Decoloniality and Contemporary Asian Theatre in New Zealand

Decoloniality and Contemporary Asian Theatre in New Zealand Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam and Rand T. Hazou Introduction: We Ourselves Speak Until very recently, the history of Chinese theatre in New Zealand has been fairly muted. Lynda Chanwai-Earle’s Ka Shue (Letters Home) (1996) is widely hailed as the first Chinese Kiwi play, written by a New Zealand playwright of mixed Chinese descent and one that reflects on the experience of the New Zealand Chinese community.1 Warrington argues that prior to 1996 and the publication of Chanwai-Earle’s play, Asian voices onstage in New Zealand were filtered through Pākehā, or white European eyes, with examples that include Vincent O’Sullivan’s Shuriken (1983) and Yellow Brides (1993) and Stuart Hoar’s Yo Banfa (1993), which was later renamed Gung Ho.2 Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam is a doctoral candidate at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand, exploring decoloniality, identity, and feminist politics in contemporary theatre in both New Zealand and Hong Kong. Her MA analyzed the works of four contemporary Chinese New Zealand female theatre-makers within the bicultural paradigm and the history of Chinese people in New Zealand. She is also a theatre reviewer and critic whose work has been published in Theatre Scenes. Rand T. Hazou is a senior lecturer in theatre in the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. His research explores theatre that engages with issues of social justice. His research on asylum-seeker and refugee theatre has been published in a series of international journal articles. In Aotearoa, he has led teaching and creative projects engaging with both prison and aged-care communities. An example of his work, titled “Performing Manaaki and New Zealand Refugee theatre,” was published in 2018 in RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance. We would like to thank Renee Liang, Mei-lin Hansen, and Alice Canton for providing feedback on earlier drafts of this essay and answering our numerous questions. We would also like to thank Julie Zhu, the Auckland Arts Festival, and again Alice for kindly providing permission for reproducing the images herein. 1 See Lisa Warrington, “A Place to Tell Our Stories: Asian Voices in the Theatre of Aotearoa,” in Performing Aotearoa: New Zealand Theatre and Drama in an Age of Transition, ed. Marc Maufort and David O’Donnel (Bruxelles: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2007), 351; Palomo Frenso Calleja, “Monodramas for a Multiculture: Performing New Zealand Chinese Identities in Lynda Chanwai-Earle’s Ka Shue/Letters Home,” Australasia Drama Studies 55 (October 2009):101; and Hilary Chung, “Chineseness in (a) New Zealand Life: Lynda Chanwai-Earle,” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 2 (2014): 173. 2 Warrington, “A Place to Tell Our Stories,” 350. The term Asian in New Zealand is often used interchangeably with Chinese immigrants from different regions, including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore (see Manying Ip and Nigel Murphy, Aliens at My Table: Asians as New Zealanders See Them [Auckland: Penguin Books, 2005], 13). Chinese are also the most populist Asian community in New Zealand, which often leads scholars or artists to use Asian when referring to Chinese. The term Asian has also been used to refer to South Asian theatre, such as the work of Prayas Theatre and Indian Ink. Throughout this essay, Asian and Chinese will be used interchangeably. Theatre Journal 72 (2020) 325–343 © 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press 326 / Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam and Rand T. Hazou New Zealand is experiencing a new wave of Chinese Kiwi theatre that is based predominantly in Auckland. This wave is demonstrated in the volume of recent theatre productions by Chinese Kiwi artists. It includes important contributions from Proudly Asian Theatre (PAT), a theatre company cofounded by Chye-Ling Huang and James Roque in 2013. PAT hosts monthly readings and often stages full productions by playwrights of Asian descent. Recent productions include Orientation (2018), written and directed by Huang, and Tide Waits for No Man: Episode Grace (2018), written and directed by Nikita Tu-Bryant.3 These works—along with I Am Rachel Chu (2019), written and directed by Chinese Kiwi playwright and critic Nathan Joe—explore issues of racial politics and identity in New Zealand. I Am Rachel Chu was a critical “rewrite” of the Hollywood blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians. Also contributing to this thriving cultural scene, two Chinese theatre groups in Auckland stage plays mainly in Mandarin for the Chinese-speaking community. I-start Chinese Theatre (established 2014) has produced three original plays to date, including A Story about a Poet (2017), written by Yabing Liu. The narrative draws on the life of Chinese New Zealand poet Gu Cheng, who lived on Waiheke Island and committed suicide in 1993 after attacking his wife with an axe.4 Similarly, Felix Creative Theatre is a company that stages works mainly for the Chinese-speaking community, with notable plays including Flatting Era (2016), written by Fei Li, which explores the experiences of Chinese overseas students renting together in New Zealand; and The Intruder (2018), also written and directed by Li and based on a real-life story of Chinese parents living alone in Auckland being confronted by a “thief.”5 Written and presented in Mandarin Chinese, these works nevertheless respond to and articulate the realities of life in New Zealand. If the 1996 publication of Chanwai-Earle’s Ka Shue (Letters Home) marks the genesis of Chinese theatre in New Zealand, then the year 2017 marks another watershed moment in the history of Asian Kiwi theatre, with productions of The Mooncake and the Kumara by Mei-Lin Hansen, The Bone Feeder by Renee Liang, and OTHER [chinese] by Alice Canton, all offering audiences a variety of new interpretations of the Chinese experience in Aotearoa.6 Austin Tseng suggests that these works indicate the growth of an increasingly bold, assertive, and savvy generation of Chinese Kiwis, arguing that Chinese New Zealanders are now exercising the agency to take control of their own narratives: “We were spoken about, but now we ourselves speak.”7 This essay engages a decolonial approach to explore the politically assertive modes of address described by Tseng. We argue that an important theme emerging in contemporary Asian Kiwi theatre is the relationship to Indigenous Māori tangata whenua (people of the land) and the often-ambiguous positioning of immigrant communities in relation to white settler colonialism. The essay examines three examples of contemporary Chinese Kiwi theatre, and how each one explores a particular period in Chinese migration history in New Zealand. The Bone Feeder (2017) by Renee Liang (librettist) 3 See the Proudly Asian Theatre (PAT) website, available at www.proudlyasiantheatre.com. The Pumphouse Theatre, “A Story about a Poet by Yabing Liu” (n.d.), available at www.pumphouse. co.nz/whats-on/show/a-story-about-a-poet-2/. 5 Stuff, “Stuff Events: Intruder” (2018), available at www.events.stuff.co.nz/2018/intruder/auckland/ onehunga. 6 Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand and will be used interchangebly throughout this essay. 7 Austin Tseng, “New Zealand Chinese Performing Arts: A Passing of the Torch,” Hainamana: Asian New Zealand Art & Culture (December 2017), available at www.hainamana.com/new-zealand-chineseperforming-arts-a-passing-of-the-torch/. 