past, she said.
"Trying to establish a positive Maori-Chinese identity when both Maori and Chinese were considered undesirable was an ongoing struggle for each one of them," said Professor Ip, who described Maori and Chinese as marginalised communities in New Zealand.
"Sharing memories of one's past is never easy, but for the interviewees it is that much harder because their stories are not just about struggles against social discrimination, but often of family disapproval."
Over five years, she worked closely with seven Maori-Chinese families, whose stories are featured in the book.
"I guess this book is not just about who they are, but it would also help us with looking at who we are and what New Zealand society will become in the future," Professor Ip said.
Manying Ip was born in Guizhou, China, and raised in Hong Kong. She came to New Zealand in 1974 and gained an MA in Chinese literature and a PhD in history at Auckland University.
She has been a long-time researcher on Chinese New Zealanders and Asian immigrants.
Her other books include Aliens at My Table: Asians As New Zealanders See Them (2005), Unfolding History, Evolving Identity: Chinese in New Zealand (2003) and Home Away From Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand (1990).
Being Maori-Chinese is published by Auckland University Press and will be available in bookshops next month.
Email this story Print this story
More by Lincoln Tan
5:00AM Tuesday March 25, 2008
By Lincoln Tan
Manying Ip says Maori-Chinese relationships are one of the least- documented pieces of New Zealand history. Photo / Martin Sykes
The Chinese men wanted the Maori women for sex, and the women went to them for the money - but it was more than a commercial arrangement, because they did have a relationship - just not the conventional husband-and-wife type.
This little-known facet of New Zealand's history is revealed in a new book by University of Auckland academic Manying Ip.
The men, who were mostly market gardeners, had wives and children in China, she says, but they never saw their families, and had children with the Maori women who worked in their gardens.
And some Maori families encouraged their daughters to be with the Chinese because they were seen as "financially secure".
Maori-Chinese relationships were complicated, and are one of the least understood and documented pieces of New Zealand history, says Dr Ip.
Her book, Being Maori-Chinese, aims to give an insight into the complexities of this cross-cultural alliance.
"Maori-Chinese are hardly featured in mainstream New Zealand history, and strangely, it is a topic that has also been largely ignored by both Maori and Chinese historians here," said Dr Ip, an associate professor of Chinese at the Auckland University, explaining why she decided to investigate the topic for her book.
But the complexities, and sensitivities surrounding it could be reasons local historians have shied away from it.
One Maori elder at the Otaki campus of Te Wananga-o-Raukawa concluded that Professor Ip would get nowhere with her research, because Maori-Chinese would be very sensitive and would not share any in-depth information.
"Are you sure you want to pursue this study on Maori-Chinese relations? I don't think people will tell you much," he said in a letter to Professor Ip.
"Actually, between the Chinese and the Maori, often there weren't marriages as such. There were relationships, yes. After all, the Chinese men lived here without their women for years and years.
"But often the Maori girls wouldn't expect marriage ... I mean, those were very hard times. The girls did as they were told. More often than not, there's no marriage, not even long-term relationships"
But having Maori-Chinese friends, whom she met through her work as a community advocate, writer and someone devoted to fostering better race relations, gained Professor Ip the much-needed acceptance among the group to enable her to conduct the in-depth research that would form the basis of her book.
Today, the younger Maori-Chinese may be confident with their multiple roots and the cultural advantages they possess, but it was a very different story in the past, she said.
"Trying to establish a positive Maori-Chinese identity when both Maori and Chinese were considered undesirable was an ongoing struggle for each one of them," said Professor Ip, who described Maori and Chinese as marginalised communities in New Zealand.
"Sharing memories of one's past is never easy, but for the interviewees it is that much harder because their stories are not just about struggles against social discrimination, but often of family disapproval."
Over five years, she worked closely with seven Maori-Chinese families, whose stories are featured in the book.
"I guess this book is not just about who they are, but it would also help us with looking at who we are and what New Zealand society will become in the future," Professor Ip said.
