Growing up in the Fruit Shop
We were Chinese and different, at a time when difference was rare and not often welcome, writes Gilbert Wong.
Wong Gee and Co was open five and a half days a week, and only succeeded when treated as a way of life rather than a job.
Dad’s day started early and ended late, a 12-hour shift most days except the weekends. He would leave by 6am to trim cabbages and cauliflowers, wash lettuce and carrots, and set up some of the produce on the shelves before leaving for the daily fruit and vegetable auction at 7.30am.
Mum would rouse us in time for her to leave to open up for business at 8.30am and start re-stacking the fruit and tomato shelves.
By about 10.30am Dad would return, his truck piled with new produce. He would then spend some hours unloading and readjusting the cool-store, bringing new produce in from the rear for Mum to sell in the front.
Mum ran the front; Dad the back. Mum liked talking with our regular customers. Dad preferred silence or the refined burble of the Concert Programme. So that people could buy fresh produce for dinner on their way home, Wong Gee and Co did not close until 6pm.
On Fridays the town had latenight shopping and we stayed open until 8pm. On Saturdays we opened from 9am to 1pm. Before we went home, we’d wax and polish the checkerboard lino floor. On Sunday afternoon, Dad would go by himself in the truck to ready produce for the week ahead. He’d trim some greens, wash carrots and spuds, bring some produce out of the cool-store and leave it ready so Mum could easily stock the shelves come Monday.
We closed on Good Friday and Easter Monday, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and sometimes the days between Christmas and New Year. In order to take those days, however, we had to do a giant clean-up and quit all perishable stock or remove it to the cool-store. After this we would pack the car and drive for eight hours to visit my maternal grandparents in Napier.
They, too, had a fruit shop, the Shanghai Fruit Company.
I don’t describe this relentless toil to draw any lesson about the virtue of hard work or sympathy for lost family time. It was just the life we had, and in small-town New Zealand in the late 1960s and 70s it was much the same for many families with small businesses. No doubt it is still the same for new migrants to this day, as they try to take their first hard steps on society’s ladder.
We spent more time together than better-off families, but leisure and holidays were unfamiliar concepts. It was a time of inconspicuous consumption in a tightly controlled economy. Money was hard to borrow, so people did not live on credit, which kept aspirations low.
Wha¯ nga¯ rei had its share of the poor and the wealthy, but neither was obvious and all came to our fruit shop at some point.
It was an era when everyone bought local.
Cameron St had a grocer, a butcher, a fishmonger and Wong Gee and Co; at one time it was one of three fruit shops within 200 metres of each other.
On a typical day you might find the matriarch of one of the town’s most well-off families sitting on an apple box we always provided, removing her gloves and nattering to Mum.
We sold eggs as singles. On the same day we would also have seen the town crazy guy, a dishevelled, unshaven man with rank body odour who always wore the same flannel trousers and a moth-eaten tweed jacket.
He’d come in and buy two eggs, then go outside and crack them open in the footpath gutter. After a few minutes, the heat of the Northland summer would render them gooey and he would sink down on his haunches and slurp the near-raw eggs up from the concrete. Lunch for 20 cents.
We pretended that this was not happening. Mum would send me out afterwards with a bucket of water to sluice the cracked shells and eggy residue into the drain.
Mum and Dad were members of the local business association. My brother and sister and I went to kindy. We became scouts and a girl guide; and endured piano lessons. My brother and I played for Rovers football club.
During rugby season, on a Saturday afternoon – his only real time off – Dad took us to watch North Auckland dazzle opponents with the help of the three legendary Mormon Going brothers, Brian, Ken and All Black Sid, at Okara Park.
So far, so ordinary. But we were Chinese and different, at a time when difference was rare and not often welcome.
On a Friday night, drunk, bored young men would come past our shop and shout racial abuse at us. Mum would tell us to ignore it, and if there were customers, they, too, pretended that nothing was happening. They never intervened.