4 DECOLONIALITY AND CONTEMPORARY ASIAN THEATRE IN NEW ZEALAND / 327 and Gareth Farr (composer) derives its title from the Chinese tradition of providing food to dead ancestors. The opera tracks the events surrounding the 1902 sinking in Hokianga Harbour of the SS Ventnor, which was carrying the bones of 499 Chinese miners that were being returned to China for burial. Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen’s The Mooncake and the Kumara (2017) retells the love story between the playwright’s Chinese grandfather and Māori grandmother as market gardeners. Alice Canton’s OTHER [chinese] (2017), a “live documentary” theatre production, assembles onstage a core cast of fourteen “non-actors” from the Chinese community to share their stories, respond to impromptu questions, and dismantle for audiences the homogeneity implied in the term Chinese in contemporary New Zealand. Each of these productions demonstrates a shift in political sensibilities understood as part of a decolonial project that seeks to reassess the Chinese migrant experience in relation to white settler colonialism and the bicultural framework in New Zealand. Such decolonial strategies include searching for one’s ancestral roots and reconciling the past through Chinese Māori traditions (The Bone Feeder), exploring the tensions between Māori Chinese Pākehā groups while illuminating the structural affinities of Chinese and Māori as subjects of settler colonialism (The Mooncake and the Kumara), and deconstructing the category Chinese as a monolithic construct to challenge white Pākehā stereotypes (OTHER [chinese]). Unlike other forms of migrant theatre that express concerns about the diasporic experience or dislocation in relation to a “homeland” far removed, these works are driven by a decolonial politics that articulates a sense of belonging and connection to contemporary Aotearoa. They express decolonial political aspirations that circumvent and challenge the hegemony of white settler coloniality by articulating reconfigured relationships between Indigenous Māori and Chinese migrants. White Settler Colonialism and the Bicultural Framework in New Zealand New Zealand’s national identity has been guided by a bicultural framework that was officially established in 1840 with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between representatives of the British Crown and approximately 540 Māori chiefs. The treaty provided the basis for British governance while guaranteeing Māori rights and sovereignty. It recognized the status of Māori not only as citizens, but also as tangata whenua, or people of the land.8 Although breaches of the Crown’s responsibilities to Māori as enshrined under the treaty have led to a series of claims in recent years by various Māori tribal groups, the treaty has nevertheless installed a bicultural framework articulated principally as a partnership between Māori and the British Crown. The treaty contains a strong moral and legal argument for shared governance, and for inserting Māori understandings into mainstream policies and bringing awareness of Māori values into the government sector.9 Importantly, the development of biculturalism as a state policy in New Zealand must be situated in relation to the structures of settler colonialism. As Patrick Wolfe has argued, white settler colonialism is “a structure and not an event,” which is 8 Te Ata O Tu MacDonald and Lindsey Muldoon, “Globalisation, Neo-Liberalism and the Struggle for Indigenous Citizenship,” Australian Journal of Political Science 41, no. 2: (2006): 214. 9 Louise Humpage, “‘Liabiltities’ and ‘Assets’: The Māori Affairs Balance Sheet, 1984–2002,” in Tangata Tangata: The Changing Ethnic Contours of New Zealand, ed. Paul Spoonley et al. (Southbank, Vic.: Thomson Dunmore Press, 2004), 26. 328 / Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam and Rand T. Hazou underscored by a logic of elimination of Indigenous peoples.10 Yet he also points to a paradoxical dynamic at play that involves settler society on the symbolic level attempting to “recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference—and accordingly, its independence—from the mother country.”11 While state biculturalism has provided a means to address historical grievences through the Waitangi Tribunal, it continues to be critiqued as a settler colonial construct that impacts negatively on Māori rights, sovereignty, and racial politics in New Zealand. As Jessica Terrhun notes, the politics of redress have been matched by a wider acceptance of “symbolic” biculturalism by Pākehā, such as “accepting Māori cultural expressions and worldviews,” “integrating Māori vocabulary into New Zealand English,” and “making Māori protocol part of many official functions.”12 Yet as Linda Tuhiwai Smith claims, this symbolic acceptance has also been accompanied by an increasing resentment of treaty settlements and a more general “refusal” to acknowledge “poverty, racism, discrimination, and marginalization” as the pervasive social problems.13 Despite the importance of the treaty as a founding document that framed relations between the British and Māori, Dominic O’Sullivan argues that biculturalism is inherently colonial and “positions Māori in junior ‘partnership’ with the Crown and oversimplifies the cultural and political make-up of its assumed homogenous Māori and Pākehā entities.”14 Moroever, new migrants to New Zealand often contend with the difficulty of fitting into this bicultural model. This situation leads O’Sullivan to ask: “What recourses exist in political theory for thinking about possibilities of a noncolonial relation between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples?”15 Manying Ip proposes that knowledge of the interaction between Māori and Chinese “holds the key to real insight” into New Zealand’s race relations and national identity.16 Similar sentiments have been posed by Rita Wong in her work on Asian/Indigenous relations in Canada, in which she asks: “What happens if we position indigenous people’s struggles instead of normalized whiteness as the reference point through which we come to articulate our subjectivities? How would such a move radically transform our perceptions of the land in which we live?”17 With these questions, we turn our focus to decolonial ways of thinking and being that inform contemporary Chinese Kiwi theatre staged in New Zealand. Decoloniality proposes that the “coloniality of power” did not end with colonialism, and that the modern capitalist world-system imposes a racial/ethnic classification of 10 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 388. 11 Ibid., 389. 12 Jessica Terruhn, “Settler Colonialism and Biculturalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity, ed. Steven Ratuva (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 880. 13 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “The Future Is Now,” in Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis, ed. M. Rashbrooke (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2013), 228. 14 Dominic O’Sullivan, Beyond Biculturalism: The Politics of an Indigenous Minority (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2007), 3. 15 Ibid., 1. 16 Manying Ip, The Dragon and the Taniwha: Māori and Chinese in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009), 1. 