In the digitised image of her specimen, the plant is fixed to a sheet of yellowed paper, along with a card giving its name and where it was collected (‘British North Borneo, Kinabalu, 1910’). Her handwritten words are compressed, made up of loose curls, as if quickly scrawled. The stems are thin and fragile now. The leaves and petals have faded to a dull gold, pressed against the page, all facing in one direction as if caught blowing in the wind of the peak. A small unfolded envelope is fixed to the sheet, opening outwards like an advent calendar window, where a handful of dried seeds has been kept safe.
My first summer in London, I picked up a copy of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours at the gift shop of the Natural History Museum. Published in 1814, the book is a taxonomy of colour descriptions in reference to specific animals, vegetables and minerals. Abraham Gottlob Werner was a German geologist who first set about classifying crystals by colour. The book’s charts are divided into whites, greys, blacks, blues, purples, greens, yellows, oranges, reds, browns. For each shade, he gives three examples of the colour spotted in the natural world. When describing certain shades of blue, Werner looked to the edges of butterfly wings, as I do. Ultramarine Blue is the colour of the ‘Upper Side of the Wings of small blue Heath Butterfly’; Flax-flower Blue is the ‘Light Parts of the Margin of the Wings of Devil’s Butterfly’.
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours reads like a colonial archive of colour. Werner sought ‘to remove the present confusion in the names of colours’ and establish a standardised colour naming system for use among naturalists, collectors and painters, at a time when scientists accompanied colonists on their voyages to the far reaches of the British Empire, like Sir Joseph Banks bringing Aotearoa’s plant specimens home on the Endeavour. Within this book, Charles Darwin found a new language for describing colour; he used it to help keep a record of his journey on the HMS Beagle to Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti and South America from 1831 to 1836.
But there is no standard catalogue of colour names. Our language for colours shifts according to our own experiences and memories: the blue of a giant Borneo butterfly’s wings pinned in a glass case; the yellow at the centre of a custard tart. These colours are changing all the time.
8. myrtle flower pale pink
An afternoon of warm rain on the foothills of Mount Kinabalu, in 1910. I see her in her white cotton dress, bending low to touch the leaves of a shrub with pink blooms. She recognises it immediately: Anisophyllea. She stops. The smell, the colour. She recalls suddenly a valley in Rotorua, New Zealand, where she had trekked alone five years earlier under the hard sun. This plant had thrived there in the wind. On the same slope she recognises a clump of myrtle, Baeckea frutescens, a tree of healing. She crushes the end of a needle-like leaf between her fingers and takes in the scent. This is her language: the language of plants at high altitudes.
A day of unrelenting sun in June, 1964. My grandfather crouches in the shade by the flowing stream, his khaki trousers rolled up just above his ankles. He watches the surface closely, reading the patterns of movement in the water. A few metres downstream, the torrent narrows where water tumbles over large rocks. As they wait in silence for fish to rise to the surface, he can hear the sound of the waterfall coursing into a larger body of water below.
A bright morning in September, 2020: I am sitting alone in the library with flax-green walls. This library is a library of the British Empire and all its flora, fauna and indigenous peoples. I think of my own natural history, both sides of my heritage rooted in island colonies. On the desk in front of me, two black-and-white photographs side by side: one shows the granite rock face of Kinabalu’s summit, taken in 1910. The other, from 1956, of the crystal-still surface of a stream in the Sabah rainforest, a pattern of leaves and tangled vines reflected on the surface, almost moving.
9. dandelion yellow
The shape of my world is altered now. It’s easy to feel stranded, stuck, no longer on the path I’d planned. There’s talk of this year marking the end of long-haul travel and it’s true, travel is a luxury. When I think of all the places I can’t reach that I wish I could reach, I feel a burning guilt in me. But there are so many of us whose skin, whose lineage, is split along lines of migration.
