Chosen Land

New Zealander-by-choice Kefeng Chu talks to Malcolm Wood.

The first time Kefeng Chu came across New Zealand it was in the pages of a textbook. Kefeng was a high school student in China’s Fujian province, and the textbook talked of Ma-ori culture, of the beauty of the countryside, and – in a chance mention – of “the best race relations in the world”.

Now New Zealand is very much his home. He has a wife and two children here. (His New Zealand-born son will turn seven shortly.) He has a mortgage. He’s acquired the national weakness for beaches and barbeques (if not for beer, cricket or rugby), and he holds a highly responsible job as one of three strategic Ma-ori/Pacific/ethnic advisers in Police national headquarters. “I look after the portfolio of Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Latin American and some Eastern European communities,” he explains, in well-articulated if Chinese-accented English.

Kefeng is trim and smartly dressed. The 40-year-old has an angular face and a well-barbered brush of black hair, and there is a barely-contained energy to him. From his small glass-walled office overlooking the Government precincts of Wellington’s Molesworth Street, he is doing his bit to realise “the best race relations in the world” he once read about. And while there remains plenty to be done, he and his colleagues are making progress. There are websites, publications, and an 0800 telephone interpreting service that attest to their success. There is a formal ethnic strategy, launched in 2005. There is the composition of the Police service itself, especially in Auckland, which in the last three years has changed to better reflect New Zealand’s increasingly cosmopolitan society.

Kefeng’s one frustration is that things can’t be made to happen more quickly. It is no criticism of the New Zealand Police, more that the country in general lacks the frenetic pace of post-economic liberalisation China.

On the other hand, a more leisured approach to life has its up side.

“My problem is that I want some things done yesterday. Being here has slowed me down in some ways, but it has given me the opportunity to think and to plan and to advance the things I want to do.”

Kefeng Chu was born in China’s mountainous coastal province of Fujian in 1966, the year the decade-long chaos of Mao’s cultural revolution began. China’s gaze may have been fixed firmly inwards, but, as he made his way through childhood and into adolescence, Kefeng’s wasn’t. He was intensely curious about the world beyond China’s borders.

In his town library he found Chinese editions of those Western novels admitted into the Communist canon: works by Mark Twain, Hemingway and a number of Russian authors. They were his window into the outside world. “A very narrow window,” he admits.

Meanwhile China was changing. In 1976, the year Kefeng turned 10, Mao died, and university entrance exams – in abeyance for a decade – were reinstituted. Three years later, Deng Xiaoping introduced the new era in Chinese history labelled officially as “Reforms and Opening up to the Outside World”.

At 16, Kefeng took his university entrance exams, winning marks that put him among the elite four percent of high school students who would go on to university. He embarked on first a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in British literature and English language.

His English was learned while studying the Jacobean language of Shakespeare and the Scots dialect of Robert Burns under the tutelage of a medley of lecturers from across the English-speaking world: English, Canadian, American and Australian. “They messed up our accents, but they taught us there was no one way to speak correctly,” Kefeng says cheerfully.

On graduating, he taught English at Fouzhou University for a year, then applied to become an official with the Fujian’s Department of Foreign Affairs. (Fujian is a province of more than 30 million people.) After two days of exams, he was declared one of two successful applicants.

During his three years with Foreign Affairs, Kefeng met foreign diplomats, experts, businesspeople and investors, and travelled the cities and counties of Fujian talking with officials. “We were starting to get overseas investment. It was a very exciting time,” he says.

His personal life also prospered. He was now married, and his wife, a former classmate, had a skilled job in an import-export firm. They had a daughter, and Foreign Affairs provided them with an apartment at a nominal rental. But he still had aspirations, and in 1993 he left Foreign Affairs and China itself to head for New York University. He took papers in natural history and American literature and he nurtured hopes of bringing out his wife and child. New York, however, was not quite as he had expected. The modernity, the universities, the American democratic process: these things impressed him. But he also met many “not-so-lucky people”: new migrants working in poorly paid jobs in factories and restaurants. “It wasn’t really the land of milk and honey. There was poverty I had never expected.

“I also saw the difficulties involved in obtaining a green card. If I stayed I would join that first generation of many migrants who sacrificed their lives in the hope that their children might prosper.”