17 Rita Wong, “Decolonizasian: Reading Asian and First Nations Relations in Literature,” Canadian Literature 199 (winter 2008): 158. DECOLONIALITY AND CONTEMPORARY ASIAN THEATRE IN NEW ZEALAND / 329 people as a basis for global exploitative and extractive power-structures.18 According to Walter Mignolo, decoloniality involves “working toward a vision of human life that is not dependent upon or structured by the forced imposition of one ideal of society over those that differ.”19 He argues that decoloniality involves “delinking” from Eurocentric categories of thought to “change the terms and not just the content of the conversation.”20 In this vein, contemporary Chinese New Zealand theatre-makers change the terms through which Māori and Chinese relationships have been framed by white settler colonialism. Although both Māori and Chinese are considered minority groups in New Zealand, their status and rights within the country differ vastly. While Māori were considered second-class citizens with some standing within the state and nation, the Chinese were the “quintessential outsiders.”21 David Pearson claims that from the 1880s to at least the 1950s, the Chinese held a vital role in the building of a “White New Zealand,” in that they functioned to reinforce “the borders of what was seen as the limits of national membership.”22 Those groups seen as racially distinct from the “majority” (white Europeans) were rejected. As a result, the Chinese occupy an ambiguous position in the colonial history of New Zealand, at once the visible markers of racial repulsion and exclusion, but at the same time afflicted with historical amnesia and invisibility. The Chinese have been in New Zealand as early as colonialism itself, yet their place in the country has not been adequately addressed.23 The Chinese are the oldest non-white immigrant group in New Zealand, having arrived in the 1860s, yet their presence and intergroup dynamic with Māori and Pākehā have been largely ignored.24 Ip suggests that the “’Two people’s, one country’ formula used as a gauge to measure New Zealand’s race relations needs to be qualified with the addition of the Asian element.”25 Asians as migrants have often been represented as wanting to “fit in” to political arrangements and belong to the status quo, while Māori are trying to “get out” of political arrangements that are seen as impositions.26 We attend to the ambiguous position that Chinese migrants occupy in settler colonial sites by exploring recent theatre that registers how Chinese migrants have been subjected to colonialism. These plays challenge the assumption about Asians wanting to fit in and assimilate, and instead articulate different visions and relationships between the Asian and Māori communities. 18 See Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 3 (2000). 19 Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2017): 459. 20 Ibid. 21 David Pearson, “The ‘Majority Factor’: Shaping Chinese and Māori Minorities,” in The Dragon and the Taniwha: Māori and Chinese in New Zealand, ed. Manying Ip (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009), 40. 22 Ibid. 23 Mark Williams, “The Other from Elsewhere: Arrested Encounters in Bicultural New Zealand,” in The Dragon and the Taniwha: Māori and Chinese in New Zealand, ed. Manying Ip (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009), 301. 24 Ip, The Dragon and the Taniwha, 4. 25 Ibid. 26 Arama Rata and Faisal Al-Asaad, “Whakawhanaungatanga as a Māori Approach to Indigenous– Settler of Colour Relationship Building,” New Zealand Population Review 45 (2019): 218. 330 / Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam and Rand T. Hazou Chinese Traditions and Māori Tikanga: Reconciling the Past in The Bone Feeder The Bone Feeder was first written as a play in 2007 by Renee Liang, a second-generation Chinese Kiwi playwright, poet, and fiction writer. In 2017, the operatic version of The Bone Feeder was presented at the ASB Waterfront Theatre as part of the Auckland Arts Festival.27 Carla Van Zon, the director of the Auckland Arts Festival had commissioned the opera because she felt that it addressed themes and topics that were missing from New Zealand’s cultural discussion. The opera is based on the sinking of the SS Ventnor and reveals that the washed-up bones of the Chinese miners were eventually adopted by local Māori tribes of the Te Roroa and Te Rarawa, who buried them in their ancestral burial grounds.28 With this production, Liang broke new ground by introducing music sung in English and the Māori and Cantonese languages, and by staging an opera about the Chinese New Zealand mining community with a primarily Asian cast.29 Moreover, the intersection of white settler, Asian migrant, and Māori communities is presented from a non-Eurocentric viewpoint, where the customs and traditions of Chinese and Māori communities are respected. As early as 1866, the Chinese arrived in New Zealand as goldminers at the invitation of the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce.30 The Chinese Immigrants Act of 1881 attempted to restrict Chinese immigration by imposing a ten-pound poll tax and a tonnage-topassenger ratio of one Chinese for every ten tons of a ship’s cargo.31 In the history of immigration to New Zealand, the Chinese were the only ethnic group on whom a poll tax was imposed to enter the country. The Chinese community at this time was mainly a bachelor society, since immigration policies prevented families from joining the working men in New Zealand.32 The New Zealand government’s institutionalized prejudice and exclusion policies during this period forced the New Zealand Chinese community into retreat and isolation as anti-Chinese sentiments developed. In 1871, an official debate about the status of Chinese in New Zealand took place in the form of a Parliamentary Select Committee hearing. A petition was launched by European miners, in which Chinese were accused of being addicted to gambling, opium smoking, and immorality due to the lack of Chinese females.33 This history of the subjugation of 27 The Bone Feeder originally premiered as a play at the Auckland Performing Arts Centre (TAPAC) in 2009 before later being adapted into an opera. Liang wrote the libretto, with music composed by Gareth Farr, Sara Brodie as director, and Peter Scholes as conductor. See James Wenley, “Review of The Bone Feeder: Feeding the Past,” Theatre Scenes, November 14, 2011, available at www.theatrescenes. co.nz/review-the-bone-feeder/. 28 Emma Cox, “Hungry Ghosts and Inalienable Remains: Performing Rights of Repatriation,” in Theatre and Human Rights after 1945: Things Unspeakable, ed. Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 110–27. 29 Nathan Joe, “Review: The Bone Feeder: No Place Like Home,” Theatre Scenes, March 28, 2017, available at www.theatrescenes.co.nz/reviews-the-bone-feeder-rice-auckland-arts-festival/. 30 Ip and Murphy, “Aliens at My Table,” 19. By 1867 there were 1,270 Chinese miners in the Westland province, and by 1869 over 2,000; see Nigel Murphy, The Poll-tax in New Zealand: A Research Paper (Wellington: New Zealand Chinese Association, 1994), 4. The majority of Chinese that migrated to New Zealand came from Guangdong province in southern China, making them Cantonese; see Manying Ip, Home Away from Home: Life Stories of Chinese Women in New Zealand (Auckland: New Women’s Press, 1990), 6. 31 Ip, Home Away from Home, 23; Ng Bickleen Fong, The Chinese in New Zealand: A Study in Assimilation (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1959), 20. 32 Murphy, The Poll-tax, 5. 