The title of this recording is "Sidney Wong - Rainbow Studies Now". It was recorded in Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn Parade, Kelburn, Wellington on the 23rd November 2023. Sidney Wong is presenting.  Their name is spelt correctly but may appear incorrectly spelt later in the document. The duration of the recording is 14 minutes, but this may not reflect the actual length of the proceedings. A list of correctly spelt content keywords and tags can be found at the end of this document. A brief description of the recording is: Sidney Wong presents at the Rainbow Studies Now symposium, held on 23 November 2023 at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington. The content in the recording covers the 2020s decade. The audio recording begins:  Tēnā koutou, ko te mihi tuatai ki ngā mana whenua o tēnei rohe, um, Te Ā ti Awa. Ko ae au, he ure hau nō Haina ki te Tonga, he Hainamara a hau i whānau mā au i te Awakairangi Tāi, engari kei Ōtūtahi a hau e noho ana inai nei. Kia ora! Lovely to meet you all. I've been thinking a lot about how do I start this talk, you know, um, and I thought maybe, you know, today we're talking about queer Asian and maybe I thought I'd share something fairly personal, is that despite Loha, my parents don't actually know I'm here. Cause, that's one thing, is that, you know, for us who inhabit these different closets, um, sometimes it's a bit of a balancing act. Sometimes it's about trying to, you know, trying to understand how these sort of different identities interplay and, and so I just want to share that with you, um, just so, you know, we get sort of like, have a feel of what today's discussion is going to be about. Um, so we all come from somewhere. Uh, we all have genealogy, we all have family history, um, this is a map of, um, so this is a map of the migration of the Wongs, uh, throughout history. So this goes back to 900 AD, and it talks about how one cousin or one sibling decided that they no longer wanted to be part of this journey, so, you know, they've sort of like, you know, stopped, established themselves, created a village, and that's family history. This is the heritage that I talk about when I talk about my Cantonese Chinese identity. And I think, um, you know, it's a bit of a catfish today when I talk about Asian identity. Because as we, sort of, as I go through the different slides, as I, we go through the story of my journey, this ongoing journey, we kind of realize that this term doesn't exist. It's something that's been put on me and put on our communities. So, first of all, I just want to say a content warning, um, it's going to be a little bit heavy, um, it's only 15 minutes, so hopefully it's, you know, short, but also please take care of yourselves. There's, um, you know, we'll talk about homophobia, racism, racial slurs, um, and also transphobia and violence, so just please, you know, um, take care of yourself and I'll let you know if I'm going to, you know, if anything that's going to be quite triggering. But first of all, as I said, as stated in my intro, I'm a linguist, so I'm a stickler for definitions, so, what do I mean by queer? Um, and I thought, instead of going through the classic, sort of like, you know, what does it mean to be queer from like, sort of this framework, um, I found this book when I was in Mumbai, by this author, Sharif, who talks it very clearly. You know, deeply about their relationship between queerness and their transnational identity as an Indian person from India and Thailand. And I thought it was just such a beautiful way to sum it up, that queerness exists outside the box. It is defined by the indefinite, the expanse, the width and length, the roundness of the earth. It is colored by colors. It isn't one color. So seeing things from a queer standpoint or lens or view isn't about one ideal thought either. It is as diverse as it can get. It recognises that there are many ways to live as there are many ways to die. I've defined queer now, but what about Asian? As I said earlier, this term is a bit of a misnomer. It's a statistical tool. It's a way that we've been sort of packaged very nicely so we know how many of these others we have in the room. You know, we have to think about these different concepts and frameworks of why do we have these terms in the first place. Uh, so, you know, we can go to the, uh, refer to the U. S. and think about concepts like racialization, you know, to signify the extension of a racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group, Asian. Who are they? We can also think of racial formation, the socio historical process by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed. But, closer to home, we can think of Asian as another way of grouping the others. The racial invisibility of Pākehā in society means for non white Tau iwi, non Māori, this often results in a default assimilation process which is facilitated by human capital model of migration. That map that you saw doesn't exist. Asian. And so, as I said, you