Hi everyone, and welcome back to Global Village, 欢迎回来《小酒馆·大世界》. We have in our studio, our old friend Simon from New Zealand again, hi, Simon.

Hey Kia Ora. 你好。

But having said about that, you also lived in South Korea, right？

South Korea is an interesting one. So I lived in South Korea for about three... a bit over 3 years.

So how are the communities different in China, the sense of community different in China, in Korea and also in New Zealand if you have to compare the three.

So there's a few things which sort of come to mind. So in China, when you say sense of community, I think people dancing in the 广场in the square at nighttime.

广场舞。

Yeah. So when you say Chinese community that's what I think about. When you say Korea, I think having a good old protest about something, Koreans they love to protest and it's a really good opportunity to get out and have a sense...that's my... it's a sense of community there.

I see.

In New Zealand, the sense of community. It's probably for most like typical traditional Kiwis, a sense of community is around watching a rugby game or a sports event.

Sports events. So it's not really on trading dear meat for crayfish.

I mean the mainstream would probably be around rugby. Everything's around rugby. But New Zealand is becoming more multicultural. It's perhaps a bit more...it is fairly becoming more multicultural, so it's no longer just about rugby and shaving sheep.

Let's not stereotype. I didn't do the stereotyping here. It’s interesting that you mentioned multicultural. So New Zealand obviously is an immigrant country. So do you see more multicultural elements over the years in the sort of local community in New Zealand?

Hugely.

So where I'm living now Hawk’s Bay region, in 2018, we had around 150 Korean permanent residents; today or this year is a census year, we've got over 600 Korean families living here permanently.

Chinese numbers, I don't have exact data, but we would estimate maybe a three and a half four thousand Chinese live here.

New Zealand like the projections, government projections would suggest that we by 2040, so it's still quite a few years away, but the 2040 we expect that 1/4 of our population, 26% of our population will be Asian.

I see, it's certainly a very popular destination for people who want to emigrate. For example, I know quite a few friends who immigrated to New Zealand. When you talk about immigration, obviously you talk about assimilation.

这种融入当地文化的意思. Do you think new immigrants in New Zealand assimilate well? Is it easy or do they even want to assimilate based on your observation?

So certainly the people immigrants they come to New Zealand, they want to assimilate, they want to become part of the mainstream community, in New Zealand, they can do it. I think overall while there is certainly racism in New Zealand, it’s racism in every country, I think generally speaking, your average Kiwi is quite open to people from other countries and other cultures.

I have a number of Chinese friends that came to New Zealand and they were determined to assimilate, meet local people and effectively become a New Zealander. They could be Chinese New Zealanders, but they wanted to become a New Zealander. They wanted to understand the culture, they wanted to embrace it, and they very successfully did so.

You also have a lot of migrants, and we see this with the Chinese community, with the Koreans, with the Vietnamese, with almost Americans are particularly bad at it to be honest, where they just want to transplant their culture from their home country and their prejudices from their home country and their problems from their home country and just replicate it here in New Zealand.

Is it one of those sort of immigrants that they just become very insular? They just keep within their community and they also kind of are showing prejudice against the locals.

That is a definite issue in my role as consul.

I've been criticized, well, the embassy has received criticism because they asked an non Korean take on the role. I've experienced Chinese people in the local community complaining, blaming saying that I have no right, I'm not Chinese, I should not speak Chinese.

Wow. They said you have no right to speak Chinese?

They say you're not Chinese, you shouldn't speak Chinese, you shouldn't know Chinese.

That's not just prejudice. That's discrimination and outright racism I would say.

Yeah, but unfortunately, it's not that uncommon. There are some quite nationalistic views within the Chinese communities here in New Zealand. Most, the average Chinese person absolutely not. There is a small proportion of the population that actually quite aggressive, quite racist towards Kiwi people. The irony is they chose to move to New Zealand.

That actually can imagine. But fortunately, I didn't have the misfortune to meet people like that in person yet. Hopefully I will never meet them in person.

But another thing that I would like to ask as we're coming to the end of our discussion about community, because you were talking about more the interactions between the immigrant community and the local community, what about within immigrant community? Are there any problems like in fights for example because I know some communities can do that.

Absolutely, firstly I can talk about the Kiwi community in China, living in Beijing. We, on the face, or were all very buddy buddy, very good friends. But secretly, a lot of us were very competitive. My Chinese is better than his, or he's got a better job than me. That's not fair.

I see.

So I will preface my next comment just saying there is within communities, there are often frictions regardless of nationality, ethnicity. What I've seen in the Chinese community here, for example, and that could be the Chinese community in Auckland, the Chinese community in Wellington or here in Hawk’s Bay is that there are a lot of cliques.

Cliques means?

There are a lot of little groups of people.

Little groups. 小团体。

And they compete with each other. In the Korean community here, those cliques usually fit along religious lines. So they might be parts of a different church, or one might be Christian, one might be Buddhist, or they might both be Christian, but they're from different churches.

In the case of the Chinese community, you have many different waves of Chinese that have come.

True.

Yes, so you'd have ones which came, they call themselves are like the poll tax Chinese, they are the very first immigrants that came, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty years ago to New Zealand.

So that one group... then you had the Chinese that came, the immigrants to New Zealand in the 90s, 90s to 2000s. And you had ones which are perhaps coming now or last 10 years.

I see,有那种鄙视链, in Chinese we say 鄙视链, and then it's just basically you sort of judge the other groups. You think they're not as good as you are.

So that's certainly there's very clear groups there. But then even within the smaller groups, there's a whole lot of different infighting and issues.

Within like at our school, we had one of our students, she wanted to attend a dumpling making event at a prison. So there's a, in Hawk’s Bay region, there is a prison, and she and a few other Chinese locals, they wanted to go to the prison as part of a rehabilitation program to help former prisoners integrate back into the society and they wanted to go and talk about Chinese culture, share Chinese food.

And many other people within the Chinese community blame them and they said you shouldn't associate with prisoners. It will reflect badly on Chinese people. They ended up pretty much pushing her out of the Chinese community. She was just not welcomed there.

That's really bad. Shouldn't it be her choice? it's not really like she was attacking China. She was doing things that the Chinese community did not approve. That sounds very paternalistic.

Unfortunately that is not an uncommon experience. In the case of this particular lady, it actually worked out quite well for her. She decided based on that experience, she actively tried to make more friends with locals, with Kiwis, now and through that she's managed to improve her English quite dramatically and become more integrated with the mainstream Kiwi population Kiwi community.

I mean as we're coming to the end of our discussion on community, Simon, both Simon and I just want to make doubly clear that we're not here sharing experiences to judge one culture, one nationality. It's more like a lot of these they do, it can happen in every community, and also whether as immigrants whether you want to assimilate or not, it's obviously up to you, but it's more like we're sharing what is happening so that you can make your own judgment.

Absolutely, and as I mentioned before, the Kiwi community in China is also cliquey, very competitive. Yeah, it's a universal, it's a human trait.

All right. And on that note, I think we are going to wrap up today's episode.

And if you had similar experiences or you have lived in another culture, another country, and you want to share with us your sense of the community or your understanding of community. Leave us a comment in the comment section, and thank you Simon for coming to the show again.

Thank you for having me. I look forward to coming again soon.

I'm sure we'll have you back in the studio before we know it. Thank you and we'll see you next time.

Ka kite, see you later.