Areezou Zalipour
Localizing Asia in Aotearoa, edited by Paola Voci & Jacqueline Leckie (Auckland: Dunmore Publishing, 2011) 248 pp., $44.99.
Localizing Asia in Aotearoa takes a multi-disciplinary approach to exploring the contemporary experience of New Zealand in relation to Asia and Asians. The book mainly investigates and examines the ways that Asia and Asians have been and can be ‘localized’ in the New Zealand context. That is, its combination of essays and personal narratives seeks to document the cultural and social presence of Asia in New Zealand as registered from various perspectives and analytical standpoints. The diversity of the book’s approaches reflects its ambitious scope in relating Asia to New Zealand and, more importantly, its goal of making the multicultural dimensions of contemporary New Zealand society more widely sensed, acknowledged and recognised.
The gradually accumulating presence of Asian immigrants who have settled in New Zealand — mainly Chinese, Indians, and Koreans — has now created a relatively large Asian diaspora in what is after all a relatively small nation. Some of the chapters of the book focus acutely on aspects of Asian diaspora in New Zealand so as to emphasise its particular cultural expressions. However, overall the book does not make a clear theoretical distinction between the relevance of Asia and Asians who live outside New Zealand (under discussion in Chapter Seven and Chapter Eight), and the Asians who have left Asia and settled in New Zealand: the most obvious difference being that this latter group of Asians have New Zealand permanent residence, and therefore a sense of belonging. They, like any other diaspora, generally conceive of themselves as active members of the social and political construction that is ‘New Zealand’. On the other hand, those Asians who do not live here do not — obviously — have that sense of belonging. The gap that exists between these two groups of Asians and their issues, though, is highly significant to discussions on localising Asia in New Zealand. One may ask what ‘Asia’ is being referred to, and who are Asians within the context of this book? This lacuna has not been highlighted by the introduction, nor by the book’s structure, with the lucid exactness that it demands.
The book is divided into four main sections: a) Localizing Asian Pasts, b) Localizing Asia in the Media, c) Localizing Asia in the Arts, and d) Localizing Asian identities. The use of the word ‘localizing’ in the title and the main four parts of the book reveals the editors’ central objectives, firstly the reframing of Asia’s relevance, and secondly in establishing the dimensions of Asian diversity within contemporary Aotearoa. The division of the book also implies that localisation should occur or be actualised within various specific domains and constituencies. In order to position Asia in the history of New Zealand (the first section), for example, the writers believe that New Zealand’s colonial and postcolonial history should be re-examined so as to uncover the links that exist between early Pakeha/Maori settlers experiences and those of the later-arriving Asian and Pasifika settlers. One such attempt is Lewis Mayo’s essay on Manukau Harbour’s Asian migration (Chapter One). Mayo reconstructs Manukau Harbour’s past by tracing the narrative of Asian and Pacific histories, where ‘survival of a group is intrinsically linked to its territory’. Chapter Two explores the history of the New Zealand Sports Association (NZISA), which was established around 1961 or 1962, and more particularly the contribution and importance of Indians in pioneering the sports of hockey and cricket here.
In its attempt to ‘localize’ (Chinese) Asians, Chapter Three takes a rather different direction by offering a personal account of the connectivities between the Pakeha-and-Maori majority and the Asian minority. Chapter Three is, in fact, Alison Wong’s commentary on her own creative writing process, with a special focus on her first novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (2009). She shares with readers the various stages that went into writing this novel and its effect on her sense of identity and (un)belonging. Wong’s narrative combines her own story and with that of her Chinese ancestors who settled in New Zealand as part of a continuum, and thereby disinters the historical connections and assumptions which connect Chinese to New Zealand — the land and its people.