33 Ip and Murphy, Aliens at My Table, 21. DECOLONIALITY AND CONTEMPORARY ASIAN THEATRE IN NEW ZEALAND / 331 Chinese under white settler colonialism eclipses the interlationships between Chinese migrants and Indigenous peoples that The Bone Feeder was commissioned to address. The opera’s protagonist, Ben Kwan, is journeying to Mitimiti in order to find and retrieve the bones of his great-great-grandfather Choy Kwan (who is referred to as Kwan throughout the libretto). At the start of his journey, Ben meets the character of the Māori Ferryman, who is able to communicate with the spirit world and helps guide Ben on his destination, reunite him with the ghost of Kwan, and locate his bones. As the narrative unfolds family secrets are revealed, such as when we learn that Kwan, who had been apart from his Chinese wife Weiwei for many years, had fallen in love with a Pākehā woman, thus highlighting a common outcome for Chinese men establishing new families, since their Chinese wives were prohibited from joining them. In the end, Ben comes face to face with his great-great-grandfather’s ghost and they are reunited as family. The attention to tikanga Māori (cultural protocols) is established early on when the Ferryman instructs Ben to respect Papatūānuku (the earth mother in Māori mythology) and the land in which bones are buried as being tapu (sacred): I’m the Ferryman, I’ll take you to the other side but a warning before we land— don’t leave the path respect Papatuanuku: the land is tapu, bones were found —don’t mess with what you don’t understand.34 When Ben cynically observes that “only an idiot would believe” in ghosts during his ferry ride across the harbor, the Ferryman warns him: “Trust me bro—don’t piss off the kehua [ghosts].”35 In The Bone Feeder, the audience is brought into the realm of the spirit world and the beliefs of both the Chinese and Māori. The opera evolves heavily around the Chinese bai san ceremony, which usually involves visiting the gravesites of ancestors and sweeping their graves, and giving them offerings of food, incense, and the burning of paper goods for the deceased to use in the underworld.36 If bai san is not performed, then the deceased will be condemned to wander as, what Emma Cox has termed, “hungry ghosts.” She argues that “[t]he SS Ventnor’s demise represented an ongoing trauma: having never been buried at home, the 499 dead were condemned to wander as hungry ghosts, unable to be venerated with gravesite offerings.”37 The bones of the miners were buried by local Māori, yet the details of the reburials remained unclear.38 Thus by writing an opera in which a bai san ceremony is performed for the deceased miners, Liang’s stages a form of recognition and reconciliation with the deceased, who have been erased from New Zealand’s cultural memory. In The Bone Feeder, a burial is first performed using Māori customs by a chorus of women who find the bones of the Chinese miners washed up on their shores. Second, 34 Renee Liang, The Bone Feeder (opera). Auckland Arts Festival, March 23, 2017, ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland. For samples of the soundtrack and a video recording of the opera, see SOUNZ, available at www.sounz.org.nz/works/22931. 35 Ibid. 36 Cox, “Hungry Ghosts and Inalienable Remains,” 110. 37 Ibid., 113. 38 Ibid. 332 / Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam and Rand T. Hazou at the end of the opera, Ben enlists the Ferryman’s help to perform a bai san for his great-great-grandfather’s ghost. In the opera, a chorus of women sing, Box by box coffin by coffin they come to find us swept in on the tides we unwrap the bones we hold them like children these bodies of men broken, needing homes to look after guests is the highest honour and so we bring them here to the urupa [cemetery].39 Through the Ferryman and dirge of the chorus of women, The Bone Feeder highlights the importance of Māori tikanga and protocols around death. As Nīkora and coauthors affirm, “death, observed through the process of tangihanga (time set aside to grieve and mourn, rites for the dead) or tangi (to grieve and mourn), is the ultimate form of Māori cultural expression.”40 In his chapter “A View of Death,” Harry Dansey suggests that one attitude to death that distinguishes Māori is how the “dead are to be cared for, cherished, mourned, spoken to, honored in a way which others might consider to be over-emotional and over-demonstrative.”41 He also argues that the strength of tangihanga as a ceremonial occasion is such that “in spite of Pākehā opposition, criticism and derision for more than a century, it has survived and continues, with many adaptations and changes in form, but with the same purpose and spirit as in the past.”42 The Māori worldview and customs surrounding the deceased intersects and has similarities with the Chinese bai san ceremony, which is highlighted in the opera. The respect given by Māori to Chinese traditions and by the Chinese to Māori tikanga is symbolized in the final scene when Ben is given a traditional Māori hongi (greeting) from the Ferryman upon waking from his “dream.” They then proceed to perform a bai san ceremony together, offering incense to Kwan and the deceased miners, while the chorus sings the closing lines of the opera in Cantonese, emphasizing the importance of the bai san ceremony and the affinity between us all: Bai San to feed the bones a sacred duty passed from son to son, daughter to daughter. Time passes, bones fade, even terraces wear down—but the land is eternal, fertile, strong dreaming of the dark and silent water and a river runs through us all a river runs through us all.43 In this way, The Bone Feeder highlights important resonances between Māori and Chinese practices of honoring the dead and how a new friendship is formed through a respect 39 Liang, The Bone Feeder. Linda Waimarie Nīkora et al., “Tangihanga: The Ultimate Form of Māori Cultural Expression— Overview of a Research Programme,” in Proceedings of the 4th International Traditional Knowledge Conference 2010: Recognising, Engaging, Understanding Difference, ed. J. S. Te Rito and S. M. Healy (Auckland: Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, 2010), 400, available at https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/ handle/10289/7968/Nikora%20et%20al%202010%20Tangihanga%20overview.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. 41 Harry Dansey, “A View of Death,” in Te Ao hurihuri: Aspects of Māoritanga, ed. Michael King (Auckland: Reed Books, 1992), 108. 42 Ibid., 110. 43 Liang, The Bone Feeder. 40 DECOLONIALITY AND CONTEMPORARY ASIAN THEATRE IN NEW ZEALAND / 333 for each other’s cultural practices. Moreover, these practices demonstrate a resilience in the face of coloniality that emphasizes communitarian responsibilities rather than the individual entitlement that is often privileged in colonial epistemologies.44 We argue that Liang’s opera has not only broken new ground, but also expresses a decolonial aesthetic as evidenced in the utilization of various cultural elements that do not privilege a Western or Eurocentric worldview.45 The production enlists English and te reo Māori and Cantonese languages, as well as the use of Western (violin, cello), Chinese (erhu, dizi, guzheng), and Māori (taonga pūoro) musical instruments. The opera begins with the Ferryman singing in Māori and a Chinese woman from the chorus singing in Cantonese. Their singing is interwoven and at times overlaps. This interweaving continues throughout the performance, with the audience being continually exposed to the sensorial and acoustic multiplicity of sung languages that destabilizes the hegemony of the English language. These production choices materialize Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins’s claim that “language is one of the most basic markers of colonial authority,” and that postcolonial stages are “particularly resonant spaces from which to articulate linguistic resistance.”46 By deploying cultural elements in this way, The Bone Feeder enacts a decolonial politics that helps to reconcile the past and the present, the living and the dead, storytelling and history, and the Chinese community with the local Māori iwi. This liminal space in which the past/present and the living/dead collide is aided by a rather “minimalist” set and stage design that consists of a rostrum made to resemble black rocks accompanied by a video projection of “gloomy but beautiful scenic photography.”47 Liang’s projected surtitles that appear like poetry on a page and the juxtaposition of different sung languages create a unique soundscape: “less a melting pot of voices and more an exchange of oral history.”48 This fluid interchange and flow of different sounds, languages, and music all taking place against a backdrop of natural scenery (which includes mountain ranges and waves from the sea) result in a blurring of an anchored time and location. By dismantling spatial and temporal boundaries, The Bone Feeder deconstructs spatial and temporal aspects of colonization; here, space and time are reorganized according to the imperatives of the Chinese and Māori communities, symbolized by the focus on the bai san ceremony and respecting Māori protocols. Thus by delinking from a Eurocentric perspective, an alternate world has been created that necessitates the customs, traditions, and perspectives of Indigenous and migrant peoples. The protagonist, in seeking the bones of his ancestor and paying his respects, has brought into awareness a history that has been forgotten or repressed by the dominant cultural memory, offering respect and reconciliation in return (fig. 1). 