Manying Ip was born in Guizhou, China, and raised in Hong Kong. She came to New Zealand in 1974 and gained an MA in Chinese literature and a PhD in history at Auckland University.
She has been a long-time researcher on Chinese New Zealanders and Asian immigrants.
Her other books include Aliens at My Table: Asians As New Zealanders See Them (2005), Unfolding History, Evolving Identity: Chinese in New Zealand (2003) and Home Away From Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand (1990).
Being Maori-Chinese is published by Auckland University Press and will be available in bookshops next month.
Email this story Print this story
More by Lincoln Tan
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Little sisters escape inferno
Little sisters escape inferno
By REBECCA PAPPRILL - Eastern Courier | Friday, 21 March 2008
SHANE WENZLICK/Eastern Courier
FAMILY TRAGEDY: Aleisha, 6, and Maia, 2, are still coming to terms with the fire.
Get down, get low and get out – that’s what six-year-old Aleisha To told her mother as they escaped from their burning home last week.
They could be the words that saved her heavily pregnant mother Linh from going back inside to try to save her 67-year-old father Hoang Chi To who later died.
Senior fire safety officer Mike McEnaney commends Aleisha for relaying safety information taught to her by firefighters at school.
"She told her mother that they had to get out and stay out. That’s a standard safety message that firefighters continually deliver to children," he says.
The family was alerted to the fire by a smoke alarm.
The fire started in the downstairs bedroom where Mrs Linh’s father, an epileptic, was sleeping.
He had recently had a hip replacement and could not walk.
Aleisha, who goes to Point View School, her two-year-old sister Maia and Mrs To were inside their Moyrus Cres home in East Tamaki when Mrs To made a frantic 111 call to the Fire Service about 6.30am.
The Fire Service communicator convinced Mrs To to stay on the telephone until the first fire engine arrived and not to go back into the burning home.
A nearby resident helped the family until firefighters arrived.
Four fire engines responded to the blaze, which badly damaged the bedroom and caused smoke damage throughout the house.
Firefighters rescued Mrs To’s father from his bedroom and gave him first aid until ambulance crews arrived. He was taken to Middlemore Hospital in a serious condition suffering from burns.
"He went into intensive care, but did not make it. He had inhaled too much smoke into his lungs," Mrs To says.
"I have never experienced anything like this in my life. I keep thinking about it – how I could have done things differently. But I had to save my children.
"Even if my husband was home he could not have saved him."
Minh To says he raced home after his wife called to find fire trucks and the ambulance there.
He ran inside the smoke-filled home looking for his wife and children.
"The fire crew said I wasn’t allowed in there and directed me to my family who were safe with the neighbours."
Mr McEnaney says it was fortunate the family had a smoke alarm.
"This is more evidence that smoke alarms do save lives."
Investigations continue into the cause of the fire.
A funeral was held on Thursday for Hoang Chi To
By REBECCA PAPPRILL - Eastern Courier | Friday, 21 March 2008
SHANE WENZLICK/Eastern Courier
FAMILY TRAGEDY: Aleisha, 6, and Maia, 2, are still coming to terms with the fire.
Get down, get low and get out – that’s what six-year-old Aleisha To told her mother as they escaped from their burning home last week.
They could be the words that saved her heavily pregnant mother Linh from going back inside to try to save her 67-year-old father Hoang Chi To who later died.
Senior fire safety officer Mike McEnaney commends Aleisha for relaying safety information taught to her by firefighters at school.
"She told her mother that they had to get out and stay out. That’s a standard safety message that firefighters continually deliver to children," he says.
The family was alerted to the fire by a smoke alarm.
The fire started in the downstairs bedroom where Mrs Linh’s father, an epileptic, was sleeping.
He had recently had a hip replacement and could not walk.
Aleisha, who goes to Point View School, her two-year-old sister Maia and Mrs To were inside their Moyrus Cres home in East Tamaki when Mrs To made a frantic 111 call to the Fire Service about 6.30am.
The Fire Service communicator convinced Mrs To to stay on the telephone until the first fire engine arrived and not to go back into the burning home.
A nearby resident helped the family until firefighters arrived.