Whenever my mum meets someone new who is Hakka just like her, her eyes light up. She’ll say to me warmly, ‘they’re Hakka too!’ and I’ll smile and nod, pretending I know what this really means. I know what the language sounds like, or at least the variant of Hakka that my family speaks, which is as familiar to me as the sound of the sea, but I can’t understand it. I know there are special Hakka delicacies, rich-smelling braised dishes of tofu, pork and offal, but I didn’t grow up with them. If I can’t speak the language or cook any of the recipes, I’ve never felt sure that I could claim this ancestral link.
Hakka isn’t an ethnicity, but a distinct cultural subgroup of the Han Chinese majority. The history of my ancestors is a history of migration, displacement and transience. First from northern and central China, from where we are thought to have originated, down to southern China and Taiwan. Then, huge waves of migration from the 1850s onwards, as a result of land disputes, famines and upheaval – to Malaysia, where my grandparents fled, to Singapore, Vietnam, India, North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Australia, Aotearoa and other lands. I now understand that being Hakka means we don’t all come from one place, but rather, from scattered villages and scattered islands. It means we don’t all speak one language, but many regional variants of multiple languages, including English.
I remember looking up the Mandarin word for Hakka on my phone during one of my first Chinese classes at university – kèjiā rén. The literal English translation of the phrase popped up underneath: guest people. I never felt the significance of the meaning of these words until years later. What does it mean to be a guest in Aotearoa: part coloniser, part recent migrant? What does it mean to be a guest in Britain under a popular government-led campaign of anti-migrant rhetoric and policy? As the Aotearoa writer K. Emma Ng asks: ‘How can we belong here, become “from here”, without re-enacting the violence that is historically embedded in the gesture of trying to belong?’ It begins somewhere in acknowledging that both my whiteness and my Chineseness are immigrant identities. It begins with understanding what it means to put down roots on stolen land, and doing so with intention, with care and respect. It means collective responsibility, and working towards a better world for indigenous and displaced people.
In Aotearoa we have an important word for this: tauiwi. Non-Māori, non-indigenous. Some New Zealanders can’t face being called a guest – they can’t see themselves as foreign, nor our grandfathers and great-grandfathers who drew lines along the land belonging to tangata whenua. But being tauiwi doesn’t mean I’m left drifting, rootless, untethered to an ancestral homeland. It means tracing the threads back to the roots of my history, my colonial history, and holding all the pieces in my hands. It means always looking for the sea.
A well-known metaphor for the Hakka people is the dandelion – the sunny yellow flower that grows like a weed. The food writer Linda Lau Anusasananan writes in The Hakka Cookbook: ‘Like a dandelion, a Hakka can land anywhere, take root in the poorest soil, and flourish and flower.’ In traditional Chinese medicine, the dandelion, like other bitter-tasting plants, is used for cleansing and healing. Bright dandelions grew all over the grass by the school buildings in Wellington. We used to pick them and crush the petals between forefinger and thumb, staining our fingers yellow.
10. magpie tailfeather blue
During the long, anxious summer, I taught myself how to sew. I had a piece of Indonesian indigo cotton given to me by my mother, folded away at the back of my wardrobe. It reminded me of pieces of a handmade patchwork quilt I had when I was little, given to me by Po Po and Gong Gong. It was made from scraps of patterned fabrics – I remember a row of sailboats, gold stars and clouds – bordered by soft turquoise brushed cotton that was beginning to wear away underneath. Mum knew where
all the squares of fabric had come from: dresses that Po Po had worn, curtains, pyjamas that had been outgrown. I’d always assumed this was Po Po’s handiwork, and never thought to find out more – until one day I told Mum I’d been learning to sew, and she sent back a message that read: ‘Gong Gong made those quilts on that old sewing machine next to the piano, you know.’ I stopped, wondering how I’d never known this before. There were several quilts: at least three, one for each of his older grandchildren. Each one an archive made of cloth, held together by seams sewn before I was born, folded into a box and carried across the sea.
