Looking back to Joe Kum Yum
‘‘I’m a bad Asian,’’ says Chris Tse.
Not bad in the sense Pol Pot was a bad Asian, but bad in that he doesn’t match the stereotype – driven, probably college dux, likely to be an accountant or lawyer.
In fact, Tse works in the auditorgeneral’s communications department and writes poetry in his spare time.
He is also an occasional actor, musician and song-writer.
Tse said he had initially avoided writing about Chinese themes because it was too obvious.
‘‘ But I had to get over that, because it’s a part of New Zealand literature that’s not visible,’’ he said.
How To Be Dead In The Year Of Snakes is in part his attempt to define what it is to be an Asian New Zealander.
Tse was born in Wellington of a third- generation New Zealand Chinese mother and a Hong Kongborn father.
How To Be Dead In The Year Of Snakes goes back to a dark moment in the history of Pakeha-Chinese relations.
In 1905 white supremacist Lionel Terry picked out Joe Kum Yung at random on Wellington’s Haining St and shot him.
Researching the 1905 murder reveals a wealth of information about the killer, his past, his education and what became of him, but precious little about his victim.
Kum Yung had come to New Zealand to work the goldfields, leaving his family behind, was injured in an accident and left penniless and stranded far from home.
Over the past 10 years Tse has tried to imagine what the Kum Yung might have been thinking and feeling, expressing the story in hauntingly vivid imagery.
‘‘It was about giving Joe a voice and presenting the story from a different point of view.’’
Many Chinese don’t talk about the dark moments in their history, but it was important to explain for a younger generation what had defined it, to question what the old story meant, then and now.
‘‘It is very important that future generations don’t take things for granted,’’ he said.
‘‘A lot of people have suffered and had to stand up and demand change against adversity.’’
Tse said he began the work on the anniversary of the murder in 2005 and it grew from one poem to 10 and eventually a whole folio for his masters thesis at Victoria.
It began as a story about the murder and progressed to a more spiritual cause.
‘‘It was that very Chinese idea of seeing someone into the afterlife, and the responsibility that the living have to make sure that happens.
‘‘Joe Kum Yung had become this footnote to Lionel Terry’s story.’’
Tse’s verse takes different forms through the book as it expresses different viewpoints. At times it stutters, with white space left within lines, at others alternate voices conduct a disjointed conversation from opposite sides of the page.
That was partly an attempt to emulate traditional Chinese poetry forms, he said.
How To Be Dead In The Year Of Snakes costs $24.99.