The second section of the book, consisting of only two chapters, unpacks perceptions of Asians in the New Zealand print and screen media. The shift from anti-Asian sentiments to more positive views of Asians in the New Zealand media is mapped by these two articles. Voci catalogues and analyses several instances of perceptions of ‘the Asian’ on TV, from a Dilmah tea commercial advertisement to Banana in a Nutshell, a documentary by Roseanne Liang, a New Zealand filmmaker of Chinese extraction (Chapter Five). What could have been usefully incorporated is a theoretical analysis that would have explored the relevance of featuring Asia in a Dilmah tea TV commercial (presenting Sri Lankans in their home country) and its economic importance to New Zealand, and also the significance of Liang’s autobiographical documentary as the cultural product of a New Zealander of Chinese ethnicity. What, it might be asked, is the significance of tacking together screen representations of Asia outside New Zealand (as a potential market) and Asians inside New Zealand (as part of the nation)?
Voci writes that ‘the appearance and growth of television shows with Asian content could be stronger evidence of a deeper acknowledgement of Asian relevance for New Zealand or Asian diasporic issues in New Zealand’. This quote reflects her overall concerns about the rare appearance of ‘Asia and Asians’ on New Zealand media. However, she could have emphasised the importance of media representations as strategic acts in localising members of Asian diaspora within the New Zealand nation — and thereby enriching our understanding of New Zealand multiculturalism.
The third section exemplifies my point about the importance of establishing an in-depth and theoretical distinction between Asia in general and the Asian diaspora in New Zealand. While Chapter Six is based on a diasporic theoretical structure and discussion of visual arts by Asian New Zealanders, Chapter Seven is devoted to describing several exhibitions of Asian arts in New Zealand (that is, arts that have come from outside the country, produced elsewhere). This is the case of Chapter Eight as well, where the main focus is on an Asian topic, that of taiko (drum) performance, an art form which has been created not by ‘Asian New Zealand’ artists but by ‘Asian’ artists.
The final section focuses entirely on Asian ethnic communities settled in New Zealand and their related issues of identity and ethnic belonging. These essays focus on issues of identity that are connected to religious or geographical or gender or historical associations of individuals as members of Asian diaspora in New Zealand. Though the final section on localising Asian identities, with its subjective accounts, does not seem to be as theoretically consistent as the previous sections which are based on approaches deriving from three main fields of the humanities — history, media and the arts — it ultimately forms a fitting conclusion for the whole book.
Overall, this book is a valuable addition to academic published scholarship on ‘Asia(s) in relation to different locations within, but also beyond, national or ethnic frameworks’. The underlying coherence of the theme addressed by the diversity of case studies leaves us with an enlightening and insightful picture of the relationship between ‘Asia’ and ‘New Zealand’ in general, and the Asian diaspora in New Zealand in particular. The editors admit that ‘stereotypes and prejudice remain present in contemporary Aotearoa’, but they also believe that the nation will, on a variety of levels, eventually accept its multicultural realities.
AREZOU ZALIPOUR is based in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato. She has a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the National University of Malaysia, and is currently undertaking a research project on the Asian diaspora as represented in New Zealand film and literature with a focus on representation and reception.
Thankyou for reviewing the book and bringing it to the attention of Asian-Australian readers like myself. It is a very important subject and I am glad the book goes so much further than our politicians who still quibble in reductive terms about Asia as a “marketplace”, or whether Australia is part of Asia or not – a yes/no binary that gets us nowhere. I would like to challenge your own reductive claim that Asians ‘like any other diaspora, generally conceive of themselves as active members of the social and political construction that is ‘New Zealand’. On the other hand, those Asians who do not live here do not — obviously — have that sense of belonging.’ Surely Asians living in Aotearoa maintain their complex links with their extended families, friends, and economic and social networks who live elsewhere, and so these links create complex relationships that go beyond a simple belonging/not belonging to the nation. Permanent residency does not automatically make one more “rooted” to a place, though it helps. There is also the “astronaut”, who moves to and fro across the Pacific and connects their host nation to other Asian (and Australian) regions. Belonging therefore is a complex notion that needs to account for the transnational.