44 A real-life bai san ceremony was conducted in the Hokianga community in 2013 as a memorial to those lost in the sinking of the Ventnor. The event took place after three years of negotiation with the local Te Roroa and Te Rarawa Māori, and involved a group of around a hundred Chinese New Zealanders including playwright Liang and Jason Sew Hoy, the great-great-grandson of Choie Sew Hoy, who is the only documented and named body out of the 499 deceased (see Cox, “Hungry Ghosts and Inalienable Remains,” 122–23). 45 Liang explained that the cultural elements incorporated into the libretto included a mōteatea, or a traditional chanted song-poem, which was written with guidance and translation from master poet Hone Hurihanganui, which Liang said she enlisted due to its similarities in form and function to Chinese verse poetry (Renee Liang, personal communication [email] with the authors, May 19, 2020). 46 Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1996), 164, 166. 47 Joe, “Review: The Bone Feeder.” 48 Ibid. 334 / Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam and Rand T. Hazou Figure 1. Jaewoo Kim (Kwan) with Te Oti Rakena (The Ferryman) and Xing Xing (Wei Wei) in the center, together with the Chorus of Women. Projected surtitles in background. (Photo: Candice Whitmore @ Gate Photography, courtesy of Auckland Arts Festival 2017.) There is a rather poignant ending in The Bone Feeder, which reinforces this reading of reconciliation and transformation in which Kwan, who previously longed to have his bones returned to China, decides he would prefer to stay in New Zealand. After “living” in New Zealand for so many years, he finally comes to the realization that his feelings have changed and that he now wants his bones to remain. When Kwan and Ben finally reunite in one of the final scenes, Kwan confides to Ben: How I’ve longed for this the moment I finally meet my family and you’re here—your eyes, your face this jade cicada led you here not to bring me home but to bring home to me, here. . . . Listen, I belong here now because of you.49 By the end of the opera, Kwan has reconciled dual aspects of his identity—being Chinese and being a New Zealander—to become a Chinese New Zealander who considers New Zealand to be his “new” home. The friendship between Ben and the Ferryman is symbolic of the alliance between the Māori and Chinese communities, as the opera makes clear that Māori customs must be respected as the bones of the Chinese miners are buried on Indigenous land. The opera not only works as a powerful instruction to the Chinese migrant community to respect Māori tikanga and the importance of tangihanga and death rites, but also 49 Liang, The Bone Feeder. DECOLONIALITY AND CONTEMPORARY ASIAN THEATRE IN NEW ZEALAND / 335 offers a vision of belonging for the Chinese, in which Aotearoa becomes home through connection to tangata whenua and the land. This vision of belonging allows for multiplicity. In this way, Liang’s opera expresses a decolonial politics that imagines a sense of belonging that transcends colonial binary constructions of us/them and self/other. Writing Family History: A Chinese/Māori Love Story in The Mooncake and the Kumara The expression of a decolonial politics that transcends colonial binary constructions is also evident in The Mooncake and the Kumara, which first premiered at Q Theatre’s Loft in March 2015 as part of the Auckland Arts Festival. Hansen, a Māori-ChinesePākehā-Danish playwright, drew on her rich family history to create the play. Set in 1929 on a farm in New Zealand, the plot follows the lives of Choi and Yee (Chinese father and son) and Wae and Elsie (Māori mother and daughter), who have come to work on the farm of the Pākehā (white European) landowner Finlayson. This story is interspersed with that of Yee’s wife, Leilan, who has been left behind in China. The play explores the romantic love that developed between Yee and Elsie as they worked the land, with dramatic tension building around Yee’s recluctance to tell Elsie about his wife back in China. The actor playing Leilan also doubles as the wife of Ming Wang (an emperor from fourteenth-century China), who ingests an elixir of immortality and flies to the moon. It is the first play that explores Māori-Chinese inter-marriage and captures a time when Māori were increasingly dispossessed of their lands and Chinese immigrants were subjected to discrimination, miscegenation, and institutional racism. The play explores the “second wave” of Chinese migrants to New Zealand, which involved moves from the goldmines to the market gardens, laundries, and green grocers. By the late 1880s, the gold was running out, resulting in many Chinese leaving the goldmines to seek employment in other areas. Many began moving from the rural areas of the South Island to the urban areas of the North Island, taking up labor-intensive jobs in fruit shops, market gardens, and laundries.50 Ip claims that the relationship between the Chinese and Māori can be traced from their early encounters in the midnineteenth century, when both groups shared a certain affinity as soil-tillers struggling for survival.51 Furthermore, Ip claims that the early Chinese were never considered to be “real New Zealanders” by Pākehā, but that Māori were largely friendly toward them. In return, the Chinese regarded Māori as friends and neighbors and employed them as seasonal workers in their market gardens. Māori and Chinese experienced a relatively equivalent socioeconomic status.52 The Mooncake and the Kumara explores the relationships between Chinese and Māori farm laborers and begins with a certain level of mistrust and wariness between the characters due to their different racial backgrounds. All five of the main characters have recently moved to the rural farm, Yee and Choi migrating from China, Finlayson from England, and Wae and Elsie having left their whānau „back home” to find work.53 Finlayson has a wary attitude toward Yee and Choi, remarking that “[t]hey’re inscrutable those Orientals. What are they working away at in those little heads of theirs? 50 Murphy, The Poll-tax, 4; Ip, Home Away from Home, 20. Ip, The Dragon and the Taniwha, 1. 52 Ibid., 1–2. 53 Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen, The Mooncake and the Kumara (Auckland: Playmarket, 2015), 63. 