Four fire engines responded to the blaze, which badly damaged the bedroom and caused smoke damage throughout the house.
Firefighters rescued Mrs To’s father from his bedroom and gave him first aid until ambulance crews arrived. He was taken to Middlemore Hospital in a serious condition suffering from burns.
"He went into intensive care, but did not make it. He had inhaled too much smoke into his lungs," Mrs To says.
"I have never experienced anything like this in my life. I keep thinking about it – how I could have done things differently. But I had to save my children.
"Even if my husband was home he could not have saved him."
Minh To says he raced home after his wife called to find fire trucks and the ambulance there.
He ran inside the smoke-filled home looking for his wife and children.
"The fire crew said I wasn’t allowed in there and directed me to my family who were safe with the neighbours."
Mr McEnaney says it was fortunate the family had a smoke alarm.
"This is more evidence that smoke alarms do save lives."
Investigations continue into the cause of the fire.
A funeral was held on Thursday for Hoang Chi To
Tong Min Li
By EMMA KELLY - East And Bays Courier | Friday, 21 March 2008
HOT TO TROT: Tong Min Li is proud of his award-winning hot cross buns.
Tong Min Li has risen to the challenge – his Easter buns have been named Auckland’s best for the third year in a row.
Customers nominated the hot cross buns made by the owner of Manurewa’s Hill Park Bakery for the Champion Easter Bun Bake Off by text message.
Mr Li, who emigrated from China nine years ago, left his job as an electrician to start baking in New Zealand.
He now runs his own bakery with the help of his family.
"We didn’t have hot cross buns in China," says Mr Li, who began making the traditional buns after seeing them in supermarkets.
In the lead-up to Easter, Mr Li and his team of bakers rise at 12.30am to begin cooking for a 6.30am opening.
"We used to start at 2.30am but we always ran out of time."
He estimates the shop sells 1000 buns a day.
Customers have even travelled from Hamilton and Wellington just to try the winning buns.
The bakery will sell the buns for up to two months after Easter, thanks to their popularity.
Mr Li won’t reveal his secret ingredient but admits he spends hours researching recipes at the library.
"We try many things and always ask our customers for suggestions," he says.
The hardest part of making the region’s best buns was trying to impress the judges for a third time, he says.
"They want to see a better bun every year. It’s getting harder to reach perfection."
Bakeries throughout New Zealand submitted their six best buns for judging.
Goodman Fielder spokesman Mike Turlej says the judges consider the buns’ texture, flavour, fruit distribution and the symmetry of the crosses.
Although Mr Li missed out on the national prize, he says the best thing about winning the regional award is seeing the smiles on people’s faces.
"I just love to see the customer satisfied."
HOT TO TROT: Tong Min Li is proud of his award-winning hot cross buns.
Tong Min Li has risen to the challenge – his Easter buns have been named Auckland’s best for the third year in a row.
Customers nominated the hot cross buns made by the owner of Manurewa’s Hill Park Bakery for the Champion Easter Bun Bake Off by text message.
Mr Li, who emigrated from China nine years ago, left his job as an electrician to start baking in New Zealand.
He now runs his own bakery with the help of his family.
"We didn’t have hot cross buns in China," says Mr Li, who began making the traditional buns after seeing them in supermarkets.
In the lead-up to Easter, Mr Li and his team of bakers rise at 12.30am to begin cooking for a 6.30am opening.
"We used to start at 2.30am but we always ran out of time."
He estimates the shop sells 1000 buns a day.
Customers have even travelled from Hamilton and Wellington just to try the winning buns.
The bakery will sell the buns for up to two months after Easter, thanks to their popularity.
Mr Li won’t reveal his secret ingredient but admits he spends hours researching recipes at the library.
"We try many things and always ask our customers for suggestions," he says.
The hardest part of making the region’s best buns was trying to impress the judges for a third time, he says.
"They want to see a better bun every year. It’s getting harder to reach perfection."
Bakeries throughout New Zealand submitted their six best buns for judging.
