Chinese Fruit Shops in New Zealand
Ruth Lam, Beverly Lowe, Helen Wong, Michael Wong, Carolyn King
Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust (2018)
904 pages, 2 volumes,
Hardcover ISBN 978-0-473-41551-8 NZ$110
Softcover ISBN 978-0-473-41550-1 NZ$90
[Special price for early orders – Softcover NZ$80]
Fruitful Research
The Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust has performed a valuable service in
publishing The Fruits of Our Labours.
It wasn’t until I started leafing through it that I fully realised that, in the
space of a few generations, we have seen the rise and fall of the Chinese fruit-shop
as an institution. Like so many other specialised services that we took for
granted, family fruit-shops have been swept away by the changes in how we do
our shopping. Here we have an important social document, which recognises a
significant chapter in our nation’s history.
This book’s companion work, Sons
of the Soil (2012) credited one of the earliest Chinese market gardens in
New Zealand to Ah Poe in Dunedin. In
August 1867, he and five other Cantonese from Victoria began converting 3 acres
of swampy land (now part of the Museum Reserve) into a market garden and began
hawking vegetables. About 1868, on the Great King Street edge of his garden, Ah
Poe erected ‘premises’ which seems to have been a shop, thus making Ah Poe our
first Chinese greengrocer as well.
Typical of the careful research behind this work, a fascinating graph
shows that as the number of Chinese working at gold-mining declined, the number
working in fruit-shops and market gardens began to increase. Every region has
its own graph showing the number of Chinese fruit-shops over the years. In most
areas the first shops opened in the 1880s, followed by a steady increase to the
1920s; the peak years were from the 1940s to the 1970s and then came a steady
decline in numbers, attributed to the rise of supermarkets and introduction of
weekend trading.
The family-owned Chinese fruit-shop (like the market garden and the
laundry) was a system which rewarded effort and expertise with a reasonable
chance of prosperity. It was an escalator, driven by human toil, which conveyed
people from life as Chinese peasants to life as New Zealand professionals. It
wasn’t efficient, and there were casualties but over three generations it
helped create a prosperous, well-educated group of New Zealanders.
When my sister, Pinky, moved to Wellington, she was so impressed by the
service she received at Hoon’s Foodmarket, Newtown, that she insisted on taking
me in there to talk to some of the Hoon family. We chatted about the importance
of family history and family trees, and agreed that too many elderly New
Zealand Chinese regard their life’s work as uninteresting and not worth
recording. Fortunately the five authors have managed to record many accounts of
the work and the people who did it – in many cases, just in time.
It is clear, after reading this work, that the Hoon family’s
achievements are similar to many other family sagas. In fact, a clear pattern
emerges for most New Zealand Chinese families’ fruit-shop experience.
There are dozens of variations on this theme in the sixteen regions
covered in The Fruits of Our Labours,
and every one of them carries a distinct fascination.
When I was asked to review The Fruits of Our Labours, it was suggested that I should indicate who would be interested in reading it. The answer has surprised me. A two-volume history of New Zealand’s Chinese fruit shops, weighing in at 3.8 kg, is not exactly bedtime reading but it is remarkably appealing.
So who is going to read The
Fruits of Our Labours? Obviously public libraries will buy it as a
well-documented slice of New Zealand history. Equally obviously, secondary
school libraries will find it useful as a social studies resource. Even more
obviously, those elderly people whose stories are told in these pages will want
a copy.
My concern is for a fourth group, those young family members – the
doctors, lawyers, accountants, teacher and engineers - who barely remember the
fruit-shop run by their parents and grandparents. It is vitally important for
them to buy this book and use it as a base for building up their own detailed
personal family history. There are plenty of good examples in these volumes,
with Albert Young particularly evocative in listing his work as a five-year old
in Timaru’s Crown Fruit Supply,
“… sweep
the floor, open newspaper for wrapping, fill up bag racks, fill up cigarette
stands, pre-bag onions and potatoes, carry parcels to customers’ cars, try to
open wooden boxes of fruit, and anything else Dad could think of.”
As Daniel Wong puts it, “The shop
taught us the value of money.”
The five authors of this book have done a brilliant job of assembling
all the information they could find about every Chinese fruit-shop in New
Zealand. (The criteria that were used are detailed on p.8.) The handy database
at the end of Volume 2 is breath-taking in its scope, listing every known shop
from Bluff (W. Wong, 1940s) to Kaitaia (Hop Hing & Co, 1942-59), along with
their Chinese names, owners’ names, dates, and their original village and
county origin. There are maps, diagrams,
graphs, shop plans and masses of photographs.
The arrangement of the two volumes is broadly geographical, beginning
for historical reasons with Otago, then following the spread of the original
Cantonese into Southland, Canterbury and the West Coast, then to Wellington,
the centre for the second concentration of Cantonese settlers, and ending in
the northern regions such as Auckland and Northland. Each of the sixteen
regions has its own historical introduction and overview, so that we also learn
about their cultural groups, produce markets, sports clubs, and Sunday
screenings of opera films.
The most remarkable stories are related in a simple fashion, such as
the account of stoker Li Sing Ah Lee (p.94) jumping ship at Lyttelton in the
1940s, evading arrest, and becoming an Oamaru market gardener and shop owner.
Through hard work, an illegal immigrant, a Hakka orphan from Java, became a
respected community figure and saw his family enter a range of professional
careers.
This book contains dozens of equally gripping accounts of survival and
success, and in each of them, we can only guess at the emotional strains behind
the simple statements, such as for Wong Chik Kwan (p.214), “He came back to New Zealand, leaving behind
his wife who later died.” The authors have carried out a wide range of
interviews, so that often we hear the authentic voice of experience.
My wife, Jenny raised in a fruit-shop, recalls that as a young girl, she
thought all Chinese were her relatives and that they all worked in fruit-shops.
Reading here of the experiences of hundreds of fruit-shop families, it is easy
to see why Jenny felt that way. For each family the fruit-shop often absorbed all their efforts six days a
week, so that it was only on Sundays (and on Double Ten) that there was time
for families to socialise with each other or attend cultural or sporting events.
Of course this closeness also meant that weddings often linked
fruit-shop families, so a complex network of relationships resulted. Inevitably
the coverage of one fruit-shop family has cross-references to several others. I
greatly enjoyed tracing various branches of my wife’s family tree and thinking
of stories that aren’t in the book. (My lovely mother-in-law once seated our 2-year-old
eldest daughter among the fruit displayed in her shop window, just so she could
say to each customer, “That’s my granddaughter.”)
Trevor Agnew
25 January 2018NOTE: The Auckland launch of The Fruits of our Labours was on 23 February 2018 and each region will be having its own launch in the weeks which follow. Check the book's Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/fruitshopsnz) for locations and dates.
No comments:
Post a Comment