know, even though in the title it says that we're talking about coercion, I have to be specific. I can only draw on my own experience, my own histories. And I want to talk a little bit about the story of Chinese in Aotearoa and how we've been subjugated and how a person like me has ended up being in a closet, in a closet. The Chinese who lived, lived with contradictory expectations. To be motivated but not assertive, to excel academically but not be competitive with mainstream New Zealanders, to know one's place. So I think for those who are familiar with, you know, being part of our rainbow queer communities, we're very familiar with the closet. It's this metaphysical description of being enclosed, being trapped, being, saying that you do exist but you don't exist at the same time. And, in a similar way, and as I, it's been a journey trying to sort of understand and, you know, my identity, but also in terms of my queer identity, what it means to be Cantonese, you know, I found, oh, actually, we start thinking about the closet. Many of our ethnic communities also inhabit a closet. We're Asian, we're Mila, whatever that term means, we're Pasifika, whatever that term means. And so, With the little time we have, we're going to have a look, we're going to go on a journey. Um, as Confucius said, Wan gui ji san, ka mua ka muri. We can only understand or see our future if we understand our past. And so, on this journey, so like, you know, thinking about sort of how, why people leave. You know, for me, for my family, they experience. Pandemics, uh, famine, uh, civil wars. They left because they wanted to survive and thrive. You know, I imagine when they sort of look at the river, they look at this gate onto the West River. This is the last thing they saw as they leave, as they left. And for them it wasn't directly to Aotearoa. It was through Macau, a Portuguese colony. Then through Hong Kong, a British colony. And then now our third colony, New Zealand, Aotearoa. And I think of all these sort of these early Chinese came to Aotearoa who, many are nameless, faceless. We do have registers. Um, but I think about this, this hut in Arrowtown. This was the sort of condition they were living in. They were told that They were excluded, they weren't allowed to live in the city, in Arrowtown. This was on the side of the river. And so I think of this expression, uh, Wailong Chowlian, which means to find warmth around a stove. And, it's true. You know, for many of them, they did find warmth. Not only around a stove, but, uh, you know, with other people. And as we know, and, you know, through history, which we talked about earlier, many of this history has been erased. This, and around, sort of, uh, 2000 BC, when the first book burning, sorry, the book burning happened with the, uh, Yellow Emperor. And then later on in, around the 1950s during the Cultural Revolution. But we know that these queer identities, relationships, expressions of life existed. But they were reprimanded. You know, um, I'm not going to go through this whole quote, but basically, as I was going through this journey, originally thinking about what does it mean to be a Chinese New Zealander, again and again, I saw these reports, court reports saying that, you know, so and so had been doing indecent acts, unnatural acts, things that are beyond reproach, things we can't mention. Of course, what it meant was that these people who were together were Engaging in a way that we're very non Christian, something that was not valued, something that we don't want in this country that we're trying to develop, that wants to exclude these others. And so, um, I know I don't have a lot of time, but, you know, I'm just going to go through like, sort of like some of the legislation that has sort of, this is the playbook of how you exclude a community. Um, oh, sorry, trigger warning. But, yeah, so, you know, in terms of these identities, you know, they were, you know, seen as the other, they're the bad ones. Don't be like them. You minorities, look at those people over there. They're other. They're wrong. They're unnatural. We need to exclude them. This is not what we want on this land. And so if we look at this, uh, representation, um, from, uh, from the newspaper back in around sort of the late 1800s. This is a representation of a Chinese person, you know, wrapping their limbs around this Māori wāikīne which was supposed to parallel Britannica. And so like, you know, the term I want to draw your attention to is licentiousness, sexual depravity, you know, these ways of being that are so disgusting, that's a monster worth the rid of. And so I don't have a lot of. A time, but you know, you make, you exclude them, you make it expensive, 10 pounds, that's about 600 New Zealand dollars. You increase it, um, you make it up to 100 pounds, 20, 000 New Zealand dollars, current, you know, current currency. You make it expensive, you make it so that only they can come, that their families can't come, that their children can't come, that their