‘If you don’t plant cabbages, you

After 18 years, one of the country’s most colourful mayors – and the only one fluent in te reo – bows out with a few salient lessons in his trademark ‘Menglish’. By Andre Chumko.

After 45 minutes on the phone, Meng Foon says it’s time to ‘‘put a full stop there’’, otherwise he won’t have any content to put in his memoirs. The outgoing Gisborne mayor of 18 years jokes he may have to write a book in his signature ‘‘Menglish’’. ‘‘I gotta get my A into G,’’ he says.

‘‘The technology allows us to just speak into a microphone nowadays and it just turns it all into text, doesn’t it? It’s very good, isn’t it? Even this phone here you can speak Ma¯ ori into it and it’s pretty good. I’m bloody amazed that Google – or Apple – has been able to have this pre-emptive text in Ma¯ ori.’’

Foon is fluent – in fact, he’s the only New Zealand mayor to be so – in te reo Ma¯ ori. He’s also fluent in Cantonese and English.

The 59-year-old was born and raised in Gisborne, hailing from humble beginnings. His parents migrated from China before he was born, but Meng says he ‘‘could have been made in Hong Kong’’ because they got married in December of 1958, and he was born the following August.

His mother Ng Heng Kiu (Helen) came from Hong Kong and his father Liu Sui Kai (George) from Guangzhou. They were market gardeners, and arrived with just the shirts on their backs.

The Foon family had a vegetable shop – the ‘‘bargain vege market’’ – when Meng and his brother were kids. He credits the Taira¯ whiti’s large Ma¯ ori population – 45 per cent at 2013 – with his te reo fluency. The region’s Asian population is stark in comparison – 2.2 per cent that same year.

‘‘I enjoyed the different accents, not only of the Ma¯ ori people but also of the English, the Irish and the Scottish people and we used to mimic them in the shop and they all laughed.’’

At Makaraka School, under leadership of headmaster Pax Kennedy, Ma¯ ori teachers would guide kids in learning how to make various items out of flax. There were also haka lessons.

There were also Ma¯ ori classes at Gisborne Boys’ High.

‘‘I said, ‘That’ll be me’, because I knew that I could beat the boys in my age because they didn’t speak Ma¯ ori and I did a little bit. So I said that to my mother. She said, ‘Oh, what are you taking?’ I said, ‘The normal language, social studies, sciences and PE’, and then I said Ma¯ ori and she said, ‘wow, that’s a waste of time isn’t it?’ Waste of my breath, she actually said.’’

But Foon persisted and took the class through form six. He played rugby – lock, hooker ‘‘one time’’, but mostly flanker. ‘‘I didn’t score any tries, but the ball was so close to the line one time’’. His coach reckoned he wasn’t a bad player, he says.

Foon left school after sixth form to continue the family’s market garden business.

He got married young – at 21. His wife, Ying, was 20, and her family at one point used to live opposite the Foons, in Bell Rd, Matawhero.

What was one vegetable shop turned into a few, then the family bought the Kaiti Mall – opened a liquor store, TAB, ‘‘all the good things those days that can make a few bucks’’. The family in 2018 put the mall – Gisborne’s biggest suburban retail precinct – on the market.

His parents retired early – about 1985 – moving to Sydney before settling again in Hong Kong. Meng and his brother took over the business with their wives. In 1995, a pair of detectives who worked at a police station the Foons built at Kaiti Mall were chatting about a retiring councillor, Owen Pinching.

‘‘They said ‘Oh look Meng, you should become a councillor’. I said, ‘Mate, I wouldn’t have a clue what you do’. He said, ‘Look, lunch is good’.’’

The ward seat was a rural one – Patutahi Taruheru – but Foon’s adamant because the family had a relationship with both rural and city folk through their shop he could’ve stood in any seat and won just as easily.

‘‘I thought, there’s only 1200 homes in the rural area, or I could go to the city and knock on 10,000 homes.’’

There, he learned about door-knocking – ‘‘the first thing you need to do is actually whistle just in case the dog comes out and bites you’’.

He got elected, and then won the mayoralty in 2001.

He says he’s never felt out of place in Gisborne, despite its low Asian population.

He marvelled at a friend’s house growing up, that they were fed spaghetti on toast – something he’d never tried – and says he used to swap his lunches – dumplings, chicken, fruit – with the other boys’ for jam or ‘‘soggy tomato’’ sandwiches.

Whenever there were local funerals, his mum and dad would deliver a truckload of veges to that particular tangi. His uncles used to go right up the coast and sell produce through Te Kaha and

O¯ po¯ tiki in the Bay of Plenty, come back through the gorge and buy wood ear mushrooms for their

Chinese dishes. ‘‘There’s been a long history of Chinese people all over Taira¯ whiti.’’

Foon says his highlights include sharing his region’s news on Ma¯ ori media platforms – Te Karere, Te Ka¯ ea, Radio Nga¯ ti Porou, Radio Waatea – in te reo.

‘‘People see me as a neutral person too, you know? I don’t have any Ma¯ ori relations as such, I don’t have Ma¯ ori blood, I don’t have English blood, just pure