Kiwi author short-listed for Aussie award
26 Jul 2010
A novel dealing with the history of the Chinese people in New Zealand has been shortlisted for a prestigious Australian literary award.
Wellington author Alison Wong's As the Earth Turns Silver is up for the main fiction prize in the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. The annual awards celebrate Australasian literature.
The Kiwi novel, set in the late 19th century / early 1920s, focuses on a cross-cultural love story between a widowed New Zealand Pakeha / European woman and an immigrant Chinese greengrocer.
The story takes readers on a journey from Kwangtung, China to Chinese settlements in Wellington and Dunedin, and the battlefields of the Western Front in Europe.
Exciting new voice
The judges at the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards said of Wong’s novel:
"Alison Wong’s haunting first novel, As the Earth Turns Silver, draws on her Chinese family history in its account of New Zealand in the early years of the last century.
"Richly layered, the book tells of independent women of conviction, of love sustained despite cultural and racial barriers (and without cliché), of the anger and malice that sinews the lives of some men.
"At the same time as a past era is surely and densely evoked, Wong treats astutely the perennial problems of prejudice and parochialism."
Early Chinese in New Zealand
As the Earth Turns Silver is an historical novel about the experiences of the immigrant Chinese community in turn-of-the-century New Zealand.
One of the first Chinese immigrants to New Zealand was a man called Wong Ahpoo Hock Ting (no relation to the author), who arrived in Nelson in 1842.
The Otago goldfields attracted the first batch of Chinese migrant workers to the country and by late 1869, over 2000 Chinese men had come to the land they would call the ‘new gold mountain’.
Although most of the male workers were married, their wives remained home in China to look after the men’s parents. The strict immigration policy of the time also limited the number of Chinese who were allowed into New Zealand. In 1881, there were only nine women to 4,995 men.
That was also the year that New Zealand imposed a poll tax on Chinese immigrants, following the example of other British colonies in Canada and Australia.
Background: Alison Wong
Alison Wong was born in Hastings but grew up in Napier, in the Hawke’s Bay region. She has spent most of her adult life in the Wellington region, where she gained a Bachelor of Mathematics, from Victoria University.
The author recently moved from Porirua to Geelong, Australia with her husband and son.
Wong was the 2002 Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago. Her first collection of poetry Cup was shortlisted for an award in the 2007 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.
As the Earth Turns Silver is Alison Wong’s first novel, and it is also a finalist in the fiction category of New Zealand’s most prestigious literary award, the New Zealand Post Book Awards. Winners will be announced on 27 August.
More information
Chinese New Zealand connections
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