Goodman Fielder spokesman Mike Turlej says the judges consider the buns’ texture, flavour, fruit distribution and the symmetry of the crosses.
Although Mr Li missed out on the national prize, he says the best thing about winning the regional award is seeing the smiles on people’s faces.
"I just love to see the customer satisfied."
Friday, March 21, 2008
http://www.nzchinese.org.nz/easter/2008/index.htm
On behalf of the NZCA Easter Tournament Committee 2008, welcome to the website of the New Zealand Chinese Association Easter Sports & Cultural Tournament for 2008. The focal point of the 60th Easter Tournament will be the Trusts Stadium at Waitakere, Auckland. It抯 a magnificent stadium, one of very few that will cater for badminton, basketball, netball and volleyball all at the same time!! The touch and athletics facilities are immediately outside, indoor soccer is held in the stadium and indoor netball is held in another facility situated less than 500 metres away.
On behalf of the NZCA Easter Tournament Committee 2008, welcome to the website of the New Zealand Chinese Association Easter Sports & Cultural Tournament for 2008. The focal point of the 60th Easter Tournament will be the Trusts Stadium at Waitakere, Auckland. It抯 a magnificent stadium, one of very few that will cater for badminton, basketball, netball and volleyball all at the same time!! The touch and athletics facilities are immediately outside, indoor soccer is held in the stadium and indoor netball is held in another facility situated less than 500 metres away.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
CANBERRA (Reuters) - Hong Kong-born action film star Jackie Chan paid tribute to his late parents and his Australian roots on Sunday by funding a new science education centre at the country's top cancer research institution.
Chan and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd opened the Jackie Chan Science Centre, at the Australian National University, paid for by Chan's donations to cancer research in honor of his parents, who were long-time residents in Canberra.
Chan made an initial donation to cancer research in Australia in 2002 after the death of his mother, Lee Lee Chan, and was back in Canberra for Saturday's funeral for his father Charlie, who died on February 26, aged 93.
"My father passed away last week. So it is about time I did something for Canberra to remember my parents. I really thank you Australia and Canberra for taking care of my parents for 46 years," Chan told reporters.
Neither Chan nor the Australian National University would comment on how much Chan had donated to cancer research, although the university said the donations were "substantial."
Chan's parents settled in Canberra in the early 1970s, where his father took a job as the head chef at the United States Embassy before becoming a successful local restaurant owner.
Before his career in film, a young Chan lived in Canberra for a couple of years, attending college and working as builder's laborer, where he was given his now famous name Jackie as a nickname by fellow workers, who struggled with his Chinese name.
Rudd, who was elected to power in Australia last November, hosted a dinner at his official residence on Saturday for Chan and his family, as well as diplomats from China and the United States.
Rudd, who speaks fluent Mandarin, discussed ways Chan could
help Australia strengthen its ties with China, which is now Australia's biggest trading partner.
Chan, who is an ambassador for the Beijing Olympics, invited Rudd to attend the Olympics later this year, and said he would be available to help Rudd at any time, but he refused say how.
"There' some secret, I cannot say it," Chan said. "I've known Kevin for a few years. Whenever he calls, I'll be there."
Chan and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd opened the Jackie Chan Science Centre, at the Australian National University, paid for by Chan's donations to cancer research in honor of his parents, who were long-time residents in Canberra.
Chan made an initial donation to cancer research in Australia in 2002 after the death of his mother, Lee Lee Chan, and was back in Canberra for Saturday's funeral for his father Charlie, who died on February 26, aged 93.
"My father passed away last week. So it is about time I did something for Canberra to remember my parents. I really thank you Australia and Canberra for taking care of my parents for 46 years," Chan told reporters.
Neither Chan nor the Australian National University would comment on how much Chan had donated to cancer research, although the university said the donations were "substantial."
Chan's parents settled in Canberra in the early 1970s, where his father took a job as the head chef at the United States Embassy before becoming a successful local restaurant owner.
Before his career in film, a young Chan lived in Canberra for a couple of years, attending college and working as builder's laborer, where he was given his now famous name Jackie as a nickname by fellow workers, who struggled with his Chinese name.
