As is tradition with Inside out – I acknowledge my newness to the practice and prepare you for the latest in an attempt at sharing some of the insides of myself as a manager. What follows is personal, and I am sure some will recognise/share my ruminations, while others won’t, but I hope by sharing my thoughts you can see some of my own reflections on becoming biculturally competent (a journey I am by no means done with yet!)
As we continue our Bicultural Journey I have found cause to reflect on my own sense of (dis)placement and identity as a half-Chinese human living/growing up in Aotearoa in the 21st Century.
A recently published article by somebody with an analogous cultural and social upbringing has helped me think though some of these aspects to my own experience. Link to article.
Sometimes in conversations about bicultural competence and Te Tiriti my own Chinese identity has felt (to me) like another unexplored aspect as NZ has both welcomed me (as I was born here) and at various points made me feel unwelcome. I remember as a child lying to my cohort at school (for reasons I still cannot not pin down) that I was born on an aeroplane on the way to Aotearoa, in fact I was born in Wanganui. I can only draw it to the fact that unlike most of my pākeha cohort – I could not be from here. The endless questions about where I was really from where only stopped by a bizarre narrative of mid-flight birth which also tacitly acknowledged that, Yes, I do not look like a kiwi, so even though I was born here, my birth must conceal some sort of story that would confirm my alien-ness. Dam acknowledges similar tensions in his own upbringing (some more explicitly racist than my own) which gave him the same impression I had growing up ” non-Māori and non-Pākehā were/are not Tiriti partners – a perspective to which I naïvely subscribed throughout my schooling”
Having a traditional NZ education means I engaged in the annual ‘Treaty of Waitangi’ exercises which we ended up using as platforms for writing a treaty with how we would behave in class (as if Te Tiriti were about behaviour modification and not land or governance), but every year the framing was around the historical partners as Māori and Pākehā – Dam notices the framing of this in our MOE codified publications as recently as 2007 (p. 9). As I aged I became adept at hiding my Chinese cultural coding. I don’t speak Mandarin (I recall speaking with my Nainai and Yeye in mandarin (grandmother and grandfather in my father’s side as a toddler)), I don’t have close contact with the Chinese community in any of the cities I have lived in, I did not watch Anime, dye my hair, and I was determined to be a good driver because I was often reminded that people would make assumptions about my driving skills. So, as a teenager and young adult my driving skills (though I actually never owned a car until I married) were a big indicator of my cultural assimilation. At time when my identity was forming, a significant part of what I carried inside myself was obscured as a way to ensure there was an easier, more readable version of myself to my peers.
Dam reminds us though that “Be(com)ing tangata tiriti affords me new possibilities to be(come) Asian in ways that are unique to Aotearoa-New Zealand and encourages me to think about how I can nurture productive relations with Māori.” As a young adult I had effectively obscured my Chinese identity (without knowing my last name most of my cohort at UC were not often aware of my heritage and would be surprised if it ever came up). As a uni student I studied possibly the most hegemonic discipline you can get – Classics. I learnt two languages unrelated to my Chinese heritage (my father enjoys pocking fun of how much I avoided Mandarin but learnt Greek and Latin instead). I nearly had an opportunity to erase the last part of my Chinese identity when I was married. Emma and I were discussing what to do with our family names, and my father suggested taking her family name (Gledhill) as it would mean I would not have my CV thrown on a pile because of a foreign sounding family name. I don’t know if this changed Emma’s opinion or not, but after that discussion we stuck with my family name. I then began a job at Haeata Community Campus – a kura where 52% identify as Māori. I carried with me into that role as a school librarian all of the above. I threw myself into the bicultural practice and work we were doing – had to do! But it was always at an intellectual level for me because I was not really a part of this. This was until working on my Reo Māori with Te Wānanga O Aotearoa. My Kaiako pushed me to rethink my mihimihi to reflect more of my experience and less of a formula. I ended up thinking of my father’s own family in Beijing (where he was raised) and I rang him and asked him some questions about his family life growing up. Believe it or not up until this point (when I was 27) I had only vague ideas about what life was like for my father growing up in Beijing through the 60’s,70’s and 80’s, so thoroughly had I eschewed that side of my own family. I learnt that he had grazed a goat with his Yeye on the side of the summer palace, and walked along Kunming Lake. The village his father’s family is from (they were moved into Beijing during the cultural revolution) is where my father really sees his homeland despite never living there himself. These features of my past were only discovered in the context of engaging with the māori practice of whakawhānaungatanga.
At Haeata we used to have a saying: ‘What’s good for Māori is good for all’. This saying always centered our māori ākonga in our planning and preparation to be biculturally sensitive. I have found an affinity of what Dam shared in his own article on his experience as an Asian tangata tiriti in Aotearoa. I have discovered in my own journey of bicultural competency that it is not that I have had to become someone else in order to engage in being tangata tiriti, but that by engaging in this process through mātauranga māori I have been able to become more authentically myself. As a librarian as well, I can see a biculturally competent practice isn’t one where we create condescensions or engage in deficit thinking – but actually maximises the potentital of each individual who uses our services, or enters these spaces.
Dale