51 336 / Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam and Rand T. Hazou Impenetrable.”54 The scene expresses Edward Said’s contention that “the mythology of the mysterious East” and notions of “Asian inscrutability” are Orientalist tropes.55 Apart from xenophobic and racist attitudes toward the Chinese during this time in the 1920s, there also existed a racist ideology regarding the fear of a “hybrid race” that would result from romantic relationships between Chinese men and Māori women.56 The phenomenon of Chinese bachelor workers led to Chinese men forming relationships with Māori women in the form of marriage or cohabitation, resulting in mixed Chinese-Māori families and children.57 Richard Bedford, Robert Didham, and Ip suggest that the fear of miscegenation and intermarriage between the Chinese and Māori was strong enough to provoke Parliament to set up a Committee of Inquiry to examine the employment of Māori in Chinese and Hindu market gardens.58 In 1929, Āpirana Ngata, the then Minister of Native Affairs, stated in Parliament that “the indiscriminate intermingling of the lower types of races—i.e. Māoris, Chinese and Hindus—will . . . cause deterioration not only in family and national life of the Māori race, but also in the national life of this country, by the introduction of a hybrid race.”59 Moreover, this “race contamination» was a very real concern, as mixed-race Chinese-Māori children were considered to be a “mongrel race” by New Zealand’s Parliament.60 The fear of a hybrid race resulting from restrictive immigration legislation against Chinese women is explicit in The Mooncake and the Kumara. In the following scene, Yee steps in to protect Elsie and Wae from a drunk and aggressive Finlayson, who hurls racial abuse at him: Just cause you’re forbidden from bringing your little Oriental ladies over here, doesn’t mean you should steal all the Māori women. We all see what’s going on here. We’re not blind. Māoris and Chinese cavorting, misbehaving . . . we know your plan! Contaminate New Zealand with your Chinese seed, that’s it, right? Well problem is, we don’t want you here. Go home!61 In contrast to the racist fears of miscegenation expressed by Finlayson, Elsie and Yee’s developing affections for each other are expressed as a desire to circumvent the demeaning attitudes of the white Pākehā community surrounding them. When Choi gets injured, Elsie offers the Chinese workers extra help in the home, which leads to disapproving gossip in town. As a remedy, Elsie suggests that she moves in with Yee and Choi: Yee: You think it would be better? elsie: . . . I don’t know . . . there’s no rules Yee, we just have to keep on going. (Elsie holds up a long skirt which requires twisting/rinsing. They twist and twist it until the fabric buckles and comes together. They stand face to face examining each other for a while. Elsie reaches up and touches Yee’s cheek) 54 Ibid., 28. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995), 52. 56 Richard Bedford, Robert Didham, and Manying Ip, “The Changing Social and Spatial Contexts for Chinese-Māori Interaction, 1920s–1980s,” in The Dragon and the Taniwha: Māori and Chinese in New Zealand, ed. Manying Ip (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2009), 94. 57 Ip, The Dragon and the Taniwha, 2. 58 Bedford et al., “The Changing Social and Spatial Contexts for Chinese-Māori Interaction,” 94. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Hansen, The Mooncake and the Kumara, 50. 55 DECOLONIALITY AND CONTEMPORARY ASIAN THEATRE IN NEW ZEALAND / 337 elsie: I just wanna live like normal. Yee: Normal? elsie: Ae, you know, like the way we are, the way we have been. Yee: Normal. elsie: Mm, that’s us Hainamana, living normal, together as a whānau, like in China. Let’s try it, ne? Yee: I am not normal, I am Chinese. (Elsie kisses Yee on the cheek) elsie: That’s normal enough for me.62 The scene demonstrates the tender relationship developing between Elsie and Yee, while at the same time challenging the position of subalternity produced by white settler colonialism that situates the Other in inferior positions. In this way, the play articulates an affinity between the Māori and Chinese characters through connection with their labor on the land. The relationship between Māori as tangata whenua and the position of the Chinese market gardeners were also explored through the staging. An elevated platform allowed the character of Leilan in China to observe the characters living in New Zealand, who inhabited three dwelling areas suggestive of the social hierarchy. Yee and Choi and Wae and Elsie were in separate abodes to stage left and stage right, inhabiting positions closest to the land and symbolizing their connection to it. Finlayson as the white landowner “occupied” a space that was elevated center stage. The three living spaces were constructed using calico strung between stripped wooden poles onto which text was projected when the various characters read or composed letters to one another. The staging also emphasized the blending of cultural elements, incorporating Chinese folk music, Waiata (Māori songs), and Kōauau (Māori flute), and also featuring the “swapping” of material objects such as hats and shoes between the Māori and Chinese characters. Again, these elements emphasized the affinity between the Māori and Chinese characters in contrast to Finlayson, who represents the white settler Pākehā world. Moreover, while Yee, Wae, Elsie, and Choi were able to navigate the multileveled stage deftly and confidently, Finlayson did not—he tripped, fell over, and knocked his head—he was like a fish out of water as this was not his world (fig. 2). In this way, the play demonstrates the potential for an “alliance” between the Māori and Chinese peoples. Arama Rata and Faisal Al-Asaad suggest that solidarity between the Māori and migrants presents a strong challenge to the settler colonial order.63 They further argue that the white/nonwhite binary underpinning settler colonialism means that the only direct relationship open to both Indigenous Māori and peoples of color is one with the Pākehā.64 As the play suggests, such constructions become a way for the Pākehā group to maintain dominance and control over nonwhites. In The Mooncake and the Kumara, the alliance between the Māori and Chinese and the presentation of narratives from their point of view subverts the hegemony of white settler colonialism. Emma Ng argues that “few non-Chinese New Zealanders today are aware of the extent to which Chinese were discriminated against in law.”65 By writing a love story that embodies difficult themes of anti-Chinese xenophobia, the loss of rights of tangata 62 Ibid., 57. Rata and Al-Asaad, “Whakawhanaungatanga,” 218. 64 Ibid. 65 Emma K. Ng, Old Asian, New Asian (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 44. 63 338 / Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam and Rand T. Hazou Figure 2. All six characters occupying their respective “territories” onstage. Symbolically, the Chinese and Māori characters inhabit areas onstage closest to the ground, suggesting a closer relationship to the land. (Photo: Julie Zhu.) whenua, and discriminatory miscegenation laws, Hansen shines the light on stories that have been marginalized and afflicted by historical amnesia. This decolonial strategy humanizes subjects and communities impacted by colonial hierarchies of difference. By dismantling and decentering white hegemonic narratives, The Mooncake and the Kumara reorganizes the settler-migrant-Indigenous dynamic through the interpersonal relationships of its characters within the context of settler colonialism in New Zealand. Similar to The Bone Feeder, The Mooncake and the Kumara articulates a decolonial aesthetic expressed in the use of Cantonese, Māori, and English languages. In an interview, director Katie Wolfe noted the “beautiful fluid flow of language” as a feature of the play that emerged when the Māori characters are learning to speak Cantonese, and the Cantonese characters are learning to speak Māori and English.66 She mentions that not one person in the audience said that they could not understand the play, because “they all understand the misunderstanding.”67 The comments point to the sensorial experience of hearing the overlapping languages spoken onstage, which, we argue, can be understood as part of a decolonial aesthetic that subverts the notions of colonial “rationality” as a necessary requirement for acknowledgment, recognition, and appreciation.68 Here, language can be viewed as both a barrier and a point of connection between the Māori and Chinese protagonists. At first, the lack of a common language creates space and distance among the characters, which slowly evolves into a point of connection and “intermingling” as the Chinese and Māori protagonists try to learn each other’s language. This “fluid flow of language” that Wolfe mentions is symbolic of a decolonial worldview in which the hegemonic narrative usually expressed in English is interrupted by migrant and Indigenous languages, all interwoven together. 