Rudd, who was elected to power in Australia last November, hosted a dinner at his official residence on Saturday for Chan and his family, as well as diplomats from China and the United States.
Rudd, who speaks fluent Mandarin, discussed ways Chan could
help Australia strengthen its ties with China, which is now Australia's biggest trading partner.
Chan, who is an ambassador for the Beijing Olympics, invited Rudd to attend the Olympics later this year, and said he would be available to help Rudd at any time, but he refused say how.
"There' some secret, I cannot say it," Chan said. "I've known Kevin for a few years. Whenever he calls, I'll be there."
Jackie Chan buries father in Australia
12:16PM Sunday March 09, 2008
By Rob Taylor
Movie star Jackie Chan addresses the media before his father Charlie's funeral service in Canberra. Photo / Reuters
CANBERRA - Hong Kong action film star Jackie Chan returned to his Australian roots on Saturday to bury his father alongside his mother almost six years after she died in Australia's capital.
Chan's father Charlie died in a Hong Kong hospital on February 26, aged 93, after battling prostate cancer. Chan brought his body back to Canberra to be laid to rest beside Lee Lee Chan, who died in 2002.
"It's a hard day. I loved my father so much because he did so much for me when I was young. We had a very poor family and he left Hong Kong to support himself. He was just the greatest father for me," a distraught Chan told reporters.
Hundreds of mourners including the US ambassador and Chinese deputy envoy attended the funeral at a leafy winery on the outskirts of Canberra, before burial at a nearby cemetery.
Chan arrived early in a black bead-embroidered suit and dark wrap sunglasses, walking past vineyards and scores of floral wreaths lining the entrance to the DeVine winery complex.
Inside, the flower-draped casket lay in front of a photo of Charlie Chan with his favourite fishing caps and wooden pipe.
Jackie Chan, star of Hollywood films such as "Rush Hour" and "Rumble in the Bronx", arrived in Australia aged 6 after his father moved there for work in the 1960s, but was soon sent back to Hong Kong to attend the China Drama Academy.
He continued to spend lengthy periods in Canberra with his parents, briefly attending a local high school.
Living in Australia for 40 years, Charlie Chan went from head cook at the US embassy to a successful local restaurant owner, though most of his final years were spent in Hong Kong with his actor son after his wife died.
"Australia and Canberra really took care of my family for more than 40 years," Chan said, adding he would open a university medical research centre named after the family on Sunday.
Chan will shortly team with fellow action star Jet Li for the new adventure epic The Forbidden Kingdom, to be filmed in China, and is also a goodwill envoy for this year's Beijing Olympics.
He said he planned one day to move his parents' bodies back to their homeland of China. Charlie Chan came from Shandong province, close family friend David Ng told Reuters.
Friends and mourners inside the funeral said Chan was "very distressed" as he and others passed a wall of family photographs, many showing father and son hugging or fishing together.
Messages of support were read from former US vice-president Al Gore and film director Quentin Tarantino.
Chan and his son Jason led mourners from the service carrying a large photo of his father before travelling to the cemetery, where roses and fishing mementoes were placed alongside the casket in the grave.
Chan said on his website that his father died "with a smile on his face and laying in the arms of those he held dearest".
- REUTERS
By Rob Taylor
Movie star Jackie Chan addresses the media before his father Charlie's funeral service in Canberra. Photo / Reuters
CANBERRA - Hong Kong action film star Jackie Chan returned to his Australian roots on Saturday to bury his father alongside his mother almost six years after she died in Australia's capital.
Chan's father Charlie died in a Hong Kong hospital on February 26, aged 93, after battling prostate cancer. Chan brought his body back to Canberra to be laid to rest beside Lee Lee Chan, who died in 2002.
"It's a hard day. I loved my father so much because he did so much for me when I was young. We had a very poor family and he left Hong Kong to support himself. He was just the greatest father for me," a distraught Chan told reporters.
Hundreds of mourners including the US ambassador and Chinese deputy envoy attended the funeral at a leafy winery on the outskirts of Canberra, before burial at a nearby cemetery.
