I had never been a patriot. But standing in a Shatin shopping mall with thousands of other Hongkongers, trying to sing our new anthem while choked up with tears, there was no other word to describe the experience.
We were bound together by our shared experiences during the first phase of the Hong Kong protests in 2019. We saw ourselves rise up in defiance and march week after week with millions of fellow protesters. We felt the government’s tear gas and rubber bullets, and the horror of seeing teens being pinned to the ground then dragged away by riot police. We saw the city transformed by Lennon Walls, graffiti and the scars of street battles, and we saw ourselves transform with it – into a miraculous, self-organising ecosystem of volunteers, offering everything from small acts of solidarity and resistance to heroic acts of sacrifice and generosity.
When we sang 願榮光歸香港 (‘Glory to Hong Kong’) with each other that night, and with millions across the city over those weeks and months, we sang it with one voice. That voice was – in a sense that felt very real to us – nationhood.
Shatin is not the ‘gritty, neon-dripped’ Hong Kong you see in movies. It was the suburb where I learnt to ride a bike. It was where my grandfather fed me pigeon eggs from his rooftop pigeon coop (illegal, and had to be dismantled once building management found out). It was where I met the girl I thought I would marry (we were five, and we did not). Back then, we were among the first wave of middle-class families to move into the new housing developments there. The original tower blocks are a bit worn now, and surrounded by sprawls of subsequent developments, but it’s still the same vibe: suburban and genteel, in a twenty-eight-storey-tall Hong Kong kind of way.
That night at the shopping mall, there were teenagers passionate about the cause, dressed in black T-shirts that were the uniform of the movement. But there were also old couples in polo shirts and sandals, and young families pushing baby buggies, holding the same anguish and the same hopes, singing with the same passion.
That was 2019. All of that is illegal now. The Hong Kong government’s request to ban the anthem was granted on appeal in May 2024, finally an officially making 願榮光歸香港/‘Glory to Hong Kong’ illegal in Hong Kong.
In the years since the protest and the subsequent crackdown, there has been a mass exodus, with surveys showing nearly a quarter of Hongkongers had made plans to emigrate. Many of those families in Shatin would have been among the first to leave. Being young, educated and middle-class, they had more options. And seeing how schoolchildren were targeted by the government – both as hotbeds of insurrection targeted by police and malleable minds targeted for ‘national security education’ – the question of whether they want their children to grow up in Hong Kong was not a question at all.
Hong Kong had always been a city of refugees, migrants and travellers, a place of in-betweenness. But now, it has become a nation of exiles, a place of nowhere at all.
*
I had never been an exile. At least, I didn’t think so. My family arrived in New Zealand in 1990. It was a year after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the 1997 handover (when Britain handed control of Hong Kong to China) loomed on the horizon. Politics cast a shadow over everything, but my parents had their own personal reasons to leave, and I was promised that there would be no homework in New Zealand.
We were migrants, here to start a new life and to become New Zealanders. Our cohort was met by the first iteration of Winston Peters’ racist anti-Asian campaign, and I got called ‘ching-chong Chinaman’ on the streets as an eight-year-old. It wasn’t always a smooth journey, but it was a journey towards finding our place here. Hong Kong continued to exist in our lives and our identity, but it was just our place of origin. It was our past. New Zealand was our present and our future.
As I grew up and drifted into journalism and writing in the early 2000s, I found myself fighting for our place. Behind every claim that ‘Asians were doing all the crimes’ or ‘Asians were buying all the houses’ was an unspoken belief that white Pākehā New Zealanders doing crimes or buying all the houses was normal and accepted – a sort of customary right – but Asian New Zealanders doing the same things violated the conditions of our citizenship. As if our citizenship was probationary and had to be earned continuously.
In many ways, those of us in that cohort were in a generational sweet spot. We were old enough to be taken seriously, but young enough to be reckless. Our families had been here long enough for us to be culturally fluent, but not so long as to have the baggage that came with having to survive and prosper in a more racist past.
Most of all, we had the luxury of being the children of middle-class migrants, a luxury that allowed us to pursue the most dubious of professions: writers, journalists, artists, academics. The act of doing these things was a claim that we were full participants in the civic life of this country, and therefore citizens in the full sense of the word. It gave us the tools and the inclination to march into white spaces (the Listener and other mainstream print publications), and not just to challenge racist campaigns, but to rip them a new one in ways that their imagined ‘Asians’ – disconnected outsiders – could not.