66 Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen and Katie Wolfe, “Writer and Director of The Mooncake and the Kumara Join Us,” interview with Mike Puru and Mel Homer, The Café, June 20, 2017, available at www.youtube. com/watch?v=5--4pgcY9hQ. 67 Ibid. 68 See Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007). DECOLONIALITY AND CONTEMPORARY ASIAN THEATRE IN NEW ZEALAND / 339 Celebrating Chinese Kiwi Subjectivities in OTHER [chinese] The celebration of diverse experiences and the embracing of multiplicity and what it means to be a Chinese Kiwi is a decolonial strategy that also underscores the work of Alice Canton, a New Zealand–born theatre-maker and performer of Chinese and Pākehā descent. In 2017, she devised and directed OTHER [chinese], which premiered at the Q Theatre in Auckland and encouraged other Chinese New Zealanders to share their stories directly to an audience. The production involved a core cast of fourteen key storytellers and a rotating ensemble cast—all non-actors. The production was a mix of filmed interviews, multimedia, and scripted and unscripted segments. The production responded to a shifting dynamic in the demography of Asian migrants in New Zealand. The Immigration Act of 1987 is considered to be a turning point in New Zealand’s migration policy, ushering in a much more diverse and highly educated migrant population. Unlike previous immigration policies that were based on “preferred country of origin,” the new policy was based on a points system awarded according to age, education level, work experience, and the ability to bring capital investment into New Zealand.69 Since 2001, New Zealand’s changing ethnic landscape comprises a much more multicultural mix, with Asians (including Chinese) accounting for 6.6 percent (237,459) of the total population.70 Auckland is being rapidly transformed by Asian immigration, with Statistics New Zealand suggesting that 34 percent of Auckland residents will identify as Asian by 2021, up from 25 percent in 2006.71 Since the 1990s, Chinese and Asians have become more prominent in New Zealand society, mainly due to their increased numbers. Different Chinese groups, such as second-generation Chinese New Zealanders and new migrants from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are adding to the mix and cannot simply be lumped into one homogenous group. Moreover, a study conducted in the 1990s suggested that the terms Asian and Kiwi were seen to be “mutually exclusive” and unable to coexist together.72 The political imperative to address what it means to be a Chinese New Zealander in Aotearoa today was taken up by Canton in OTHER [chinese]. The performance begins with the actors standing onstage with their backs to the audience. Three large television screens hang on the backwall showing different video montages of representations of Chinese or Asian people. These projections included media and news reports about Chinese businesses buying up farms in New Zealand and pop songs featuring Korean pop stars. This theatrical device showcased Asian or Chinese stereotypes in the media. After the screening, the actors turned around to reveal black masks covering their mouths, and black-and-white stripes projected onto their bodies suggesting that the actors were caught inside a television screen. The simple but powerful staging eloquently suggested that the theatre production was working to counter the video projections. In an 69 Wardlow Friesen, “Asian Auckland: The Multiple Meanings of Diversity,” Research Report, Asia New Zealand Foundation, February 2015, 9, available at www.asianz.org.nz/assets/Uploads/33be70f7bc/ Asian-Auckland-The-multiple-meanings-of-diversity.pdf. 70 Allen Bartley, “Contemporary Asian Migration to New Zealand: Challenging the ‘Settler’ Paradigm,” in Tangata Tangata: The Changing Ethnic Contours of New Zealand, ed. Paul Spoonley et al. (Southbank, Vic.: Thomson Dunmore Press, 2004), 158. 71 Statistics New Zealand, “Demographic Trends 2012: Subnational Demographic Projections. Population by ethnicity: Asian” (2012), available at http://archive.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/population/estimates_and_projections/demographic-trends-2012/subnational%20demographic%20projections.aspx#gsc.tab=0. 72 Bartley, “Contemporary Asian Migration to New Zealand,” 163. 340 / Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam and Rand T. Hazou interview, Canton explained that “if the idea of the show is Chinese voices, authentic Chinese voices (whatever that means), then they need to know what is not authentic in order for us to set what the agenda is. That’s why it was important to go: ‘This is representation of us; this, this, this.’ It was like a tsunami of representation.”73 After showcasing all these “false” representations, the show invited the audience to hear snippets of each person’s “real-life story” relating to being a Chinese or mixed Chinese person in New Zealand. The production also utilized impromptu segments that involved Canton asking the nonactors questions such as “What do you think of this statement: The Chinese are buying up all the houses in Auckland. Agree, disagree, or neutral?” In reply, the actors were asked to congregate on stage left for “agree,” stage right for “disagree,” or remain center stage if they were neutral. The segments worked as a kind of live vox pop and a representation in real time of the opinions of a diverse group of Chinese individuals. The use of nonactors telling their stories and the unscripted segments added to the “veracity” of the show and underscored the production’s argument that the Chinese are not one homogenous group, but have varying opinions and individual responses. The varied ages of the nonactors, ranging from teenagers to a senior in his sixties as well as their different cultural backgrounds based on different Chinese ethnic groups (including Chinese people from Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, mainland China, and second-generation Chinese Kiwis), underscored this point. This amalgamation of different Chinese people challenged the limitations of racial categories produced by Western coloniality. The production presents a multitude of different opinions and challenges dominant discourses about how to or even whether one can define a Chinese person. One of the important questions that Canton asks the nonactors onstage is “What is Chinese?” followed by “What is not Chinese?” The presentation of a plurality or diversity of bodies onstage can be understood as a decolonial strategy to resist the homogenization of racial categories such as “Chinese” produced through colonial power. Gilbert and Tompkins refer to Elizabeth Grosz to illustrate how the actor’s body can be a site of decolonial subversion: If the body is the strategic target of systems of codification, supervision and constraint, it is also because the body and its energies and capacities exert an uncontrollable, unpredictable threat to a regular, systematic mode of social organisation. As well as being the site of knowledge-power, the body is thus a site of resistance, for it exerts a recalcitrance, and always entails the possibility of a counter-strategic reinscription, for it is capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways.74 By presenting a diverse range of bodies and Chinese subjectivities onstage, OTHER [chinese] confronts the audience by this question of “Chinese-ness” in a very physical and visual sense. By presenting themselves as they are, including the unfamiliarity and awkwardness of untrained actors, the cast members are able to take back control of their own bodies through reinscription and self-representation for the duration of the production. Canton remarks that on different performance nights, some of the nonactors would give a different response to her impromptu questions. These shifting responses mark the multiplicity of a decolonial world, in which identities can be fluid through self-representation and agency (fig. 3). 