James Liu 1 |
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Written by Steven Young | |
Tuesday, 09 October 2007 | |
Don’t Slip
on a Banana Skin:
A Reply to
Brian O’Flaherty’s “Kiwi View” of the Bananas Conference
The Bananas
“Going Global” conference was the 3rd of a trilogy. The first two engaged with Chinese
communities and promoted the idea of being a Chinese New Zealander. The most
recent one connected this platform to wider communities in NZ and to Chinese
communities around the world. Brian
O’Flaherty presented his reactions to the 3rd conference in My Kiwi
View in ways that demand reply from the Chinese community.
The term
“banana” began as a catchy, tongue-in-cheek reference to attract media
attention. Surely no one could have
missed the humour in giving people bananas in their conference packs and
presenting them as gifts to guest speakers?
The term reflects a long history of assimilation adopted by NZ Chinese
to survive politically and to achieve economic success; among its unintended consequences
has been a loss of heritage language and culture among Kiwi Chinese. The term may have out-lived its usefulness as
I heard some young people at the last conference calling themselves “bananas”
in all seriousness. It’s a joke, guys,
like Black people in the
The process
of revisiting the history of racist policies directed against Chinese migrants
to NZ in past resulted in not only the creation of the Poll Tax Heritage Trust,
with its small endowment of $5 million, but more importantly the will to use
this money to create a public profile, an “identity position” for Chinese New
Zealanders that has been shunned by the community in the past. This was the impetus behind the conferences,
and raises the first issue where I will respond to Mr. O’Flaherty through his
own statements:
“Who
suppressed it, and why?”
Colleen
Ward and Anne-Marie Masgoret in a 2007 issue of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations demonstrated that
New Zealand employment agencies (they used a sample of 85 technology sector
recruiting firms) are significantly more likely to discard a CV with a
Chinese-sounding name and request a follow-up interview for a CV with an Anglo
sounding name even though the two were designed to have equivalent qualifications.
So in 2007,
a person with a Chinese name and superb qualification in IT (hardly a
language-intensive area), was one-third as likely to get a call-back from an
employment agency compared to a person with an Anglo-sounding name, and nine
times more likely to be told there were no jobs on offer. This is in our “politically correct”,
socially sensitive today. It was much,
much worse in the past. No wonder New
Zealand Chinese put their heads down and tried not to draw attention to
themselves in the past. Invisibility was
the safest strategy for survival, and perhaps acceptance. But in the post-1987 era of points rather than
race-based qualifications for immigration, this does not work anymore because
so many Chinese in NZ are now first generation immigrants from
As a
post-1987 migrant, I admire the courage and dedication of those who have
planted a stake in the ground to represent the lives of those Chinese who have
become rooted to this land through the lives of their forefathers, and have as
much a claim to its resources, both symbolic and realistic, as anyone
else. Thank you for reaching out and
giving us a place to stand.
“Over-sensitivity
and implied recrimination over the question of where you are from”
A quote
from a chapter by Elena Stevens on Russian (white) migrants to NZ illustrates
why some people find the question “where are you from” alienating:
Interviewer: How do you introduce yourself to New Zealanders?
M8: Well, they usually ask… start with… a
stupid question, “Where are you from?” To this question I always reply, “From
Brooklyn [
For Chinese
New Zealanders, the problem is more acute because we are a visible
minority. Work in press in the European Journal of Social Psychology by
Chris Sibley and James Liu shows that kiwis can pair white and brown (NZ
European and Maori) faces to symbols of NZ more quickly than they can do this
for yellow (NZ Chinese) faces. While
kiwis say that “everyone is equal” they do not act in this way, neither at the
explicit level of handling CVs, nor at the implicit level of their gut-level
associations of people to national symbols like the flag. This is alienating for multi-generational NZ
Chinese because they are treated as foreigners though some of their families
have been in NZ since the 1860s. For
newcomers, it is not necessarily the most inclusive ice-breaker, though it can
work if there is genuine interest in the reply.
It all depends on the timing and the intent.
“How comfy
are you in your own skin?”
Mr.
O’Flaherty calls Professor Margaret Mutu “an outspoken… angry lady”. She makes him uncomfortable, because he is a
man “with little recognisable past and no concern for the gap”. As he says, this is not the place to discuss
Maori-Pakeha politics, but as I have written in my book New Zealand Identities, Chinese and other Asians in NZ might do
well to orient towards a bicultural system of nationhood where the principle of
non-assimilable difference accorded to Maori as Treaty partners also extends to
other groups struggling to maintain heritage language and culture. The past is only a burden for those who want
to deny its present day legacies.
“Contrition”
makes “the hairs on my neck start to prickle”
Mr.
O’Flaherty “can’t get away from the feeling that the sins of the fathers are
being visited on the sons” with respect to the issue of Treaty Settlements and
the Poll Tax Settlement and Apology.
Brian, one of the best predictors of the economic success of the son is
the economic standing of the father. Unfortunately,
one of the major bases of economic success for previous generations of NZ
Europeans was land alienated from Maori, often illegally. As Kenda Gee writes, “Government is a living, breathing
organism. Just as we hold citizens responsible for their obligations, despite
changes in administrations (including back taxes owed
by their estates when they have long expired), so, too, should
we expect government to be held accountable for
egregious (racist) policies and actions.”
Why should
we do this? Because ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’
(George Santayana). In some ways, NZ is
a marvellously harmonious society, that has transformed itself from an
agricultural society to a multi-sectoral, innovation-based society (with
agricultural as a base) in just 25 years.
But in other ways it bears dark stains of its colonial legacy: the
second highest incarceration rate per capita in the developed world, the
highest youth suicide rate, the unwillingness of employers to hire people with
a different skin from themselves. If
“mainstream NZ” is incapable of harnessing the energies of its New Settler
communities, and healing the divides of its colonial past, these problems will
eat away at its civil society. The “unmarked
centre” created in the 19th century to unite the various White immigrant
groups from
“It’s time we got real about each other”
There is no
question that English language skills are essential to success in this
country. In fact, English language
skills are useful in many parts of the world, not the least of which is
Man-ying Ip
theorizes both about the interaction between the “NZ factor” and “
Dr. James
H. Liu
Deputy
Director, Centre for Applied Cross-Cultural Research
Email:
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