relations can't come. And then you say that, hey, now you have to do an English tip. And, um, later on they realized, well, actually there are British citizens like our, um, you know, British citizens who are not welcome either. So let's extend this and say that only Anglo, so Anglo British can come to this country. Um, and so like, you know, as we sort of like go through this journey and start thinking about sort of why there's like, there's this invisibility of these sort of identities, you can think, well. They were told they're not welcome, they'd been excluded, they'd been diminished, and now you're welcome to establish a community with, you know, and sort of, and there's no coincidence, there's no Chinatowns here, there's no coincidence, there's no Little India, you know, there's no enclaves because we're told to be invisible, to disappear. And so, as you establish your roots, Lok Te Sangan, so like to, lay down, lay your roots, establish a community, you know, you try and, you disappear. You know, the more successful Chinese became, the more invisible they needed to be to counteract the effects of being seen as a threat and thus narrowing the threshold tolerance level. You, spread out. You know, don't form a community. You know, you, you have, you see a takeaway here, see a shop here, okay, we'll move somewhere else. We don't want to be grouped together because we don't want to be seen as a threat. Uh, avoid incidents. I don't want to be involved in things. If there's something, if something happens to me, I don't want to go to the police, I don't want to cause a stir, I don't want to be involved in politics. You normalise. I say I'm Kiwi, now I'm New Zealand. I am, I speak English. I don't have these odd cultural practices that you've told me that are wrong. You act passively. You don't exist. You sit in the corner, and you live. Because you're grateful to survive. And so, I think about, so for the last two days I've been at the Rainbow Takakui, um, Uenuku, so at the Rainbow Rites, um, sort of, at the Rainbow Rites Conference up in Tama, Kokoro, and I think to myself as I'm sitting in the room, why do I always feel like, you know, I've been told I take up too much space as, you know, the Chinese person, as the Asian. I should be making room for more people to come into these spaces. I'd love to, I'd love to be at home watching TV, drinking wine, bake off, what not. But why have we been told that we have to shut up and buck up? But we're turning the tides here. So we, there are a lot of groups out there trying to sort of make change, trying to sort of reconnect with our heritage, reconnect with our culture, our language. You know, try and form a sense of community. But how can we do that when so much of that has been told that you don't belong, that you shouldn't speak up and be, um, proud of your identity? And I just want to sort of, um, you know, shout out to these organizations that were formed. Some very, uh, you know, they formed, but then sort of disbanded. But they existed to help queer Asians form a sense of identity. And so. One, two, yeah, Mihi, I, I, yeah, IOPNZ, Arka Aotearoa, China Pride, Proud Campaign, Rainbow Path, Ethnic Rainbow Alliance. These organisations are trying to sort of like, understand what is the means of our identity when so much of that history and genealogy and heritage has been taken away from us. And so, I come to my last slide, which hopefully meets the 15 minute threshold, but I'll, I, I sort of impart you with this last idiomatic expression. And what that means is to respect our ancestors, our elders, our , in order to nurture those who come after us. And so as we go on this journey, as we try and sort of reconnect with our different heritage, with our culture, with our language, with the people who we here, who no longer, uh, the forgotten histories, as we try and sort of like bring these stories to light, that's what we need to do. We need to honor the histories. And on that note, I just want to end with this again. So solidarity, stand without faltering. We are here, our identities and communities exist, and we will not fall, and we'll stand by other communities who require our allyship and support. Thank you. The audio recording ends. A list of keywords/tags describing the recording follow. These tags contain the correct spellings of names and places which may have been incorrectly spelt earlier in the document. The tags are seperated by a semi-colon: 2020s; Chinese; Chinese migration; Queer Asian identity; Sidney Wong; immigration; racialization; racism; repression; solidarity. The original recording can be heard at this website https://www.pridenz.com/rainbow_studies_now_sidney_wong.html. The master recording is also archived at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand.  For more details visit their website https://tiaki.natlib.govt.nz/#details=ecatalogue.1107380. Please note that this document may contain errors or omissions - you should always refer back to the original recording to confirm content.