My grandparents’ house always felt like an archive of sorts – not one left dusty and untouched, but a living record of a scattered family. At this moment we don’t know when we’ll see each other again, but it doesn’t always matter. This is an archive rooted in memory, and in our shared habit of collecting things and never throwing them away.
A personal archive of the colour blue: Wellington harbour beneath dark clouds; the wide wings of a Tanaecia iapis butterfly pinned in a glass case; the iridescent tail feathers of a magpie lying with its head turned gracefully to one side, as if asleep on the footpath; a hundred-year-old pressed orchid specimen collected from Borneo, the veins of its curled petals still purple and indigo; a petrol-blue enamel pot that once belonged to Po Po; my mother’s deep sea blue sewing box; a swimming pool surrounded by rainforest hills.
‘A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit,’ Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass. I think of the last bodies of water I have touched sustaining me, connecting me to places I can’t reach. In midsummer, under heavy clouds off the coast of Kent, near the strip of water that separates this small island from the continent of Europe. Late summer, in a river near Oxford, where David swam out to the other side to pick blackberries and carried them back across the water to me with one hand held above him. Early autumn in the darkening pond, leaves falling around me and from me as I pulled my aching body up the metal ladder, squeezing pond water from my hair. I think of my untidy balcony garden, a collection of plants placed there to help sustain both my body and spirit: ginger, garlic, spring onions, mint, marigolds.
Outside my window, the little kōwhai grows steadily in its pot, its leaves turning dark and strong.
Notes
The Safe Zone
Kyo Maclear. Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation. New York: Scribner, 2017.
Rena Priest. ‘What Happens to Them Happens to Us’. Hakai Magazine, 12 May 2020:
John Ristau. ‘Ghost quakes: The ghost chips of earthquakes’. Newshub NZ, 10 September 2018:
Where the Kōwhai Blooms
Joseph Banks’ Florilegium: Botanical Treasures from Cook’s First Voyage. London: Thames & Hudson, 2017 (first published 1990).
Walter Reginald Brook Oliver. Botanical Discovery in New Zealand: The Visiting Botanists. Wellington: Hutcheson, Bowman & Stewart, 1951.
Joseph Angus Mackay. Historic Poverty Bay and the East Coast, North Island, New Zealand. Gisborne: J.A. Mackay, 1949.
‘Sophora Tetraptera. Winged-Podded Sophora’. Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, 1791.
Anna Jackson. Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries, 1915–1962. Oxford: Routledge, 2010.
Sylvia Plath. The Bell Jar. London: Faber & Faber, 2001 (1963).
Franny Choi. ‘How to Let Go of the World’. PEN America, 3 October 2019:
Katherine Mansfield. ‘At the Bay’, from The Garden Party and Other Stories. London: Penguin Books, 1997 (1922).
Jessica J. Lee. Turning. London: Virago, 2017.
Quentin Pope (ed.). Kowhai Gold: An Anthology of Contemporary New Zealand Verse. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1930.
The Language of Waves
Pliny the Elder. The Complete Works of Pliny the Elder. East Sussex: Delphi Classics, 2015.
Abi Andrews. The Word for Woman Is Wilderness. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2018.
Cheryl Strayed. Wild. London: Atlantic Books, 2012.
Abi Palmer. Sanatorium. London: Penned in the Margins, 2020.
Kirstie Millar Curses, Curses. London: Takeaway Press, 2019.
Crushed Little Stars
Mitski. Bury Me at Makeout Creek. New York: Double Double Whammy Records, 2014.
Mitski. Puberty 2. Indiana: Dead Oceans, 2016.
Aleyna Martinez. Tayi Tibble on Poūkahangatus & Decolonising the Mind. Serum Digital Magazine, 13 September 2018:
Will Harris. Mixed-Race Superman. London: Peninsula Press, 2018.
Talia Smith. The heart is the strongest muscle in the body. Auckland: Window Gallery, 2018: multimedia artwork accessible at
Michelle Zauner. ‘Crying in H Mart’. New Yorker, 20 August 2018.