But something about it always nagged at me. To lay claim to being a citizen is to claim a set of legal, political, economic and social rights that we were promised as immigrants. It’s more than the probationary and contingent status of a guest worker, but it was still fundamentally transactional. We were owed these things not because we were loved, not because we were kin, but because that was the deal. Until 2019, I hadn’t realised just how limited this was, just how far short of true community this fell. I had never known anything else.
*
My journey as a migrant seemed straightforward, and the communities we were building as migrants in Aotearoa also seemed straightforward: a broad coalition of ‘Asian New Zealanders’, brought together by common experiences of migration and being othered. It felt like being a steadily coalescing ‘Asian’ tributary of some grand multicultural river. None of that seems to fit anymore. How can we be New Zealanders if we’re fighting the fights of Hong Kong, and bringing those fights here? If even ‘Chinese New Zealanders’ is too broad, too loaded a term, what is the future for ‘Asian New Zealanders’?
The answer appeared unexpectedly during Chinese Language Week (CLW) of 2022, an annual event aimed at ‘increasing Chinese language learning in New Zealand’.
For the Pākehā who organised, sponsored and participated in CLW, it must have appeared an innocuous Ethnic Event, a harmless and cheery celebration of ethnic communities and linguistic diversity, with loud undertones of ‘learn Chinese to make money’. But for many of the Chinese-speaking communities in Aotearoa, the event served as a lightning rod for our fears and anger towards the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to lay claim to our identities and communities.
At a basic level, CLW celebrated Mandarin as ‘the Chinese language’, erasing Cantonese (the most widely spoken Chinese language or dialect in New Zealand until the 2010s) and every other Chinese language/dialect spoken here. But CLW must also be understood through the involvement of two long-serving Chinese former MPs, Raymond Huo (former Labour MP, a co-founder of CLW) and Jian Yang (former National MP, still listed as an honorary advisor on the CLW website).
Yang was revealed in 2017 to have taught English at a People’s Republic of China (PRC) language school that trained spies. Both helped organise trips to China for their fellow members of Parliament. At the height of the Hong Kong protests in 2019, Leader of the Opposition Simon Bridges met with Politburo member Guo Shengkun, who was responsible for state security. The message of the meeting – though it’s unclear whether Bridges understood it, or cared – was to signal to Hong Kong protesters that the PRC security state had influence everywhere, even in the West. That trip was organised directly by Yang, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade kept out of the loop until a week before the trip.
Both Huo and Yang had resigned nearly simultaneously in 2020 to … spend more time with their families. Radio New Zealand reported that the resignations were coordinated in a meeting between National’s and Labour’s chiefs of staff, though neither party would confirm or deny whether this was based on intelligence briefings they received.
For nearly a decade (after the 2011 departure of National’s Pansy Wong), the two men were the only ethnically Chinese representatives in Parliament. But time and again, they made it clear that their representation of ‘Chinese’ meant the PRC, to the exclusion of all the other Chinese communities in New Zealand. In this context, it’s hard to see CLW as a cultural or linguistic project separate from any national agendas. And as if to remove any doubt of this, the CLW of 2022 was held on the week of the PRC’s National Day.
Language has always been a tool of imperialism, and in China it is etched onto its ancient founding myth: the first emperor of a unified China (秦始皇/Qin Shi Huang, third century BCE) is said to have burned books and killed scholars to pave the way for a universal Chinese language that enabled the administration of a unified Chinese empire. In its most modern and oppressive form, the CCP’s language programme is being forced upon the Uyghur people in prison camps in Xinjiang, where Mandarin lessons go hand-in-hand with ideological indoctrination and forced labour. As with the original emperor, the eradication of competing linguistic and ethnic identities is a part of creating a uniform national and political identity. To see an extension of that programme being rolled out in New Zealand, with oblivious support by the New Zealand government and Pākehā, was a painful experience.
It had particular resonance with old-generation Chinese New Zealanders, whose ancestors had immigrated more than a century ago from Cantonese speaking regions of southern China. To erase Cantonese was to erase their history, and the realities of the Chinese languages as they exist in New Zealand.
