She didn’t know she was Chinese
As part of a series on New Zealanders of Chinese descent, Sally Kidson and photographers Virginia Woolf and Braden Fastier look at the incredible story of the first mixed marriages on the Otago goldfields.
For most of her 78 years Wendy Mckay felt something was missing. She always knew her grandfather Hugh Chooquee was part Chinese. But her family never discussed it.
‘‘I just knew I couldn’t ask questions as Mum had made it quite plain she didn’t want to talk about it,’’ Wendy says of her Otago upbringing.
Her grandfather, Pop to her two older brothers, was muchloved. ‘‘He was lovely,’’ recalls Mckay, from Nelson.
But his ancestry – his father, Wendy’s great-grandfather, was born in Shanghai in 1833 and married a young girl on the Otago goldfields in 1869 – was strictly off limits.
‘‘We lived with my granddad, but it never occurred to me that he was Chinese. He was just my granddad. And I loved him. And that was that.’’
It is most likely that the shame of being different in the conservative 1940s and 50s was the reason the family’s Chinese links were not spoken about.
And decades later that still stings. Mckay’s life-long quest for information about her heritage took her back to Lawrence, the small Otago town where she was born, last year.
And it would be, of all things, a family reunion that would fill in the missing pieces about her family’s past.
From the dragon’s mouth
Drive 1.2 kilometres towards Queenstown from Lawrence and you reach its historic Chinese camp.
Gabriel’s Gully – where
Gabriel Read is said to have seen ‘‘gold shining like the stars in Orion on a dark frosty night’’ in 1861 – is close by. Lawrence, with a population today of 450, was home to 11,500 people at the gold rush’s peak.
Only three buildings remain at the Lawrence Chinese Camp: a temple or joss house, a stables, and the once-bustling Chinese Empire Hotel.
But 160 years ago this camp, known as ‘‘Canton’’ or ‘‘Hong Kong’’, was an important gateway to the harsh Otago goldfields and was home to a substantial village of Chinese men hoping to make their fortune.
The camp included butcheries, a slaughterhouse, boarding houses, gambling dens and a brothel. In its heyday, it also hosted family life and festivities.
Adrienne Shaw, a fifthgeneration descendant of the camp and amateur historian, knows more about the camp and its inhabitants than most.
She talks rapidly and her stories are a whirl of names, dates and anecdotes of the men who lived there.
Some of the long-dead Chinese sojourners wake her up in the middle of the night, bidding her to record their stories, and she talks of the men she’s researched almost as if they are alive.
The Chinese were given the swampy piece of land for the 1.2-hectare camp after
Lawrence Town Council banished them from living with the Europeans. Another bylaw enforced a curfew so they weren’t out at night.
Historian James Ng, who has spent eight years compiling an exhaustive history of the early Chinese in New Zealand, says the Lawrence camp was the biggest and earliest of the Chinese goldfield settlements.
It is one of the few places where Chinese and Europeans were openly in relationships – and that included several marriages.
Shaw is working on a book on the first mixed marriages from the camp. Her dogged research is helping many with links to the camp uncover their family’s history.
Shaw’s great-great-grandfather Chow Tie (Chau Chu Taai), a butcher at the camp, married her great-greatgrandmother Grace Kerr. The Scottish Grace was a barmaid at the Chinese Empire Hotel.
Shaw first heard stories of her Chinese ancestry when she was 8 or 9. In a story common for many descendants of
Chinese mixed marriages, Shaw had only titbits of oral history she had heard as a young girl to decode her family.
Those who knew, now long dead, were reluctant to talk, she says. ‘‘They brushed it under the table. They shut it down.’’
The early Chinese were largely shunned by Europeans, and mixed-race children also endured racism, she says.
‘‘The papers called them ‘half-caste children – living in a sea of vice in the camp’.’’
A letter in the Tuapeka Times shows the disdain for the camp, calling it a ‘‘great evil’’ and a cancer eating its way into the district’s morality.
Descendants from the first mixed marriages, many of whom shifted to Dunedin once the gold ran out, were socially mobile and often hid their heritage to get ahead.
‘‘No-one was proud of being Chinese,’’ Shaw says. ‘‘They covered their noses, wore glasses, and wore hats.
‘‘If you looked Chinese, well, you just had to live with it. If you looked a bit more European ... you sort of had an easier life really.’’
Names were anglicised. Her family took her great-greatgrandfather’s first name of Taai and modified it. ‘‘Half the family today are still running around with Tie and the other half are running around with Tye.’’
She knows stories of descendants not finding out about their heritage until they were in their 60s.
It is important to note that
not all families have grown up carrying their ancestry with shame. But others grew up thinking their modified surname was French. Discovering as adults that they had Chinese heritage was shocking.
One attendee said all her school friends knew she was ‘‘Chinese’’. ‘‘The only ones who didn’t know they were Chinese in the whole district were us.’’
A disgraceful affair
Last year Shaw held a family reunion for more than 100 descendants of the mixed marriages from the camp. There were many times during it when Mckay just wanted to have a good cry.
In the sterile surrounds of a funeral home (where part of the reunion was held due to Covid restrictions), it was hard listening to the story of her greatgrandmother.
Sarah Ann Austin, known as Annie, caused quite a stir in 1869 when, at 14 and quite likely pregnant, she eschewed the strong social conventions of the day and married the much older George Choo Quee (later Chooquee).
It was the first Chinese mixed marriage in Otago and took place at the Lawrence camp. George recorded his age as 29, when he was either 39 or 44, Shaw says.