Chan arrived early in a black bead-embroidered suit and dark wrap sunglasses, walking past vineyards and scores of floral wreaths lining the entrance to the DeVine winery complex.
Inside, the flower-draped casket lay in front of a photo of Charlie Chan with his favourite fishing caps and wooden pipe.
Jackie Chan, star of Hollywood films such as "Rush Hour" and "Rumble in the Bronx", arrived in Australia aged 6 after his father moved there for work in the 1960s, but was soon sent back to Hong Kong to attend the China Drama Academy.
He continued to spend lengthy periods in Canberra with his parents, briefly attending a local high school.
Living in Australia for 40 years, Charlie Chan went from head cook at the US embassy to a successful local restaurant owner, though most of his final years were spent in Hong Kong with his actor son after his wife died.
"Australia and Canberra really took care of my family for more than 40 years," Chan said, adding he would open a university medical research centre named after the family on Sunday.
Chan will shortly team with fellow action star Jet Li for the new adventure epic The Forbidden Kingdom, to be filmed in China, and is also a goodwill envoy for this year's Beijing Olympics.
He said he planned one day to move his parents' bodies back to their homeland of China. Charlie Chan came from Shandong province, close family friend David Ng told Reuters.
Friends and mourners inside the funeral said Chan was "very distressed" as he and others passed a wall of family photographs, many showing father and son hugging or fishing together.
Messages of support were read from former US vice-president Al Gore and film director Quentin Tarantino.
Chan and his son Jason led mourners from the service carrying a large photo of his father before travelling to the cemetery, where roses and fishing mementoes were placed alongside the casket in the grave.
Chan said on his website that his father died "with a smile on his face and laying in the arms of those he held dearest".
- REUTERS
Thursday, March 06, 2008
88 Ways to know you're chinese
1. You look like you are 18.
2. You like to eat chicken feet.
3. You suck on fish heads and fish fins.
4. You have a Chinese knick-knack hanging on your rear view mirror.
5. You sing Karaoke.
6. Your house is covered with tile.
7. Your kitchen is covered by a sticky film of grease.
8. Your stove is covered with aluminium foil.
9. You leave the plastic covers on your remote control.
10. You've never kissed your mom or dad.
11. You've never hugged your mom or dad.
12. Your unassisted vision is worse than 20/500.
13. You wear contacts, to avoid wearing your "coke bottle glasses".
14. You've worn glasses since you were in fifth grade.
15. Your hair sticks up when you wake up.
16. You'll haggle over something that is not negotiable.
17. You love to use coupons.
18. You drive around looking for the cheapest petrol.
19. You drive around for hours looking for the best parking space.
20. You take showers at night.its the only natural time of day, your dirty from the whole day hence you must shower at night
21. You avoid the non-free snacks in hotel rooms.
22. You don't mind squeezing 20 people into one motel room.
23. Most girls have more body hair than you, if you are male.western girls that is
24. You tap the table when someone pours tea for you.
25. You say "Aiya!" and "Wah!" frequently.
26. You don't want to wear your seatbelt because it is uncomfortable.
27. You love Las Vegas, slot machines, and blackjack.
28. You unwrap Christmas gifts very carefully, so you can reuse the paper.
29. You only buy Christmas cards after Christmas, when they are 50% off.
30. You have a vinyl table cloth on your kitchen table.
31. You spit bones and other food scraps on the table. (That's why you need
the vinyl tablecloth).
32. You have stuff in the freezer since the beginning of time.
33. You use the dishwasher as a dish rack.
34. You have never used your dishwasher.
35. You keep a Thermos of hot water available at all times.
36. You eat all meals in the kitchen.
37. You save grocery bags, tin foil, and tin containers.
38. You have a piano in your living room
39. You pick your teeth at the dinner table (but you cover your mouth).
40. You twirl your pen around your fingers.
41. You hate to waste food.
42. You have Tupperware in your fridge with three bites of rice or one
leftover chicken wing.