In the meantime, however, his wife, who had heard good things about New Zealand, had successfully applied for the family to emigrate here. So it was that in 1995 Kefeng found himself flying over the Manukau estuary to the shed-like Auckland terminal, scanning the green surrounding fields in vain for the sheep he was sure must be there.

Kefeng and his wife both had masterates; both had successful careers behind them; both spoke good English. Neither could find satisfying work that would draw on their work experience and academic background. “I thought that with my master’s degree I could teach in a secondary school. But I was told I lacked the New Zealand teaching qualification.” says Kefeng. “Then I decided I should study educational psychology but again I was told that to gain entry I would have had to have taught for two years in New Zealand. I thought it would be easy to find a job; I couldn’t even become a student.”

As a Chinese migrant with fluent English he had quickly been seized on as an interpreter by friends who needed to deal with agencies like Income Support (now Work and Income) and the health system. The experience prompted him to rethink his aspirations. “I was interested in psychology, and I saw the difficulties they faced. So I chose to study social work.”

Kefeng was accepted for a master’s degree in social work at Massey’s Auckland campus. “It taught me about the history, culture and social policy. It was a really good choice. It helped me adapt to this new society.”

When he graduated in 1997 he became a portfolio worker: he taught English for beginners at a language school, did contract work for Child, Youth and Family and started working part time for the Compulsive Gambling Society (now the Problem Gambling Foundation). Soon part time became full time, and Kefeng became one of the principals behind the creation of the Asian Problem Gambling Service.

Is gambling then a particular problem for Asians? Not so, according to Kefeng.

He says the perception is an artefact created by the way we view different forms of gambling. Some forms of gambling – feeding the pokies, taking a punt at the TAB, buying a Lotto ticket – are seen as simply being a part of normal social life. Some, such as visiting a casino, are not. (And this is irrespective of relative social harm, a measure by which the pokies would surely be damned.) It’s not that Asians have a particular predilection for gambling. It’s the type of gambling where they have a visible presence: casino table games.

“Table gambling involves more money,” explains Kefeng, “and it is more conspicuous. When you visit a casino you see this beautiful space, and these large tables, and they seem to be packed with Asians. They have black hair, dark eyes. They are simply more visible.”

Figures showing that New Zealand’s Asian population has a lower incidence of problem gambling than the general population are powerless in the face of an entrenched stereotype.

“I met an artist in a flea market when I was working for the foundation. He said, ‘You Asians are all problem gamblers’. And then, when he realised he might cause offence he said, ‘Well, I’m a West Aucklander and all Westies are problem drinkers.’ Of course neither statement is true.”

Meanwhile New Zealand’s demographic mix, and particularly the percentage of Asian New Zealanders, was changing dramatically. In 1996 the Asian population was 173,502; in 2001 it had reached 237,459; in 2006, 354,552.

In 2003, the Police national headquarters, aware of the need to work more closely with the Pacific Island, Ma-ori and Asian communities, set up an office of Ma-ori Pacific Ethnic Services. Kefeng, who took on the Ethnic portfolio, was one of the first appointments.

Ethnic Chinese, like Kefeng, are probably the best recognised face of New Zealand’s Asian population. And in the 2001 census over 40 percent of New Zealand’s Asian population identified themselves as Chinese. But New Zealand’s Asian population is multifarious. That other 50-something percent includes Tamils, Pakistanis, Japanese, Koreans and many others. Even to regard Chinese New Zealanders as anything resembling a homogeneous mass is a mistake. They can be Northern, Southern, Taiwanese, Malaysian or Singaporean Chinese. They can be first generation, second generation, or the descendants of nineteenth century gold rush immigrants. Some have permanent residence, some work permits. Some are refugees, some international students; some are residents, some New Zealand citizens.

What they and other New Zealand ‘Asians’ share is a vulnerability to prejudice.

Asian Angst, Is It Time To Send Some Back, screamed the inflammatory cover headline of the December 2006 issue of North & South.1 Written by former ACT MP Deborah Coddington, the article recounts a number of high-profile criminal cases in lurid detail. Then – lest it be seen to generalise from the particular – makes some oddly ingenuous use of statistics.