The Tuapeka Times, in an article about the wedding, described Annie as a ‘‘European child’’, ‘‘little past the age of infancy’’, and George as a middle-aged ‘‘Celestial’’. It labelled the union a ‘‘disgraceful affair’’, hoping ‘‘it would be the first and last of its kind in the district’’.
The Austins lived near the Lawrence camp, and Annie had ‘‘taken an interest’’ in the men living there. ‘‘She was a bit naughty,’’ Mckay laughs.
George, a miner turned storekeeper, was ordered to build a house in the Chinese camp for his wife. Shaw says the marriage, like many mixed marriages, was divisive. Chinese men were considered ‘‘alien’’ and a bad match.
Perhaps, like other girls from tough working-class backgrounds, Annie saw the more mature George as a way out of a life of domestic servitude, Shaw speculates.
For some Chinese, marrying a European, although frowned on, was their only option.
Most Chinese miners intended to be in New
Zealand only for a short time, and many were already married in
China.
The New Zealand government’s informal white New Zealand policy restricted entry for Chinese women in a bid to ensure they didn’t have children and build families in New Zealand.
In 1881, there were 4995 Chinese men in New Zealand (the highest number before World War II) and only nine Chinese women.
Despite the salacious circumstances of Annie and George’s marriage, it was definitely one of the better matches.
Annie died aged 35 of cancer of the womb in Dunedin, where, like many Chinese, the family moved as the gold ran out.
George remained a loving father to their six children and the couple are buried together in Dunedin’s Southern Cemetery.
Other marriages and de facto unions were more volatile and sad. Many were scarred with psychiatric problems, violence, alcoholism and the untimely death of their children.
‘‘Overall, the Chooquee family was a well-behaved one and did their best for their children, with a few exceptions,’’ Shaw says. ‘‘But there were other families that were in and out of the courts for shooting each other and chasing each other with broomsticks.
‘‘The Seque kids got done for drunkenness. The mother Elizabeth Seque had illegitimate children to other Chinese men ... So yeah, the Chooquees were a bit boring [in comparison].’’ Canterbury researcher Julia Bradshaw says that, between 1865 and 1910, there were at least 43 Chinese-european marriages and probably as many de facto relationships.
The marriages were often financially tough as the Chinese sent money back to China, and the family was often subject to taunts and discrimination.
Bradshaw agrees that almost all first-generation children hid their Chinese ancestry.
With more than 146 Otagoborn Anglo-chinese children, their descendants are now likely to number in the thousands. Much like Mckay, they are now embracing their history.
Anti-chinese hostility
High in the hills 20km west of Alexandra, past farmland peppered with flowering purple wild thyme and spiky matagouri, is the abandoned mining site of Shek Harn.
There are not many places in Central Otago with a Cantonese name still imprinted on the landscape, but Shek Harn, which means big ditch, is one.
Wild Chinese gooseberries grow near the crumbling remains of old stone huts used by Chinese miners 160 years ago.
The first Chinese to arrive in New Zealand was Appo Hocton, who jumped ship in Nelson.
But the story of New Zealand Chinese as a community really begins on the Otago goldfields.
The Chinese were invited to New Zealand by the Otago Chamber of Commerce when the majority of miners had left to chase gold on new goldfields.
Life was harsh, but conditions must have been extra tough for the Chinese, who kept to themselves and lived frugally in rudimentary shelters.
James Ng says the average life expectancy for all miners was 30.
The Chinese were ‘‘sojourners’’ from southern China, who aimed to earn money and support families living in poverty. They arrived in 1866 and by 1886 numbered about
5000.
While some miners, such as the Dunedin merchant Sew Hoy, prospered, many were unsuccessful. They also attracted suspicion, jealousy and fear.
In 1881, the Chinese were made to pay a poll tax when they entered New Zealand. The tax started at £10 – and increased to £100, which equates to about $18,000 today.
Other laws targeted at the Chinese included a cargo tax, which limited the number who could come to New Zealand, and a reading test on arrival.
The thaw – a new beginning
Drive two minutes from Lawrence and travel up Gabriel Rd and you get to the Otago town’s historic cemetery.
The European graves lie on land that gently slopes towards
State Highway 8. But at the southern, swampy end, where the Chinese graves lie, it’s a lonelier story. Many headstones are neglected or broken.
When Shaw first visited the cemetery in the 1990s, graves lay neglected, lost in knee-high grass or bush.
Researchers say at least 1000 Chinese were buried in New Zealand before 1900.
Many Chinese miners who died in New Zealand were later taken back to China – which was the intended destination of the 499 bodies on the ill-fated SS Ventnor when it sank off the Hokianga heads in 1902.
Shaw has raised money to tell the story of these men and restore their headstones. ‘‘I didn’t want them to be a rock in the mower.’’
On a drizzly Sunday, a group of descendants from the mixed marriages at the Lawrence Chinese Camp help to unveil the restored graves.
Alan Mccord, who looks like a Pākehā from any small New Zealand town, addresses the ‘‘understandable but troubling’’ stories he has heard – including the fact many were brought up believing their heritage was French, not Chinese.
‘‘Whether it was done out of shame or to protect their children, this heritage needs to be acknowledged,’’ he tells the group.
Completing the jigsaw
For Mckay, reclaiming her Chinese ancestry at 78 brings her joy and she now feels whole. ‘‘My heritage is mine, now I know where I come from.’’
She had never really spoken to her three children about her Chinese links, but this has now changed.
‘‘I want them to know where we came from. I want them to understand a part of the history of the country. Because that is what it is.’’