43. You don't own any real Tupperware only a cupboard full of used but
carefully rinsed margarine tubs, takeout containers, and jam jars.
44. You also use the jam jars as drinking glasses.
45. You have a collection of miniature shampoo bottles that you take every
time you stay in a hotel.
46. You carry a stash of your own food whenever you travel (travel means any
car ride longer than 15 minutes). These snacks are always dried and include
dried plums, mango, ginger, and squid.
47. You wash your rice at least 2-3 times before cooking it.
48. Your dad thinks he can fix everything himself.
49. The dash board of your Honda is covered by hundreds of small toys.
50. You don't use measuring cups.
51. You beat eggs with chopsticks.
52. You have a teacup with a cover on it.
53. You always look phone numbers up in the phone book, since calling
information costs 50 cents .
54. You only make long distance calls after 11pm.
55. If you are male, you clap at something funny and if you are female, you
giggle whilst placing a hand over your mouth.
56. You like Chinese films in their original undubbed versions.
57. You love Chinese Martial Arts films.
58. You've learnt some form of martial arts.
59. Shaolin actually mean something to you.
60. You like congee with thousand year old eggs.
61. You prefer your shrimp with the heads and legs still attached.
62. You never call your parents just to say hi.
63. If you don't live at home, when your parents call, they ask if you've
eaten, even if it's midnight.
64. When you're sick, your parents tell you not to eat fried foods or baked
goods due to "yeet hay".
65. You know what "yeet hay" is.
66. You e-mail your Chinese friends at work, even though you only 10 feet
apart.
67. You use a face cloth.
68. You starve yourself before going to all you can eat places.
69. You know someone who can get you a good deal on jewellery or
electronics.
70. You save your old Coke bottle glasses even though you're never going to
use them again.
71. You own your own meat cleaver and sharpen it.
72. Your toothpaste tubes are all squeezed paper-thin.
73. You know what moon cakes are.
74. When there is a sale on toilet paper, you buy 100 rolls and store them
in your closet or in the bedroom of an adult child who has moved out.
75. Your parents know how to launch nasal projectiles.
76. You iron your own shirts.
77. You play a musical instrument.
78. Even if you're totally full, if someone says they're going to throw away
the leftovers on the table, you'll finish them.wastage is no good
79. You've eaten a red bean popsicle.
80. You bring oranges (or other produce) with you as a gift when you visit
people's homes.
81. You fight over who pays the dinner bill.
82. You majored in something practical like engineering, medicine or law.
83. You live with your parents and you are 30 years old (and they prefer it
that way). Or if you're married and 30 years old, you live in the apartment
next door to your parents, or at least in the same neighbourhood.
84. You don't tip more than 0% at a restaurant, and if you do, you tip
Chinese delivery guys/waiters more.
85. You have acquired a taste for bitter melon.
86. You eat every last grain of rice in your bowl, but don't eat the last
piece of food on the table.
87. You know why there are 88 reasons.
88. You see the truth in this and then send it to all your Chinese friends
2. You like to eat chicken feet.
3. You suck on fish heads and fish fins.
4. You have a Chinese knick-knack hanging on your rear view mirror.
5. You sing Karaoke.
6. Your house is covered with tile.
7. Your kitchen is covered by a sticky film of grease.
8. Your stove is covered with aluminium foil.
9. You leave the plastic covers on your remote control.
10. You've never kissed your mom or dad.
11. You've never hugged your mom or dad.
12. Your unassisted vision is worse than 20/500.
13. You wear contacts, to avoid wearing your "coke bottle glasses".
14. You've worn glasses since you were in fifth grade.
15. Your hair sticks up when you wake up.
16. You'll haggle over something that is not negotiable.
17. You love to use coupons.
18. You drive around looking for the cheapest petrol.
19. You drive around for hours looking for the best parking space.
20. You take showers at night.its the only natural time of day, your dirty from the whole day hence you must shower at night
21. You avoid the non-free snacks in hotel rooms.
22. You don't mind squeezing 20 people into one motel room.
23. Most girls have more body hair than you, if you are male.western girls that is
24. You tap the table when someone pours tea for you.
25. You say "Aiya!" and "Wah!" frequently.
26. You don't want to wear your seatbelt because it is uncomfortable.
27. You love Las Vegas, slot machines, and blackjack.
28. You unwrap Christmas gifts very carefully, so you can reuse the paper.
29. You only buy Christmas cards after Christmas, when they are 50% off.
30. You have a vinyl table cloth on your kitchen table.
31. You spit bones and other food scraps on the table. (That's why you need
the vinyl tablecloth).