73 74 Alice Canton, personal interview with the author, August 19, 2018. Grosz, qtd. in Gilbert and Tompkins, Post-colonial Drama, 204 (emphasis in original). DECOLONIALITY AND CONTEMPORARY ASIAN THEATRE IN NEW ZEALAND / 341 Figure 3. Cast members watch a recorded interview of Asian New Zealand actress Lynette Forday. (Photo: Andi Crown.) How then can Chinese migrants create a home for themselves while honoring the rights of tangata whenua? Ip claims that in the beginning, Chinese and Māori groups largely shared a peaceful and cordial coexistence, which has changed in contemporary times to become more tense and mutually wary.75 Ng argues that the Chinese in New Zealand have been “the subject of generalizations that have cast them as scapegoats for a variety of societal problems.”76 Examples include Chinese market gardeners from the early twentieth century who were willing to work for lower salaries and thus undercutting the prices of other farmers up to the present day, where the Chinese are blamed for driving up housing prices.77 The perception of economic disparities between Chinese migrants and Māori is a source of tension that underscores the importance of land as a contested site in settler colonialism. This complex relationship, as well as the ability of Chinese migrants to create a home for themselves while honoring the rights of tangata whenua, was explicitly referenced in OTHER [chinese], which projected the following quote from second-generation Chinese Kiwi writer and curator Emma Ng onto the stage during the performance: It is easy to demand acceptance as New Zealanders from Pākehā. It is much more difficult to ask for the same from Māori. We have all seen how easy it is for the desire to belong to teeter and slip into a neocolonial agenda of “laying claim” to a place. How can we belong here, become “from here,” without re-enacting the violence that is historically embedded in the gesture of trying to belong?78 75 Ip, The Dragon and the Taniwha, 1. Ng, Old Asian, New Asian, 13. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 87. 76 342 / Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam and Rand T. Hazou Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that “land is what is most valuable, contested, required” in settler colonialism, because settlers make Indigenous land “their new home and source of capital, and also because the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence.”79 The desires of Chinese migrants to find a new life in New Zealand and contribute to the national economy must also contend with the extent to which these pursuits contribute to white settler colonialism and the ongoing disruption of the Māori worldview and relationships to land. This point is raised by Rata and Al-Asaad, who claim that people of color and Indigenous peoples exist in a power relationship with each other, albeit indirectly.80 In this respect, Chinese migrants often legitimize the white settler state with which they see their interests aligned, undermining Indigenous claims to sovereignty and allowing migrants to share in the spoils of Indigenous dispossession.81 They further argue that “[w]hite supremacy also operates through Indigenous communities who internalize and reproduce European-conceived racial hierarchies, and jostle with minoritized racial groups for social status within a system stacked against both Indigenous people and settlers [migrants] of color.”82 Thus Indigenous/migrant relationships are complex and continually shifting. Furthermore, Chinese migrants and Indigenous Māori live and operate within a white colonial framework that plays different minority groups against one another. This situation is evident when, as mentioned earlier by Ng, Chinese migrants are made scapegoats for a society’s ills. Perhaps then one way to dismantle the white colonial framework and the racial hierarchies it imposes is to challenge stereotypes of Chinese people portrayed in the media and speak up against prejudices levied against them. In order to break free from the racial hierarchies imposed by white supremacy, it is important to celebrate what it means to be Chinese—which is defined according to the nonactors themselves and subject to change from performance to performance—through self-representation. Conclusion: Counter-Creative Solidarity Contemporary Asian Kiwi theatre-makers are changing the terms through which Māori and Chinese relationships have traditionally been framed by white settler colonialism. The contemporary works we have explored here are driven by a decolonial politics that challenge the ongoing structure of white settler colonialism by celebrating Chinese voices that have been traditionally silenced within New Zealand historical narratives. Our analysis has also highlighted how recent theatre examples challenge colonial racial constructions such as Oriental and Chinese, as well as examining how Chinese and Māori have coexisted as subjects of settler colonialism and how their traditions sometimes intersect. Our analysis suggests that contemporary Asian Kiwi theatre-makers are engaging decolonial strategies in an effort to decenter Eurocentric hegemonic narratives regarding Chinese people in New Zealand. For Nelson Maldonado-Torres, decoloniality involves the production of “counter-discourses, counter-knowledges, counter-creative acts” aimed at breaking down “hierarchies of difference that dehumanize subjects 79 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 5. 80 Rata and Al-Asaad, “Whakawhanaungatanga,” 218. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. DECOLONIALITY AND CONTEMPORARY ASIAN THEATRE IN NEW ZEALAND / 343 and communities and that destroy nature.”83 We argue that these recent examples of contemporary Asian Kiwi theatre can be read as counter-creative acts that produce counter-knowledges that disrupt colonial epistemologies by offering different visions of belonging for migrant Asian communities in Aotearoa. By highlighting three key periods in terms of Chinese-migration history through each of the plays, our analysis argues how these ontological visions of belonging are imbricated in relationships to land and to Indigenous Māori and can therefore be read as critical interventions into the often-ambiguous position that Chinese migrants occupy in relation to white settler colonialism. While this critical engagement might not be expressed in all contemporary works by Asian Kiwi artists, we suggest that the decolonial politics expressed in the works we have analyzed in this essay might be emblematic of an important shift in cultural production in New Zealand, one that rejects the desire by Asian migrants for acknowledgment from the nation-state in favor of fostering and privileging relationships with tangata whenua as a precursor to enhancing mutual acceptance and solidarity. 83 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality,” Frantz Fanon Foundation and website of the Caribbean Studies Association, October 26, 2016, 10, available at http:// fondation-frantzfanon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/maldonado-torres_outline_of_ten_theses-10.23.16.pdf. 344 / Cynthia Hiu Ying Lam and Rand T. Hazou