Coddington cites a 53 percent increase in total offences committed by Asiatics (not including Indian) between 1996 and 2005, but omits to mention as an explanatory factor that the Asian population doubled over this period.2

All of which is but a distraction from the one commanding statistical comparison. In 2006, 9.2 percent of the New Zealand population identified themselves as Asian, yet, according to 2005 police statistics, Indians and Asiatics together make up less than three percent of apprehensions for crimes.3 Cut it as you will, how menacing can the “Asian crime menace” be?

Of course there is little defence against the innumerate, as Kefeng well knows. “I read an article a few years ago which said that Asians were two percent of total apprehension and 6.7 percent of the population, so one in three Asians walking down the street was an offender. There are lots of people who aren’t particularly good at maths.”

For Kefeng, articles like Asian Angst are nothing new. All that is unusual is the timing: immigrant scare stories are more usually instigated in the lead in to elections.

“Some people just don’t realise the extent to which the comments they make hurt these communities. People don’t feel as secure. They become uneasy.”

Sometimes legitimately so. Race hate crimes, ranging from harassment to property damage, do occur in New Zealand. An internal Police website details eight successful prosecutions. Here are two, not high profile but surely distressing. While travelling on a train, a woman spills cold water over two Chinese women for talking in Chinese. A man tells a woman to go home and accuses her of being a terrorist for wearing a hijab (Moslem headscarf) in public.

And when it comes to making judgements about ethnicity, what of those other high profile crimes? What of Graeme Burton, who gunned down a father of two and wounded four mountain bikers while fleeing police? What of Daniel Moore who stands accused of murdering Tony Stanlake, allegedly his business partner in a drug-growing enterprise, and of dumping the headless body on Wellington’s coast? Burton, Moore, Stanlake: names as British as Coro Street.

“Do we talk about Caucasian crime or British crime?” asks Kefeng. “Of course we don’t.”

One of the major problems facing a significant number of migrants is their lack of English. “One of my Chinese professors used to say the best way to punish a person is to get him to learn English. The grammar, structure and pronunciation are very difficult,” says Kefeng. One initiative he has launched is a pocket-sized multilingual phrasebook; another, a Police public website with basic safety information in 12 language options. And a handbook has been published to help the Police understand the differences between cultures and religious observances.

But for Kefeng the most important thing is that the Police themselves should include Asian New Zealanders in their ranks. This is happening. Consider Auckland, the most ethnically diverse region in the country and the home to its largest Asian population. In 2003 it had a handful of bilingual Asian police officers; today there are more than 50.

In the next few years, Kefeng hopes, New Zealand will have its first Asian inspector and in maybe 10 years its first superintendent.

“I want to have more young people join the police. I want to have parents tell their teenagers,‘After university, maybe you should consider the police as a career option.’”

By joining the police young people can participate in society and change the way it works. Few other vocations offer as much.

Although now very much a New Zealander, Kefeng has not sundered all of his ties to China. His most recent visit to his home province in December 2006 was the fourth in two years. His friends and former colleagues drove him around Fuzhou. “I couldn’t recognise it.” A landscape of farmland and rundown houses was now a lively and prosperous metropolis. They ragged him about his circumstances. How could it be that he, a New Zealand government official, still had a mortgage? Their dwellings were all freehold. Some had become landlords themselves.

He quotes Napoleon: “China is a sleeping lion, when it wakes the world will tremble”. China, says Kefeng, is waking.

Kefeng believes China’s destiny is to become a wealthy superpower, and that political freedoms will be an inevitable consequence of growing economic prosperity.

“When I was last there China announced media freedom for foreign journalists visiting for the Olympics. I believe the trend is for China to open up. It can’t go back.”

1. While Kefeng studied towards a masterate in social work, his wife studied towards a masterate in business studies, also at Massey. Her class was full of Chinese who, like her, had found it difficult to find employment commensurate with their skills. She is now with the Ministry of Education.
2. The article generated responses in the form of blogs, an article in the Listener, and numerous letters to North & South. At going to print, the article is the subject of complaints to the Press Council.
3. A 104 percent increase can be observed between the 1996 and 2006 census figures. The 2006 figures were not available when North & South went to print.
4. ‘Asiatic’ makes up 1.64 percent of apprehensions and ‘Indian’ 0.94 percent.
For these and other figures see www.statistics.govt.nz