Layli Long Soldier. Whereas. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017.
Sarah Howe. Loop of Jade. London: Chatto & Windus, 2015.
Jem Yoshioka. Visits. 2017:
Falling City
Eileen Chang. Love in a Fallen City (trans. by Karen S. Kingsbury). New York: NYRB Classics, 2006 (1943).
Robin Hyde. Dragon Rampant. Wanganui: AG Books, 2013.
Eileen Chang. Half a Lifelong Romance (trans. by Karen S. Kingsbury). New York: Anchor, 2016 (1948–50).
The Plum Rains
Du Fu. (‘Plum Rains’), The Poetry of Du Fu: Volume 1 (trans. and ed. by Stephen Owen). Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
Nina Li Coomes. ‘What Miyazaki’s Heroines Taught Me
About My Mixed-Race Identity’. Catapult. 3 October 2016:
We Are All Dreaming of Swimming Pools
Leanne Shapton. Swimming Studies. New York: Blue Rider Press, 2012.
Ellena Savage. ‘Everything Anyone Has Ever Said About the Pool’. Kill Your Darlings, 3 June 2019:
J.A. Johnson. Assessing the Impact of Climate Change in Borneo. Washington, D.C.: World Wildlife Fund’s Environmental Economics Series, 14 June 2012.
Unpeel
Jane Wong. ‘Offerings’. The Common, 19 June 2019:
Faraway Love
Louise DeSalvo & Mitchell Alexander Leaska (eds). The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2001.
Katherine Mansfield. ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’, from Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories. Auckland: Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2010 (1908).
Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Anchor Books, 1998 (1985).
Emily Jungmin Yoon (ed.). Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Translating Feminisms). London: Tilted Axis Press, 2019.
Tender Gardens
John MacKinnon and Karen Phillips. A Field Guide to the Birds of China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020 (2000).
Alexander Chee. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.
Emily Jungmin Yoon. A Cruelty Special to our Species. New York: Ecco Press, 2018.
Rachael Allen. Kingdomland. London: Faber & Faber, 2019.
Alison Wong. ‘Pure Brightness’. Griffith Review 43: Pacific Highways, January 2014:
Manying Ip (ed.). Unfolding History, Evolving Identity: the Chinese in New Zealand. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003.
Alison Wong. ‘The River Bears Our Name’, from Cup. Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2006.
Maraea Rakuraku & Vana Manasiadis (eds), tā
tai whetū: seven Māori women poets in translation. Wellington: Seraph Press, 2018.
Julia C. Lin (ed. and trans.). Women of the Red Plain: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Women Poets. New York: Puffin, 1993.
Bing Xin (‘Paper Boats’), from (‘Paper Boats: Classic Masterpieces’). Fuzhou: Fujian People’s Publishing House, 2012.
Ache
Ava Wong Davies, ‘The First’, from At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond. London: Daunt Books Publishing, 2019.
Jessica J. Lee. Turning. London: Virago, 2017.
Katherine Mansfield. ‘At the Bay’, from The Garden Party and Other Stories. London: Penguin Books, 1997 (1922).
Sharlene Teo. ‘Echolocation’, from At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond. London: Daunt Books Publishing, 2019.
Ilaria Maria Sala. ‘What the world’s fascination with a female-only Chinese script says about cultural appropriation’. Quartz, 24 May 2018:
Jen Bervin. Su Hui’s Reversible Poem. Video installation (various dimensions) & two framed double-sided silk embroideries, 33 ½ x 20 ½ x 8 in.
Rainbow Chan. To Enclose One’s Mouth. Installation at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, 2017.
Kerry Ann Lee. The Unavailable Memory of Gold Coin Café. Limited edition exhibition catalogue designed, printed and produced by the artist, 2015:
Guerrino Marsecano. The English–Hakka Dictionary 1959.
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