Saturday, April 21, 2018

Paul Wah's Thin slice of heaven

I have known Paul Wah for something like sixty years. I can't recall whether it was Teachers' College or university, but we go back many years. Our paths have crossed from time to time. When I received an invitation to the launch of his new book A thin slice of heaven, I looked forward to meeting there some people from my long distant past. Paul published his autobiography Wooden man Stone Heart five years ago. It traced his story from the grocer's boy in a small Taranaki town to his very successful career in education. For the last five years he worked on his historical novel that had probably certain parallels with the story of his own great-grandfather and grandfather. A Chinese immigrant, a successful merchant in New Zealand, goes back to the village in China he came from and takes his grandson with him to give him a Chinese education. There the grandson is abducted by bandits. A lot of cowboys and Indians murder, mayhem and bloodshed enhances the action, but in the end the grandson is saved, the ransom money is not called on, and grandfather and grandson return to peaceful prosperous New Zealand. There are vivid descriptions of the simple life and poverty in the Chinese village, as well as the breakdown of law and order. For the villagers, New Zealand is the Golden Mountain. But there is a dark side to the lives of Chinese in New Zealand, gambling and opium, which ruined the business that the grandfather bequeathed to his son. 

It took five years for Paul to research and write this book. He explained that he wrote it for the Chinese children of a younger generation in New Zealand to tell them about their roots and heritage. I, as a Jewish immigrant saw parallels between the stories of Chinese and Jewish immigrants. Being like everyone else, assimilating, had a price to pay. The looked down on  tailor in the back street tailoring shop, or the garment worker, the hawker trying to make a living from the back of a cart, the labourer working long hours too make a living and get out of poverty and give his children a better chance in life, was probably a man learned in Talmud, speaking five languages, but with an accented version of the the Queens or the BBC's English. In many ways, the Chinese became the new Jews. The former image of the Chinaman, who for my grandmother was synonymous with the greengrocer became in this generation the image of the doctor, the successful lawyer, the brilliant musician, the overachiever, and the Chinese mother became the Tiger Mother, the driven Jewish mother of a generation ago. The great difference is that the descendant of Chinese immigrants has a village in China to go back to, where remnants of his family history is still remembered. The roots of the Jewish immigrants have been almost without exception annihilated, destroyed, and the people in these places had betrayed their Jewish neighbours that had so enriched their world. 

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