kōrero mai

“I speak Mandarin pretty well because I was part of an experimental language teaching method in elementary school,” my dad told me recently, with a hint of pride in his voice. Later, in the silence of my car going to work, I realised the weight of his statement: my dad and his contemporaries were victims of forced assimilation. As I reflect further, I’ve become aware of the layers of complexity of identity that I can simultaneously embody, of being both colonised and a settler; Indigenous and an im/migrant.

My dad was born in Taiwan the year before the Chinese Communist Revolution, an event that sent ripples of one million political refugees across a strait of water. As they arrived on the shores of his homeland, my dad was learning how to walk and eating his first solids.

I learned in a History class that the migration of these political refugees (the Kuomintang, or KMT) was meant to be a temporary re-grouping before staging a counter-revolution. But, at some point, they settled, fitting into the gaps that the previous Japanese colonisers had left when they “lost” Taiwan at the end of WWII. A relic that remained was a well-worn implement in the colonisation toolbox: one of the most effective ways to kill a culture is by attacking their language.

And so, when my dad entered school in 1954, he became part of the KMT domination effort.

Taiwan has had a long history of colonisation with the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese laying claim to some or all of the island at various points since the 16th century. The Qing Dynasty in China encouraged active settler colonialism in the 1800s and some of my ancestors likely arrived during this period from southern China and Macau. I’ve heard that Taiwanese is similar to Hokkien, which settlers from that period probably brought over and which was used to dominate the Indigenous population.

I didn’t know this history growing up. All I knew was that we spoke Taiwanese at home with my grandparents, while other Taiwanese people spoke Mandarin. This used to be a point of annoyance to me, that my only other fluent language had limited global use. I asked my dad about it once and he told me that we spoke Taiwanese because of his mum, who worked in the back of a fruit shop and didn’t need to use Mandarin regularly, so she never gained easy fluency.

It wasn’t until 2018 that I learned my grandmother, who passed away when I was an infant, was actually Shiraya, an Indigenous tribe from the plains in the centre of Taiwan.*  Like in other colonised countries, the Indigenous peoples were deliberately and systematically discriminated against and assimilated. I don’t know if my grandmother spoke her own language; instead, she learned Taiwanese growing up (the language of the 1800s settlers) and then Japanese in school, since Japan took control in the late 19th century. All my grandparents spoke Japanese to one another, having become so comfortable in the language of another people.

Although I don’t remember her, my grandmother is a source of inspiration to me. Her people had their language and culture assimilated out of them by both the dominant culture and by the Japanese.  But when she faced yet another attack after 1949, with her whole world shifting around her, my grandmother chatted comfortably in Taiwanese in the back room with her co-workers. In an unintentional way, she was resisting colonial power.

In their 20s, my parents migrated to Canada and with English as their third language, my parents learned to adapt to a new land and new culture, choosing to assimilate. But even with their sacrifices as immigrants, or perhaps because of them, I left my homeland with its particular set of colonial histories to settle across the waters in yet another colonised land. (Is any land outside the reach of colonisation??)

Here, in Aotearoa, through the same colonisation tools that have been used in other parts of the world, te reo Māori was once on the brink of extinction as it was attacked and legislated out.  Within living history, it nearly disappeared because of the deliberate work of a surge of British and other immigrants who crossed the waters from their faraway lands. The New Zealand colonial government knew that by uprooting Māori from their identity - their reo, their whenua, their whānau - they would weaken resistance to domination.

Except it didn’t work. Like Indigenous peoples elsewhere, the very existence of Māori has remained a vital challenge to colonisation.

While living in Canada, I learned about the vibrancy of Māori culture and language and that was one of my motivations for wanting to move to Aotearoa. I knew I wanted to learn te reo and gain an understanding of te ao Māori after I arrived as a way of supporting efforts to revitalise the language and to contribute to normalising it in mainstream spaces. My personal te reo journey launched through my young friend, Maiarangi who I met when he was two. I met Maiarangi and his mum, Arohanui, after I participated in a very basic introductory te reo course and a few weeks into the self-study book Māori Made Easy.  Arohanui was endeavouring to speak only in te reo to Maiarangi and, through our friendship, I learned what I have come to call, “two year old te reo.” In addition to stringing together simple sentences, I learned key vocabulary of toys and vehicles as well as commands to keep things outside (like bikes), sit down (when eating) and to wash one’s hands (often).

Te reo and te ao Māori were all that Maiarangi knew in the early years of his life. His mum had attended kura reo in the 90s and early 2000s after his koro had been part of the te reo revitalisation movement. I’ve heard that it takes one generation to lose a language and three to bring it back.  My grandmother, even if she spoke her Indigenous language, never passed it onto my dad.  That was lost. But what remains is my own ability to speak Taiwanese - an introduced language passed down to me by my grandparents.

I have the privilege of being a settler, both by birth and by choice. Though my roots are not in this land and the stories that form the words are not mine, I learn te reo as an intentional act of political resistance, to stand in solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of this place. Every time I use te reo, it is a simple, subtle and subversive act, done repeatedly and over time. As a tauiwi of colour, learning and using te reo is one way of many that I can counter colonial domination and I’ve found it to be an entry point to conversations with Pākehā and other tauiwi about being tāngata tiriti and giving up power.

As I learn and speak, read and sing, I stand by the people of this land, to agree with them in saying, “Yes, you will remain. I stand with you, to resist.”  As an immigrant, it’s only right that I do so.

*Taiwan’s Indigenous people comprise about 3% of the general population and are colloquially known as “mountain people.” Indigenous peoples from the plains are not yet officially recognised.