32. You have stuff in the freezer since the beginning of time.
33. You use the dishwasher as a dish rack.
34. You have never used your dishwasher.
35. You keep a Thermos of hot water available at all times.
36. You eat all meals in the kitchen.
37. You save grocery bags, tin foil, and tin containers.
38. You have a piano in your living room
39. You pick your teeth at the dinner table (but you cover your mouth).
40. You twirl your pen around your fingers.
41. You hate to waste food.
42. You have Tupperware in your fridge with three bites of rice or one
leftover chicken wing.
43. You don't own any real Tupperware only a cupboard full of used but
carefully rinsed margarine tubs, takeout containers, and jam jars.
44. You also use the jam jars as drinking glasses.
45. You have a collection of miniature shampoo bottles that you take every
time you stay in a hotel.
46. You carry a stash of your own food whenever you travel (travel means any
car ride longer than 15 minutes). These snacks are always dried and include
dried plums, mango, ginger, and squid.
47. You wash your rice at least 2-3 times before cooking it.
48. Your dad thinks he can fix everything himself.
49. The dash board of your Honda is covered by hundreds of small toys.
50. You don't use measuring cups.
51. You beat eggs with chopsticks.
52. You have a teacup with a cover on it.
53. You always look phone numbers up in the phone book, since calling
information costs 50 cents .
54. You only make long distance calls after 11pm.
55. If you are male, you clap at something funny and if you are female, you
giggle whilst placing a hand over your mouth.
56. You like Chinese films in their original undubbed versions.
57. You love Chinese Martial Arts films.
58. You've learnt some form of martial arts.
59. Shaolin actually mean something to you.
60. You like congee with thousand year old eggs.
61. You prefer your shrimp with the heads and legs still attached.
62. You never call your parents just to say hi.
63. If you don't live at home, when your parents call, they ask if you've
eaten, even if it's midnight.
64. When you're sick, your parents tell you not to eat fried foods or baked
goods due to "yeet hay".
65. You know what "yeet hay" is.
66. You e-mail your Chinese friends at work, even though you only 10 feet
apart.
67. You use a face cloth.
68. You starve yourself before going to all you can eat places.
69. You know someone who can get you a good deal on jewellery or
electronics.
70. You save your old Coke bottle glasses even though you're never going to
use them again.
71. You own your own meat cleaver and sharpen it.
72. Your toothpaste tubes are all squeezed paper-thin.
73. You know what moon cakes are.
74. When there is a sale on toilet paper, you buy 100 rolls and store them
in your closet or in the bedroom of an adult child who has moved out.
75. Your parents know how to launch nasal projectiles.
76. You iron your own shirts.
77. You play a musical instrument.
78. Even if you're totally full, if someone says they're going to throw away
the leftovers on the table, you'll finish them.wastage is no good
79. You've eaten a red bean popsicle.
80. You bring oranges (or other produce) with you as a gift when you visit
people's homes.
81. You fight over who pays the dinner bill.
82. You majored in something practical like engineering, medicine or law.
83. You live with your parents and you are 30 years old (and they prefer it
that way). Or if you're married and 30 years old, you live in the apartment
next door to your parents, or at least in the same neighbourhood.
84. You don't tip more than 0% at a restaurant, and if you do, you tip
Chinese delivery guys/waiters more.
85. You have acquired a taste for bitter melon.
86. You eat every last grain of rice in your bowl, but don't eat the last
piece of food on the table.
87. You know why there are 88 reasons.
88. You see the truth in this and then send it to all your Chinese friends
Saturday, March 01, 2008
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