Caliope liked to think of herself as a local, and in many respects she was, but she wasn't a New Zealand-born Chinese descended from the gold miners and market gardeners that had come in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Back then, the yellow peril and the Hindoo peril were all the rage. Chinese didn't have the same rights as other citizens, and the establishment was harsh and unforgiving.
She wasn't even part of the 1990's influx of East Asians to New Zealand, but she'd matriculated in Wellington, and that was her home now. She knew the ways of the land and the attitude of the people, but this was a society designed for Westerners, and it didn't take much to push the latent xenophobia of the ruling class to the surface. - Much like the repressive regime at home, she thought. The one-child policy might have been ditched in the mid-2010's, but the social stigma of being born female was still a fundamental part of the culture. Her parents: a respected intellectual at a powerful university, and the other a submissive housewife, had packed her off to New Zealand at age 14. They remained in China, providing for her international education, but essentially freeing themselves from the need to raise an inferior child. She'd been uprooted from her life and found herself adrift in a new place. There were no helpful relatives from a far-flung branch of the family tree to comfort and support her: she was a teenager in exile.
She was jealous of the Kiwi-born Asians that spoke with Kiwi accents and embraced the Pākehā ways as soon as they were out of earshot from their staid, conservative parents. The culture shock was intense, and learning the language was even harder: she wished that she'd come when she was younger, knowing that children have a knack for picking up new languages.
At uni, she'd been able to reinvent herself as a staunch left-winger that moved in anarchist circles, but that had put a serious strain on her relationship with her father, and she'd been obliged to pull her head in and finish her degree, lest her allowance be cut and her life upended.
Determined to be more Kiwi than the white boys, she threw herself into sociology and anthropology, dissecting this strange new world that baffled and enticed her. She found a mentor in Sally, an aloof American professor with a disdain for loafers and layabouts that spent their mornings taking drugs and their afternoons waffling on endlessly. *
Thanks to Sally, she'd managed to acquire a post-graduate scholarship to study in San Diego, and the years that she'd spent there were the happiest of her life. The Asian culture in America was much larger and more sure of itself, and her fluent but exotic accent was a bonus compared to the brash, nasal twang of the Californians.
She'd fallen in love with a zookeeper, and he introduced her to the wonders of cannabis and psychedelics. Despite this, it never felt like home the way that Wellington had, and her father thought that studying in the US was essentially treason.
So, she returned, to find that most of her anarchist friends had all straightened up and found jobs in the public sector and the corporate world. All these long-haired freaks and punk girls were now cardboard cutouts from the same assembly line as their parents, and she was feeling an increasing pressure to conform to the stultifying, pretentious and often terminally boring world of Victoria University of Wellington.
* Academia had become obsessed with statues of dead white guys and a faux-tolerant view that painted colonialism in broad brushstrokes suited to a bad play rather than the significantly more complicated reality. Her new project was her rebellion. Instead of emphasising the dominant culture, she was going to seek out the real people: on the streets, in the pubs and in the illegal clubs that her few remaining hard-left friends were eagerly setting up. As part of the third wave of migrants, she was still living that first contact experience, and hated the smarmy tone of well-off white people pretending to be woke with their pounamu and half-assed pēpeha. Very few New Zealanders spoke the specific dialect of her region, so her experiences of the Chinese community were largely ceremonial and often confrontational. She was deeply opposed to the human rights abuses of her homeland, and thought it was criminal how the CCP was controlling overseas media to provide a sanitised experience of an infinitely diverse nation of billions. I mean, Falun Gong were having their organs harvested by the state, and Uyghurs were being put in concentration camps. The Holocaust might have ended for the Jews, but it was just getting started for minorities in China!
*
Caliope and her friend Aragorn - yes, that's his real name - are in the woods. Caliope has a cheap 4K handycam that she's pointing at him. 'Wellington's a city where you can leave your keys in the park for a week and people won't steal them,' said Aragorn, with a cheeky smile.
'Bo-ring!' - Caliope
'Like you're so special!'
Caliope thinks about that for a second.
*
Pūkeahu Memorial. Aragorn has the camera as Caliope begins a standard walk-and-talk, as if she's a newscaster.
'Hi, I'm Caliope Zhōng. I'm not a native Wellingtonian, but this is where I live and these are the landmarks that surround me. This particular memorial is a recent addition to the landscape, but it holds special memories for me.' Aragorn cringes. She places a hand on one of the Aboriginal pillars.
'I had recently moved here and was still finding my way when I hooked up with this skater boy that went to my school. It was a balmy summer night, and I remember the way that he kissed me in the dark: it felt like I was home.' 'Spew!'
'Cut!' - Caliope is incensed. 'Dude, do you want me stepping all over your big speech?'
Aragorn laughs, and starts rolling again.
'In my thesis, you'll find a portrait of the city painted by the people who inhabit it. Young and old, black and white and yellow and brown, we all share this little piece of the South Pacific.'
-
Sally is watching the clip as Caliope bites her nails nervously...
'You want that to go with your proposal?' 'Yep.' Sally thinks for a second. 'Fine, but don't make a habit of the treacle: nobody takes emotions seriously in science.'
-
Caliope is tidying up her flat. As she vacuums, a book is knocked over. Inside it, a photo of her with the skater boy. She picks it up, stares at it for a long while, then throws it onto the floor and hoovers it up.
Chapter closed.
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