Being Chinese: A New Zealander's Story

Being Chinese: A New Zealander's Story
Helene Wong

Three decades ago I began a quest – the search for my Chinese identity. My journey unravelled the personal, professional and historical threads in my life, and revealed how bound together they are by ‘being Chinese’. But I am a New Zealander too. So this became a story not only about Chinese identity but also about the country I live in. I wanted to know how I could make a connection between these two places in my life, and thus find my place in the world.

Helene Wong was born in New Zealand in 1949, to parents whose families had emigrated from China one or two generations earlier. Preferring invisibility, she grew up a young New Zealander. But in 1980 she travelled to her father’s home village in southern China and came face-to-face with her ancestral past.

What her Chinese heritage means to her gradually illuminates the book as it sheds new light on her own life. Helene Wong writes eloquently about her New Zealand childhood, about student life in the 1960s, and coming of age in Muldoon’s New Zealand. Drawing on her experience with writing for New Zealand films, she takes the narrative forward through the places of her family’s history – the village of Sha Tou in Jung Seng county, the rural town of Utiku where the Wongs ran a thriving business, the Lower Hutt suburbs of her childhood, Avalon and Naenae.

As she writes: While this is a narrative about being Chinese and also a New Zealander, I know that the search for purpose and meaning in life is universal. I hope that others in our culturally diverse society will find their own ways to embark on that same journey.

For publisher Bridget Williams: We look for books that illuminate the past, enrich the present, and inform the future. Being Chinese does all of this. BWB is very proud to be publishing Helene Wong’s eloquent, insightful memoir.

About the Author
Helene Wong was born in Taihape, and grew up in Lower Hutt, near Wellington.

After graduating from Victoria University, she entered the Public Service, becoming in 1978 social policy adviser to Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon.

She then worked in theatre as an actor and director before moving into film and television. The first script development executive in the NZ Film Commission, Helene was later a script consultant for films that included Illustrious Energy, Leon Narbey’s acclaimed feature about Chinese goldminers in Otago, and directed the documentary Footprints of the Dragon, about Chinese in New Zealand.

In 1996 she became a film critic with the New Zealand Listener; and from 2000 served for six years on the Board of the NZ Film Commission. Helene Wong is now a fulltime writer and occasional actor.

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