Others spent generations as part of the Chinese diaspora in South-East Asia and around the world, and none of their ancestors had ever been a citizen of the PRC (founded in 1949). Others still had fled the PRC, or were descendants of people who fled the PRC.
For Hong Kong New Zealanders, CLW echoed the Mandarin education programme that is being forced on Hong Kong. There, it is an attempt to displace Cantonese and erase local identity, replacing it with a single ‘Chinese’ identity prescribed by the CCP. It is designed as a programme of imperialism and colonisation.
For all of us, this felt like the imposition of a language and an identity that was not ours, and an attempt by the PRC to control and pave over the communities that we had built here.
More broadly still, the CLW was a continuation of the pattern that defined Yang and Huo’s political careers. They were valued by their respective parties for their ability to tap into networks of wealthy business people, and turn those connections into large political donations. Whether they represented the interests of the many Chinese communities in Aotearoa was an afterthought at best. The parties showed remarkably little insight or curiosity about why they were receiving such generous donations. Both National and Labour would eventually become embroiled in the same donation scandal and be investigated by the Serious Fraud Office.
That lack of insight or curiosity – when there is an incentive to not know and to not wonder – was apparent in the CLW organisers’ bafflement at the hostile response. There had been constant complaints by the Cantonese-speaking communities over the years. But even as they were attending patriotic celebrations of PRC National Day at the embassy – concurrent with Chinese Language Week itself – they seemed unable to comprehend their language programme as part of a wider political project, or that this project makes some of us very, very mad.
Every interaction with the PRC revolved around advancing our trade interest, with human rights and even national security taking a back seat. The only ethnically Chinese representatives in Parliament were not there to win over – or god forbid, actually represent the interests of – the many Chinese communities of New Zealand; they were there for their ability to raise money for their parties.
All of this had been simmering for a long time, but Chinese Language Week served as a focal point for our energies. More critically, this was our turf. The CCP influence operations had cash, and extensive business and political links, but as in the early 2000s, we had cultural force. Our ranks were full of writers, journalists, artists, and even a poet laureate.
*
This fight is a fight for survival. A fight to outlive Xi Jinping, outlive his regime, and maybe the next one, and maybe the one after that. It’s a fight at the scale of many generations.
And if the idea of a stateless nationhood surviving indefinitely seems farfetched, we simply need to look to those who’ve done it: nations including Ireland and Ukraine that survived (and are still surviving) absorption by their superpower neighbours; post-colonial states that rebuilt or replaced the institutions and cultures destroyed by their colonisers; tangata whenua o Aotearoa and other Indigenous peoples who work to restore their people and their mana from within the settler colonial states that enveloped them.
The fight to survive is the opposite of a fight to ‘burn together’, but it is also where 攬炒 has led us. The frenetic desperation of a last stand is gone, but its trauma and its glory serves as a trumpet, calling us to hold on to the community and solidarity that it created. These communities are how we – Hong Kong New Zealanders and the rest of the Hong Kong diaspora – turn that myth into reality again, not as an idea, but as a lived experience of solidarity.
More than that, even our community needs community. Community with other Hongkongers around the world, but also with other communities in Aotearoa: specifically with other communities who are threatened by PRC influence and control, but more generally with other communities who are fighting to survive and maintain their identities. Hongkongers are not the only ones who’ve been thrown down this pit, and our community needs solidarity just as we need solidarity as individuals.
This essay started at transcendence and heroism amidst tear gas and truncheons, and ends on community and relationships and survival. This path is not exciting, and it’s certainly not glorious. Goddamn, it’s not even easy. We have learnt the hard way that passions can fuel protesters through battles and sieges, but won’t do the delicate, mundane work of holding a community together over the long run.
But like the Hongkongers of our myths – because we are the Hongkongers of our myths – we’re learning, adapting and flowing back like water into the sea, because this is our path to victory.
A mildly abbreviated chapter taken with kind permission from Between Dreams: Resistance and Representation in Asian Aotearoa edited by Grace Gassin (Te Papa Press, $50), available in selected bookstores nationwide. The anthology examines what it means to be ‘Asian’ in Aotearoa, with contribiutions from journalists, researchers, activists, filmmakers and political commentators including Keith Ng, Tze Ming Mok, Balamohan Shingade, and Isaac Te Awa (Ngāpuhi, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu, Waitaha).