Sometimes the bored young men would kick over our baskets of produce sitting at the front of the shop for the pleasure of inciting Dad to shout at them, threatening to call the cops.
They’d bolt, hurling abuse as they ran off up Bank St. Mum kept a whistle by the phone, to use for the inevitable calls; some were pranks by kids, others threatened violence. All were anonymous and hateful.
The racism became more direct at school. My brother and I both ended up in fights after being pushed and goaded. We’d be heading to class, and would be punched, tripped or kicked unprovoked.
When I started high school, two boys followed me for days calling me a ‘‘yellow monkey’’, among other things. I finally snapped, and lashed out. One ran off; I tackled the other to the ground, punching him repeatedly in the face.
Prefects pulled us apart but nothing further happened. Like our customers, the school quietly ignored what had happened. Mum’s standard response was to recite the sticks and stones rhyme.
But the words did hurt and brought with them a powerless anger.
We were raised to know that violence was no answer. Nor did reasoned discussion work in the face of mindless xenophobia. It hurt because it was impossible to be anything else but a New Zealander after being born and raised here. It hurt because it revealed how threadbare was New Zealand’s perception of itself as a country that valued egalitarianism and fairness.
Mum and Dad took comfort in their Chinese values: respect for education and the aged, the strength of the family and its bonds, and pride in the legacy of a culture that had lasted 4000 years.
The incidents of outright racial abuse and discrimination waxed and waned. We became New Zealanders with a small ‘‘c’’ Chinese heritage. Much to the dismay of our grandparents, who spoke a clutch of bewildering southern Chinese dialects, language and literacy were lost to us. We were a tiny minority in a little country at the end of the world.
This meant that practically every Chinese person we met was virtually treated like a long-lost friend. Within our tiny minority that was almost certainly true: it was a time when almost everyone in the Chinese community was linked by village and clan ties fostered by the universal rites of births, marriages and deaths.
We often hosted gatherings for the small local Chinese community and visitors. They came because our household was the only one in town to have a 2-metre-tall cylindrical brick oven in the backyard, big enough to roast a grown pig whole.
On the day of a gathering, my job was to stoke the oven with a fire fuelled by fruit-case wood for six hours to reach the required heat.
Meanwhile, Dad and others slathered a freshly butchered pig with plum and soy sauce and heads of garlic, and wired its splayed carcass to a metal roasting frame fabricated at the local boatyard.
At the appointed time, we dampened the fire, leaving a bed of glowing coals, before lowering the pig on a pulley to roast in the ferocious heat that had been absorbed by the kiln bricks. When we had chicken, our preference was to take a crate of live birds, slit their throats and drain their blood into bowls before dipping them in boiling water to ease plucking.
The coagulated blood was sliced into soups to add dense flavour and colour.
Picture this: a brick-and-tile house on a suburban quarter-acre in Wha¯ nga¯ rei on a summer’s afternoon. The driveway is crammed with an array of small trucks and cars. In the backyard, a handful of men have lifted a whole roasted pig ever so slowly from a brick oven, and portioned it with cleavers before transferring the bite-sized pieces of succulent pork to platters.
The glistening roast pork has pride of place on large trestle tables laden with dishes set up in the double garage. A dozen or so people sit down for dinner, perched on upended wooden apple boxes.
There’s a moment when the dishes are ready and the rice has been served. Dad calls out ‘‘Sik fahn!’’, ‘‘Time to eat!’’ and everyone digs in.
The conversation mixes Cantonese and English. There’s talk of how the kids are doing at school, and amateur analysis of the Ranfurly Shield defence.
If you were to ask my departed father, he’d say that’s how life growing up Chinese in small-town New Zealand should be remembered. Life is to be celebrated, not tainted by its failings.
❚ Extract from The Journal of Urgent Writing vol 2, edited by Simon Wilson, Massey University Press, rrp $39.99.